 Here’s a Q+A with a Japanese architect from Néojaponisme on concrete uchihanashi/uchippanashi, or as we know it, Tadao Ando exposed cast concrete. The piece goes over its origins in Japan, what those signature circle relieves are, its current trend/bastardization as wallpaper, and if, you click the links, you can even find out how its done!
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 Okay, so the SketchUp-esque screenshot of a twisting space station got me interested, and the fact it was a screenshot of Japanese-designed point-and-click “escape the room” puzzle game suckered me in, but all I got was a frustrating and unfulfilling experience. Got some time to kill? Try it yourself: http://terminalhouse.com/guesthouse_en.html
Referring links: http://kotaku.com/338877/holiday-weekend-timewaster-guest-house
http://sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com/2007/12/point-and-kickass-guesthouse.html
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Architecture today encounters a parallax, provided by video games, in the development of new typologies of space – spaces that are merging and emerging from the confluence of the physical and the virtual in the form of the digital. To render this argument quite plainly, the qualification of ‘the product of the genius of the designer in creating a place of experience, of participation and even of contemplation – a medium for humans to encounter and engage in’ can apply to ‘video games or architecture’. Video games are, categorically, digital spaces of play – spaces, defined through the act of playing, and have become integral to our contemporaneity, not only embodying, but also defining and changing our cultural, spatial, temporal, and experiential way of perception and expression. On the Internet, video games integrate social communities and cultivate human networks, which then can extend back into “real” life. These ludic spaces can be 2D or 3D representations, complex social constructs, or novel concepts linking physical spaces. Our idea of video games and architecture begin to intertwine and interweave, blurring the distinction between where each begins and ends. The merged idea of gaming and architecture isn’t new, mind you; not video-gaming specifically, but this earlier example of ludic architecture: Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon. Before getting into New Babylon, ordered around this understanding of ‘video games’ is an argument for the differentiation in degree between ‘gaming’ and ‘playing’ [1]: ‘gaming’ is a structured activity performed according to a set of rules or laws. Oppositely, ‘playing’ is fantasy-driven and less limited by fixed rules, although the definition of rules can be an integral part of playing.[2] In that sense, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon is the ultimate pervasive game that’s more along the definition of ‘playing’ than ‘gaming’ (or a sandbox game, “a genre or mode of some video games for open-ended, nonlinear play”), a game broader than the traditional environment of a screen, a game-space that you cannot disconnect from and is constantly coinciding with the space that you live in (see eXistenZ). It’s a proposal for a future society, “a society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play, in which traditional architecture has disintegrated along with the social institutions that it propped up”.  New Babylon’s model is the playground, the place of child’s play, where traditionally, you leave as an adult to work, loosing freedom to do as you want – to run free. It’s imagined as a place where you never work, where you can perpetually be a child. Such state of affairs would not stem from Marxist revolution, but from a technological revolution, liberating its occupants from any burdens to do whatever comes into their minds.[3] But a playground is a bound space of total control, and in Constant’s project, “you never get out of the playground” (à la: The Matrix). Today, New Babylon looks almost as a prophetic spatial prototype for the video game virtual worlds [4] of the Internet.[5] Each in its sense is a model of a liberated, collective creation and interaction within an apparent incomplete open-source system. Homo Ludens – Man the Player [6] – becomes a collective designer of nomad space, “wander(ing) through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new experiences, as yet unknown ambiences (…) fully aware of the power they have to act upon the world, to transform it, recreate it”; virtual worlds take things even further, as will be later elaborated (Marcos Novak’s Soft Babylon, Next Babylon). However, Constant reverses his opinion on his own project, that if you build New Babylon – that is, you give everyone a playground for their desires – it would become a terribly-bloody atopia. The last four years Constant spent on the project were dedicated to depicting images of how horrible it would be like living in New Babylon. [7] Constant’s conclusion on the project is not unlike William Gibson’s “bleak and ironic” vision of the digital future that is not naïvely cheerful (with computer games as its foundation) in Neuromancer – a vision which, ironically, is opposite that of the generation of cyberspace theorists and technologists that he inadvertently inspired – who fail to see Gibson’s irony. [8] This is not to dismiss the potential behind ‘virtual space’ of video games or New Babylon, but to critically examine and compare these systems to see where overlaps lay and lack. For instance, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) retain descriptions that coincide with the ludic city’s ability to produce universal and anonymous subjects. However the multiplicity of determinants is restricted to the existing infrastructure, which is already geared at commodification and end-consumer subjectivity. The machinations of late-capitalism, the consumption of commodity, either ‘real’ (the actual video game) or ‘virtual’ (downloads, advertisements), are the very means of the mainstream video game industry’s current existence. What subsists is a homogenized closed system of space, tailored as the theatrical stage for popular culture, which reused, unauthentic experiences serve as spectacles for the use of turning the individual player and the gaming community into passive consumers [9], where users are regulated pre-packaged content predetermined by those of the few, rich, and powerful (game corporations, advertisers) – a total one-eighty from the manifesto from which New Babylon was envisaged. So, the earlier question of defining ‘video gaming’ arises again when challenged against Keller Easterling’s Enduring Innocence, where she defines architecture as “the medium of an open platform storing both structure and content. [10] The information it stores, as both data and persuasion, is literally a product, property, or currency.” Architecture is equated to a ‘spatial product’, a classification that can as easily describe an operating system, a webpage, a building, a video game, or a virtual world. 
Leaving the answer at Easterling’s Marxist critique of architecture and video games, though, is inadequate; contrastably, Deleuze and Guattari went against the Marxist-capitalist theory that desires come from a sense of lack, and that the only way to meet those desires is to consume (as echoed by the Situationists [11]). Instead, Deleuze and Guattari claim that desire is a productive and creative force. [12] It is easy to conclude that productive/creative forces exist in the making and engaging of architecture as building. Seeing passed the fact that most video games are consumer products for purchase, socio-cultural creative forces exist in video games as well – not only in making (including user-created content), but in playing video games: an entire generation has grown up immersed with playing video games – they do not read the instruction manual for a video game, they just begin playing. Through abduction, gamers build a dynamic mental model of the game through gathering empirical evidence through playing – learning and, possibly, mastering the game. It’s the gamers’ mindset, not much unlike the New Babylonian’s: a different way of learning and knowing than the previous linear cultural standard of consuming knowledge, such as through reading the instructions; a way of knowing the world as a place – rather of consumption – but that of creation. [13]
[1] …without delving into possible tangential analysis of “gamer” culture or ‘game theory’. [2] Vuillemin, Ronald. “Game Physics” in Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2007), 62 [3] Nieuwenhuis, Constant. “New Babylon” in exhibition catalogue (The Hague: Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1974) [4]From here on out, ‘virtual’, ‘virtual world’, ‘synthetic world’ and such the like are in reference to such video games as Second Life, but the author welcomes any Deleuzian overlaps, implications, or terminological confusions; the specifics of the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ that can span from Bergson to Baudrillard, of defining what is ‘real’, its insistent identification with the ‘actual’, and its coupling with the ‘virtual’ and its counterpart, the ‘possible’ are beside the point. [5] Feireiss, Lukas. “New Babylon Reloaded” in Space Time Play, 219 [6] Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1938) [7] Wigley, Mark. New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1998) [8] Aarseth, Espen. “Neuromancer” in Space Time Play, 143 [9] Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone 1995) [10] Easterling, Keller. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005), 1-3 [11] Novak, Marcos. “Next Babylon, Soft Babylon”, in AD (vol. 68, 1998), 26 [12] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) [13] Wright, Will. “Dream Machines”, Wired (vol. 14 no 4, 2006), 111
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Ideas of authorship in architecture have been kicked around for a while now, with debates circling mostly the concept of symbolic figureheads in architecture firms: For how long should scholars, students, architecture critics, and journalists be expected to go to Renzo Piano or to Jean Nouvel for every building design that comes out of their studios? Those architects, as well as Hadid, Meier, and Koolhaas, are still heavily involved in designing and prototyping but neither have been the lead designer on their signature “franchise” for over a decade. From where I sit as student, Koolhaas’ position in the architecture community on consumerism, cosmopolitism, etc. would not be dated, but if I had taken a different standpoint and addressed issues of, say, building, should the founder still be the go-to guy for perspectives on the firm? Some weeks earlier I was exchanging emails with a friend who worked at SHoP this summer and he talked about how collaborative the process is; just got me thinking, how the idea of the lead designer we grew up with is increasingly irrelevant. You still need a central repository to bring all these ideas together, but design is messy... yet the idea of the “Starchitect” persists even as the discipline becomes less dependent on original breakthrough designs and more dependent on a consistent collection of talent. So, what to do? Should buildings now come with a concatenated rolling name credits for their design/build teams? Case-in-point, here is a photo plus an analysis of OMA ex-pat Joshua Prince-Ramus and Erez Ella’s REX studio from archidose: 
Image by Jason Schmidt
“The two leaders are prominently located in the foreground of a New York loft with the 30-odd employees dispersed behind them and some foam models. Perhaps the more senior ones are closest to the camera and the young ones at the back, meaning if the latter leave the firm they don’t have to keep reshooting this photo as they’re faces are too small to be distinguished. This raises the paradox of these sorts of photos: their role in illustrating the important role individuals play in the production of architecture, a role that can be seen cynically as interchangeable with any qualified person.” This analysis begins to question implicitly the role of the intern versus the starchitect. Are the visions of the figurehead only endowed in virtue of the intern? Or is the building project and the internship only viable/possible through the demiurgic nature of the celebrity architect? Between project meetings and lecture circuits, how much credit should go to the principal when the building is all said and done (think: Holl’s watercolor sketches)? Where does one draw the line of where the architect can just ride on his/his firm’s built reputation and no longer really design? Should that even ever be the case?
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 “Portugal Now: Country Positions in Architecture and Urbanism is the third in a series of conferences and exhibitions organized by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. The series explores some of the most intriguing currents in contemporary architecture, landscape architecture, art, and urbanism in different parts of the globe. Portugal Now will examine examples of emerging contemporary Portuguese architectural practices and how they contend with global political, economic, and social realities.” Official Site
AAP’s Brief: Double conference features Portuguese architecture of the now
Participating exhibitors that have websites:
GB Arquitectos
João Luís Carrilho da Graça
Cannata & Fernandes
menos é mais
Camilo Rebelo
CVDB arquitectos
Embaixada
moov
a.s* - atelier de santos
Bernardo Rodrigues
S'A arquitectos
Nuno Brandão Costa
Augmented Architectures
ReD
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| » (Un)holy Alliance: Architecture and Video Games? |
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 This hasn’t been the first time I’ve been wary about architects’ involvement in video games or “Architecture” in video games, but it seems again in the technology news media, questions about the validity of “games as art” have come up, as well as some mainstream video games prominently displaying “Architecture” in their virtual worlds. What is going on with this? Are video games trying to authenticate themselves as ‘Art’ by inserting “architecture” along with other examples or extensions of existing artistic mediums, such as movies and music? Why, indeed, are so many architects snapping up ‘land’ in Second Life, the virtual online world with almost eight million residents? What is this relationship, if any, between video games and architecture?
This question arises for me in my reading of Keller Easterling’s Enduring Innocence, where the author defines architecture as “the medium of an open platform storing both structure and content. The information it stores, as both data and persuasion, is literally a product, property, or currency.” In the book, she basically equalizes architecture as a ‘spatial product’, a classification that can as easily describe an operating system, a webpage, or a building. A video game or a virtual world, such as Second Life, could also fall under this categorization. But, just as Michael Benedikt asks in “Physics for Phantoms”, “how important is it that Pacman could disappear on the left of the screen and reappear on the right, or disappear on the bottom to reappear at the top, instantaneously, without it troubling us that the actual corners of Pacman's world-surface cannot be joined in any physically realizable topology whatsoever?”, why is this relation with virtual worlds and architecture relevant? Or on the nature of virtual environments as comes up in Steve Rose’s The Guardian Unlimited article on architects and Second Life, “Buy! Buy! Buy!”: “There’s an office, where Bartlett holds real-time business meetings, a home theatre where she can watch movies with friends, outdoor areas for cocktail parties, even a dining room - yes, you can mimic eating in SL. But why would you want to eat? The more I explore, the more I find myself asking similar questions. Why put stairs in a house when you can fly? Why put a roof on it when it never rains? Why mimic a Barcelona chair when you never need to sit down? Why build a house at all?” The significance of the relationship stems from the separation of the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’, for as believable or perverse the simulacrum is, there is always that differentiation; if it’s not for real, you can turn it off and walk away. The thing is, now, there is a fuzziness introduced between this boundary. Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life, can now actually be exchanged for US dollars. There is even a character in SL whose virtual dealings make her a millionaire in real life. Virtual gaming clans are extensions of real-life friendships and vice-versa. Video games are not solely about entertainment anymore, or even creating ‘art’ for art’s sake: they have become the components of the manifestation of an extended “virtual reality”, which until recently, only have been known to us through the telephone, e-mail, chat rooms, VoIP, or message boards. As summarized by Benedikt, “the question as a whole is “critical” because as today’s cyberspaces… coalesce with today’s arcade- and museum-grade virtual worlds, logics will emerge that are informed by the reality coded into our bodies: the topo-logic, that is, of four million years of natural evolution as well as the mytho-logic of one hundred thousand years of human cultural evolution, layered upon the topo-logic and constrained by it.”  These virtual spaces maybe, in fact, the prototypical precursors of such virtual realms as depicted in modern-day fantasy tales as read in Gibson’s novels or as seen in movies like Tron and The Matrix or anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiment Lain. And the ‘architecture’ in these spaces…maybe that’s why certain people want to archive the architecture of these early iterations of extended reality/virtual worlds: this stuff might be important!
But in that belies the problem: why are architects building ‘architecture’ in what itself can be ‘Architecture’? Why mimic a Barcelona chair when you never need to sit down, or build a virtual house at all? “When you have all the possibilities in the world, you choose to represent something so close to suburbia”: when architects are presented a medium that lets architects do anything, why re-present the Farnsworth House? Even when disregarding a variety of aspects of the ‘real’ such as “gravity” or “gender”, the ‘virtual’ is bound by laws and principle via the very limits of the code and the computer’s computation. However, even within such bounds, certain matters may come up, such as those of social or political consequence, which normally remain unquestioned in “meatspace”: “In both of (Kafka and Borges), the Law is carried in the architecture and the architecture is virtual: capable of a liquidity of scale, of a dream logic not far from reality but far enough to settle upon its own faults an air of normalcy. (…) Consider: what is “property” when whole tracts for new settlement can be fabricated algorithmically and buried in the eye of a firefly? What is “liberty” when constraint upon movement and access to people’s consciousness is governed by neither architecture nor nature, i.e. by neither gates nor walls nor the fading effects of time and distance, but by private law: permissions, encryptions, and inabilities appearing to us as inexplicable lacunae in the data, as silences, circular logics, puzzles, and endless loops?” Are these virtual worlds and their “architectures” challenging our conceptions of reality, or they “a consciousness-degrading torrent of choiceless choice, kitsch, and commercialism”? What are we to make out of the mish-mash of Neo-Whatever’s or such faithful recreations as Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Second Life or Wright’s Fallingwater (Kaufmann) Residence in Half Life 2? Or professionally, is ‘virtual architecture’ no more than a useful tool “to showcase a build [sic] to anyone around the world and have them interact with it on a virtual level”? Or to authenticate or sell a fantasy experience in the ‘real’, à la Herzog and de Meuron’s Beijing National Stadium in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games? These questions become precursors to further questions, as in why “a Dutch library chain called DOK, which “...is on a mission to become the world’s most modern library” would want to make games a part of the public knowledge-base in a similar way to, say, books”. Or why Mario Gerosa, editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest Italy, would want to preserve a EverQuest 3D castle as one would a Piranesi etching or a Sant’Elia sketch. Or if Jenova Chen’s then-MFA thesis, now-PS3 game, flOw is a participatory art installation and/or simply a video game. Are we really at the cusp of something truly artistically, architecturally, and/or gaming-ly exciting, or are we still years away from any kind of game or ‘virtual’ space that may resemble Ebert’s definition “High Art”, or even “Architecture”? --- These are, to me, only minor issues to what my main concern is really and what may really be just a digression: The way designers are designing, whether through software like Maya or 3DStudio Max, or the way gamers or ‘users’ are playing or experiencing “virtual space”: it’s nothing more than a finite collection of possible inputs of the user and the consequential graphical outputs displayed on the screen. That means every available preloaded tool (Line, Circle, Loft, Create Cube, Texturize Cone… ready-made geometric operations) defines the unconscious computation of the “virtual space”, preventing an exploration of the inherent space of the parameters or of the program itself in the design process… even Second Life groups Seifert Surface or LOL Architects’ fractals, a-platonic geometries, and “giant green rings populated by pink flamingoes and fields of wavy purple topiary, staircases leading up into the sky”… or Hernan Diaz Alonso’s blobitecture… this isn’t pushing anything. It is design, repackaged and crafted in a traditional way, and a waste of the possibilities inherent to the use of computers in architectural or game design, regardless of the program being used. (This directly stems from a larger problem; that of the program designs of programs that design architecture/video game. If you really want create a new level of whatever, start from there) Ultimately, what has become of games and architecture alike within the ‘virtual’ realm is a search for the latest (p)re-packaged “new” with the newest techniques and technologies, producing architecture and games for the sake of “newness”: in my opinion, this is a misguided use of the potential provided by these techniques and technologies which within this realm can honestly be used for so much more. Sources: Keller Easterling’s Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades, p. 2-3 (MIT Press, 2005) Michael L. Benedikt’s “Physics for Phantoms” rogerebert.com: Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker
BusinessWeek: Second Life's First Millionaire MoCo Loco: Kaufmann Residence in Half Life 2 Level Up : N'Gai Croal Vs. Roger Ebert Vs. Clive Barker on Whether Videogames Can Be (High) Art. Round 1--Fight! Kotaku: Architecture in Second Life Guardian Unlimited: Steve Rose’s “Buy! Buy! Buy!” The Escapist: Jared Newman’s Dewey Decimals and Dance Dance Revolution GameSetWatch: The State Of Video Games In Libraries DOK - de wereld te leen played in Italy: The Convention is back! GameSetWatch: Game Architecture Preservationist Mario Gerosa Second Life Flow in Games: A Jenova Chen MFA Thesis flOw Seoul Metropolitan Government: Online Gaming: Korea's National Pastime? Kotaku: Unholy Alliance: Mario and Sonic Trailer Hernan Diaz Alonso - http://www.xefirotarch.com/ Related Links: The Weekly Geek: Top Five List: Top Five Games As Art
Next Generation: Games and Metaphor
Jul. 31st, 2007 @ 06:52 am
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| » Amsterdam; MVRDV, Borneo Sporenburg, in the Land of the Box |
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 Amsterdam was particularly nice, with occasional showers, but otherwise sunny. Our compulsory tour of the local museums was of first order, hitting the Vincent Van Gogh Museum, by Gerrit Rietveld, which held the various periods of Van Gogh, and the special exhibition wing, by Kisho Kurakawa, which was holding pieces by Max Beckmann.
We stumbled upon our preferred choice of hostel on accident, without any research or looking really: just by chance. We also had Indonesian food that day, a specialty by order of the East Indies being a previous colony of the Netherlands. We also found the city’s architecture centre, predictably named ARCAM Amsterdam Centre for Architecture, which sells maps and guide books featuring architecture of the city, as well as the usual wares of an architecture student, but also housed models of firm and student works and books. The building itself was pretty cool, designed by René van Zuuk. The highlight of our stay at Amsterdam was our rental of bicycles. Amsterdam, besides being a crazy city of old row houses and canals, is famous for its bicycle infrastructure, having more bike paths than roads. Bike riders trump right-of-way over automotive and pedestrian traffic. And how nicely the paths are all laid out in brick, even out in the countryside; or even the intricate system of traffic lights for bikes, cars, and people alike is quite astounding. By switching off foot travel to bike really felt like taking part in the embedded semantics of the city. Our new-found mode of transportation managed us to traverse the old city now in ten minutes, making exploring much easier. On bike, we rode along the waterfront, where all of the haute architecture is popping up (such as Borneo Sporenburg). There we visited the Muziekgebouw, by 3xNielsen Architects, a huge hyper-functionalist building, with large spaces and a huge cantilever. Inside was an exhibition, where a grain of rice equaled one person, and had massive and little amounts of rice piled to make critical comments of the social and cultural situations in the Netherlands, Europe, and the world. Not far off from the Muziekgebouw was Silodam, the famous multi-typology mass of housing by MVRDV, all clad with its different materials for different unit types, as well as a huge public deck over the water to stare up from upon the building and its people in the windows.  Besides seeing tons of notable architecture that I don’t particularly know, of what we saw included Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s Nemo Museum, de Architeckten Cie’s the Whale, and Nicholas Grimshaw and Partner’s Ijburg Bridges. The most exciting discovery found through riding (though we know where they relatively were) were the Borneo Sporenburg development and housing (and the Python Bridge, which connects Sporenburg to Borneo Island). I asked some native Amsterdamians what they thought of it: the Architecture Centre curator thought it was over-hyped by the media, and was not that interesting. The late-20’s hostel desk-guy thought it was interesting because of the contrast between the old way of life and the new. Borneo Sporenburg was master-planned by West 8; it’s particularly different because it was privately developed, a contradiction for Amsterdam, which is entirely developed through public urban initiatives. It was a reclaimed shipping dock site, on islands off the coast.
“Almost sixty architects were involved in the developing of the main urban program. The master plan demanded a 30%-50% void in each of the individual homes. The architects were challenged to develop a typology in which a small patio served for day light penetration and personal outdoor space… This regulation created a series of new building typologies that suited the high density and back-to-back structuring of the houses.” The housing projects are little ‘paradises’ for young families with children filling the public grassy grounds. As expected, it’s all friendly-looking, with playful multi-colored and -materialized façades and forms. It very much felt like an insular complex away from the burgeon of the city, where to safely and caringly raise children, but it felt all-so middle- and high-class… I don’t know who lives here, economy-wise, but it felt like an escape for those who can afford it. What especially conveyed the feeling was the custom-designed row houses in another part of the islands, each a careful play on the traditional Dutch box, however suited for their millionaire owners. Those of noteworthy interest by the mainstream architectural books, such as Phaidon’s Architecture Atlas of the World were the ones designed by Enric Miralles and MVRDV. Without question, they were all so varied and interesting, and worked well as a whole complex. On the contrary opinion, our hostel desk-guy had interesting things to say about Amsterdam: in the city, predominantly, in the old city, people are not living in the city, but living in a concept of the city. Amsterdamians, he says, are always living out what it means to live in Amsterdam, so they are never themselves until they retire to their row houses. His main problem was this space of the row house, that it is so small, so confining. He said he was sick of the box: interestingly, he was an architecture student for a while; he wanted to change this city of boxes from within, but the box was all they ever taught there. The legacy of Koolhaas and the hyper-functionalism of the box remain, and he quit in three weeks for art school. Ironically, all they teach in Dutch art school now is the concept of the box, such as “the beauty and simplicity of the white box”, and now he’s quitting that, and leaving for art school in Paris to escape this city of the box. He’s summation and dismissal was very terse: “All you see here is the three meter by three meter space, with one view in and one view out, all stuck between two other boxes; you might get to have another three-by-three space underneath, but ultimately, you need a desk, a bathroom, and a kitchen. You have these massive windows looking out from both ends. You have no space for privacy, you have no space for anything. You can go insane living here.” Upon further riding outside the city we saw more custom housing being built; just the day before, I saw one in a recent architecture publication, and, there it is, almost simultaneously published along with its completion. The whole neighborhood was sprouting up, all in different stages of construction, like watching A+U magazine-fodder in the making. This city is quite design-bent, skewed for immediate appreciation for art, graphic design, and architecture. It can be really exciting, but from seeing the reactions of the locals to their surroundings, all this design can also be quite numbing, almost to the point of desensitization.  The bicycle also afforded me a solo excursion out to MVRDV’s WoZoCo, all out in the western outskirts of the city, where tourists don’t dare to go (not that it’s not safe, just not touristy). We also took a free public ferry to one of the not-bridge-connected islands, and rode arounf there. Of what we skipped was Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s Byzantium, which, accordingly to what the architecture centre woman said, was boring. The apparent gauged reaction to Koolhaas here in Amsterdam is that they seem to not like him. We also skipped the red-light district, and the drug-addict strained parks. What we finished our time in Amsterdam with was a visit to the Rijksmuseum, featuring paintings by Vemeer and Rembrant (also included works by Jan Lievens, Jan Jansz van de Velde, Willem van Aelst, Willem Claesz Heda, and Pieter Claesz).
Jun. 17th, 2007 @ 06:22 pm
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| » Berlin; Libeskind's Jewish Museum |
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  My brother and I will be in Berlin for the week, checking out the sites that I learned in European History in high school, then sites that I learned in Architectural History in college. On our first day exploring, we managed to visit Museum Island and the Reichstag, while the following day, we visited the Jewish Museum and the Brandenburg Gate. Libeskind's museum was smaller than it seemed in photograph's, however, the various zig-zags, and penetrating lines read through, just as in the drawings. Very much, the building translates the drawing's concepts, with violent breaks, angled passages, and long hallways. The voids were as I expected them to be: tall, cold, and dark, with the few penetrations to the outside, beaming in rays of light. The sound produced inside these spaces reflect the intended gravity, an echoed amplified sound from footsteps or clanging of metal inside the spaces. The details of doors and handrails were expectedly well done, as was any workmanship. The outside facade, the striated incisions of slit windows, the building plan... everything was well-thought-out and integrated. We visited the Garden on Exile on Friday, due to bad weather. The intended dizziness was there, caused from the slanted ground and stelae. This was most of all packed with symbolism, 49 stelae (7x7, 7 days in week, one holy... or year '48, the creation of Israel, + 1 for Berlin... it's all open for interpretation), olive bushes, etc. It's a good contrast to Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, an abstraction without any symbolic significance.
Jun. 13th, 2007 @ 10:58 pm
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| » Europe... |
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 I’m going to New York City tomorrow with my brother, and then on the 10th, it’s backpacking off to Germany, Spain, France, and wherever else our whims and the winds take us. I’ll be looking out for the latest art and architecture, plus absorbing the culture and cuisine. I’ll try to update the blog on LiveJournal, and upload pictures, depending on Internet café availability and time; but really… who reads this thing?
Jun. 8th, 2007 @ 12:01 am
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| » Gizmos and Gadgets |
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  You may not know it, but Apple and Sony are in competition. This is not only because both of their leading products, the iPhone and PlayStation 3 respectively, are $600 and tout a sleek aesthetic. Or that both products are proprietarily-locked, where users are regulated pre-packaged content predetermined by their respective corporations.
They are both, for themselves, out there competing to privatize and commercialize space. This is probably one of my main problems with the cell phone, besides its annoying rings in lectures and enabling obnoxious conversations in public: as with the media of cell phones (or the iPod), where their deployment in the public brought greater agency and freedom to its user, their benefits were a double-edged sword; through conversing in public places on a cell phone to another individual who is physically absent in the same space creates a homogenized void of ubiquitous one-sided monologues, where once potentially the conversation was traditionally always directed to other people who were present. As a result whether cell phone, iPod, or iPhone, the public zone becomes privatized into the individualized catering of what the user wants to hear and say, without having to deal or acknowledge the present site context, depriving the space and the user themselves from what the space has to offer right there and then, both spatially and temporally. The Japanese know it’s bad; in Japan, people cover their mouths, whisper, anything not to bring attention to themselves that their breaking so public of a bond with their surroundings or the community, though the next generation might not be as sensitive. The same can be said of one-player video games, a “private” media enjoyed alone, taking away from the “communal nature of television, where the entire family sits around the set and chooses programming together.” But honestly, that’s starting to sound like what my parents once said about the Nintendo Entertainment System; the stereotype of the anti-social gamer is one that I do not necessarily agree with. So is the privatization and commercialization of space through technology inherently good or bad? Or does this just an argument for face-to-face of family and community interaction? (Or a promotion for family/community-geared media, such as the Nintendo Wii?) Well, there’s more that Sony and Apple are competing for: the most over-hyped, extras-loaded gizmo. Futurist guru, Bruce Sterling had this to say about Gizmos, from his keynote “When Blobjects Rule the Earth” at the SIGGRAPH Festival in Los Angeles in 2004:  “A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre, baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I’m carrying here, this is a classic Gizmo: it’s a cell phone, a web browser, an SMS (Short Message Service) platform, an MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It’s not a Machine or a Product, because it’s not a stand-alone device. It is a platform, a playground for other developers. It’s a dessert topping, and it’s a floor wax.
(...) so there are good reasons why a Gizmo is almost impossible to use.
It’s because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos.
It is trying to cram as much impossible complexity as it can, into an almost usable state.
It is leaning forward into the future.” Both the iPhone and PlayStation 3 are trying more or less that, pushing the envelope, innovating, and so forth. Again, by being everything plus the kitchen sink – is that inherently good or bad? Is it about reinventing the whole notion of the technology, right down from interface to design, and pushing the limits? Is this universal technology that will sincerely make our lives that much more enjoyable, easier, or better… or is it something else: that these are reserved luxuries and fetishized gadgets limited, designed, and catered for the technology-aficionados or monetarily wealthy? If you couldn’t tell, I won’t be getting either anytime soon.
Jun. 5th, 2007 @ 03:24 am
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| » Sci-fi and Architecture |
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 A few days ago, I came across a short excerpt from an interview of Mark Wigley in BLDGblog (“From: Architectural Weaponry: An Interview…”), which elicited me to ask the question “Which you'd rather be locked in a room with: a science fiction book or Deleuze?” to my fellow colleagues from our theory class. The immediate response I got was not pertaining to the question, but rather delved into the interview in regard to the discipline’s self-held importance about how architecture is most influential of arts and sciences in culture and society. The irony I drawn from this comment came from where I read the excerpt and found the link to the article: science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog, Beyond the Beyond; the irony being that architecture is not the most influential, but has the reciprocal relationship of being (arguably) the most influenced and influential. Architecture takes in all of the ideas and products of innovation of other fields and intergrades them, and in every respect, becomes the source of ideas and inspiration for other fields. The fact is that science fiction legitimately is as much of an important means of theorizing about technology and space as Deleuze and Guattari.
 The reason why I’m bringing this up is because I’m reading Orson Scott Card’ Ender’s Game (where in zero-gravity, ‘up, down, left, and right’ is wherever you want it to be), but also because the relation between science fiction and architecture keeps popping up lately, like at the Science Fiction and the City lecture earlier this month at Pasadena or in talk about manga-artist Osamu Tezuka’s exhibition this summer in San Francisco… or because that I’m interested in this stuff and I read too much Wired-related things. But this is also in part what Wigley and Inaba are saying about loading architect’s vocabulary with adjectives, nouns, and verbs that are not found within the discipline, but from outside “genres”. So architects look at set designs of Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Minority Report or better yet, read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the basis for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, same author of the short story, Minority Report) or Stanisław Lem’s Solaris for inspiration. And of course, the “why” is that so architects can re-imagine architecture, creating future infrastructures in the reshaping of city space and formulating potentially new political matter and space, problematizing new cities, new entities, and new subjectivities. In other words, to not create forms that reflect our socio-cultural and political effects, but to cause them, push them, challenge the pre-conceived normatives to help people make connections and allow us to see and know the world differently.
The irony in that is that these science fiction novels and stories depict forms created within dystopias. Are they instructive on how not to build? Or are they just bases from which architects can draw a certain aesthetic (whether smooth, organic, turbulent…)? I would hope that they were looking also at the latent tropes and questions in such stories in regards to freewill or the nature of humans. So I end with some quotes, one from Of Cars, Dogs, Golf, and Bad Feng Shui: An Interview with Jeffrey Inaba: “I think what’s important is our ability to extract things from the genre of science fiction, not to reproduce the look and feel of science fiction as a genre. As architects, we can go beyond aesthetics – in the sense of beautiful buildings, or interesting buildings, or new buildings – and find public consequences both for architecture and architectural discussion…” … that is, to think of architecture not as aesthetics or the finished building, but an ability to allow and create change in a changing world and to “allow us to think the unimaginable” (Cedric Price).
Jun. 1st, 2007 @ 02:25 am
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| » Semester Redux |
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 Work section revamped, plus Links updated.
May. 28th, 2007 @ 10:19 pm
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| » In Praise of Japan-blogging |
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Went to see an exhibit at UB on Muriel Orr-Ewing – which could have been a tutorial on how you could gaijin-blog old-school; that is, live around Japan and write a diary: Monday -- I shall launder Peter's things and practice the piano
Tuesday -- practice singing and study Japanese
Wednesday -- write letters home and piano
Thursday -- do sewing and singing practice
Friday -- write this diary or Peter's or do other writing, the piano.
Saturday -- wash my hair and study Japanese
On Sunday all or more of these things.
[Diary, June 1, 1926 pg. 7-8] I guess today’s gaijin diaries are a bit more… tech-savvy:
Sushicam - http://www.sushicam.com/
Alin Huma - http://akabe.livejournal.com/
Mar. 21st, 2007 @ 10:49 pm
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| » Mini-houses of Japan |
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I had a chance to rant about Mini-houses of Japan a few weeks ago; around the same time I was putting together a presentation on SANAA. Now BusinessWeek has an article about this too: Japan: Micro-Homes in the Big City.
Via Jean Snow, Core77, ApartmentTherapy, and MoCo Loco
Mar. 20th, 2007 @ 02:10 am
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| » Dragon Day 2007 |
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Archinect just posted links to the recap of Cornell’s Dragon Day. All I personally have to report from being there is that I got to see the 5th years being chased away by cops for t-ping, my apartment building hosted a few “Dragon Day Breakfasts”, and I got some of those t-shirts for myself and my siblings. Good times.
Mar. 20th, 2007 @ 12:47 am
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| » More Links... |
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An update on links… basically stole all of the architecture ones from Victor. MacHall web comic is now Three Panel Soul New design blog link: MoCo Loco Some architecture blog: Veritas et Venustas
Mar. 18th, 2007 @ 01:07 am
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| » Christian Kerez Wins MoMa Warsaw Competition |
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This will be the second high profile contemporary structure proposed as of late to be built in Warsaw; the first by one of the jurors of the said competition, Daniel Libeskind, also right next to the Palace of Culture and Science.
 
Christian Kerez - http://www.kerez.ch/
Images of competition - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cisar/sets/72157594544643173/
Libeskind’s Złota 44 - http://www.zlota44tower.com/
Source: Archinect
Feb. 20th, 2007 @ 12:02 am
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