WARREN HAASNOOT STUDIO

Sketches

2011-12-13T04:14:00.000-08:00

These are from my sketch book over the last couple of months. In no particular order

Be Like the Cow

2011-12-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

There is a good interview with François Roche from R&Sie(n) that can be found here. In particular I found the following statements highly evocative and interesting to consider.

FR Do we need to accept the economy of the devil to fight against the devil? Is that the question? I can’t answer. It depends on what you’re doing. Is it to clean the money? No. If it’s to use the money to show that the system is corruptible, and to show how you can use it to create an alternative – perhaps. You can refuse the economy out of principle, to say: ‘I don’t want the post-capitalist economy. I want to do my own work by myself for my own purposes’. But in that case you can’t be an architect. Mainly, we are in a field where there is intrinsically a negotiation with the devil. We are exactly in the middle of the negotiation. Sometimes, I dream to be a writer or philosopher, a profession where you can be outside. But as an architect, you have to find a more sophisticated strategy than this kind of literal romanticism of Don Quixote. You have to be inside and outside, a sort of schizophrenia.

FR We are push-and-pull with real commissions, exhibitions, teaching laboratories and lectures. The architecture field is becoming poorer and poorer, compared with the increasing sophistication of what is expected of us. We spend a lot of time working on projects, and we are not clearly paid for the sophisticated work we do. Now, architecture offices are relying on the work of interns to produce sophisticated work – it’s slavery. Why are we using interns to produce work for capitalism, while at the same time we try to fight capitalism? It’s contradictory. It’s not only us – it’s a widespread problem. To be an architect is to reveal this contradiction, to make it visible.

I think the way R&Sie(n) operates is an excellent model to follow.

Hybrid Muscle (2003) Chiang Mai

Weekend

2011-12-01T12:39:00.001-08:00

Exhibition tonight at Padington Town Hall, 5:30 for one night only.

Homebake on Saturday, looking forward to seeing Nick Cave.

Picasso Exhibition on Sunday...

Exhibition Prints

2011-11-24T12:17:00.001-08:00

Decay

2011-11-24T03:43:00.001-08:00

This is a small movie I put together for my final project. The beginning is taken from footage of the closure and demolition of BHP in Newcastle. Other parts of the movie are spliced with footage from the movie Zeotrope, a short film adaptation of a Kafka Novel called The Trial. Both influenced the project in various forms and help evoke emotion and dialogue about the work.

Climate Change

2011-11-22T03:26:00.001-08:00

I was looking for an old newspaper to make a print of my work. This one is more than appropriate, it is an article about the radical weather experienced in Sydney in 1958. It is interesting to consider that the notion of global warming has been speculated now for over 50 years and that man himself maybe responsible...maybe its time to act

Dudley Residence

2011-11-08T23:40:00.000-08:00

A couple of photos taken a few weeks ago out on site. The clients have now moved in, it will be good to see without the work truck in the driveway and all the landscaping done.

Thats my dog, she loves site visits but hates nail guns

Distractions

2011-11-08T23:15:00.000-08:00

I have been busy focusing on producing work for the final submission so I have been off the internet as much as possible but I will definitely have some stuff to post soon. These are a couple of progress photos of the models under construction.
1 week to go!!!

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang)

2011-10-09T15:01:00.001-07:00

BMW

2011-10-07T05:20:00.000-07:00

Cool BMW motor part cutaway sections

IDEA Introduction

2011-10-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

The project has been developed out of an interest in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project where he explores the rich diversity of activities, people and human behaviour in and around our built environment. Benjamin constructs the cities topographical domains of the flâneur as a stage for the marvels of the everyday.

The proposed project restores the historical notion of the wharf as a place positioned at the edge of society, both physically and conceptually. Characterised by its diverse activity, transgressive program, empathetic fascination with the crowd and otherworldiness of transience, drinking, violence and prostitution; the radical antithesis of contemporary harbour development.

Slipway Carrington

Ship Mill

Dyke Point Carrington

Albert Tucker

An architect appalled at communism and consumerism alike

2011-10-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

Visitors to the Hungarian pavilion at the 1992 Seville Expo came in from the searing heat to a cavernous, dark space with a great curving roof like a cathedral. At its centre was a tree, brought from the Hungarian plains, stripped bare and set into a glass floor so that its roots, which stretched as far and wide as its branches, were made visible.

It was the work of Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz, who has died aged 75.

Guy Rottier

2011-09-29T19:35:00.000-07:00

Some amazing architectural / artistic images by French architect Guy Rottier.

MANIFESTO

Architecture is being invented just like one invents a car or a plane. It has no boundaries and can be exported like any other creation. Sites never compelled a predetermined architecture.

Architecture has no public interest but private, except for some public buildings or monuments.

It is the synthesis of all arts including every discipline and in that regard it should be free and should only obey to technical constraints, security, hygiene and land planning.

But Human beings have a different judgment. Deep frozen in the past and crazy about tradition, they added such useless constraints that any evolution seems to be impossible. Housing is yet the basis cell of any society is currently the only field where progress, especially in France, is almost impossible, in the global indifference of users and most of architects.

French (original)

Views of the Kroměříž Archbishop's Palace and its Pleasure Gardens

2011-09-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

Quarantena

2011-09-21T01:33:00.000-07:00

QUARANTENA from Robert Gilson on Vimeo.

Working Drawings

2011-09-17T22:07:00.000-07:00

Fulfilling course requirements...

Transparent Underground

2011-09-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

Working Model

2011-09-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

Dudley Residence

2011-09-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

Balustrades, painting and landscaping to go...nearly there!

W House

2011-09-01T18:15:00.000-07:00

Small addition to an existing weatherboard house including Kitchen, Living, Bathroom and Laundry. The island bench in the Kitchen is designed to accommodate cooking and casual seating and opens onto a Courtyard. The Courtyard also provides sun access to all the Living spaces and an internalised "green" room.

Dr. Mabuse the Gambler

2011-09-01T05:19:00.001-07:00

"The film moves from the world of the slums to the world of the stock exchange and then to the cabarets and nightclubs–and everywhere chaos reigns, authority is discredited, power is mad and uncontrollable, wealth inseparable from crime."

Cabaret Voltaire

2011-09-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

Its dark premises were artists' club, exhibition room, pub, and theater, allrolled into one. The artists' performances consisted of the oddest workswhich had never before been seen or heard. Noise music, simultaneous poemsrecited by 4 to 7 voices speaking all at once, bizarre dances in grotesquemasks and fancy costumes, interrupted by readings of German and French soundverses sounding like nothing on Earth, and solemn incantations of texts bythe mystic Jacob Böhme and of Lao-Tse. On the walls had been hung pictures by artists whose names had been unknown until then: Arp, Paolo Buzzi, Cangiullo, Janco, Kisling, Macke, Marinetti, Modigliani, Mopp, Picasso,van Rees, Slodki, Segal, Wabel, and others. A place where young people not only laid stress on enjoying theirindependence, but also wished to proclaim it.

In this declaration the name of "Dada" is documented for the first time, andfrom here it was carried into the world. On July 14th, 1916, the first DadaSoirée took place at the "Waage" hall; and in the same month the seriesof books, "Collection Dada," began to appear.

Developed Design

2011-08-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

This isnt an urban renewal plan, it is a reaction against the very type of market satisfying architecture that is shaping our social environment, stifling innovation and our freedom of choice.
The strict organisation of Newcastle's harbour development and commercially driven architecture has decayed any notion of a complex social order. A monoculture of greed and power has swollen within the urban condition of the city and unconsciously generated a mode of violence, drunkenness and unsolicited behavior. Only through civil disobedience and Dionysian activities is the individual able to be liberated of the oppression sustained by a society of control.
As the demand for inner city residential developments intensifies and prices increase the after hours activities and unsolicited behavior are no longer welcomed in the city and are being forced to occupy new territories.
On the industrial harbour edge of Carrington, opposite the Honeysuckle precinct a new type of development emerges. Under the shadows of the monumental silo's, factories and coal terminals, symbols of our greed and environmental destruction, Carrington's rich historical past is reopened and the vitality of human existence explored.Compassion, equality and moral virtue are examined through the collective unity and otherworldliness of drinking, violence, prostitution, transience and gambling.

Dudley Residence

2011-08-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

Nick Missel

2011-08-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

Some beautiful sculptures by Nick Missel, something very architectural about the pieces.

Preliminary

2011-08-18T03:43:00.000-07:00

Preliminary render of wharf bars where the consumption of alcohol, gambling, violence and prostitution are ~~welcomed~~ explored. The materials and machinery of the industry are taken, twisted and put together in ways that seek to restore the historical notion of Carrington's past.

Not a big fan of computer renders, if time permits I am going to do the presentation by hand.

Model

2011-08-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

From 1:20 to 1:200

from sail

to square

coal loader

2011-08-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

Dobell

2011-08-10T01:46:00.000-07:00

I remember my primary school had a copy of this painting in the principles office and I also remembering the teacher bringing it in to class one day for us to sketch, I would have been about 10. I have strangely been attracted to it ever since, maybe its because the artist was local, or maybe its the controversy surrounding the painting, but now many years on I like to think it is the honesty and strength of the piece. His style had the amazing ability to adapt and change to the personality of his subject and I believe this character is apparent in all the best architecture.

"I just wanted to show a man in a warm night light setting, and I wanted to work in the sculptural setting - a light figure in a dark setting - so I built it up as a sculptor builds up any form; I glazed my colors on to it." William Dobell

The Lost Thing

2011-08-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

Earlier I looked at some of the art of Shaun Tan, an Australian artist who creates beautiful illustrated novels for children. One of his stories, The Lost Thing has been made into a short film and is an interesting critique of contemporary society and the notion that unless we are looking for something, it can go unnoticed.
There is a sameness and dreariness of the city workers in their grey suits, blind to a world full of beautiful things the film suggests they have perhaps lost their childhood spirit.

Slippery Slide

2011-08-02T04:01:00.000-07:00

Slippery Slide House by Level Architects
Cool!!
遊具としてのすべり台を、建物の動線として取り込むことを考えた。階段で最上階にまで登り、すべり台で最下階におりる。日常の動線の中にすべり台を入れる事で、『すべり台のある住宅』ではなく、建物全体が遊具になった、「すべり台の住宅」となった。

Floating Project

2011-08-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

A couple of interesting floating projects...

Family and PlayLab, Plus Poolin New York

+31 Architects Watervilla, house boat on the river Amstel in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Studio Noach, and Anne Holtrop's, Floating Gardens, the Netherlands.

Floating House / MOS Architects, Ontario, Canada

Thames Salmon Rehab

2011-07-31T02:28:00.000-07:00

An impressive film by Jonathan Schofield from the University of Westminster in the UK. The Thames Salmon Rehab project is a type of mechanical architecture that responds to the kinetic energy of the moving tides and creates an interesting synergy between the natural and the artifice.

Thames Salmon Rehab from Jonathan Schofield on Vimeo.

Looking Up

2011-07-26T04:13:00.000-07:00

Its better than looking at the muddy ground!

ScanLAB

2011-07-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

ScanLAB Projects has revealed this ‘millimetre perfect’ visualization made from 3D scans of last year’s summer exhibition at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

The research project by Bartlett students Matthew Shaw and William Trossell was explained: ‘Our current exhibition of drawings and animations records last year’s Bartlett School of Architecture Summer Show not through video or photography but solely through the 3D Scanning. 48 hours of colour 3D scanning produced 64 scans of the entire exhibition space using a Faro Photon 120 laser scanner.

Bartlett Summer Show 2010 3D Scan from ScanLAB on Vimeo.

‘The scans were then aligned to create a millimetre perfect 3D model of the entire exhibition space and all of the thousands of drawings, prototypes, models, sketches, films and installation within. A series of ‘standard’ architectural drawings are taken from this data set and exhibited on bespoke light boxes.

‘These drawings represent the closest record to an “as built” drawing set for the entire exhibition and an “as was” representation of the Bartlett’s year.

‘The exhibition and all research work was supported by Faro Laser Scanning, Pointools and CEGE at UCL. The exhibition was launched as part of the recent Fabricate Conference at the Bartlett which discussed the progressive integration of digital design with manufacturing processes.

‘The conference brought together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation.

More information and photos can be found here.

Good, Bad or Ugly

2011-07-17T01:13:00.000-07:00

Brisbane's South Bank

Nearing completion

2011-07-11T01:14:00.000-07:00

Glass Tower II

2011-07-09T22:03:00.000-07:00

Why does a man build a Tower?
To fight off enemies? To transmit TV pro-
grams? To house more inhabitants and to
economize high costly earth? No, no [and] no!
That's a lie and the masking of the real [and]
the only true function of a Tower [-] to shout
as loud as possible: "here I am! Look how st-
rong and mighty I am!" All the rest - the ele-
vators, the floors and the countless clercks
filling the Tower [-] exist only to put on a mask.
Let us build at last the Real Tower - "A Glass
Tower for a Little Man." It will be a gigantic
glass cylinder standin[g] in the very
center of a town. There will be nothing in-
side but a glass staircase leading to it.
A man can go upstairs [,] and at the moment
he enters the room, his Old Dream comes true:
Due to the newest technical inventions and
wonderful nature of glass[,] a little Man will
fill in by himself the gigantic Tower. And
all the town will see him[,] and every tremen-
dously enlarged spot on his nice face will
shout: "look, here I am!" Afterwards the
Man will disappear t give place to the next
one... so welcome to the Glass Tower!!!
(Works day and night)

Ionisation

2011-07-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

An awesome short film by Flat-e. The project began life as a film to accompany a performance by the London Sinfonietta of Edgard Vareses Ionisation. An inspiring 20th century composer who pioneered works that cross over into the electronic scene of today.
The piece shows what you can achieve when people collaborate in an unventilated environment where superglue fumes outweigh the oxygen 6:1.

Ionisation from Flat-e on Vimeo.

Pruitt Igoe

2011-07-08T15:58:00.000-07:00

I think my whole perspective of architecture changed when I watched the destruction of the Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis housing complex that was demolished in 1972 and is considered one of the touchstones in the 'death' of modernism. The site is typical of the towers in the park ideal most notably ascribed to public housing and derived from version of Le Corbusier's Radiant City designs. In this case, bars of housing were interwoven with roads, parking, and open space within immense superblocks as seen in the aerial and plan of the original development.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

A new competition has just been launched that seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, designers, writers and artists of every discipline have been invited to re-imagine the 57 acres on which the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was once located." What could the site be today?

Under Limassol's pier

2011-07-05T23:40:00.000-07:00

Bricks

2011-07-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

Its funny brick is a really Australian building product and recently I have noticed a lot of good local architects have been using it in interesting ways. Its kinda cheap, robust and familiar to all builders so it makes it a good product without creating awkward details or joinery.

Using it to bring life to this simple two box addition with a courtyard that is currently under construction.

The Black Market

2011-07-05T00:37:00.000-07:00

If the factory represents the highest possibility in terms of production and the lowest possibility in terms of wages, then the black market represents the lowest possibility in terms of production for the highest possibility of gain.

Jason de Caires Taylor

2011-07-03T01:20:00.000-07:00

Wow, these underwater sculptures by Jason de Caires Taylor are life size figures that rest on the Cancun seabed in Mexico. The aging process of the sculpture becomes interesting as they develop into artificial reefs and attract marine life and the shifting sands. The unique experience is as if a modern day Pompeii, we seem to glimpse into a moment when time is frozen and the sea levels have risen, perhaps a timely reminder of the destruction we are committing to our own place of habitation.

Fed Square Face Off

2011-06-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

Sin Centre 1961-1963

2011-06-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

Last year I did my research dissertation on Archigram and their use of montage to represent the vitality of the street and human experience. With the exception of Simon Sadler's Architecture without Architecture, the theoretical validity of Archigram’s work has long been dismissed by prolific critical theorists such as Denise Scott Brown and Reyner Banham as “short on theory, long on draughtsmanship". I looked at establishing a new theoretical framework and integrity for the group following investigation into their extensive use of montage by identifying characteristics associated with the historical avant-garde and the integrity that distinguishes Archigram’s social, political and psychological position, particularly through the writings of Peter Burger in his seminal book Theory of the Avant-Garde.

Like action hero's I would have to say that my two favorite members are David Greene for his theoretical position towards architecture and Michael Webb for his revolutionary thinking and amazing technical presentation. Sin Centre is one such project by Michael Webb, the technical and theoretical resolution is truly a representation of his talent. The full text on this project can be found here along with a staggering number of other projects by the group.

The Salk Institute

2011-06-23T01:17:00.000-07:00

Found these today, etchings I made in first year. It was my first attempt at doing this and the technique is in no way sophisticated but it could be an interesting way to present my final project...

Forgotten Urban Squalor of The Ward

2011-06-21T05:29:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting article on the forgotten urban squalor of The Ward, the worst slum in Toronto Canada. When the population nearly doubled in the decade of the 1920's due to an influx of Jewish immigrants by the First World War. They lived side-by-side with Italians, Poles, Macedonians, Lithuanians, Chinese, and those from countless other countries. What followed was the growing public concern over crime, poverty, and drug abuse. It would be easy to imagine faceless immigrants as social threats, defined by their strange accents and mannerisms rather than their individual and personalising characteristics. While the majority of the Ward's population was hard-working and undeserving of the added stigmas of vice and criminality, that element certainly existed there. The neighbourhood was rife with bootlegger dive bars, gambling dens, and brothels. Centre Avenue was the city's most notorious red-light district, where prostitutes openly solicited from their doorstep while young boys earned their pay keeping watch for the police. Police targeted lower classes at least partly out of concern that their poverty and urban squalor would contaminate respectable society. Police reports, according to sociologists Helen Boritch and John Hagan, characterised the foreigners who ran the Ward's illegal gambling houses as "vicious criminals" and "racketeers."

What cant be denied here was a type of human resilience and determination that thrived in the narrow lanes densely packed with ramshackle cottages, dingy storefronts, and street-corner preachers hassling the locals to convert. Homes were a far cry from the architect-designed houses of the city's newest subdivisions and within the underbelly of life there was a particular human geography of place. By the 1950s demolition of The Ward to allow the commercial district's office towers, hotels, and, more recently, condos to stretch northwards all but erased the streetscape and memory of the under-valued immigrants.

Modern architecture and the coagulation of money has all but destroyed any notion of a complex social order. The forgotten memories, dreams and hopes of the less fortunate find an uncomfortable repose in the foundations of the modern monuments that rise in their place. In this situation I cant help but think a piece of the city dies rather than develops or flourishes. There is a beautiful nostalgia in the memories of the old and perhaps none more beautiful than Brodsky and Utkins Columbrium Habitabile. Their proposal becomes a refuge for the little old houses, their inhabitants and their memories in a large modern city. After all, each is suffused with the soul of its architect, builders, inhabitants and even the passerby who happens to cast an absent-minded glance its way.

There are so many interesting and amazing stories to be discovered here and for similar reasons its why I find the political situation in Australia more and more frustrating in regards to the treatment of refugees escaping unrest in their own countries. The treatment of these people when they reach australia is nothing short of barbaric and inhumane. It is sad to think our government is bowing to public opinion driven by commercial media. Australia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world and one of the richest and we have the nerve to consider our country "full". We are an educated nation of morons, racists and xenophobes. Imagine the journey the refugees have taken to reach our shores, imagine their stories, their culture, history and skilled trades they could bring to our country. The potential to evolve and develop in this situations in incredible however our system seems to stifle the greatest possibilities we are given.

Street Section

2011-06-19T05:12:00.000-07:00

Influenced by Piranesi's etching of Roman drainage works, the emerging French urban planning tradition, and the reconstruction work following the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, Pierre Patte developed an image for the first section of a street that articulated new ways of managing rain and wastewater. His image is considered one of the first cross-sections to include both the neighbouring buildings that define the street and the interconnected works of engineering that link interiors to the urban underground. In this latter role, Patte's drawing is also the first to articulate the fluid discharges of the city that arise within water and sewerage networks. Not only is wastewater conveyed from the building's interior to the sewer, but Patte considered the wat that water running off a building's roof and onto the street might also be sent into the underground sewer.

Subnature : Architecture's Other Environments
Gissen, David

Alts and Ads

2011-06-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

Its been a busy few weeks, at uni, work and on site. I have even strapped the nail bag on for a few days and been helping on site, its good to get away from the computer! These photos were taken recently, I think there has been a decent amount of progress from the last lot. There is maybe 1-2 months until completion, the clients will be happy indeed.

so busy!!!

2011-06-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

a quick feast for the eyes from a project by Ben Sweeting who is working towards a PhD by design, supervised by Neil Spiller and Ranulph Glanville (who recently visited our school ). Ben's research preoccupations include ethics, cybernetics and architectural design. The following is text associated with the project;

My particular research interest is in the ethical dilemma of designing for others when there is no 'right' solution. In designing architecture we can't possibly avoid interfering with other people's lives as architecture itself forms part of the framework in which people live; that is, intervening in people's lives is rather the point. Thus in architecture we can seldom maintain the isolation implied by an ethics of personal responsibility which is, I argue (following von Foerster and Sartre amongst others), the appropriate response to the undecidability of our situation. Indeed architecture is a good example of the more general difficulty of acting in ways that impact on others.

According to Von Foerster, there are questions that are in principle decidable and those that are in principle undecidable. Decidable questions are 'already decided by the choice of the framework in which they are asked' and are therefore undecidable, whereas 'only those questions which are in principle undecidable, we can decide'.1 The consequence of undecidability is the necessity of choice, i.e. design. Architecture is undecidable because the purpose of a piece of architecture is intrinsically linked to the set of human purposes it supports and these human purposes are themselves undecidable: any analysis of architecture will therefore always have an unresolvable gap at its centre which can only be met by design. Indeed it is always the undecidable parts of architectural dilemmas where design takes place.

My theoretical work focuses on three areas of theory that are linked by the theme of purpose: cybernetics, existentialism and teleological ethics. My design projects explore the questions of purpose and contingency which become explicit as soon as architecture is considered over time, proposing different ways of relating the use of architecture to the architecture itself.

Schematic Model

2011-05-24T05:06:00.000-07:00

Vitamin D

2011-05-20T01:12:00.000-07:00

How to go out of your mind!

2011-05-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

Clip from the 1966 documentary How to Go Out of Your Mind: The LSD Crisis, filmed in part at Timothy Leary’s foundation for psychedelic research in Millbrook, N.Y.
Michel Foucault writes:

We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of categories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disintegrates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asymmetrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events. As it slides on this surface at once regular and intensely vibratory, as it is freed from its catatonic chrysalis, thought invariably contemplates this indefinite equivalence transformed into an acute event and a sumptuous, appareled repetition… Drugs - if we can speak of them generally - have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world “more truthful than the real.” In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought by eliminating the old necessity of a theater of immobility. But perhaps, if it is given to thought to confront stupidity, drugs, which mobilize it, which color, agitate, furrow, and dissipate it, which populate it with differences and substitute for the rare flash a continuous phosphorescence, are the source of a partial thought - perhaps (Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum”, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp 189-90).

German Brothel vs German Prison

2011-05-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

These photos were taken by the German photographer Juergen Chill. They show the remarkable likenesses between a brothel and a prison cell.

Brothel

Prison

The Opium Factory

2011-05-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

These colour lithographs were originally made in 1850 at the request of Walter S. Sherwill, an army officer who served as a British “boundary commissioner” in Bengal. According to Ptak Science Books, these particular reproductions were taken from an article exploring the economic and infrastructural marvels of the Indian opium trade in an 1882 supplement to Scientific American.
They show the main opium receiving, production, and distribution center of the East India Company in Patna, a town in the north-western Bihar province of India. From these vast mixing rooms and examining halls, the Company claimed to produce roughly 13,000,000 pounds of opium annually, which was then shipped down the Ganges to Calcutta, and from there to China.
The image above shows the Examining Hall of the opium factory, where, Scientific American reports, “the consistency of the crude opium as brought from the country in earthen pans is simply tested, either by the touch, or by thrusting a scoop into the mass. A sample from each pot (the pots being numbered and labelled) is further examined for consistency and purity in the chemical test room.”

In the Mixing Room (above), which otherwise looks like a somewhat spartan bathhouse, “the contents of the earthen pans are thrown into vats and stirred with blind rakes until the whole mass becomes a homogeneous paste.” Next stop, according to Scientific American, is the high-ceilinged Balling Room, where the opium paste is shaped into small spheres:

Each ball-maker is furnished with a small table, a stool, and a brass cup to shape the ball in a certain quantity of opium and water called ‘Lewa,’ and an allowance of poppy petals, in which the opium balls are rolled. Every man is required to make a certain number of balls, all weighing alike. An expert workman will turn out upwards of a hundred balls a day.

After this, the balls are taking to the Drying Room, where each is placed in an individual earthenware cup. The image below shows “men examining the balls, and puncturing with a sharp style those in which gas, arising from fermentation, may be forming.”

The finished opium balls are stored before shipping in the Stacking Room, where “a number of boys are constantly engaged in stacking, turning, airing, and examining the balls. To clear them of mildew, moths or insects, they are rubbed with dried and crushed poppy petal dust.” Finally, the balls are transferred into cardboard boxes and loaded into ships bound for Calcutta.

This factory — “the architecture of 13,000,000 pounds of opium production,” as Ptak Science Books calls it — is part of a larger British colonial landgrab fueled, at least in part, by pursuit of the immense profits to be earned from an unrestricted drug trade. As Amitav Ghosh, in an interview about his novel, Sea of Poppies, explains, “The Ghazipur and Patna opium factories between them produced the wealth of Britain. It is astonishing to think of it but the Empire was really founded on opium.”
While the buildings at Patna now house a government printing press, the Ghazipur opium factory to which Ghosh refers both was and still is the largest opium factory in the world. It has remained pretty much unchanged since Rudyard Kipling described it in 1888, according to a report in the Bihar Times, and has generated a profit every year since it was founded in 1820. The USA and Japan are the largest opium importers, apparently, having inherited the crown from the Soviet Union following its collapse.
In any case, both factories, as well as the fields of poppies that surrounded them, and even the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, form a living archaeology of the incredible economic influence, infrastructural legacy, and spatial impact of the opium trade. Curiously, in Afghanistan today, one of the reasons why opium is more economically attractive to farmers is infrastructural and architectural: drug traffickers pick up the poppies at the farms, whereas growing a food crop would require farmers to build storage facilities and transport their produce to market.
It’s also interesting to consider these grand, temple-like opium factories alongside contemporary spaces of drug production: the foreclosed tract homes that house America’s meth labs, or the tunnels carved out as part of the U.S.-Mexico border smuggling wars. Perhaps a more accurate analogy is Jeff Wilcox’s “vision” for an industrial-scale marijuana farm and processing facility on a 7.4 acre business park in Oakland (already rewired by PG & E to supply banks of power-hungry grow lamps), as opposed to the unregulated encampments of barbed wire, plastic tubing, and leaky generators currently hidden in Mendocino and Humboldt County’s redwood forests.

Speculative Windows text

2011-05-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

For Walter Benjamin, fashion is incorporated by the passage with the full hypnotic force of shop window that is like a narcotic to the flâneur. In the Parisian arcades – the first streets covered with shop windows – the windows are so fabulous that they actually observe the outside world. “Pedestrians in the arcades are so to speak inhabitants of a panorama. [...] They are observed from the windows but they themselves cannot see in.” The shop window is the space of visual speculation. It is the stage of visual ecstasy, fashion’s place of seduction. In the 19th century, the window ceased to be an architectural opening for light and ventilation and became its modern function of framing a view. In this sense, the shop window can be regarded as the window of fashion, which demonstrates inside itself, the ever-changing fashion.

As Benjamin illustrates, the era of glass architecture begins in department stores with their rows of display windows and grand light courts or light wells. For him, the collective, dream-like unconscious of the modern industrial age is to be found in the transparency of the glass that consistently exteriorises the interior. Glass, with its main properties of transparency and protection, keeps the outside out and at the same time brings it in. Its transparency forces a two way model of visuality: framing a private view outward (the picture window) and framing a public view inward (the display window). Commodities, seductively shown behind the glass surface of the shop window, frame the gaze of passing flâneurs and increase their desire for purchase.

Richard Sennett has illustrated glass as a “material, which lets [us] see everything inaccessible to desire.”One can look through but cannot touch, which means, desire, but not possess. Thus, the view trough the shop window reduces street life to merely viewing. It allows vision but prohibits touch and sound, which intensify the desire of consumers and make commodities “look better than they really are.” The shop window becomes a dream world of material pleasure and of the phantasmagoria of commodities.

Salvador Dali was commissioned to design two display windows at ‘Bonwit Teller’, a fashionable New York department store on Fifth Avenue. One of the Displays symbolizes ‘Day’, and the other ‘Night’. For ‘Day’, Dali places a frightful wax mannequin, which is stepping into an old-fashioned hairy bathtub lined with astrakhan and filled with water, from which three wax arms arise holding mirrors. For ‘Night’, in the other window, he shows another frightful mannequin lying on a bed, whose canopy is made of a buffalo head that carries a bloody pigeon in its mouth; the feet of the bed are the feet of the buffalo.

When arriving to see the reaction of his windows he was shocked that “everything, absolutely everything, had been changed,” because shoppers have raised such a hue and cry at the shocking display. With anger Dali sees the changes, and asks the gentleman from the management to remove his name. After their uncooperative talk, he goes to overturn his hairy bathtub of the ‘Day’ window. It crashes through the plate glass of the display window, and he falls through the broken window. Time Magazine among others reports this happening: “‘Oomph’ went the tub as he jerked it from the moorings. ‘Crash’ went Bonwit Teller’s beautiful plate-glass window as the small struggling artist and his tub went through it and lit ‘bang’ on the sidewalk.”

Some other print media, including Art Digest, suspects the apparent accident was a publicity stunt. Dali is arrested because of this accident, which is a big spectacle that made all the New Yorkers and the newspapers talk of him.

Far from being incidental, high fashion is always central to Surrealism’s project, providing raw material, a model of craft-based production and theatrical modes of presentation, all of which prove a fertile ground for Surrealism’s obsessions: the fetish and the dream. Fashion is obviously at the heart of Surrealist interest, and becomes an important part of their visual language.
Following Louis Aragon, the co-founder of Surrealism, fashion is the element, which is common to all forms of modernity. In one of his most well-known works “Le Paysan de Paris” from 1926, Aragon identifies the passage with the ‘Théâtre Moderne’. He sees the passage as the site of erotic spectacles, where commodities on shop windows are more actors than the prostitutes. The shop window becomes the stage, the space of performance, and the spectacle. And the passage becomes an ocean as walking sticks in a shop window turn into see animals.

In his essay “Some Notes on Shop Windows” Friedrich Kiesler proposes that the shop window should be performing a play, starring Mr. Hat and Miss Glove. He refers to the shop window as a peepshow stage, describing the street as the auditorium (of the theatre) with constantly changing viewers. He concludes with a rhetorical question, asking if anybody has written a play for commodities yet. The shop window is a central issue in several of Kiesler’s works, in which he wants to attract the attention of the observers and turn them into active viewers, to awaken their desire to purchase. In 1930, he publishes an extensive work on shop windows titled ‘Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display’, focusing on the topics of contemporary art and architecture and their relation to consumer culture. He maintains the significance of the commercial market for art and architecture, since he sees the department store as an important conduit through which to communicate with the public. He even calls one of the chapters “Contemporary Art Reached the Masses Through the Store.” The department store is regarded as “the true introducer of modernism to the public at large. It reveals contemporary art to American commerce.” It should be “the interpreter for the populace of a new spirit in art.“ It should be an active agent – or sender – of the message of contemporary art and architecture. And it should function to bring the new of art to the public.

Thank You Mona Mahall and Asli Serbest

A Rolling Master Plan

2011-05-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

This project is great fun, it is by a Swedish architecture firm jagnefalt milton and was been awarded third prize for 'a rolling master plan', their proposed development for the idea competition of Andalsnes in Norway.

The design utilizing new and existing train tracks to create a diverse system where buildings roll through the city on rails, providing an opportunity to reorganize programmatic requirements in relation to the urban space. The mobile flexibility allows the city to adjust for uses such as concerts, festivals, markets, and seasonal changes.

The integration of mobile structures - including a rolling hotel, public bath and concert hall - has the
potential to transform the city into a dense, integrated and continually changing scenography.
the temporary, small-scale structures sets the 'city in motion', providing an important connection
between the land and the sea.

Melissa Clinch

2011-05-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Melissa Clinch uses ideas of architectural anamorphosis to create a series of spaces and semiotics that inhabit that great exposition of anamorphic painting Ignatius of Loyola Church in Rome. The church has an anamorphic painted ceiling and an extraordinary painted anamorphic dome. From certain positions in the nave the dome looks perfectly real in others is reveals it for what it is a distorted painted form on the ceiling. Clinch position a three dimensional forms within the church that create fluctuating architectural spaces according to the dynamics of the observer. These spaces open and collapse as one moves and help the viewer understand the science of anamorphic projection and also the rituals and history of the church. These objects operate like four-dimensional hypertexts.

Shaun Tan

2011-05-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

The following images are by Shaun Tan, an Australian artist who creates beautiful graphic novels for children. I think there is an attraction to these images that an adult cannot deny and there is something uncanny about about the fairy tale that speaks to our inner child. It is the fairy tale that teaches us great moral virtue and something contemporary society wants us to deny as we grow older. In Freudian terms there is a strong connection to our animal origins and we can take the fairy tale Beauty & the Beast as an example of a story that emotively connects the audience to the animal or so called "evil" character in order to reveal their true beauty and the ugly honesty of a xenophobic society.

Jan Dibbet

2011-05-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

Jan Dibbets (born 9 May 1941, Weert), is a Dutch conceptual artist. These collages of photographs with pencil have a unique architectural quality, they were designed for his exhibition at the Zadkine museum in Paris in 2004 and it is said that he was inspired by the building itself.

Moonhoon

2011-05-08T02:47:00.000-07:00

Images from the amazingly creative Moonhoon!!!

Update

2011-05-06T22:25:00.000-07:00

In the next 2 weeks the driveway is being poured, flashings and cappings are going on, it should be sheeted internally, some external painting and we should reach lock up.

Conquistador

2011-05-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

The priest killed their victims on top of the pyramids. They would stretch them over a stone alter and strike them in the chest with an obsidian knife. They would tear out the still-beating heart and raise it thus to the sun. Most of the victims were prisoners of war, which justified the ideas of wars as necessary to the life of the sun: wars meant consumption, not conquest, and the Mexicans thought that if they ceased the sun would cease to give life. (page 129, Mical, Surrealism and Architecture)

Likewise in the horror fiction Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani speculates that warmachines dont create war but war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ... oil itself which is directly associated with dying mater, consumption and the life blood of a capitalist society.

Slavecity by Atelier Van Lieshout

2011-05-05T04:47:00.000-07:00

I love the political incorrectness and satiric nature of Van Lieshout's Slavecity, it reminds me of Bruno Taut's Alpine Architecture. The project follows a dystopian narrative similar to the fiction books of Huxley’s Brave New World or H. G. Well’s Men Like God.

The following words are from the artist:

Before entering SlaveCity and becoming an inhabitant you have to pass the Welcoming Center. In this large building the participants are selected for their suitability to come and work in SlaveCity. Old, cripple, sick and bad tasting people will be recycled in the biogas digester. Healthy, not so clever people, will be recycled in the meat processing factory. Young and very healthy people will be able to take part in the organ transplant program. Healthy, clever people will go to work in the CallCenter. Values, ethics, esthetics, moral, food, energy, economics, organization, management and market are turned upside-down, mixed and reformulated and designed into a town of 200.000 inhabitants. The ‘inhabitants’ work for seven hours each day in office jobs and seven hours in the fields of inside the workshop, before being allowed three hours of relaxation before they sleep for seven hours.

Within the city there are two Slave Universities, one for males and one for females. The Female Slave University goes on 24/7, the slaves are functioning in 7 hour shifts (7 hours of study, 7 hours of work on the grounds or other supportive activities, 7 hours of rest and 3 hours of personal care such as eating, washing and relaxing). Male Slave University is the educational centre for the male slaves in SlaveCity. The building is shaped as a heptagon with seven large, impressive auditoriums which are centred around a central multifunctional space. This model of Male Slave University has a cut-away and reveals the interior of the lecture halls, dormitories and teacher’s lounge
The city also features a luxurious female brothel that is shaped like a sperm. In this the male slaves can indulge. The male at the end of the tale has to fight their way through different sections. Only the strongest and most clever men will find their way to the front, where the women will wait for them, in a round arena where they will perform their last battle. Micro, meta and macro levels in our society are the same. The male ‘participants’ of SlaveCity are not being paid for their work in the call centers. Instead of a payment they receive privileges such as a visit to a brothel. The brothels for the higher-class slaves are far more luxurious. In the 5 star brothel for men the slaves can choose between different kinds of pleasure. There are also mini modular brothels. Designed for the lower-class slaves, the modular brothel mixes the style of Bauhaus, a Socialist Plattenbau and a ramshackle wood construction.

The Architecture of Ruins

2011-05-03T05:57:00.000-07:00

imagination

2011-05-03T05:53:00.000-07:00

By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools.

Thank you but does it float

Notes from Delerious New York

2011-04-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

From the 1850's Manhattan became a mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a Culture of Congestion. The revolutionary lifestyle was brought about by the simultaneous explosion of human density and an invasion of new technologies. In his book Delirious New York Rem Koolhaas explores the mutant metropolitan culture of Manhattan and the seemingly unrelated episodes of urbanism. Koolhaas declared that the program of "Manhattanism" was so outrageous that in order for it to be realised it could never be openly declared. The untangling of theories, tactics and dissimulations were collectively established on the unconscious realities of the city grid. "On each plot stands an identical base, built from heavy polished stone. To facilitate and provoke speculative activity, these bases - ideological laboratories - are equipped to suspend unwelcome laws, undeniable truths, to create non-existent, physical conditions. From theses solid blocks of granite, each philosophy has the right to expand indefinitely towards the heaven. Some of these blocks present limbs of complete certainty and serenity, others display soft structures of tentative conjectures and hypnotic suggestions."

The grid can further be understood as the subdivision of metropolitan territory into maximum increments of control - an archipelago of "cities within cities". The more each "island" celebrates its own values the more the unity of the city is enforced. It is within this realm that the skyscraper is able to create its own instantaneous "folklore" by separating interior and exterior architecture - such structures can devote their exterior only to formalism and their interiors only to functionalism.

Each parcel of land represented an irreconcilable shameless bombast of forms and each building striving to outdo the other. The metropolis strives to fabricate the world in his image so it wholly and absolutely coincides with his desires.

Map of Carrington, New York become the hegemony of urban planning in cities around the world.

Love this quote

2011-04-28T05:22:00.000-07:00

Architecture as an idea cannot be limited to one-off masterpieces but should create an inspiring fabric of spaces and ways of living, a tapestry of human invention and aspiration. It is possible to imagine a vibrant urban tapestry—a city—with many Zvi Hecker buildings, while it is not possible to imagine the same with the singular buildings of, say, Zaha Hadid. (Lebbeus Woods on Zvi Hecker's architecture)

Aldo van Eyck

2011-04-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

"A building is a city, a city a building", Aldo van Eyck. His pavilion in Arnhem's Sonsbeek Park reproduces and contains the concept of the city: the parallel walls form five 'streets' which are interrupted here and there or curve to form a system of 'city squares'. This environment is linear on the outside but filled with motion on the inside.

model for an exhibition pavilion

Egocentric

2011-04-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

Presenting a series of smaller projects has proven to be both complicated and time consuming. Further when condensing the projects onto a singular site their positioning felt arbitrary, lacking context and also lost a lot of my initial ideas about creating slow change through an urban fabric of a city.

This is the first iteration of a new idea for my final project I have had. It takes all the same ideas but inverts the design process. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project focuses on the iron and glass construction of the arcades and their affiliated activities and in doing so he illuminated the vitality of human existence. My idea follows a similar notion by considering the associated external spaces of each building or program and the way they frame the public space. This space then becomes a singular entity or building in itself and creates a new interesting way to consider architecture. This is something definitely lacking in commercially driven architecture and our suburban streets, a complete and utter disregard for the social qualities of building and completely egocentric.

Kin Dza Dza Sketchbook

2011-04-25T04:47:00.000-07:00

Wow!

These images show the process Alex Andreyev uses to create his amazing renderings. He uses pencil drawings which he scans and takes into photoshop. Using multiple layers he builds up the base colours and highlighted tones. Finally patches of light and textures are added to create a sense of realness.

Highlighted notes from Surrealism: the last snapshot of the european intelligentsia(1929)

2011-04-24T06:03:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin in his essay The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia considers the transformation of a society, tensioned by a profane struggle for power and domination, as either occurring through decay or explosion. At the time when it broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, surrealism seemed the most integral, conclusive and absolute of movements to stimulate change. “Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous images flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where, sound and image, image and sound interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called meaning”.

Max Ernst (1891-1976)Collage tiré de Une semaine de bonté.

Benjamin describes their writings as primarily concerned with experience and not with theories. And these experiences are by no means limited to dreams, hours of hashish eating, or opium smoking. It is a cardinal error to believe that, of “Surrealist experiences”, we know only the religious ecstasies or the ecstasies of drugs. The opium of the people, Lenin called religion, and brought the two things closer together than the Surrealists could have liked (...) but the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.)

In the world’s structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the domain of intoxication.

To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petty-bourgeois parvenus. Nadja has achieved the true, creative synthesis between the art novel and the roman-a-clef.

Breton was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution...

No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors/enslaved and enslaving objects- can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism. Leaving aside Aragon’s Passage de I’Opera, Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion.

To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution—this is the project about which Surrealism circles in all its books and enterprises. This it may call its most particular task. For them it is not enough that, as we know, an ecstatic component lives in every revolutionary act. This component is identical with the anarchic. But to place the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance. Added to this is an inadequate, undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication. The aesthetic of the painter, the poet, en etat de surprise, of art as the reaction of one surprised, is enmeshed in a number of pernicious romantic prejudices. Any serious exploration of occult, surrealistic, phantasmagoric gifts and phenomena presupposes a dialectical intertwinement to which a romantic turn of mind is impervious. For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illumination just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.

Surrealism has come ever closer to the Communist answer. And that means pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals.

As is attested by the experience of the Surrealists, and earlier of Hebel, Georg Buchner, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud, cannot lead without rupture to anthropological materialism. There is a residue. The collective is a body, too. And the physics that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands.

Fallen Silo

2011-04-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

Fallen Silo's narrative revolves around a community that has inhabited a family of derelict grain silos, returning to a pastoral way of life. The multilayered rendering style strives to capture the fragility of these stoic structures. The illustrations took "Best in Show" at KRob 2009 Architectural Illustration Competition.

The gift of Time

2011-04-20T04:44:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around 1950 Georges Bataille gave Le Corbusier a copy of his book La Park Maudite, essai d'econmie (The Accursed Share) in which the following passage was marked and underlined by Corb:

This useless consumption is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed. And if i thus consume immoderately, i reveal to my fellow beings that which i am intimately: Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely. But nothing counts then; violence is released and it breaks forth without limits, as the heat increases.

This passage represents the so called "productive expenditures" or activities which, considered in primitive terms, has no end beyond itself (surrealism and architecture, Tomas Mical). Corbusier noted the word "fusion" which is believed to reference The Poem of the Right Angle, which he composed over a period of seven years, from 1947-1953.

Fusion (Red)

Do not overwhelm then he
who wants to take his part of the
risks of life - Let
the metals fuse
tolerate the alchemists who
besides leave you outside
the cause

All the buildings we design are projected into the future, so it is hard to disregard the morrow and the immoderate disposition of the irresponsible consumer. "But nothing counts then; violence is released and it breaks forth without limits, as the heat increases."

Coal Mines Hunter Valley


Its hard to comprehend the size of these, check the scale. Coal Loaders Kooragang

Kooragang Coal Loaders

Genius

2011-04-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the best photos I have ever stumbled upon. Le Corbusier and Albert Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey, c. 1946. from Lebbeus Wood's Blog.

A game of chance

2011-04-19T04:21:00.000-07:00

Torgeir Husevaag is a Norwegian artist who has created this series of work based on the visualisation of data collected during a game of poker. In a way that succumbs to the game of chance each players moves are mapped and illustrated in a way that crystallises the flow of chips and cards in graphic form.

There is only five basic acts in poker; bet, raise, call, check, and fold, but they create a quite complex language, since each of these “words” have the potential to chance meaning according to the context it is implied within... My works based on poker translate these processes into visual imagery; the performances focus in on the group-dynamics, the video and installations use the flow of values, as well as the game-aesthetics as their starting-point (green felt, focused lightning, hands, cards and chips in motion). In my drawings the above-mentioned basic acts of poker (and their consequences) are translated into signs, directions and connections. A language created to describe the use of another language, - that of the game.

Hieronymus Bosch

2011-04-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

A great painting I discovered on the Funambulist and also recognised in a movie last night is Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Apart from the artwork itself it is amazing to think that this piece is over 500 years old. I can highly recommend following this link and exploring the painting in high resolution. The painting is a triptych and is perhaps meant to be read from left to right. The garden of Eden is depicted on the left followed by a scene of excessive indulgence of earthly delights and then finally damnation.

Carport on Site

2011-04-08T02:50:00.000-07:00

Density

2011-04-04T07:17:00.000-07:00

So Australians have an issue with density...I found these photos when looking through Lebbeus Wood's blog. It is from the Latin American town of Bagota high in the Andes. It has developed from major urban sprawl resulting in a complex web of arterial routes that weave between the conglomeration of houses and the organic shape of the mountain. The complexity and vitality of spaces could be said to exceed that of the actual city centre.

NEW DAWN FOR CARRINGTON PUMPHOUSE

2011-04-01T22:50:00.000-07:00

NEW DAWN FOR CARRINGTON PUMPHOUSE

In the Penal Colony

2011-04-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Just read Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony and found it very powerful, dark and enigmatic. The story focuses on the machine and the associated processes of an outmoded form of justice. Without giving away to much the paradox that occurs between the machine and those who follow its infallible process is an interesting one and perhaps something to be considered when trying to understand our current environment...do we live and die by the machine or does the machine set us free.

Zeotrope is a film adaptation that is loosely based on the Kafka's book

Construction as Dismemberment

2011-03-29T06:25:00.000-07:00

"construction as dismemberment" was a term used by Hal Foster to read Hans Bellmer's progression of flexible sculptures that he documented in a series of photographs from the mid 1930's called La Poupee.
These images he describes as from the dark underside of a twentieth-century world whose sociopolitical acts of construction have torn people and the social world apart and rebuilt it in monstrous ways.

BIG architects: loop city film

2011-03-28T04:39:00.000-07:00

Very clever! after 3 minutes it will blow your mind...and love the chemical brothers!

sigfrido martín begué (1959-2010)

2011-03-28T04:17:00.000-07:00

Architect and Painter

My New Hero

2011-03-28T02:53:00.000-07:00

The following is a letter from French Architect, Francois Roche and his reasoning for the cancelation of an exhibition and Lecture he was scheduled to give at Sci-Arc on the work of his practice R&Sie(n). His reasoning and position towards architecture, I believe, is a new wave of critical thinkers concerned with the sophisticated sociopolitical aspects of the built environment and our commitment or ability to stimulate change. He is speaking at an upcoming conference in Melbourne (Natural Artifice) that will be extremely interesting and I have the pleasure of attending. I hope he doesn't cancel!

Dear
I have no other way than to cancel the Sci-Arc exhibition in the Gallery (scheduled in May 25) and the lecture (scheduled the April 6-2011)
The gap of point of view, and the lack of interest for politics and attitude, reducing the architecture process to a unique design agenda cannot fit with our scenario of production and scenario of speeches.
Our works and attitudes are toxic, animal, dangerous, regressive, politic and computational.
Architecture is mainly an affair of resistance and self-defense, against hypocrisies and “in”voluntary servitude, to quote La Boetie. It cannot be reduced to a design goal, exclusively dedicated and trapped by tooling. I disagree on the way the knowledge is framed by and for predictable professional, without any potential to corrupt and desalienate through educational procedures the “coming out” of neoplagiarism and neocopism, which remind me the Beaux Art symptom and syndrome. I ‘m French and know perfectly the stickiness of this sliperring addiction.
I just want to precise that this voluntary abandon, cannot be understood as a “tantrum or capriccio” against the Sci-arc students pool, but it is at the level of Sci-Arc staff arrogances and ignorances, which seems to shrink architecture purpose to a simple affair of design agenda.
My best
F Roche /
PS Speaking and writing are done, here, in my Frenchglish dialect / I let you the opportunity to translate it in the Shakespeare “mayonnaise”.

Naja & deOstos

2011-03-24T03:33:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased Pamphlet Architecture 29, Ambiguous Spaces by Naja & deOstos and their position on architecture is a refreshing change from the kind of market-satisfying function that defines so much contemporary architectural design and thinking today. The orientation of their projects helped me clarify my direction for my final year work. Brett Steele describes their work as "designed to speculate-on the unexpected strangeness, the otherworldliness of how human beings have already transformed their world through infrastructural modernization. It is important architectural work that takes as its site the most prosaic and ordinary features of our planet; large-scale infrastructures...attention is focused on the unexpectedly alien (non-) places created by large scale infrastructure", including post-industrial terrains. Through peculiar building programs and unusual sites they criticize the contemporary built environment and see architecture in wholly unexpected ways. These projects operate as a forum for discussion on the global modernisation that transforms our society. Steele also describes the current architectural culture as "undoubtedly growing more and more global, generic and market driven. We live in a time when contemporary architectural culture has nearly surrended itself to the pervasive circumstances of global economies and the imperatives of their accelerating markets, technologies, and development."

"These projects not only fulfill a program or propose solutions but also materialize conflicting stories, framing events into a plot-magical, ironic, tragic, or informative." (Naja & deOstos)

Rock Hughes Residence

2011-03-24T02:44:00.000-07:00

East Elevation

South Elevation

View Kitchen

Steel for the Carport is going to arrive next Monday so there will be some big changes to show next week and the general shape of the building will be close to complete.

demolition of Newcastle’s BHP Steelworks

2011-03-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks... it dies.
Amazing destruction at the former BHP, no special effects.

Possible Site Location?

2011-03-16T03:46:00.000-07:00

Interesting backdrop and relationship to Newcastle...

Alcoholic Architecture

2011-03-16T03:43:00.000-07:00

This brings a new idea to my proposed Warfies Saloon. A walk-in cocktail has opened in London where just entering the bar could get you drunk.

Gin and tonic vapours are pumped into the air at Alcoholic Architecture where visitors pay £5 each to spend an hour inside the breathable cocktail.

The interior is decorated to look like a giant cocktail glass with huge limes, massive straws and a soundtrack of liquid being poured over ice cubes.

Visitors are advised to wear protective suits to prevent the smell getting into their clothes and even without a drink they will leave feeling tipsy.

It is not known if heavy breathers will be treated as binge-drinkers and kicked out.

Alcoholic Architecture is the brainchild of Sam Bompas and Harry Parr who have already brought us scratch and sniff cinema and jelly banquets.

Harry Parr said: "I'm interested in states of matter. Here we've vaporised a cocktail. In the future I would like to make a liquid banqueting table."

Weather Shelter

2011-03-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

Its fun to design/build.

Rock Hughes Residence

2011-03-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

foyer void

entry void

Zoopraxiscope

2011-03-10T00:59:00.000-08:00

It was the process of pictorial reproduction that freed the hand of its most artistic function. This break in tradition reversed the function of art as ritual and instead promotes contemplative immersion. This change in reproduction is seen as a decisive point in the theology of art where further critical enquiry is required to decipher hidden meanings and motifs. Below is an example of one of the first methods of film, it represents the acceleration in mechanical modes of reproduction and also a change or evolution in traditional art practices.

creative evolution - silvertown ship breaking yard

2011-03-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

The Silvertown Ship Breaking Yard by Jonathan Schofield is the creative evolution of place, society and architecture explored through some amazing plans, section, renderings, sketches and models. Through a process of deconstruction the project exposes the hidden potential and future life of the Royal Docks, Silvertown, East London. Ships are broken up and inhabitants of the city are encouraged to reconstruct the pieces into new forms of creative architectural language. A deeper understanding of this project can be appreciated through the writings of Henri Bergson and his philosophical theories on our evolutionary qualities found through creativity.

Creative Evolution - Silvertown Ship Breaking Yard / Reconstructed Hybrid Community from Jonathan Schofield on Vimeo.

Illustrator...

2011-03-05T03:59:00.000-08:00

A journey to the past

2011-03-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

When Newcastle was first settled, Carrington, as we know it today, didn't exist. It was a low lying tidal island that was known to the local Aboriginals as "wuna - r tee" and was known to be abundant with fish, mud crabs and oysters. Originally named Chapmans Island during the convict era, then later Bullock Island, it rose from the mud from 1859 when extensive dredging commenced in Newcastle Harbour to help alleviate flooding (probably following the 1857 floods) with the spoil spread over the tidal flats gradually raising the island above the tidal influence. Then during the 1860's Bullock Island became a ballast dumping ground for the visiting coal ships and as the demand for coal continued to grow, more expedient methods were sought on the loading of the colliers with Mr. E O Moriarty, the Chief Engineer of the NSW Steam Navigation Board, expanding Bullock Island to accommodate the growing coal trade. In 1874 Mr Moriarty commissioned the British based Armstrong Hydraulic Machinery Factory to design a hydraulic crane delivery system for the Bullock Island site. James Barnet was commissioned to design the Power Station to accommodate the new fangled equipment and so in 1878 Newcastle led Australia when the £20,000 ($16 million) Carrington Hydraulic Power Station began operations with the first load of coal dispatched using this new system on the 18th March 1878. It wasn't until 1916 -17 that electricity replaced the steam pumps and in 1964 the last of the internal machinery were removed from building for scrap. Recently the building has been purchased by the NSW State Government which intends to restore this excellent example of 19th century industrial architecture to its former glory after nearly 50 years of disgraceful neglect. (information courtesy of John McCulloch)

30 ton Crane, Dyke Point

Bullock Island high tide

Steam Powered Crane circa 1900

Sketch

2011-03-02T19:55:00.000-08:00

Coal Ship Sketch

Coal Ship Photoshop

Reversing the Implied Importance

2011-02-28T05:13:00.000-08:00

Thinking about my final year project so far and following initial discussions with the year coordinator it is interesting to consider the social demographic surrounding my proposed building ideas. My interest has developed from my research dissertation that considered the technical modes of montage restored by Archigram in the 1960's, their projects became the literal layering of architecture, technology, environment and the social phenomena that represented the vitality of the streets and the human experience. These techniques where partly explored through Walter Benjamin’s theories pertained to the methods of mechanical reproduction and his analytical perceptions that dismantle the urban fabric and develop new understandings of the complex social order.

Ron Herron Tuned Suburb: Oasis, 1968

Following a critique of consumerist society through the readings of Benjamin and reflecting on the users influencing my ideas an interesting social paradox occurs where the traditional bourgeois-capitalist both creates a degenerative minority and at the same time represses it through a social/class struggle.

I believe we have become to obsessed with the majority and a bourgeois lifestyle, Benjamin sees the colossal acceleration of the tempo of living as being heralded from the tempo of production. "In this country, the main thing is to reap a huge fortune with as little delay as possible...people want to enjoy without waiting, without having to be patient". This to me is the very antithesis of how we should consider society and in particular architecture (which in Newcastle is a scary trend). Benjamin's Arcades Project focuses on the suffering of the vanquished and in doing so liberates the suppressed and celebrates their existence.

Walter Benjamin

Similar ideas are discussed in a conversation between Toni Negri and Gilles Deleuze; "What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to… A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody’s caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them into unknown paths if they opted to follow it through."

This leads me to the theory and approach my ideas set out to navigate via an architectural investigation that suggests a romantic notion to enlighten people through a series of projects that address social issues within the city of Newcastle. By reversing the implied importance generated by capitalist society the projects would develop as a thesis highlighting the importance of forgotten fragments and minorities in our cities and the potential that can be extracted from them.

The Carrington Ghost Ship

2011-02-24T23:36:00.000-08:00

I was driving home today and came across something, that when ever I see my mind has trouble processing. I have seen it countless times at the end of my street and the shear scale and obscurity always delights me. This time I had a camera with me to capture the event before it was gone (and my memory card was filled).