We will be presenting at the Australian Institute of Architects tomorrow night on housing models along with Welsh+Major, Nobbs Radford and Kieran McInerny.
Tuesday September 30 at 6:30pm Tusculum
- Ken Adams, set designer, talks about the War Room from Dr Strangelove. Concept Sketch.
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- A New York Times article on Streetwars — a competition where contestants stalk each other through Manhattan with water pistols knocking each other off until one remains.
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- 10 tourists have been treated for twisted ankles and other minor injuries after stumbling on the irregularly spaced steps of Calatrava’s new bridge in Venice. The Guardian.
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- The Portuguese government have inaugurated the world’s first commercial-scale wave farm. The 140m long snake-like device will generate enough electricity to power 1,500 homes annually. Video footage at the Guardian.
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- Tara Donovan, sculptor and Macarthur Foundation “genius” award winner, transforms ‘huge quantities of prosaic manufactured materials — plastic-foam cups, pencils, tar paper — into sculptural installations that suggest the wonders of nature.’ NYT Article. Slideshow.
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- You know that an interview that opens with a tobacco company endorsement and the following three questions can only be superb:
“First of all organised Christianity.”
“What do you think of the American Legion, Mr Wright?”
“Mercy Killings. What’d'you think of them?”
The entire interview is captivating. Via.
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- Christopher Rothko shares memories of his father’s turbulent career including the Seagram mural commission and his discomfort with the restaurant’s ostentation: In 1958, Rothko was asked to supply wall paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in its opulent new building in New York. He agreed. Yet, by 1960, he returned the portion of the $35,000 fee that had been paid to him, and kept the murals. Later, the artist is reported to have said that he accepted the assignment with “malicious intent”, and hoped to paint something that would “ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room”. The Independent.
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- Welcome to Coker Alley is a laneway installation in Melbourne where all the exposed drainage pipes have been gold leafed and turning out like a subversively precious micro version of the Pompidou Centre.
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- Today’s episode of Radio National’s architecture program, By Design, will have a segment on blogging. Tune in at 3pm to hear us waffle on about the subject.
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- The NYT reviews NBC’s remake of Knight Rider:
‘The plot is plodding, the characters are interchangeable, and as an actor Mr. Bruening makes David Hasselhoff seem like Derek Jacobi. Even KITT is a letdown: in the original the car had the prissy, supercilious voice of William Daniels; here Val Kilmer reads his lines with all the personality and inflection of a rental-car G.P.S. system.’
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- Jonathon Glancey reviews Anish Kapoor’s new house designed by Tony Fretton. The Guardian.
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- Snap together potable precast prison cells ready to be rolled out in a town near you!
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- The winning entries of the White House Redux competition run by the Storefront for Art and Architecture are up online. The second place entry is a homage to Superstudio where the White House is re-imagined “given a multitude of cultural/economic/environmental shifts”.
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- Waltz with Bashir comes extremely highly recommended.
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- The Danish Pavilion for the Shanghai Expo in 2010 is a velovangelist spiral building that will store and project 1500 bicycles into Shanghai for the duration of the expo.
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- An amusing round-up of the Venice Biennale the author of which appears not to be at all impressed with Patrick Schumacher. “When I see Patrik Schumacher (business partner and factotum of Zaha Hadid) speak about architecture, I get very sad for him. He looks like a member of Kraftwerk trapped in one of those kidnap videos released by organisations with names like Swords of the Righteousness Brigade. ‘Parametricism is the great new style after Modernism,’ he says in a talking head film in the main exhibition of this year’s Venice architecture biennale. He looks as though someone is pointing a Kalashnikov at his kneecap just out of shot”. Via.
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Fitter, Happier, More Productive
Friday, 19th September 2008 Tweet
Brad Rhoads, a computer programmer and missionary in Princeton, Ill., faces a computer monitor on a file cabinet and gets in about five miles a day on a treadmill while working in his home office.
“After a while, your legs do get kind of tired,” said Mr. Rhoads, 40, who started exercising in March, when doctors advised him to lose weight after open-heart surgery.
Jim Keane, Steelcase Group president comments, “Organizations interested in elevating healthy activity and productivity among its employees can install the Walkstation in a variety of ways – as part of a conference room where employees can walk while meeting, in individual workstations, or for groups of workers to share in other common areas around the office.”
DIY.
- The trailer for Charlie Kauffman’s new film Synecdoche, New York is up online. The film concerns the staging of a play set within a life-size simulacrum of New York City inside a warehouse (shades of The Remainder?). Jimmy Stamp has pics and some thoughts on the film.
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- Build me an Art Crusher. Edward Lifson proposes ratcheting down the roof of Mies’ New National Gallery; crushing the works of Jeff Koons within. This is a very good idea.
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- Is Pac-Man to fashion what Star Wars is to architecture?
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