The Sea and the Cake

Every year in early January, swimmers jump into the sea to find a cross
a few days ago the celebration was canceled because the sea was too rough

impromptu beach tables

were almost dragged into the waves

makeshift chairs were left staring at the sea
tents stepped into the water

beach became waves

the sea kept getting angrier

ready to wipe everything away

Monument to an oncoming disaster - Gate to the Athens Marina

A Marina is by definition a place where we leave the city to go off into the sea, to find leisure and pleasure in nature. Recently our relationship with Nature has changed drastically, and environmentalists predict that things will only get worse. According to a popular scientific scenario, sea levels around the world will rise, resulting in a severely altered coastline that will find many beachside developments underwater.
Instead of designing a gate for the Athens Marina, we proposed a structure that refers to this potentially new sea level. Using the geometric rock modules that break waves are usually built with, we balance an artificial island up at the future horizon line. The structure at present time functions as the gate for the Athens Marina gate though in reality it is an island expecting the oncoming disaster.
Further down at the marina, the flagpole is made from precariously balancing the rock modules one on top of the other, again to form the base for a tiny island that can barely host a wind turbine. The wind turbine functions as a wind direction indicator while creating sufficient energy for a light signal. This tiny island will function as a beacon for approaching ships in the future sea.

Andreas Angelidakis Studio, Athens Marina competition entry, completion 2011.
Project team: Sotiris Vasileiou, Nana Stathi, Efrosyni Charalambous, Eirini Anthouli, Andreas Sivitos
Construction consultant Christos Kaklamanis - Palimpsest
Green Roof consultant Grigoris Kotopoulis E-Green
construction partner Diarchon

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Theodor Kittlesen

Kind of obsessed with Theodor Kittelsen, popular Norwegian artist, famous for painting Nature, Fairies and especially Trolls

I'm not sure what these are but they sure look interesting

These were all sitting in the "to blog" folder"
I don't remember where I got them
or if they are part oft he same search
and maybe it doesn't matter

Bunker Flowerpots and other miracles by Lina Bo Bardi

Spent a perfect Sunday morning leafing through Olivia de Oliveira's
classic Lina Bo Bardi monograph

we've blogged about Bo Bardi before

but what struck me now was the quite eccentric Chame-Chame house
basically a Bunker Flowerpotbuilt in Salvador in Bahia in the 60s and demolished (RLY?) in the 90s

arranged around an existing tree that Lina loved
this became her later style

kind of culminating in the miraculous MASPI where paintings
were iconicaly hung on a plexiglass sheet supported by a concrete block
Lina hung out a lot with all the artits of the period
and was especially inspired by the great Helio Oiticica.

According to Oliveira,
Lina translated Oiticica's Crelazer concept (creative inactivity! our favourite!)
into the Maspi void, an urban space where activity was not prescribed,
but people could just hang around waiting for nothing
Another important Oiticica concept that Lina translated into architecture was of course the Parangole , the fabric that could provide shelter. Lina used curtains and drapings as Parangole, even dressing up columns in tropical fabrics. In the back , a tree column

and a Tree skyscraper

a Cyclopean wall with flowerpots, a design intended for the fantastic Sesc de Pompeia


and a pyramid chair.
For more Bo Bardi,
head over to Mr Pablo De La Barra's Blog
the Centre for Aesthetic Revolution

Junior Boys - Bits And Pieces

Mysterious Island

Blue Moon Revisited

i-tə-ˈrā-shən

Iteration means the act of repeating a process usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal or target or result. Each repetition of the process is also called an "iteration", and the results of one iteration are used as the starting point for the next iteration.

A pentagon iteration. Connecting alternate corners of a regular pentagon produces a pentagram which encloses a smaller inverted pentagon. Iterating the process produces a sequence of nested pentagons and pentagrams.

Electric Labyrinth

Re-Ruined Hiroshima was one of the drawings that Arata Isozaki
presented as part of his Electric Labyrinth installation
at the 14th Triennale di Milano in 1968.

"Haunted by the remaining destruction of Hiroshima twenty-two years after the atomic bomb was exploded there, Arata Isozaki has projected images of his megastructures onto a photomural of the razed city. In this image his constructions are also in ruins. It is as if he had rebuilt Hiroshima, and it had once again undergone destruction. Ruins provide an important metaphor for Isozaki: "They are dead architecture. Their total image has been lost. The remaining fragments require the operation of the imagination if they are to be restored."

Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo
Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 101

Incubation Process, part of the 4 core joint system, showing Isozaki's City in the Air growing amidst ancient Greek columns. (thanks to Dimitris Zisimopoulos for the great scan)


Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 120

Arata Isozaki began his career in 1954, in the office of Kenzo Tange, his former professor and the most influential figure in postwar Japanese architecture. While Tange's architecture was in itself radical in its conception, it was his urban projects that most influenced the younger generation of architects, including Isozaki. Tange's Plan for Tokyo (1960) is critical in this regard. Trying to reconcile the incredible density of Tokyo's urban fabric with the rapid expansion and reformulation of modern social structures, Tange's plan proposed multilevel urban construction layered over the existing city and its waterways.

Radical new visions of the city were not limited to Tange's plans for Tokyo. The New Babylon project that Constant Nieuwenhuis began in the 1950s, Yona Friedman's Spatial Plan for Paris of 1958, and the work of the collective Archigram in the 1960s embraced urban transformation as a means toward achieving social change. In Isozaki's City in the Air (Joint Core System) project of 1962, the multilayered city hovers over the traditional city, the scale of which can be seen at the far right. Highways and parking structures thread their way between massive pylons that support blocks of offices and apartments above. The ground plane is reconstituted as tiers of gardens above and within the blocks.

Isozaki's City in the Air (Joint Core System) project was undertaken in 1960, the same year a number of younger architects, almost all of them affiliated with Tange, issued the Metabolist Manifesto. While Isozaki was never formally a member of the group, his project and the work produced by the Metabolists over the course of the decade largely reflected Tange's description of his own urban work: "By incorporating elements of space, speed, and drastic change in the physical environment, we created a method of structuring having elasticity and changeability."

Terence Riley
Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 49

In Arata Isozaki's unrealized design for the Joint Core System spatial construction, massive pylons support elevated transportation, housing, and office systems as well as parks and walkways, suspended above the existing city. This scheme was undertaken at a time when Kenzo Tange and a group of five young architects working in his office, known as the Metabolists, were creating radical solutions for restructuring Tokyo's rapid and uncontrolled postwar growth. As a member of Tange's office, Isozaki was inspired by Tange's proposal for a multilevel urban construction above the city. But, unlike Tange's plan, in which a square support system limits expansion to four directions, Isozaki's round columns permit growth in any direction.

Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo
Texts from MOMA.ORG where both collages are in the collection

Autopia

I've been looking at these drawings of the Autopia project by the late great Wolf Hilbertz
Autopia was a project for an independent island, based on Hilberz's sea-cretion, the electrolytic deposition of sea-shell-like minerals from seawater that creates a construction material.
Autopia Ampere involves deploying house-size wire frames connected to large floating solar panels on the Skerki Bank, in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and Tunisia, where the island will be built/grown. Autopia will house 5000 inhabitands
images thanks to the fantastic Radical Nature catalogue

Still good friends

PINA BAUSCH - The Man I love (Gershwin)

Nostalgia for an ancient future

Loving the low-res texture mapping and the lo-tech sounds of the first Tombraider