Wood

I've enlisted in a carpentry course at London Met, and I'm halfway through a small cabinet which belongs in the bathroom of a mean hermit or something. but i've worryingly gained an interest in historic fine furniture, purely on the grounds that i now know it takes hours to complete a dovetail.

Dare studio do a good job at tapping into the inner georgian gentlemen in all of us, (right guys) that make you want to sit and write a novella inspired by that favourite buxom manor muse you oh so devilshly desire.

Japanese outfit Nendo made this freak of a chair, its fragility is untrustworthy like a skinny food critic, but we all know we would participate in the old school pastime of the "lean back". The simple and slight deserted chair is synonymous with japanese architectural pornography photography and these guys really set illusions to see how much they can hide.

Their fadeout chair too!

and also "I am the new Jesus!"

Analogue Astronomy

Fantastic posters from the depths of a time capsule by Simon Page take me back to the days Kubrick, if I was alive, and the tones of unloved seventies maths textbooks.

Patience in the turbine hall

Good things come to those who wait, or an audience with Demand and Caruso. The projects they showed give the image they both operate on each others terms. Working for, rather than working with, which has to be better form of collaboration for clarity of vision. I don't approve of design by half measures.

The craftsmanship of Demands models are amazing and the off-kilter photorealism sets about memory triggers and connotations of a tangible inhabitance. The evidence of the human presence is inexplicably linked to these pictures. They charge stories in the mind and feature as sets in our head-dramas.

The Nagelhaus (two bottom pictures) is constructed from a concoction of modern references that exist in film and on the pixel-deep online space. This removed third person layered experience from a distance allows for the bending of truth like a massive chinese whisper/photo/copy/paste. I find Caruso St Johns classical winks so charming that they pass far beyond pastiche, usually handled with their own colour palettes and touch that is something on the odd side of quintisential english.

The other Arne

I see within some designers a move towards purist structural honesty, the clean surface of modernism has been violently frayed and pulled inside out to show the chaotic innards. These pallettes have to be limited and concept to be clear to avoid pomo catastrophe. Welsh design outfit Freshwest taps right into the juvenile toybox with these pieces both titled brave new world.

Arne Quinze also flirts with the auto-didactic craftsman with his sprawling parasitic sculptures that dart like inkstokes over buildings and the sky. I like his models though.

Which leads me to these shoes I built for our very own debonair girl Camille Roman's label Tour de Force. This was a fun maquette which made me realise how long it had been since i had made a model. Literally made on a shoestring (with a bit of an old wooden pallet) it was a bizarre construct that constantly contorted every time i returned to work at it, shifting like original lumber. I don't think i've ever seen anything i've done in a more professional surrounding.

In celluloid we trust

Werner Herzog, the bastion of guerilla film-making, has announced the opening of a rogue film school. i believe this will create some obscure stories on the net about arrests in cambodia or deaths in the underground caves of prague. Here's hoping.

And there should be some cool films emerge afterwards.

The talent of the Irish

Not much get said about the new Irish kids over here, they don't really get included in competitions and literature as much. I somehow doubt that really matters the Irish sense of pride and independence but their young practices like O'Donnell and Tuomey, ODOS, Cast, Ozmin, A2 etc can rip it up like the Lynch's and Carmody Groarkes over this side of the channel.

Here is the work of Taka, formed by a pair of Irish women in Bangladesh, which explains the brick patternings, and have already done work for the Venice Biennale. House 1 and 2 shows a structural ambiguity, sturdy lightness with Victorian sensibility in the celebration of the vintage decoration and the taste for using imported flavours from their travels.

Humble space geometries

Designed with Gaudis method of hanging chains in search of the perfect natural geometries.

Gaudi chair from Dutch student Bram Geenen.

Intertwinning

Travelled to finland and broke all of the non-judgements I had of the place. I mostly only captured photos in Helsinki, otherwise i was too occupied by fondling moonbeams and breast-stroking through waters. After rushing past the strangely ordinary Kamppi Center by Juhani Pallasmaa - from a quick walk through i couldn't gauge how it had much relevance to his theories on architecture and the senses - i came to Kiasma which feels like it has been put together by one man, sculpting away for about 40 years. For a big building it remains continuously tactile as everything you touch transfers a sense of hours. Each piece of brass marked with a thousand prints.

and the babies get to sit in tim burton diy high chairs!

Happy Chinese New Year!!

Well TVCC by OMA, has been lit up like a tinderbox just a few months before its opening. These images and you could be forgiven for thinking it was part of some elaborate fireworks show, and theres still a doubt in my head that this is still a hoax as part of a competition to create a believable disaster and some pro-china sympathy. These things come across too comic and plastic to me and of a scale too vast to register with a tangible heartfelt response.9/11 - the comic was confidently apt way to tell the story, thats if i go out and read it.

The charred headstone is more blunt rather than a pile of post-cremation ashes and points a knife to the face of progress. Wonder what Rem Koolhaas has to say on the matter?

Sleeping on the job

Last night pick off the cellophane from a dvd that has been sitting in my room since my friend gifted me this before she flew from the nest to conquer teaching rich korean brats back in december 2007 (ouch). the film, heart of glass from ol' Werner Herzog, left so much of an impression on me i felt guilty it stayed in the plastic that long, and for spending time watching films like "Wanted" or "The day the earth stood still", but how was i to know.

The story originates from a collection of bavarian, german, swiss and czech locations and folklore, show a village crumble under the strain, when the keeper of the secret formula for their ruby glass dies. The glass factory; aimless and leaderless collapses and tugs the pockets and minds of the village into bewilderment, through the typical stages of denial, contempt, remorse and submission.

I can remember reading that the cast were hypnotised but in watching the film i had completely forgotten, and so wandered into the unsober events blind. the film starts with herzog mesmorising the eye with potent and stylised views of a Bavarian landscape, denial of zoning out is not an option. to have a film where the cast acted, and also sometimes wrote, towards the film under hypnosis, is clearly going beyond the call of duty, but what comes from that is a film that is so unwavering it is impossible not to get lost in it.

Hias plays the only sober unwavering voice in the film. His visions, predictions and actions of the future have a clarity and purpose which stays true amongst all the hazy chaos that blindly ensues.

The landscapes feature always put me in memory of casper david friedrich paintings.

(that one made a fellow painter friend drop his brush and train as an architect due to his disbelief in even approaching caspers unattainable greatness)

And the end of the film leaves a touch of hope that is also somewhat blind, especailly considering the ominous predictions of the local Nostradamus.

Artists take on architecture

Some sunday in august, i think, i took my bike with my friends to the south bank and waited behind around 30 to get inside the hayward, we were also harassed, or interacted with, by some youth theatre company sweeping and cleaning us. I was hopeful for this exhibition, considering there are a lot of artists that have a strong architectural sensibility in their work.

The first thing you see is ernesto neto's work which looks playful and is filled with smells of christmas and citrus. This sits in the middle of the space and looks like it could be pulled from another one of his exhibitions, and although you can - and cannot refrain to - walk through the notice of "do not touch" changes your attention from absorbing yourself in the work to watching where your hands are. This denial of the sense of touch does not do much to heighten the experience of others but frustrate your curiosity and deny the possibility of texture/smell/vision association.

Other pieces focused on the issue of scale; two dolls houses colliding into each other, a collection of 200 of rachel whitereads dollhouses and a paper mache 1:1 playhouse.
Atelier bow-wow's introduction is probably the most engaging of the lot, which inserts a metallic cave structure to connect three levels, two by level by scrambiling through the tight and low tunnel and also by sight and sound upwards through the tunnel that winds its way up in the gaps in the stairwell. It creates something from a mostly redundant space in the gallery like the nest of a metallic insect.

And as for the boating lake on the roof thats another matter; after i've waited some time to get inside the exhibition, i really don't expect to wait another three times inside the gallery for various events -mini-cinema, boating lake, geodesic dome- i don't really care how they would sort it out, let people wait longer outside, etc its just frustrating after you pay your money to have to wait repeatedly, i know we're british and supposedly love that shit but its just not my thing.

Overall i still see the artists looking at their work very protectively and reluctant to engage with the public other than just an observer, there were some good ideas but i could not get over the distance that they put infront of their work, and the arrogance that comes with "taking on architecture" and producing a show which looks like they haven't changed their perspective to tackle the subject of architecture.