Lots happening this week in the lead up to the Sydney Architecture Festival taking place next Monday at Customs House. Here are some things that we are involved in:

DARCHBAR - darch is hosting a series of dinners at Tony Bilson’s restaurant One at Circular Quay. The three course dinners will be interspersed with presentations on a particular topic surrounding architecture, with discussion over good (excellent) food and wine.

I am going to talk at tonight’s dinner on the topic of ‘Architecture and Illustration’ along with Adam Russell from DRAW and Rachel Walls. Seats may be reserved at the Sydney Architecture Festival page.

REMODELLING ARCHITECTURE - The Australian Architecture Association is holding its annual exhibition at Customs House, this time focussing on emerging practices that have a particular take on the ‘digital’. We helped to curate the exhibition along with terroir and have two boards on display.

The opening is on Wednesday night 7pm at Customs House.

60 SECONDS OF ARCHITECTURE - The online video festival hosted by the Architect’s Association of Denmark will be running at Customs House during the festival.

And for the trivia buffs, Emergency Architects are holding an architecture trivia night at the Swans Club on Wednesday night, hosted by the Chaser’s Craig Reucassel. Download the entry form for more details.

Did you hear that there was a dust storm in Sydney on Wednesday? Everyone got very excited about the whole thing and I have to admit, it was a potent reminder that yes, perhaps we do live on a planet. Such a visceral, visual event, is the kind of thing that the internet responds to with abandon and Flickr, facebook and twitter rapidly filled with orange photos of backyards, opera houses and roads and status updates about mars and the end of the world. Beside the excitement of experiencing an alternate atmosphere, some observations of the morning that resnoated:

City of Sound has a typically thorough run down, and of all the posts I have seen is the only one that tracks the storm after about 10am, when the photogenic orange glow had desaturated to a less romantic grey-brown haze.

The big picture, among the number of dramatic shots of Sydney icons rendered red, shows the storm from above showing it for what it actually was, an enormous cloud of airborne dirt.

Simon Wright observes a decidedly un-Sydney scene: dirty 4WDs. I like to think that Sydney’s absurdly large population of city bound 4WDs were too important to make it out to the desert, and istead made the desert come to them. And I wonder if 4WDs owners will be the longest to hold out on washing their cars to prolong the illusion of off-road credibility.

And finally,of course, there is already a magazine of the six hour period available to purchase from MagCloud. Unable to be purchased in Australia though, ‘Strange Light: Photos from the Great Australian Dust Storm’ collates imagery found online in one handy publication two days later.

The Elizabeth Bay Apartment is our first multiroom-project to be completed, and it was photographed by the very excellent Murray Fredericks. The project involved removing a number of walls to open a series of dark landlocked rooms to the light and view, new flooring, storage and kitchen.

Click through for the full photoshoot and further information on the project.

Man, it’s been a while between drinks and my ‘to post’ folder grows larger by the day… So let’s get all Things Mag about it and dump some paragraphs of linkage.

As seen above, SC favourite Hiroshi Sugimoto has a new series of photographs documenting paths of electric current on exhibition in San Fransisco. Just when libraries as libraries are rediscovering their relevance, Philadelphia decides to close all of theirs.

The finalists from the UPTO35 competition for student housing in Athens have been announced. Add this to the long list of competitions we started work on but never submitted. Oh well, some interesting proposals in the shortlist. Maybe you remember that there will be SMS voting for the second stage, so keep your eye on their site for updates. And speaking of competitions, fi5e has been awarded first place in archinect and Buslter’s Live Forever: Michael Jackson Monument Competition with a proposal that sits adeptly across media, politics, intellectual property, and pop music. And finally, for those not disillusioned from the first round, UTS is holding another competition, this time for an extension to the podium of the tower building on Broadway.

Photographs of the olden days. But in colour. The medium of colour photography compressing time and bringing an immediacy and familiarity to the otherwise alien world of 19th Century Russia. InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office are authoring the next issue of Pamphlet Architecture titled Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism. Infranet is one of my favourite blogs, so I have high hopes for this one. Archdaily lists the 10 Top Websites of Architecture Offices. We have our own bias, and they are far better than the flash-riddled sites that plague a lot oaf architecture offices site, but all of these sites are essentially the same portfolio model with different skins.

New Weird Australia compiles excellent new and sometimes weird music from this continent. Two volumes are available for download. About NSW is a comprehensive mashup of census data, historic records, artefacts, maps etc on New South Wales. The Nutritional Impossibility of Australia speculates that Australia’s relatively late discovery by Europeans was due to the length of time it took for scurvy to take hold. And once they did arrive, of course, they discovered that citrus is not in high supply in these parts. The article then goes on to make an association with the nutritional challenges of space travel, something I thought was solved successfully long ago.