My powerbook has not arrived yet, so this post is being written on a regular ol’ PC. Can you tell the difference? Perhaps when the keys of my keyboard are flatter and I only have the one mouse button, syntax will come more naturally, naturallier even; prose will shoot from my fingertips like great bolts of lightning, destroying golfers and people sheltering under trees showing little prejudice nor remorse. Although, come to think of it, Jeremy has been using macs for, like, ages, and boy does he talk some trash from time to time.

For now I am going to keep things short and sweet and will let my staff of highly trained and skilled writers bulk up this weeks content…

Word on the street is that Peter Zumthor will be giving the first lecture for the Australian Architecture Assosciation. “oooohhhhh… ahhhhh…” I hear you say, and I concur entirely.

Frank O. Gehry may be the most tolerant guy in the world, he may totally get off on just letting stuff happen to him, stuff that most people myself included would object to quite vehemently. So it may not be at all startling to learn that Frank O. Gehry has designed The New Centre for Human Dignity and Museum of Tolerance.

But maybe it is startling. Employed in this project is the same tired theme-park imagery that has graced Frank O. Gehry’s work since Bilbao. How can a museum located in Jerusalem and concerning itself with the exploration of human dignity end up as just another collage of irregular formal gestures? A formal language that it shares with a winery in Ontario and the Experience Music Project (’You may not need to be a rock star to appreciate EMP, but you might leave here feeling like one’) in Seattle.

So what if he got The Pritzker. Shiny trinkets may buy the loyalty of the monkeys but they don’t hold sway over me.

Presenting to you, for your reading pleasure a series of unrelated points, one of which with tenuous architectural content:

Firstly:
I don’t know which I should be more excited about; the fact that a Danish Prince decided to marry a Tasmanian named Mary or that Krispy Kreme donuts are opening a store in the city. Our Mary, is certainly occupying a great deal of real estate in the printed media however double-deep-fried-donuts have gathered lines of mythical proportions out Penrith way. Either the folk at Weta Digital have been working their magic out panthers way or these lines actually exist and are made up of real people. I don’t care how good the donuts are, people should not line up for them.

Secondly:
Alain de Botton spoke on tuesday at the Sydney Wrtiters Festival. He and Andrea Stratton, waxed lyrical on Proust, the value of reading, why his writing is more than mere self help and why there are no great women philosophers - at least in the olden days. He truly was a pleasure to listen to; his turn of phrase and quiet, studied, Cambridge accent made for an entirely pleasant hour of chit chat. At the end of the talk it was revealed that, no his next piece of writing would not be on Dante, much to the dissapointment of an elderly litterati in the audience, but rather that it would be concerning architecture. It seems that he is fascinated by how we relate to space. “So are we!” cried Antoinette and I, unable to contain our excitement. On quieter reflection though, high up in my mountain retreat where I drink only the purest of mountain spring water and eat the leaves of the plant with the red berries, I have come to the conclusion that it is a potentially scary situation. This could be another Pattern Language, complete with cut and paste zen views and anti-modernism rhetoric. Alternatively it could be In Praise of Shadows which be okay I guess. For now we will give him the benefit of the doubt, he seemed affable enough and I enjoyed his baldness but if he starts dissing modernism because of the poor imitators of Mies and le Corbusier then he will truly know the pain of being criticised on a little-read niche webpage.

Thirdly (briefly):
To keep you abreast of my fantasies concerning typing in the dark, they will be fulfilled within ten working days, as evidenced by a sudden, drastic drop in my savings.

Parte the Fourthe:
The first mega-run of Functional Jones apparel was created today. Fifty fine t-shirts made of cotton and imprinted with design phantasique.

We can all breath a little easier tonight, The Empire will not be without resistance. Brad has heard our call and has decided he wants to join the fray. Gravestmor is usually quite cynical about Hollywood millionaires wanting to be Frank Gehry but he has stated that he would like to give the concrete desert a soul, and who can blame him? With hope, the re-souling of the concrete desert will be a success as well as good training for his final showdown with the Dark Side in Episode Three. Regardless, for the first time since this story broke on wednesday, it looks like, for the time being, all will be well in the Galactic Republic.

The Death Star, it seems, is in prototype stage. Of all the cities expected to begin development on a planet destroyer, I have to admit that Barcelona was very low on the list. Just under rjyvic (sic) and above Jamaica, I never really thought that those party loving Catalans had it in them. Pick-pocketing and ring roads, sure, but enormous machines of death just seemed so out of character. So it comes as no surprise to learn that those nasty swiss people are involved.

I have begun working my way through The New Jedi Order (TNJO) series of novels. They take place some twenty five years after the end of The Return of the Jedi and a scant five years after the final truce with the Imperial Remnant. The novels detail the New Republic’s defence of the galaxy against an invasion by the Yuzhan Vong, a warrior race that despise technology and have ships made of coral. Add the fact that they have amphistaffs, the equal of a lightsaber in sheer future of sword-ness, and you have a fairly heated battle on your hands. This does not concern me too much to be honest. It is all set in the future or the past or something and bares little impact on my day to day life.

Events in the movies do have an immediate impact though. That shit is not far off becoming a reality and the recent developments in Barcelona stand testament to this. People are developing the technologies to destroy the planets of peaceful peoples and the Swiss are building the triangular prototypes of these technologies in Barcelona. Troubling times.

Folk that have read the other five hundred and seventy two Stars Wars novels that I have not yet read will be able to help fill in the blanks here, but in book three of TNJO there is some talk about an architect by the name of Qwi Xux; the very architect of the Death Star, the Eye of Palpatine and the Sun Crusher. Luke, his wife Mara Jade Skywalker and his nephew Anakin Solo travel to the planet Vortex (I’m serious, the planet is called Vortex. Cool name for a planet, hey?) to ask this chick some questions. She is not much help to them though as she is no longer in practice as an architect, let her registration lapse, no longer in the business of all-encompassing vehicles of genocide. So they go and do something else, I can’t remember what, but it probably involved beating up the Yuzhan Vong with lightsabers and Luke saying something trite about the Force.

It is a shame that Ms Xux featured so briefly, I wanted to know more about her career as an architect, how her practice operated, did they have an open plan office, what sort of printers did they use? Did they use printers? More than this though I wanted to know about her time as a young architect. Where did she learn her skills? Did she in fact work at the offices of Herzog & de Mueron while the Barcelona Death Star Prototype Phase One was being designed and documented? The cover of El Croquis 109/110 is no help, if she is there it is impossible to tell. The people are all too small.

Is Qwi Xux at the offices Herzog and de Mueron learning the art of cold hard indifference from Jaques? If so she must be stopped. Before it is all too late and all is dead and death.

Well, Gravestmor is finally up and running on Word Press and as such things should get somewhat more interesting as you will no longer have to listen solely to me. Soon there will be others to misspell and missarrange words and sentences…

From time to time, when at Uni we used to hate our design tutors a great deal. They would be wonderful all through semester and then BAM come presentation day they became the most untrustworthy conninving little rats that ever walked the earth, from times paleolithic until now. At least this is what Jeremy will tell you. Me? Tutors were usually kind to me I always felt the need to join in on the bitching regardless. Now that I am on the other side, tutoring design in first year, I am gaining an understanding of why most tutors are complete cocks. It is because after lunch we get sleepy. It is simple and as complex as that. We are like children who, denied their afternoon nap, get a little irritable and decide that everything around them just sucks.

Functional Jones has been updated. Some of the extraneous rubbish has been removed and some details of the t-shirts included. There is even some limited evidence of the existence of actual prototypes… For those of you that have missed this minor style revolution, it is a t-shirt making enterprise that Jeremy and myself are attemtping to set up. It has taken a while to get moving but now that it is Winter we are gaining some momentum and God-willing, come some cold rainy day in July we will be out at the Bondi Markets holding back the crowds of young humans wanting a groovy t-shirt to go with their scarf. We have found the manufacturers of the cheap but sturdy t-shirts we require to bless with our artwork, so our fortunes founded on your wallets cannot be far away.

This site, too, has had a bit of an upgrade as folk have been informing me that navigating to older entries is a little confusing and difficult and we must cater to all levels of navigational prowess now, mustn’t we. As such there is now one, uniform archive page where old entries can be accessed.