Carloft

Let's imagine that you really want to live dead centre in a metropolitan area. But you don't want to experience all the possible negative side effects of living in such a place. And you have a lot of money. These three elements are crucial assumptions to understand the concept of the Carloft.

Apparently, living in a closed cocoon yourself, in some sort of gated community for wealthy urbanites isn't enough. Let's imagine: it could be hard to find a decent parking space. It might be slightly uneasy in a dark, underground parking space. So the people behind the carloft thought it must be a good idea to include the car as a part of your private luxourious condominium with a splendid view over the city centre.
So the appartments built with the carloft-system come with a built-in carlift, with which you can park your car right in front of your home, in front of your own window. Even if you live on the fifth floor in the centre of Berlin.

Honestly, I like luxus in appartments. I like stupid gadgets. And the private loft-gardens that every floor has in this building is just a lovely contrast to the city around the building. But this is overshadowed by a way to park your car that is just over the top in all possible ways. It's a way for inhabitants to close themselves off even more radical from everything around them that is slightly different (and thus: a potential threat to peace and security). Sure, it looks good in a photoshopped image, but the concept is just a bridge too far for me. If you'd want to live in the city, you'd have to deal with the fact that it's actually a city. And parking your car on the fifth floor might be a nice gadget, but for the god's sake: aren't there smarter (and less flashy, maybe?) ways to organize parking for an appartment building in an urban settings?

Falken Baden - Burkhard Meyer

If you'd like to have a crystalline, edgy smooth-shaped building, be sure to contact a Swiss architect. The practice of creating tightly lined buildings with a subtle twist has been traditionally Swiss. And the firm Burkhard Meyer has proved to be among the best at this game, with their Falken Baden building. This building consists of offices and appartments, in a sleek, elegantly morphed box. There are several things that make this building spectacular, besides the shape of things. For starters: the huge overhangs of the building. The sharp, fully glazed corners of the building cantilever up to eight metres, with a cantilever in a different direction above that. This makes the already elegant building extra sexy in its shape.

Also, organisationally it's quite interesting how Burkhard Meyer put the different parts together. On top of a block of offices, arranged around an atrium, there are houses around a central patio. So the roof becomes a roof-terrace, inverted, turning away from the cityscape around it.
The question might be: is there nothing wrong with this building whatsoever? Well, to be honest, the atrium in the office block seems to be a bit gloomy (and almost depressing, in a way). But other than that, this building has so much going on for it. It's sheer elegance, in organisation, morpheology, materialisation and urban positioning.

The dude

Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not "Mr. Lebowski". You're Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

You can say whatever you want, but I am absolutely convinced that The Big Lebowski is one of the masterpieces of modern cinema. Period. There are just so many great things about that movie that I wouldn't even know where to start.

And Jeffrey 'The Dude' Lebowski is a role-model if there ever was one. There is so much wisdom in the way he lives that he has inspired scores of individuals over the years. This made way for an entire new religion, called "The Church of the Latter Day Dude". The teachings of The Dude are converted in a simple, easy to apply religion, based on Taoist and/or Buddhist principles, combined with a laid-back, laissez-faire attitude.

As said on the site:
The beauty of Dudeism is its simplicity. Once a religion gets too complex, everything can go wrong.

That’s why the “To What/From What/By What Means” method of identifying a religion is a great way to summarize the Dudeist ethos for your un-Dude friends.

For example, if you apply this method to Buddhism (a compeer of Dudeism), you can easily answer what the point of it is.

From what is Buddhism trying to liberate us? Suffering
To what state of being is Buddhism trying to bring us? Nirvana
By what means does Buddhism attempt do this? The Noble Eightfold Path.

Isn’t that fucking interesting, man? Now let’s apply it to Dudeism:

From what is Dudeism trying to liberate us? Thinking that’s too uptight.
To what state of being is Dudeism trying to bring us: Just taking it easy, man.
By what means does Dudeism attempt do this? Abiding.

Now, that’s fucking ingenious, if I understand it correctly.


The dude abides. Damn right so. Can I get an AMEN?

Swoosh pavillion

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the [C]-space pavillion that some students of the Architectural Association in London designed and constructed on Bedford Square in London.

It seems as though a herd of pavillions is slowly taking over the square. A group of second and third year students - lead by Charles Walker and Martin Self - recently designed and constructed a pavillion, aptly dubbed the "Swoosh Pavillion". Even though this name seems to be a reference to the well-known logo by Nike (which is also called the swoosh), I am pretty much positive that the pavillion isn't sponsored by the sporting goods mogul. I believe that the name seems to relate to the dynamic nature of that logo.
Because, simply said: the Swoosh Pavillion is a sleek, dynamic form. It swirls itself around a lamppost on Bedford Square. In the centre, the pavillion is closed off by a dense structure of pieces of timber. In the outskirts, the spiral becomes looser, transforming the overhanging enclosure into benches.

The pavillion started out as a scripted 3D model, I assume. Therefore, it is quite an impressive feat that the pavillion was constructed by manual labor. It's always really good to see how an experiment in a computer program is transformed into something that can actually be built. The fact that it is done by a bunch of students makes it even more impressive...


The images come from dezeen.com.

A house made out of lace?

It might be typical Japanese to use paper-like walls on a building to seperate spaces (inside or outside), without them being too rigid. A wall is, in traditional sense, more like a membrane that filters the stimuli.

Mount Fuji Architects Studio used this old principle for a house in Tokyo, but without doing so in a traditional sense. The architect himself compares the aim with that of, for instance, the famous Glass House by Philip Johnson: it questions the traditional needs and goals of a house, because of the site. But alas, there are not that many forests available in downtown Tokyo. So they had to come up with something different, and cladded the building with sheets, in which a pattern of cherry blossom trees is perforated. This creates a pristine effect, almost as if the building is dressed in lingerie: you can see something of the interor, but not quite, it's more a hint of the promise that an actual revealing. At the same time, it also creates a sense of privacy in the interior, by filtering out the city surroundings.

By using this type of skin for this building, the architects manage to create a sense of openness and freedom, but at the same time they made an enclosed, private house in a dense, hyperactive city.

Jose Vasconcelos library - Alberto Kalach

It most be rather intimidating - or even frightening - to enter the Jose Vasconcelos library in Mexico City. The spectacular building, designed by Alberto Kalach, is not just a regular library. It's a monument to books.
It is one of the major cultural buildings that should function to turn the urban decay of the north-central area of Mexico City around. It's also something of a scandoulous political affair, but I don't want to get into all that.

This building is just spectacle in the interior. Highrising stacks of books fill this building, dizziling high. I don't want to spend a tons of words on this buildings, because I truely believe that the images of this building speak for themselves. I'm in awe. And I am pretty sure that I'm not alone at that...

The photography of Martin Parr

I really like the humorous, tongue-in-cheek approach that Martin Parr has to documentary photography. He shoots ordinary - whether it's about tourism, consumerism, contemporary living or what not - scenes in such a way that makes you want to feel uncomfortable, and fascinated at the same time. Like in the books "bored couples book" (see image above), or "think of england" (below). Or in many of his other books, for that matter.

And the cool thing is that, on his website martinparr.com, you can browse through a great part of his books. It's all so british (in style and content), and yet very universal. Satire without trying. Compelling by keeping a distance. Fascinating by being normal.

Weingut Gantenbein - Bearth & Deplazes

Brick is mostly considered to be a traditional building material. Granted, the material's been around for ages, and in certain cases it certainly plays on a nostalgic feeling of recognition, but there are other ways of dealing with this material. As the Swiss architects Bearth & Deplazes have shown in their Weingut (winery) Gantenbein.

For an expansion of the existing winery near the village of Fläsch, they chose to go for a concrete skeleton with a brick infill pretty early on in the design process. But instead of limiting themselves to the traditional brick-laying methods, they decided to opt for something rather more contemporary. They really treated the brickwork as a skin of the building, and decided to have it "tattooed" by an image made out of bricks, by using patterns of bricks and seams.

And traditional methods didn't suffice. Laying bricks by hand wouldn't be precise enough, let alone massively expensive. So they teamed up with the people from the chair for Digital Fabrication from the ETH Zürich, who were already working on a bricklaying robot. In the end it all worked out rather splendidly: a robot was created, which was programmed to position every single brick in exactly a certain position - in order to create a really sexy, modern skin out of a classic material.

A different perspective

I know that I should definitely stop mentioning the Euro 2008 football championship. And I'm sure that I would have stayed off the subject if I hadn't heard about this brilliant feature by Eurosport and Yahoo, called "Virtual Replays". You can watch every single goal from Euro 2008 from a bunch of different perspectives. But the most brilliant thing about it is that you can actually see the goals from the perspective of some of the players involved. My favorite ones: well, probably either the goal by Arjen Robben (Netherlands) against France, seen through his eyes. Or the goal by Nihat (Turkey) against Czech Republic, as seen through the eyes of the Czech goalkeeper? Anyway, it's really nice to have such a feature at hand that really takes advantage of computational powers available.

Image is everything

Have you ever had the experience of buying something in the supermarket that just looked absolutely delicious, but turned out to be nothing short of appalling? Well, there's definitely a discrepancy between the image that we buy, and the actual product.

That lead the people behind pundo300.com to conceive their project "ads vs. reality", in which they compare 100 products with the image on the package. Some look more alike than others. It's not to rate a product or anything, just to get people thinking about the way the means and ends of the advertisement-industry is used...

I stumbled upon this via www.hard-c.com.