gravestmor » 2007 » March : : architectural ephemera

‣It is all over the internet, but if you haven’t seen it already, go check out Saturn’s giant hexagon. #
‣A 13 Mile long dragon is under construction in Xinzheng city, Henan province.
“The finished dragon is to wear 5.6 million scales of jade or gold-coated bronze. People can pay to carve words on the scales, and inside the body there will be trains and clubs. It will be a place for cultural activities and relaxation,” he said. “I am not afraid of attacks. Our ancestors built the Great Wall, and now I am building the Great Dragon. I will succeed.”
#

March 28th, 2007 Comments {0} + del.icio.us +digg

Its that time again…and it is pretty short notice I know…

But.

Pecha Kucha Sydney Volume 03 is on this Thursday 29th March at the CTA on Martin Place. So if you would like to see a whole bunch of really great jewellery, design, architecture, engineering, whatever, drop in. Bar opens at 6, presentations getting underway at about 7pm.

For Pecha Kucha novices, information on the Sydney gig can be found at the Pecha kucha Sydney page while global Pecha Kucha info is over at the Mothership.

‣Great post at BLDGBLOG on cinematic urban landscapes as represented in sci-fi concept art. The four artists in the post will all be presenting short talks on their work as a part of the film festival hosted and curated by BLDGBLOG and Materials and Applications. All taking place in a converted wind tunnel… [Link] #
‣Anytown, USA. “From the Center For Land Use Studies — a fake ‘town’ in California where cops practice shoot-‘em-ups.” Complete with a car chase racetrack and cardboard cut-out bad guys.[Link] #
‣Death By Architecture is back. After a pretty substantial period of inactivity, the number one source for architecture competition information is back on the scene with a redesign and feature articles to supplement the competition listings. [Link] #
‣Cinema baddies like minimal while the good guys prefer soft furnishings and throw rugs. In the real world, however, the opposite seems true. [via Archinect] #
‣‘Peter Zumthor Works’, long out of print is available at Amazon for the bargain price of US$1975.00 Go on. Buy it. [Link] #
‣Beautiful fruitbowl teaset by SANAA for Alessi. A couple of years ago, Alessi asked a bunch of pre-eminent architects to design new tea sets for them, with limited edition sets produced. SANAAs was a favourite - next to Greg Lynn’s - and it is nice to see that it has gone into mass production. [via Atelier A+D] #
‣For those drawing sections through parking lots behind pubs. Great .dwg people especially for you. [Update: Drawings by Bump. Thanks Rob.] [Link] #
‣I wonder how poor old Juan Navarro Baldeweg feels about being the filling in an OMA sandwhich? El Croquis is publishing a double double (quadruple, no shit!) issue on OMA and AMO, the second part of which comes out after the Baldeweg volume, and which surely must be being buttered right now. [Link] #

Lepidoptera Gothic

March 11th, 2007 Comments {3} + del.icio.us +digg

Damien Hirst at the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills and London wherein the artist revives his penchant for arranging dead animals in interesting poses. This time, butterflies as stained glass windows.

The Explosion
Exalted, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Aubade
Crown of Glory, 2006
Butterlifes and household gloss on canvas.

Sympathy in White Major
Absolution II, 2006
Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Gravestore. Geddit?

March 10th, 2007 Comments {2} + del.icio.us +digg

Introducing the Gravestore. The Amazon Associates program now allows users to set up their own store.

So I have set up the Gravestore, where you will find books, DVDs and comics that relate to what goes down here at gravestmor mixed in with stuff that I recommend.

Gravestore

A percentage of anything purchased after clicking through the store foes to me. So spend up.

Photoset of New Work By Peter Zumthor

March 10th, 2007 Comments {5} + del.icio.us +digg

Nice photoset by Ssaannddeerr on the Bruder Klaus Chapel, the Kolumba Diocesan Museum and the some model photos of the ‘Ssummerrestaurant’ (of which I have seen nothing of previously) by Zumthor.

A step by step instruction kit on how to build your own Klaus Bruder Chapel may be found here.

(Newsreader people are going to have to click through for the embedded pictobrowser.)

‣Consistently rad bookmarks from Fish. The dude that behind this and this. #
‣Strange first person article by Frank Gehry on the Abu-Dhabi Guggenheim. Where he slags off the MOMA (”that’s like a big, shiny department store.”) and tries to come off as some kind of mafioso type, making allusions to drowning a British journalist who “described my recent buildings as “crude curlicues”. If you know who he is, get him to try on some concrete overshoes for size. I’ll send them over . . .” [Link] #
‣Atelier Bow-Wow at PingMag. I love these guys. I want to have their babies. [Link] #
‣Eddie Campbell, gives a rundown of the reference material for Gull’s tour of arcane, occult and occasionally secular Victorian London in ‘From Hell’. (part 2, 3, 4, 5) If you have not read From Hell put it on your list; for the wild conspiracy theories, ruminations on Hawksmoor’s churches, and endless footnotes. And if the above is not enough, a whole list of Eddie Campbell’s ruminations and dissections of the book may be found here. Via City of Sound [Link] #
‣BLDGBLOG and ‘Materials and Applications’ are putting together an architecture film festival of sorts. And are calling for submissions:
“The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment – or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn’t just backdrop. Even more specifically, we’d love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces, such as the short films generated annually by the the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Unit 15. (International submissions are encouraged).”
[Link] #

Metropolis, New Tokyo, Pummeled by Gender Swiching Robot, Children with Latent Unfathomable Psychic Power.

March 5th, 2007 Comments {1} + del.icio.us +digg

‘Tezuka The Marvel of Manga’ is an exhibition currently on at the Art Gallery of NSW detailing the career of Osamu Tezuka - the manga artist best known to the world as the creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion.

He also made Metropolis that was later to be made into an anime feature film by Katsuhiro Otomo. It was based super-loosely on the Fritz Lang film of the same name and tells the story of gender switching robot, Mitchi, in search of its parents. The anime made in 2001 and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo brings the story back to something closer to the themes of Lang’s original silent film.

But.

That is not why we are here. We are here because of one of the pages of the manga on show in the exhibition depicts Mitchi flying through the city knocking buildings over.

The page sticks out for two reasons. Firstly it is hard to look at images of generic office towers being snapped in two, with screaming people jumping out the windows innocently anymore. For obvious reasons.

And secondly, it bears an uncanny resemblance to pages out of Katsuhiro Otomo’s epic manga masterpiece, Akira.

At around 2000 pages over six volumes, Akira is the kind of book that takes a good solid amount of time to work through and so it was coincidental that in the week following the attack on the world trade centre I found myself reading Volume 03 on the bus. Volume 03 where towards the end, Akira in reaction to the execution of his unleashes his psychic powers, levelling New Tokyo. For about 20 pages, New Tokyo is given a brutal, beautiful, beatdown. It was the reason I love the work of Otomo - over the top, epic stories told in obsessive detail.

But on the bus that week it was, of course, not acceptable reading material.

Then, in Volume 04, it is a somewhat disgruntled Tetsuo who this time creates a hole in the sky that brings portions of the buildings previously destroyed by Akira crashing back down on New Tokyo.

Related:
Paracity Aquarius.

‣East Germany lives on on an island in the Carribean. In 1972 during a state visit to Berlin, Fidel Castro gave the island, Cayo Blanco de Sur, to the German Democratic Republic as a sign of goodwill. According to the aptly titled Strange Maps, the island was never mentioned during the formal reunification of Germany and as such could feasibly be the last remaining piece of East Germany. [Link] #
‣The Boring Store. Definitely not a Secret Agent Supply Store. Move along. There is nothing fundamentally awesome here. [Link] #
‣Exploding fireworks drawings by Rosemarie Fiore. “large works on paper are made by exploding and containing live fireworks, resulting in bursts of saturated color that are overlaped and collaged into abstract compositions.” [Link] #

In Defence of Sinkholes

March 2nd, 2007 Comments {1} + del.icio.us +digg

While the world focusses its attention on the Guatemala sinkhole, it is worth noting that not all sinkholes are evil. Some are delightful, infinite, and made of paper.

‘A Piece of an Infinite Whole’ by Jen Stark.