This is completely uncomfirmed and it was only on screen for a split second, but I swear that I saw Jean Nouvel’s Agbar Tower in the background of Star Wars Episode 3. Towards the end, on Naboo. It may have just been another phallic tower that Naboo seems chock full of, but i swear it had an uncanny similarity to this puppy. If anyone can confirm this, I would love to know.
Almost exactly one year ago I mentioned that Brad Pitt was keen to try his hand at churning out a few door schedules, attending a few community consultations, sending out a few batch plots. you know, being an architect. At the time I pretty much dismissed it as a throw away line. Yeah sure you want to be an architect Brad, so does George Costanza. Wait in line buddy.
However, it seems he was serious. So serious that he did a celebrity internship at a celebrity architects office and is now designing a restaurant and penthouse for a Frank Gehry project in the UK. The Guardian has the full story.
“I’m really into architecture, structure and design. Give me anything and I’ll design it. I’m a bit nutty with it.”
I am inclined to be a little cynical about actors yearning to have real jobs; especially when it involves working for the UN. But fuck it. I think its awesome. We spend our entire careers trying to get people to recognise architects and their trials, attempting to lure obscure Japanese journals and the conservative news press into our light-filled atelier to spread our gospel to the masses. To little or no effect. Brad, on the other hand, has Who magazine, The Sun and every damn tabloid the world over peering over his hedge trying to get a photo of him snogging Ms Jolie. Would it hurt if there were a few copies of GA Houses scattered across a coffee table in the background of a photo catching Brad and Anjelina lying topless next to the pool? No it would not.
Utzon was a ship builder and Borromini a stone-mason before each took up architecture as a vocation and drew some of the best building of their time. While it is easy to see the corelation between craft and architecture; in todays age where craft has been lost and fame is the primary pursuit of architecture, I believe Brad stands more than a sporting chance.
Again, I am trapped under the hefty weight of competition, As such posting will be sporadic at best for the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime I hope you enjoy this photo of some hot, pouty German models in an entirely appropriate photoshoot at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
Sydney’s Evil Quarter is nearing practical completion. Taking shape on Philip Street between Martin Place and Hunter Street, the Evil Quarter hopes to do for the Black Arts what Sydney’s Spanish Quarter has done for our Spanish friends and their pigs, suckling.
Characterised by dark glass, velveteen mullions and gathering clouds of portent, the District of Evil has long been incomplete. The first two stages of the unholy trinity comprise the Goodsell Building, home of the Law Reform Commission - a body that has obviously benefited from its close proximity of Sydney’s future black heart and Stage Two, the State Bank Headquarters which rise from the asphalt like an inky fortress of solitude.
For years, the third development site remained undeveloped. Until five years ago when it was announced that the happy union of Lord Foster and Lend Lease would fill the gap with hundreds of German Bankers.
And now, after many years, Stage Three is approaching practical completion. Uber Lord Foster. Slayer of Hope. RIBA, has stated that he expects “A great evil” to be channelled from the depths of Phillip Street” upon the handing over of the site. Asked to expand, he added that “it is expected that a Three-Headed, Five-Tentacled Alber Speer will break free of the pavement, spitting fire, breathing savagery.” The Five Tentacles whose names are Pestilence, Fury, Famine, Faceted Curves and Polychromatic Brickwork are expected to wreak havoc on pedestrian access to Phillip and Hunter Streets.
While Sydney Town Hall has asked the City to take their Five Tentacled Overlords under their wing, State rail is asking commuters to avoid using Martin Place railway station over the next three weeks and to expect delays along the rest of the Eastern Suburbs line.
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While in Berlin they are scared and confused by a hectare of sorrow, in Las Vegas they are squeezing 23 000 000 calories into roughly the same floor area.
And at Cornell University they have made a robot that can rebuild itself.
Bricklayers are now officially redundant.
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The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin by Peter Eisenman is finished and The New York Times has a good article up about it (funny, Richard Serra, an early collaborator and obvious influence, is not mentioned…).
It is a project that I have been following since it was first announced and it is the project that I most blatantly copied while I was still studying. It is a return to form for Eisenman with more in common with his early houses than his more recent larger commissions. ie. it is spacialy challenging, uncomfortable and ambiguous. It is not the colour of tasty upriver swimming fish, nor does it succumb to the succulent succour of current fads.
Due to the tardiness of Miss April, we have organised a special sample room free for all:
Tongue and Groove Gang Bang.
The year is 1984, with an uncanny accuracy, George Orwell had predicted the dark and sinister forces that ruled the globe. Some men, it is true, had been made more equal than others. Pomo was casting a long pastel shadows over the metropolis and the future looked bleak.
However one group of auteurs had something else in mind. They looked to the dark, foreboding future suggested by Bladerunner, Alien and Oversized Novelty Corinthian columns and said: NO. “No thanks, not for me nor my children, life can (must!) be better than this. Our city need not be these dens of deceipt, crime and cheap appropriation of historical motif.” Geometry had for too long ruled the planning departments of the world, it was time for the bastard lovechild of Rhythm and Blues to take centre stage and the vehicle for this anthem was four heavy coiffed youngsters, Starship.
Under the proposed planning legislation put in place by Starship, all new cities and urban growth were to be forced into a position subservient to an irresistible 2-4 beat. Sweet riffs cut swathes through industrial zones, power chords decimated slums. Needless to say such ideas did not wash well with the establishment nor the weed-tokin’ jazz-listening-to beatniks but Starship were unfazed by the backlash, they had youth on their side and big hair to match.
Mickey Thomas on the Vox:
- “Someone’s always playin’ corporation games
- Who cares they’re always changing corporation names
- We just want to dance here, someone stole the stage
- They call us irresponsible, write us of the page”
“We just want to dance here.” Like Kevin Bacon before them, the kids just wanted to dance.
And boy did those kids dance.
The Starship manifesto, We Built This City on Rock and Roll, expounding their latest theories of urban renewal through the simple backbeat of rock and roll took the world by storm, going to number 12 in the UK before rocketing to Number 01 in the US of A in November 1985. All across North America towns were demolished, cities gutted in the promise of the new Utopia. The plans were being drawn up for a new beginning of civilisation,
- “The city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps,
- We built this city, we built this city on rock and roll”
Sadly these words held false promises. The so-called Cities of Rock and Roll never eventuated. Caught up in planning departments and land and environment courts the world over, the cities that had captured the imaginations of zillions were filed under
Starship, whose mantra “Nothings Gonna Stop us Now” proved ultimately misleading, fought a valiant battle to keep the dream alive. But in the end the bureaucrats and marketers won. It was found through market research that the punters needed something more digestible and “We Built This City on a Pop Tart Jingle” became the essay de jour.
