Sunday, November 16, 2008
The Northwest’s premiere budget boutique hotel - The Ace - will soon have new digs on the east coast. In line with Ace properties in Seattle and Portland, many of the NY rooms will feature shared hallway bathrooms – but at least you’ll have you’re very own in-room turntable. Not kidding.
Along for the ride [...]
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Insightful review of Michael Winterbottom’s 2003 film Code 46 at bldgblog. Seems that the film develops its urban backdrop via visual bricolage, amalgamating the landmarks of developing megacities into an uncannily familiar no-place. Regarding this technique, Geoff Manaugh asks, “But what does it mean that Asian cities – cinematically depicted as a kind of monolithic [...]
Life is but a stage, especially if you live a tulou-style structure like the ones built by China’s Hakka people more than 1000 years ago. For those interested in trying out communal round-house living, Shenzhen-based Urbanus is developing a modern tulou in Guangzhou to provide some affordable housing China’s vast migrant worker population. The Cooper-Hewitt [...]
Thursday, September 25, 2008
One of the most insightful architecturally-directed blogs I’ve come across in a while is Steve Parnell’s Sesquipedalist. Rather that serve up shiny new renderings of the newest buildings on the block, Parnell combs back issues of architecture porn to demonstrate “the architectural journal’s effect on the profession’s social construction of architecture.” The results (part of [...]
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Apartamento is a new international editorial project dedicated to the world of interiors, born to tell the story of personal experiences and lifes through the spaces where we live and work. Everyday stories, seen without the usual masks of look-a-like interiors perfect to the millimeter, because in real life the variables are infinite and unpredictable, [...]
Monday, September 8, 2008
Great article in the New York Times by Nicolai Ouroussoff about the architect Lebbeus Woods.
Some critics condemned the design for its coldblooded imagery. But it also turned cold-war Modernism on its head. In the 1950s American architects were striving to retool wartime military production for the construction of a peacetime paradise. One result was [...]
Friday, September 5, 2008
The Chinese artist Liu Bolin continues his ongoing photo project of “blending into” the background. This time, he embeds himself in slightly more politically loaded situations, including a poster for the Olympic mascots and a scene where he’s being grabbed by a policeman.
via ifgogo
Friday, September 5, 2008
Amazing and beautiful Bird’s Nest “homage” in a farming village in China.
via Virtual China
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
In Beijing, we witnessed the building of incredible, totally unsustainable structures that were built to temporarily alleviate seemingly minor problems. For example, a giant silver scaffold erected for a few months to “hide” the demolition and reconstruction of the Qianmen area. In Berlin this morning, we saw the same technique interpreted on a smaller scale. [...]
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
aka House of World Cultures…
We went to the opening of a show called “In the Desert of Modernity” that deals with cities in North Africa and their attempts to modernize after European colonization. The exhibition is unsurprisingly dense and is comprised of a maze of easels holding various charts, images and historical ephemera relating to [...]