Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
(Un)Canny Inhabitations - Site Model Development
I have been experimenting with the groundplane for my site:
Monday, March 24, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Good Friday Pope Parade
The story of the stations of the cross in front of the Colosseum on Good Friday... told in the pouring rain... followed by an Easter blessing from Pope Benedict XVI (who is sitting up in the tent).
Friday, March 21, 2008
Romaturismo
I found this website when I was looking up current events going on in Rome. It's pretty good and lists almost everything happening in the city like art exhibitions, concerts, seasonal events, etc. So check it out!
Thursday, March 20, 2008
3 graces
if you thought the last post was cool - check out this ad campaign for the knives. (http://eternallycool.net/)
... yes, it's a radish.
... yes, it's a radish.
la notte bianca [2007]
i just came across this website (http://eternallycool.net/?p=500) while hunting for images online. thought i would share it...
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Some preliminary sketches for Uncanny Inhabitations
I am attempting to deviate from my usual working method by starting this design with images more evocative of experience such as sections and vignettes. Here is a sampling. . .
Monday, March 17, 2008
come se
just in case you are interested...
Last Friday (March 14) the gallery “come se” opened in Rome. This is a new gallery dedicated to architecture. The inaugural exhibit is called Fifteen Roman Architects, new challenges for the City of tomorrow, and project invites a new generation of architects to the dialogue, and gives them an opportunity to present their perspective, ideas, and research. This exhibit confronts the issues of “the city of tomorrow,” including the issues need to be addressed, and examines city planning from the perspective of an increasingly global viewpoint. A vast range of experiments, innovations and achievements will be presented, which have affected both the city of Rome and other metropolitan areas throughout the world. If you want to get a glimpse of what a new generation of architects is envisioning for the city of Rome, this is your chance.
[from http://rome.moleskinecity.com/:]
Last Friday (March 14) the gallery “come se” opened in Rome. This is a new gallery dedicated to architecture. The inaugural exhibit is called Fifteen Roman Architects, new challenges for the City of tomorrow, and project invites a new generation of architects to the dialogue, and gives them an opportunity to present their perspective, ideas, and research. This exhibit confronts the issues of “the city of tomorrow,” including the issues need to be addressed, and examines city planning from the perspective of an increasingly global viewpoint. A vast range of experiments, innovations and achievements will be presented, which have affected both the city of Rome and other metropolitan areas throughout the world. If you want to get a glimpse of what a new generation of architects is envisioning for the city of Rome, this is your chance.
[from http://rome.moleskinecity.com/:]
Designer Donatella
(Un)Grounded Objects
Roma's Dancing Donatella and Designer Labels
What do you get when you place Rome's infamous 'Dancing Lady' (whom we have dubbed 'Donatella') adjacent to the world of Designer Fashion, as it is embodied within the 'Logo' (both Fake and Authentic)?
Roma's Dancing Donatella and Designer Labels
What do you get when you place Rome's infamous 'Dancing Lady' (whom we have dubbed 'Donatella') adjacent to the world of Designer Fashion, as it is embodied within the 'Logo' (both Fake and Authentic)?
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Street Fashion in Paris
Not sure how I ended up watching this, but there are some great images in here. Christina, of particular interest to you I believe - http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/fashion/20080315_ONSTREET_FEATURE/index.html?th&emc=th
D.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Sampietrini
[artifact – sampietrini]
Mushrooms in the city
The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.
One day, to the narrow strip of ground flanking a city avenue came a gust of spores from God knows where; and some mushrooms germinated. Nobody noticed them except Marcovaldo, the worker who caught his tram just there every morning.
This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plan, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of the season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.
Thus, one morning, as he was waiting for the tram that would take him to Sbav and Co.. where he was employed as an unskilled laborer, he noticed something unusual near the stop, in the sterile, encrusted strip of earth beneath the avenue’s line of trees; at certain points, near the tree trunks, some bumps seemed to rise and, here and there, they had opened, allowing roundish subterranean bodies to peep out.
Bending to tie his shoes, he took a better look: they were mushrooms, real mushrooms, sprouting right in the heart of the city! To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly generous with hidden riches; something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage of his stipulated salary, with inflation index, family grant, and cost-of-living allowance.
On the job he was more absent-minded than usual; he kept thinking that while he was there unloading the cases and boxes, in the darkness of the earth the slow, silent mushrooms, know only to him, where ripening their porous flesh, were assimilating underground humors, breaking the crust of clods. “Only one night’s rain would be enough,” he said to himself, “then they would be ready to pick.” And he couldn’t wait to share his discovery with his wife and six children.
“I’m telling you!” he announced during their scant supper. “In a week’s time we’ll be eating mushrooms! A great fry! That’s a promise!”
And to the smaller children, who did not know what mushrooms were, he explained ecstatically the beauty of the numerous species, the delicacy of their flavor, the way they should be cooked; and so he also drew into the discussion his wife, Domitilla, who until then had appeared rather incredulous and abstracted.“Where are these mushrooms?” the children asked. “Tell us where they grow!”
At this question Marcovaldo’s enthusiasm was curbed by a suspicious thought: Now if I tell them the place, they’ll go and hunt for them with the usual gang of kids, word will spread through the neighborhood, and the mushrooms will end up in somebody else’s pan! And so the discovery, which had promptly filled his heart with universal love, now made him wildly possessive, surrounded him with jealous and distrusting fear.
“I know where the mushrooms are, and I’m the only one who knows,” he said to his children, “and God help you if you breathe a word to anybody.”
The next morning, as he approached the tram stop, Marcovaldo was filled with apprehension. He bent down to look at the ground and, to his relief, saw that the mushrooms had grown a little, but not much, and were still almost completely hidden by the earth.
He bent in this position when he realized there was someone behind him. He straightened up at once and tried to act indifferent. It was the street-cleaner, leaning on his broom looking at him.
This street-cleaner, whose jurisdiction included the place where the mushrooms grew, was a lanky youth with eye-glasses. His name was Amadigi, and Marcovaldo had long harbored a dislike of him, perhaps because of those eye-glasses that examined the pavement of the streets, seeking any trace of nature, to be eradicated by his broom.
It was Saturday; and Marcovaldo spent his free half-day circling the bed of dirt with an absent air, keeping an eye on the street-cleaner in the distance and an eye on the mushrooms, and calculating how much time they need to ripen.
That night it rained: like peasants who, after months of drought, wake up and leap with joy at the sound of the first drops, so Marcovaldo, alone in all the city, sat up in bed and called to his family: “It’s raining! It’s raining!” and breathed in the smell of moistened dust and fresh mold that came from outside.
At dawn – it was Sunday – with the children and a borrowed basket, he ran immediately to the patch. There were the mushrooms, erect on their stems, their caps high over the still-soaked earth. “Hurrah!” – and they fell to gathering them.
“Papa! Look how many the man over there has found,” Michelino said, and his father, raising his eyes, saw Amadigi standing beside them, also with a basket full of mushrooms under his arms.
“Ah, you’re gathering them too?” the street-cleaner said. “Then they’re edible? I picked a few, but I wasn’t sure… Farther down the avenue some others have sprouted, even bigger ones… Well, now that I know, I’ll tell my relatives; they’re down there arguing whether it’s a good idea to pick them or not…” And he walked off in a hurry.
Marcovaldo was speechless: even bigger mushrooms, which he hadn’t noticed, an unhoped-for harvest, being taken from him like this, before his very eyes. For a moment he was almost frozen with anger, fury, then – as sometimes happens – the collapse of individual passion led to a generous impulse. At that hour, many people were waiting for the tram, umbrellas over their arms, because the weather was still damp and uncertain. “Hey, you! Do you want to eat fried mushrooms tonight?” Marcovaldo shouted to the crowd of people at the stop. “Mushrooms are growing here by the street! Come along! There’s plenty for all” And he walked off after Amadigi, with a string of people behind him.
They all found plenty of mushrooms, and lacking baskets, they opened their umbrellas. Somebody said: “It would be nice to have a big feast, all of us together!” But, instead, each took his own share and went home.
They saw one another again soon, however; that very evening, in fact, in the same ward of the hospital, after the stomach-pump had saved them all from poisoning. It was not serious, because the number of mushrooms eaten by each person was quite small.
Marcovaldo and Amadigi had adjacent beds; they glared at each other.
[Marcovaldo: Seasons of the City, by Italo Calvino]
Mushrooms in the city
The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.
One day, to the narrow strip of ground flanking a city avenue came a gust of spores from God knows where; and some mushrooms germinated. Nobody noticed them except Marcovaldo, the worker who caught his tram just there every morning.
This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plan, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of the season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.
Thus, one morning, as he was waiting for the tram that would take him to Sbav and Co.. where he was employed as an unskilled laborer, he noticed something unusual near the stop, in the sterile, encrusted strip of earth beneath the avenue’s line of trees; at certain points, near the tree trunks, some bumps seemed to rise and, here and there, they had opened, allowing roundish subterranean bodies to peep out.
Bending to tie his shoes, he took a better look: they were mushrooms, real mushrooms, sprouting right in the heart of the city! To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly generous with hidden riches; something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage of his stipulated salary, with inflation index, family grant, and cost-of-living allowance.
On the job he was more absent-minded than usual; he kept thinking that while he was there unloading the cases and boxes, in the darkness of the earth the slow, silent mushrooms, know only to him, where ripening their porous flesh, were assimilating underground humors, breaking the crust of clods. “Only one night’s rain would be enough,” he said to himself, “then they would be ready to pick.” And he couldn’t wait to share his discovery with his wife and six children.
“I’m telling you!” he announced during their scant supper. “In a week’s time we’ll be eating mushrooms! A great fry! That’s a promise!”
And to the smaller children, who did not know what mushrooms were, he explained ecstatically the beauty of the numerous species, the delicacy of their flavor, the way they should be cooked; and so he also drew into the discussion his wife, Domitilla, who until then had appeared rather incredulous and abstracted.“Where are these mushrooms?” the children asked. “Tell us where they grow!”
At this question Marcovaldo’s enthusiasm was curbed by a suspicious thought: Now if I tell them the place, they’ll go and hunt for them with the usual gang of kids, word will spread through the neighborhood, and the mushrooms will end up in somebody else’s pan! And so the discovery, which had promptly filled his heart with universal love, now made him wildly possessive, surrounded him with jealous and distrusting fear.
“I know where the mushrooms are, and I’m the only one who knows,” he said to his children, “and God help you if you breathe a word to anybody.”
The next morning, as he approached the tram stop, Marcovaldo was filled with apprehension. He bent down to look at the ground and, to his relief, saw that the mushrooms had grown a little, but not much, and were still almost completely hidden by the earth.
He bent in this position when he realized there was someone behind him. He straightened up at once and tried to act indifferent. It was the street-cleaner, leaning on his broom looking at him.
This street-cleaner, whose jurisdiction included the place where the mushrooms grew, was a lanky youth with eye-glasses. His name was Amadigi, and Marcovaldo had long harbored a dislike of him, perhaps because of those eye-glasses that examined the pavement of the streets, seeking any trace of nature, to be eradicated by his broom.
It was Saturday; and Marcovaldo spent his free half-day circling the bed of dirt with an absent air, keeping an eye on the street-cleaner in the distance and an eye on the mushrooms, and calculating how much time they need to ripen.
That night it rained: like peasants who, after months of drought, wake up and leap with joy at the sound of the first drops, so Marcovaldo, alone in all the city, sat up in bed and called to his family: “It’s raining! It’s raining!” and breathed in the smell of moistened dust and fresh mold that came from outside.
At dawn – it was Sunday – with the children and a borrowed basket, he ran immediately to the patch. There were the mushrooms, erect on their stems, their caps high over the still-soaked earth. “Hurrah!” – and they fell to gathering them.
“Papa! Look how many the man over there has found,” Michelino said, and his father, raising his eyes, saw Amadigi standing beside them, also with a basket full of mushrooms under his arms.
“Ah, you’re gathering them too?” the street-cleaner said. “Then they’re edible? I picked a few, but I wasn’t sure… Farther down the avenue some others have sprouted, even bigger ones… Well, now that I know, I’ll tell my relatives; they’re down there arguing whether it’s a good idea to pick them or not…” And he walked off in a hurry.
Marcovaldo was speechless: even bigger mushrooms, which he hadn’t noticed, an unhoped-for harvest, being taken from him like this, before his very eyes. For a moment he was almost frozen with anger, fury, then – as sometimes happens – the collapse of individual passion led to a generous impulse. At that hour, many people were waiting for the tram, umbrellas over their arms, because the weather was still damp and uncertain. “Hey, you! Do you want to eat fried mushrooms tonight?” Marcovaldo shouted to the crowd of people at the stop. “Mushrooms are growing here by the street! Come along! There’s plenty for all” And he walked off after Amadigi, with a string of people behind him.
They all found plenty of mushrooms, and lacking baskets, they opened their umbrellas. Somebody said: “It would be nice to have a big feast, all of us together!” But, instead, each took his own share and went home.
They saw one another again soon, however; that very evening, in fact, in the same ward of the hospital, after the stomach-pump had saved them all from poisoning. It was not serious, because the number of mushrooms eaten by each person was quite small.
Marcovaldo and Amadigi had adjacent beds; they glared at each other.
[Marcovaldo: Seasons of the City, by Italo Calvino]
Temporal Cities
[artifact – scaffolding]
In Ephemera, a temporal city exists within an ancient city. It is a nomadic parasite, constantly relocating itself into the city fabric. Ephemera can be densely concentrated in one location, or it can spread across miles. This city lightly constructs and deconstructs itself leaving no visible traces behind. The ancient city dwellers are preoccupied with traffic, honking horns and foamy beverages and do not even notice Ephemera. Instead they look through this city, only recognizing the underlying structure Ephemera has attached itself to.
Each day, the city of Ephemera is inhabited with creatures in bright orange jumpsuits. They climb up the thin vertical city and disappear between layered veils. It is here, in this secret world in the heart of the ancient city that they meet. These small hairy creatures amalgamate together and begin their never ending task of erasing time. Little do the people of the ancient city know that without Ephemera their own city could not exist.
In Ephemera, a temporal city exists within an ancient city. It is a nomadic parasite, constantly relocating itself into the city fabric. Ephemera can be densely concentrated in one location, or it can spread across miles. This city lightly constructs and deconstructs itself leaving no visible traces behind. The ancient city dwellers are preoccupied with traffic, honking horns and foamy beverages and do not even notice Ephemera. Instead they look through this city, only recognizing the underlying structure Ephemera has attached itself to.
Each day, the city of Ephemera is inhabited with creatures in bright orange jumpsuits. They climb up the thin vertical city and disappear between layered veils. It is here, in this secret world in the heart of the ancient city that they meet. These small hairy creatures amalgamate together and begin their never ending task of erasing time. Little do the people of the ancient city know that without Ephemera their own city could not exist.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
Paris and its Cafés...
"This city, around which one still can travel in a circle past the old gates, has remained what the cities of the Middle Ages, severely walled off and protected against the outside, once were: an interior, but without the narrowness of medieval streets, a generously built and planned open-air intérieur with the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above it. . . . It is the uniform façades, lining the streets like inside walls, that make one feel more physically sheltered in this city than in any other. . . . In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés, which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. To this day, Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot."-Walter Benjamin
Friday, March 7, 2008
Ungrounded Objects images
My work from the first studio project, (Un)grounded Objects
The FIAT Panda: The Roman Car
Taking back the Piazza (Stacked Pandas)
Welcome to the Forum
Roman Forum Tourist Guide
Floating Footpaths
The FIAT Panda: The Roman Car
Taking back the Piazza (Stacked Pandas)
Welcome to the Forum
Roman Forum Tourist Guide
Floating Footpaths
Charlie Rose Architecture Interviews
Charlie Rose has had a series of interviews with architects over the years which have been quite interesting.
Here is the link to his interviews from the show's archives. Enjoy :)
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Some Pictures from Ungrounded Objects
You can see more images from my project, with explanations, here.
For now I just wanted to post some of my images here, but I am aware that they aren't very understandable without any accompanying text.
For now I just wanted to post some of my images here, but I am aware that they aren't very understandable without any accompanying text.
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