Friday, December 29, 2006

The Möbius strip of self promotion

This blog was always supposed to be the "News" page of my site, then it turned into something else entirely. Now a part of this blog has been included in the last issue of super cool L.A. based Textfield magazine, and I guess blogging about the publication of your blog is the absolute Möbius strip of self promotion, so much so that it's almost funny. Anyways, here's how it looks in print:On the subject of publications, here's also the brand new Ff magazine (no, not THAT type of FF) from Sweden with a sexy looking Farshid Moussavi of Foreign Office Architects on the cover. This first issue has tons of great stuff on the branding of Stockholm, Urban Sustainability, hot favourites R&sie, as well as me with Hotel Blue Wave, Cloud House and Polygon Housing with excerpts from an interview by Jan Aman which you can apparently read here (though I could not find it).
Polygon Housing seems to be popping up in different publications, like Dcasa di Republica, Mark and more.and this just in from Ligne8 the magazine of the Opera de Paris

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Mark 4

It seems I'm only blogging about magazines or books or internet stuff, and I can definetly feel the urge to get the hell out of the office but it aint happenin just yet. I've posted about Mark before, but cant help posting some more because it just gets better and better with every issue. I wonder if they're going to keep redesigning the whole thing with every issue because it sure looks different every time. So apart from the totally cool content, Lesley Moore's design for Mark 4 totally rocks. Like totally.

Monday, December 25, 2006

Christmas in the Sandbox

Our property is totally blocked in because the area has really shitty zonng laws, and there no room to work on the tiny 512sqft lot, so I took the Tube House out for repairs to a Sandbox, to have alook at the section and group it as a single object. A Sandbox is an area where you get lots of space for 12 hours, so people go to there to build and test tons of stuff, like snowmen and scary monsters that wrap themselves around your head, to a little chrsitmas kiosk selling trees and guns, and french fries and burgers, and there was even a weirdo goth guy looking over my back lest I snatch the fries, so I scrammed and continued looking for a larger piece of land somewhere along the coast...

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Pugno al Architettura

OK I have definetly overdone it with the Gaetano Pesce posts, so here's one more. I just couldnt resist blogging his RAG CHAIR (how fabulous?) or this MOLOCH LAMP (???) and the cute drawing whose title once again says it all.

My Anchorage

Here's "My Anchorage" a work from early 2001 that I just put on You Tube. It was part of the Massless Medium exhibition in the Brooklyn Anchorage, an amazing enormous and very cavernous space underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. This was the last time the space was used for exhibitions, for obvious bomb related reasons. The show was organized by the nice people at Creative Time. For this YouTube version I put "If I were a carp" by Final Fantasy as an impromptu soundtrack.
My Anchorage is my version of the space where the show took place.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Pin-Up Magazine for Architectural Entertainment

I'd been looking for this all over Amsterdam when my friend Jop told me about it, and finally I found it in Milans' Corso Como boutique. Super expensive fashion stores are good for something after all: Check out Issue 1 of the hot new architecture magazine, PIN-UP: the self procaimed magazine for architectural entertainment It doesnt say anywhere that it's a GAY ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE but the first issue is very homo friendly indeed, featuring the sexy and talented Mr Juergen Mayer H talking about his upcoming buildings as well as the New Bears of Berlin, the cute and very interesting artist Daniel Arsham and the utterly camp Anca Petrescu talking about her most famous achievement, the Palace of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu. Oh and there's famous tall buildings made into dildos, the fabulous Rick Owens showing us around his house,texts by Beatriz Colomina and so much more. Run to the newstands.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Project for an underground city in the age of great contaminations

While on the subject of the great Gaetano Pesce, lets have a look at his "Project for an underground city in the age of great contaminations -A Comunal habitat for twelve persons" a project that needs no explaining because the title says it all. Pesce showed this at the legendary exhibition that I've blogged about in the past, "Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and problems of Italian Design" at MOMA in April 1972.

Friday, December 15, 2006

Sleepless in Milan

I'm so behind on my blogging it's not even funny, or maybe it is. Milan was rather stressfull, I didnt even get a chance to wish my friend Ferda happy 40th birthday. And one night I couldnt sleep so natually I was browsing the closest bookshelf, and in the design books (it's Milan after all) I found these curiously fantastic items:
What do you do when you cant' sleep? You hoover of course, or at least you would if you had this prototype hoover by Studio Alchymia. Why cant I find a book on Alchymia, anywhere?
After a little hoovering, you take a rest on the city that never sleeps ( New York Sunset, Gaetano Pesce)
or you really just go to sleep on the Sit Down (get it?), also by Pesce. As Banana Yoshimoto would say, "Very Sleepable" and finally you could have breakfast in the plexi dome that I have no info about, apart that it was on the cover of Interni, the magazine that published a lot of the really great work of the 70's - 80's, which is what all this is about really.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

Animal Leader

Recently I read an extensive profile on Will Wright , designer of Sim City and Sims and the much talked about and upcoming Spore. Spore is a game where you evolve your creature/avatar so that it survives and conquers, which sounds exactly like Animal Leader, the japanese only game that my friend Mai was obsessed with in the early 2000s'. In Animal Leader you start life as a blank cube and had to evolve in to a more complex creature and take elements from your enemies in order to beat them. Just like architecture.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Fiascorama

Angelo was in London, and amongst other thing he brought back the Fiascorama issue of USELESS Magazine , featuring the lovely Kai Kuhne, the even lovelier Annika Larsson and much much more. (because life is longer than you think)

Monday, December 04, 2006

If you're in Athens tonight

I'm part of the "Apolis" exhibition, that opens tonight at the Hellenic American Union, curated by artist Kostis Velonis. Come by check it out. I'm showing a model and a video of Cloud House.

The exhibition also includes works by: Alexis Akrithakis, Nikos Alexiou, Tzimmi Efthimiou, Dimitris Foutris, Alexandros Georgiou, Eleni Kamma, Tassos Langis, Panayiotis Loukas, Leda Lycourioti & Thanos Pagonis, Network Nomadic Architecture (Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou, Eleni Tzirtsilaki, Pegu Zali), Simos the Existentialist, Vassiliea Stylianidou, Stefanos Tsivopoulos.

Sunday, December 03, 2006

The Portrait Room

Brian Bress and Jacques Vidal
more at: http://www.brianbress.com

Trepponti di Comacchio

Found this on Flickr one day
is it a famous bridge? It makes a full circle when the arch is reflected in the water. And its a three way bridge. And it's a very sunday morning kind of post.

Friday, December 01, 2006

Cero9 becomes AMID

Recently I got a comment on this post that the Office Cero9 had been renamed AMID. I'm still a big fan of their powerstation (and especially the model made of flower petals) and even though there's no projects on their website, it seems that Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda are keeping up the good work. Here's a few images from Water House