It's Sunday afternoon and I dont really know what to blog, so its back to the random folder.
These are pictures taken at the Museum of Natural History in New York, a few days after September 11 2001. Everything seemed quite dramatic these days, and even the animal displays seemed to aquire a metaphysical importance.
These are pictures taken at the Museum of Natural History in New York, a few days after September 11 2001. Everything seemed quite dramatic these days, and even the animal displays seemed to aquire a metaphysical importance.
A deer scared by a pack of wolves. 
Escimoe life in the deep of winter. 
Somebody flying his carpet over Baghdad.
It's London fashion week, and like every season there's a few outfits inspired by the late great Leigh Bowery. 
This time it's a 
Mr Gareth Pugh does a fantastic job of channeling the post human Mr Bowery. Even though the outfits are fantabulous the checkerboard patern has been around the TopShops and the H&Ms for ages now, so we cannot really consider it a fashion statement, just a solution. Maybe it's time to check the calendar, or maybe it's time to head for Hollywood:
Most action/science fiction movies would look soooo much better costumed by Mr Pugh.
This is an utterly fabulous never-used-and-abandoned beachside resort in Taiwan.
Once again I was browsing the 
and also some interesting info in the comments. Now if only these pictures were in color...
If you use Google Earth, try 
This was done by logging onto SL with the two separate accounts on two computers side by side and reading the body data on the 1st account and manually imputting on the second. It was definetly sinister copying your self. Then when the security drama happened (on September 11 no less) they had to reactivate all accounts. I log onto the Habsburg account and I am not myself anymore. 
Instead I see a young, boy-band cute boy with strange hair and naive smile, while getting a "failed to locate body part in database" message. How boring I think, I have re-do myself all over again, but anyway the Habsburg account is the secondary one so it's not really necesary. I turn to the other PC and og onto the "onlyone" only to get the same message but this time I look like a badly tanned and older and more middle-eastern guy with, umm, tits. 
very scary indeed, and I fire away help messages to the support team. After a while I log back on and I am finally myself with only the skin color to adjust, as I am now rather purple. 
The composite city made from projects by 20 young italian offices, in the Italian Pavilion at corderie. Each office did a part of this city, such as the cemetery by DOGMA office and 
this brigde by Menegati Nencini.
This was in a way the most ambitious project in the biennale, with mixed results, as it ended up looking a little like Brasilia. Still it wholy embraced the notion of fantasy utopia, and we always like that.
This was a COUNTRY as a ROOM and a CITY at the same time. There were many doors, and you entered through a hyper-real mirror and fluorecent light corridor. The room took the shape of Belgium, a country that can easily be described as a city or a fuzzy border between countries with more defined identities.
This was a utopia in the main pavilion that is Italia but not about Italy. Looks like a video game city, but I'm just imagining this, since in all the Biennale I didnt see a single mention of video games. And to think that a major part of the kids growing up today spent 1/3 of their time in cities inside video games like Half Life and Grand Theft Auto. Just goes to show that the next biennale should be curated by someone MUCH younger.
This is a city inside a aquarium size snow globe in the Russian Pav. You turn the handle and some romantic nostalgic music plays and snow erupts inside the post-industrial whateverville.
Magic Mountain "city" inside the curious Danish Pavilion, which pretented to look like a chinese pavilion when in fact it looked like a pavilion by the now defunct Danish firm Plot, which now is BIG and JDS. 
Aldo Rossi's Citta Analoga, 1976
As has been written all over the place, this was not the most fascinating exhibition, as the main part consisted of facts prettily illustrated to look a bit like contemporary art, a bit like science, 
a bit like wacky corporate info and a whole lot like Koolhaas' WIRED issue of a couple years ago. I'm more interested in proposals than facts so I'll concentrate more on the pavilions that didn't take the main theme too seriously.
the work 
and inspirations of architect Terunobu Fujimori. Not only is his work , umm, particular, 
but what can I say about carving an architectural model AND it's base 
out of a single tree trunk? The only place I'd seen his work in the past was of course Casa Vogue...
The Austrian Pavilion featured an exhibitit called Rock over Barock (!) and featured 2 Hans Hollein and one Frederic Kiesler project from the 60's and some contemporary works inspired by these. Holleins' Superbuilding is propably the single most inspiring image in the biennale... 
The Korean Pavilion featured a show on Housing: how it gets chosen, built, placed in the city etc. Apparently housing gets built by catalogues; you draw the building, a pamphlet gets published, people choose and buy from the catalogue and from 1-1 mock ups, and the thing gets built if it sells well enough. 
Also apparently they are running out of "last homes" or graves,
and they have to invent new techniques 
to properly bury their own. 
The French pavilion featured Daniel Buren's fantastic striped cylinders on the facade, something I seem to have subconciously reffered to in the Cloud House, though I'd never actually seen them. 
Inside the pavilion had been turned into a squat with 20 young architects DJs artists bla bla living and rotating for the duration of the biennale. 
The idea is great and fresh etc but I found the scaffolding thing kind of ugly and borng and even passe, if I may say so. Other things to check out are the Cypriot participation which featured projects about the "green line",
and I particularly liked this inhabitable frame that could be transfered and transformed into many differered buildings. The idea is not new 
but the result was super interesting. The Dutch pavilion featured a historical exhibition of utopian projects for cities, 
like Constants' bridges etc. Not a challenging or attention grabbing show but definetly full of great encyclopedic content, 
and the set-up was hip as usual. 
Finally the Americal pavilion focused on the destruction from Hurricane Katrina, and projects 
that propose solutions for the flood striken area.
This past weekend I bought a little piece of land in Solbim, on the mainland of Second Life (if you want to visit, the coordinates are 128, 128, 0) . The plot is between two houses, so just enough room to try out the building tools and make a little demo house for Angelo and me. So naturally I went for inverted leopard rhomboids with arrow graffiti interiors, just as a base for building on. 
The next door neighbors came over, and I thought I was happy to meet them, instead I got : "whats this - this is ugly- can u please delete it? - now, yuk yuk" etc etc. Apparently they both hated the Leopard, thought it vomitrocious, and one of them even wanted to get into a fight. The neightbor to the east put up a wall of forest so as to not see my house, and the one on the side demolished his house and put the plot up for sale. So much for feeling at home on the internet. 
All this was semi fun of course, but it brings us to the real Carrie Bradshaw: Is a Leopard wall less fitting for a building than a exposed concrete wall, and arent they all just texture maps? Can we consider one material to be authentic and correct and another one kitch or just wrong? When are they going to invent photoprint concrete so everything can be texturemapped everywhere and nothing be tha same again?
Been thinking about Leopard Buildings recently, ever since the 
The Leopard Cube by Konst2 is a an exhibition space at 
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