While at DLD...

I met up with my old friend Ruth Berktold, who I hadnt seen in at leat 10 years. now she runs a firm called Yes Architecture. Yes indeed.

If you're in London tonight

Come to Miltos Manetas' Internet Painting show at the super-cool Blow de la Barra gallery, 35 Heddon street. Everybody will be there.

COLLATERAL, construction shots

Opens February 1st, Hangar Bicocca, Milano.

Allianz Once, Allianz Twice

On the way to the airport we passed by the Allianz Arena by the great Herzog & de Meuron, a building that has made football fans hot for arhitects (which is a good thing). I had to take a mini-shuttle and the driver was great and super fast, so I barely got a chance to look at the staium properly, especially as it was white for the occasion (snowstorm).
Inside the Munich airport, I got a chance to have a better look. I guess twice of a good thing is even better... What's really interesting though is that the pattern that H&dM have used on the stadium's facade, is in fact a kind of logo for Munich,
as you can see all over town and mostly on the Munich Crest (though this is a bit venturing into Angelo territory so I'll leave it to that..)

Last DLDays

M/M and Hans Ulrich are about to go on stage on the smaller "NEEN" auditorium. The two projections have been dedicated to showing works by Rafael Rozendaal, Miltos Manetas Angelo Plessas and me for the whole conference. I really wanted to get Arianna Huffington to say something here but but she was having a power blabla at the Lufthansa Lounge (by the way she is too funny in person) so instead you get me looking at you.

HUO starting off but I'm not sure you can see anything...
and a little soundbyte by M/M tallking about the internets and their really great parallel Serpentine which we have to wait a few months to see and Olafur Eliasson Another highlight of the panel was the presentation by Ai Wei Wei who even though speaks perfectly english decided to give the talk in chinese to give a bit of personality. Check out his really cool work here
and if you speak chinese, also check out his super nice blog

If you are in Munich today

...come by the DLD Conference, where I'm on the Creative Crossings panel together with Miltos Manetas and a bunch of over fab people. There is a whole segment dedicated to NEEN with projections and Miltos' Jacksonpollock.org project. If you're not in Munich, just watch the live video, and be sure to check out Linda Stone's fantastic presentation on the short attention span of the contemporary user.

Meanwhile in Milan...

COLLATERAL is furiously under construction...

Better off Gold

I think Miltos once had a theory that Glamour was somehow related to Orthodoxy, but I'm not sure what that was about. I just love the Goldness of this Russian orthodox (and slightly Muslim??) church, especially against the greyness of Geneva.

Right next door is the museum, glamorous with out being gold, though it woud be better off gold, like almost everything in life.

Who is this building?

Anybody know anything about this building? Looks really cute, though would be much cuter if it was like a 60's thing... not really sure why but somehow I would appreciate it more if it was old.

The Hunt for Architecture in Second Life

The hunt for architecture on Second Life continues. After the Triple House, I stumbled upon this hysterical pagoda-ish termite-carved house

and then this funny house with a drawing texture map interior.


It was cute enough, but far away on the horizon I spotted some Animal Print so obviously I had to rush over.










I found this slightly 80's looking Zebra House, which looks a little bit boring from the outside even though the interior is rather satisfying. Further down the hill I spotted an ominous looking black thing that looked more like a tacky jewelry box and less like architecture, but these distinctions are boring so we don't go there. The blackness disappears when you clock on the right button, and you can look inside, and even see that the blackness is one way so from inside its transparent but no entrance for you and me because it has a privacy restriction, which is soooo boring, whatever, it doesn't look too interesting from inside anyway

BBPR

BBPR otherwise known as Torre Velesca is the fabulous 50s skyscraper that looks like a medieval castle or maybe even a Greek Monastery, right smack in the middle of Milan. I used to be totally obsessed by this building, and tonight I was walking around Milan, and I looked up and there it was, and then so I took some artistically spooky photos with da new phone.


they are totally working the under-the-overhang-lighting though, looks extra spooky with the constant fog in the city. And so that ppl dont say I'm superficial, here's also some information type of facts. and yes this last photo on the left is VERY pretentious and was totally accidental, and has no reason being here, just the phone is really slow on recording the damn thing.

Angelo House

For a while I've been working on another Neen Home, this time based on Angelo's works. I started off with melookingatyou.com and extracted a pattern, then some other ideas came along and somehow I ended up with a cagey-looking thing.

I never really show things in process, do you think this is the new me?
Should I put proper windows? Should it stay like this?

Best of the Best

Between 1970 and 1984 SITE designed a series of iconic showrooms for Best Products. Almost anything that can be said about plopping generic container buildings in suburbia, is said by this set of amazing buildings. Indeterminate Facade Showroom

Notch

Inside Outside Building

Peel

TiltRainforest

Clear Sky Black Cloud

A few years back Cai Guo-Qiang's work scared the shit out of me. We were living in Harlem and suddenly we heard loud explosions and of course we thought it was 9-11 the Sequel, but it was just art after all. This piece is called Clear Sky Black Cloud, and I love everything with black clouds. Here's the nice video too, but unfortunately in boring and hard to use quicktime
this via the really great VVORK

Thug For Life

Finally I managed to meet some really bad guys in Second Life. "Protected by the DPA Jd Moxing" (yes thats a name) is a Darth Vader-ish guy who drives around in a black Mustang (its a Nissan but don't tell) and leaves traces of black smoke as he walks around. We took a ride in his car and I think we "killed" a couple of sucker citizens. That was bad, but it was fun too. When JD stands still, kisses fly around him. (!?)

Random Access Memory: Military boats can be cute

I took these ages ago, on the Intrepid Museum, when I did an inflatable video booth for Vanessa. How cute are these rhomboid details? I guess they paint them white 'cos thats where they tie their ropes when they play WAR. Still all the color coding on the grey background is unexpectedly elegant.

The intrepid is a boat that has become a museum. Vanessa was doing her VB42 and she asked me to make a reconstruction of a small Navy-Seals museum in Florida, so I decided to make it out inflatable military boat material, so that it would be a mini museum made as a boat based on a museum of boats inside a boat that became a museum.
Later on I reconstructed this reconstruction of a museum as my video room for the Venice Architecture Biennial of 2000.

A House is Three in Second Life

So I was randomly flying over islands and putting "architecture" in the finder, to see what the map would come up with, which was not really much. I did bump into a stupid looking house which was flying up in the air for no apparent reason, and things without reason always attract my short attention. On closer inspection this was not one house but three, all "created" one next to the other like bad leftover copies. This happens sometimes in SL because you can prefabricate objects in the sandboxes and then just place them wherever from your inventory. Somebody must have clicked "place" three times for this stupid looking generic house. The copies were placed a little apart and somehow it created an early Eisenman effect of displaced grids blabla. Given how generic-wal-mart the interior is with the greige carpeting and the windows that look out to other windows it's almost interesting. Later on I found yet another copy of this house, this time with a faux 60's spacey thing on the roof. Seems like this poor house can never be normal.