candyland

mañanarama

2009-04-21T21:16:00.004+02:00

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dearest friends, foes, fans, followers and fellow bloggers:

as you must've realized by now, candyland is kaput. it's been a nice run, with its ups and downs. i'm not particularly proud of any given post here. each blog i start seems to move further and further away from the simple, self-referential "authorship" mode and closer to an engagement with everything that's out there. i think this is what made candyland worthwhile. but the candy ran out.

the good news is i've already moved on. i'll be blogging at mañanarama now. there you'll find all sorts of visual and textual goodies on the subject of failed development, bogus modernization, and other urban or architectural dreams deffered. i've decided to concentrate on mexico, for once (i'm sure a big part of it is homesickness, considering this is already my third year away from d.f.), though I'll probably indulge in the occasional musing on (pan)americana, mid-century manias, tercermundismo or just random mexotica.

it was nice having you here, and i hope you'll come on down to mañanarama and take a look (if you like it, make sure you update your links and feeds). there's also a little tumblr appendix to the blog. See you there...
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r.i.p

2009-04-20T08:10:00.004+02:00

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j.g. ballard. writer, thinker and science fictioneer (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009)

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candyland. weblog (18 July 2006 – 19 April 2009)

home

2009-04-17T10:42:00.001+02:00

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i've realized i can only live in places i love/hate

last view

2009-04-09T20:19:00.001+02:00

makes me rather sad

2009-04-04T12:27:00.001+02:00

tomorrow never came

2009-04-01T08:41:00.001+02:00

refreshment

2009-03-25T07:37:00.002+01:00

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¡refresca en grande!
refreshment, big time!

o-rama

2009-03-19T17:55:00.001+01:00

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bowl-o-rama (ashtray)

futurama (1964)

2009-03-18T15:49:00.003+01:00

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futurama (1939)

2009-03-17T15:13:00.000+01:00

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-rama

2009-03-16T12:08:00.004+01:00

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It is interesting to note the widespread use of a new derivative suffix, -rama, in New York advertising language. The appeal of -rama is evidently due to the great success of the wide-screen motion picture, Cinerama, which had its New York première on September 30, 1952…Cinerama was made up in the mid-194os, when Fred Waller, the inventor of this motion picture technique, offered a case of champagne to a co-worker for the best name for the process. The prize was won by Waldo McLowerie, who came up with Cinerama. It was obviously coined on the analogy of panorama and the less frequent cyclorama, from the root cine-, occurring in a great many words related to motion pictures, and the ending -rama, taken from the final part of panorama and cyclorama, disregarding any analytic-etymological considerations. (Panorama, dating from 1796, goes back ultimately to the Greek pan 'every' and horama 'view,' and thus the -o- is an etymologically given phoneme in the compound…)

The transfer was motivated by the similarity in the arrangement of the Cinerama technique…offering a wide panoramic view which creates the illusion of depth, an illusion which is further augmented by stereophonic sound effects...

Immediately after the enthusiastic reception of Cinerama by critics and public, the liquor store next door to the theater called its window display a 'liquorama'; other names followed: audiorama, a display of acoustic instruments; Autorama, a television show; colorama, a color movie; Dekorama, an oil paint decal set; Figurama, an 'amazing new three-dimensional girdle'; Himberama, 'a 4-D show,' advertised on Times Square; motorama, an auto- mobile exhibit; newsorama, a television news program; Phonorama, a new Philco phonograph; scoutorama, a meeting of New York State Boy Scouts; sinerama, in an advertisement of the jacket of a book called Jest and Sex: 'Sexplosively Sexational Sinerama of life'; skinerama, the headline of a World-Telegram article making fun of baldness concoctions; smellorama, the 'symphony' of a 'smell organ,' in an article on experiments in sensory entertainment during the 1920s; striporama, a burlesque movie; telerama, a television show; vistarama, a new anamorphic type of wide-screen photography and projection; and Wonderama, 'the first musical of the future.'

The word Cinerama was by no means the first coinage with this ending in the twentieth century. Well known is the Futurama of the General Motors exhibit during the New York World's Fair of 1939-40, but this did not seem to create a fashion…

The meaning of this suffix is clear: 'a spectacular show or display' (the thing displayed is sometimes indicated in the stem).

John Lotz, "The suffix -rama", American Speech, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May, 1954)

balzacorama

2009-03-15T11:45:00.003+01:00

The boarders dropped in one after another, interchanging greetings and the empty jokes that certain classes of Parisians regard as humorous and witty. Dullness is their prevailing ingredient, and the whole point consists in mispronouncing a word or in a gesture. This kind of argot is always changing. The essence of the jest consists in some catchword suggested by a political event, an incident in the police courts, a street song, or a bit of burlesque at some theater, and forgotten in a month. Anything and everything serves to keep up a game of battledore and shuttlecock with words and ideas. The diorama, a recent invention, which carried an optical illusion a degree further than panoramas, had given rise to a mania among art students for ending every word with rama. The Maison Vauquer had caught the infection from a young artist among the boarders.

“Well, Monsieur-r-r Poiret,” said the employé from the Muséum, “how is your health-orama?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned to Mme. Couture and Victorine with a “Ladies, you seem melancholy.”
“Is dinner ready?” cried Horace Bianchon, a medical student, and a friend of Rastignac’s; “my stomach is sinking usque ad talones.”
“There is an uncommon frozerama outside!” said Vautrin. “Make room there, Father Goriot! Confound it! your foot covers the whole front of the stove.”
“Illustrious M. Vautrin,” put in Bianchon, “why do you say frozerama? is right by the same rule that you say ‘My feet are froze.’”
“Ah! ah!”
“Here is his Excellency the Marquis de Rastignac, Doctor of the Law of Contraries,” cried Bianchon, seizing Eugène by the throat, and almost throttling him.
“Hallo there! hallo!”
Mlle. Michonneau came noiselessly in, bowed to the rest of the party, and took her place beside the three women without saying a word.
“That old bat always makes me shudder,” said Bianchon in a low voice, indicating Mlle. Michonneau to Vautrin. “I have studied Gall’s system, and I am sure she has the bump of Judas.”
“Then you have seen a case before?” said Vautrin.
“Who has not?” answered Bianchon. “Upon my word, that ghastly old maid looks just like one of the long worms that will gnaw a beam through, give them time enough.”
“That is the way, young man,” returned he of the forty years and the dyed whiskers—
“The rose has lived the life of a rose—
A morning’s space.”

“Aha! here is a magnificent soupe-au-rama,” cried Poiret as Christophe came in bearing the soup with cautious heed.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said Mme. Vauquer; “it is soupe aux choux.”
All the young men roared with laughter.

honoré de balzac, old goriot (1835)

mañana...

2009-03-14T08:19:00.007+01:00

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you,
with your moonshine eyes
and your envious mouth
that doesn't give, that doesn't give,
that doesn't give at all.
you, with your lover
and friend the wind
that ruffles your hair
and reveals all your dreams.
twisted, rebellious, crazy,
in love with yesterday
and tomorrow and with the desire
of what i want to be,
and tomorrow,
if there is a tomorrow,
i will be...

bessie

2009-03-08T11:08:00.001+01:00

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fading out

70/100

2009-03-03T16:33:00.003+01:00

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kevin bauman, abandoned house 70

*via spaceinvading

idle

2009-03-01T20:01:00.001+01:00

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sunday, idle

going down

2009-02-28T11:40:00.005+01:00

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even i, always the ardent decay enthusiast and lover of blight, am kind of freaking out and finding it hard not being overwhelmed with the onslaught of neodepression-related architectural and urban occurrences. i was hoping for the day when architecture would be more about buildings crumbling down than going up, but i never thought it would come so fast and be so in-your-face. i certainly didn't see it happening practically everywhere. i'm trying to come to grips with the debacle by compiling a series of keywords:

bust-towns
disasterscape
excesscapes
frozen skyline
see-through buildings
slumburb
unbuilding

care to share?

perilous

2009-02-25T16:25:00.003+01:00

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the perilous state of mexico
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* night scene in neza by brian l. frank for the wsj

strait?

2009-02-23T10:41:00.003+01:00

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is it?

via brandavenue

narcomuseo

2009-02-20T13:43:00.004+01:00

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museo del enervante, mexico city
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narcobloqueos

2009-02-19T13:43:00.002+01:00

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from the nyt:

"they kill. they bribe. they launder money. and now mexico’s drug cartels may have their hands in a new activity: street protests."

neverland

2009-02-19T10:34:00.004+01:00

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neverland, vacant

via fantastic journal

tank

2009-02-17T10:21:00.002+01:00

this blog is tanking faster and deeper than the global economy. better find me some stimulus.

slums‘r’us

2009-02-12T12:06:00.003+01:00

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go read

* m.i.a. portrait by napoleon habeica, from babybabybaby magazine

neodepressed (4)

2009-02-10T22:34:00.001+01:00

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global warming (plus the tropicalization of old europe)

neodepressed (3)

2009-02-06T07:00:00.000+01:00

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bolivia on its way to world superpowerdom due to lithium reserves (plus electrocumbia andina becoming the next reggaeton)

neodepressed (2)

2009-02-05T16:12:00.002+01:00

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toxic mist (plus cheap thirdworld imitation imports)

neodepressed (1)

2009-02-04T17:55:00.004+01:00

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urban blight (plus not knowing what the f*ck is going on)

wetdream

2009-01-29T17:37:00.002+01:00

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click

found here via loudpaper

le visage de

2009-01-28T18:13:00.004+01:00

it ain't garbo, but still deserves a barthesian ode of its own, don't you think?

tangentially related

home porn

2009-01-26T15:12:00.006+01:00

"as wall street titans grabbed bonuses based on illusory, short-term paper profits, so regular americans took on all kinds of debt wildly disproportionate to their assets and income. the nearly $1 trillion in unpaid credit-card balances is now on deck to be the next big crash. this debt-ridden national binge of greed and irresponsibility washed over our culture not just through the marie antoinette antics of a schwarzman and a thain but in mass forms of conspicuous consumption and entertainment. Cable networks like bravo, a&e, tlc and hgtv produced an avalanche of creepy programming catering to the decade’s housing bubble alone — an orgiastic genre that might be called subprime pornography. some of the series — 'flip this house,' 'flip that house,' 'sell this house,' 'my house is worth what?' — still play on even as more and more house owners are being flipped into destitute homelessness."

frank rich, "no time for poetry"

punctum

2009-01-23T13:33:00.010+01:00

hotel habita, monterrey, mexico. agustín landa and joseph dirand. via spaceinvading

some archiglam shots prove striking for all the wrong, unintended reasons.

feelin' good

2009-01-22T16:04:00.002+01:00

this is how inauguration festivities went down in mexico city

gabrielle civil, via intersections

soundtrack

2009-01-20T11:05:00.003+01:00

if this turns out to be as bad as they say it can get, i think the official soundtrack for the xxist-century neo great depression should be nico muhly's the only tune.

resolutions

2008-12-30T15:55:00.002+01:00

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what 2009 might bring. read

santa baby

2008-12-24T14:41:00.001+01:00

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merry xmas

shots, df

2008-12-16T15:51:00.003+01:00

womb

2008-12-08T15:12:00.005+01:00

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i'm back in mex city. each time i land here i need a re-insertment period of a couple of days, when i only stay locked-up inside my parents' house and buy magazines and newspapers and read them and have take out and go through my old books i forgot i had and drink café americano and try to block out everything. it's like a f*ckd-up functional jet lag thing or something, i leave mex city and become so chicken and civilized that i can't deal at first when i come back. but today i go out.

dump

2008-11-28T18:08:00.002+01:00

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go read @ where

moderno

2008-11-15T12:29:00.001+01:00

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"those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most"

marshall berman

american pie

2008-11-12T13:06:00.006+01:00

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"i've made my own luck because i looked at what was available, and i didn't want to eat the apple pie they offered. i don't care to have car payments to impress somebody. i don't care to have a mortgage to impress somebody..."

from forclosures by bruce gilden
via slate

today sucked

2008-11-11T16:39:00.006+01:00

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till i saw this

via angelosays

california

2008-11-11T12:21:00.001+01:00

follow the backlash on wockner

nov. 4

2008-11-10T11:44:00.003+01:00

i was nervous going to bed tuesday night. i woke up automatically at 3.19 a.m, when the first polls were closing (7 hour difference). i can't fucking believe how globalized i am. even my subconscious is globalized. i got out of bed in the dark and tried desperately to find a free wifi connection with my ipod to log onto nyt.com and track the first results. no luck. i sms'd my sister in boston: sms me when obama wins. i sms'd the news service, got 3 replies: one about eta terrorist attack, one about something going on in congo, one about AMERICAN ELECTIONS: OBAMA LEAD IN OHIO, OBAMA 51% MCCAIN 49%. got even more nervous. couldn't sleep. seant another sms at 4.30 a.m. DEMOCRATS TAKE 4 STATES. another sms close to 5 a.m BARACK OBAMA PRESIDENTE DE EEUU. sis called at 5 something a.m. ecstatic yelling obama had been declared the propsective president or the projected president or something like that. could hear american teenagers yelling mad happy in the background. couldn't sleep but kept smiling in bed till 6 a.m. walked out early. papers were coming out with martin luther king on the cover: NOT A DREAM ANYMORE they said. i went for a swim and thought about how fucking fantastic everything was. after i showered got a voice message from boyfriend: have you heard? they killed mouriño. they shot his plane down, it fell on periférico. i called him back. the day turned bittersweet. reading parallel newspapers. happy u.s. shitty mexico. it all felt unreal. we truly are melting into the air i thought. then california voted to strip gay people of a basic right. i thought joni mitchell singing california coming home and how shitty california has become not that sunny free place anymore. and how everything is messed up and confused and open.

tomorrow

2008-11-03T18:43:00.002+01:00

vote if you can

muertos

2008-10-31T18:52:00.004+01:00

if only i could spend this weekend in df
and party like the dead

happy muertos

new localism

2008-10-28T15:21:00.002+01:00

what could be new about "new localism" ? (and what's not)

go read

sad scott matthew

2008-10-21T11:17:00.003+02:00

i was riding the metro this morning listening to
sad scott matthew
and one of the fluorescent light-bulbs overhead
was ailing too
blinking and flickering on and off a little
the train was one of those long, continuous, corridor-trains
with no dividing doors
so i could see everyone riding till the end
it felt like looking at a screen
and everyone was silent and gloomy and bursting with
melancholy
like scott and me

obamistas

2008-10-17T09:45:00.008+02:00

if mexico could vote on nov. 4, this is what our electoral map would look like:

reforma, one of mexico city's main newspapers has put up a poll on its website to determine if takers lean more towards obama or mccain in terms of policy affiliation. over 5000 have responded so far and results are pretty categorical. (by the way, yucatán—the only red state on the map—considers itself an independent republic; it's like the mexican alaska).

oohbama

2008-10-16T11:23:00.001+02:00

i'm sorry, i just had to

as promised

2008-10-15T17:04:00.001+02:00

click

posting drought

2008-10-14T13:00:00.000+02:00

expect something interesting, mañana.

i'm only happy when i shop

2008-09-30T15:34:00.005+02:00

– – – – – –

of course, denial is always an option

go read @ brandavenue

high windows

2008-09-26T18:48:00.005+02:00

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i leave you with a little poetry for the weekend. i first heard this poem when i was 19, out of a teacher that smoked a pack of non-filter cigarettes per class, making his voice deep and scruffy. i had a mad crush on him and every time i read this i get jittery and a bit ruttish. ejem.

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High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin (1974)

this is the end

2008-09-25T15:20:00.008+02:00

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1. this is the end of architecture for me. it is somehow tied to my growing out of puberty.

2. with the passing of years and events, my love of architecture has waned and i've overcome my childhood reverie of becoming an architect, for good.

3. as a kid i didn't really know what architecture was about. i just liked to build dinosaur skeletons on this really ancient 2-d computer program i had, and constantly drew megapalaces and encased cities and flying walkways and underwater capsules in notebooks. when i was like 9 or 10, i thought i had it figured out: i wanted to be an "architect by computer." computers were pretty rare in the tropics back then, and people would ask me: –what the hell is that? and i would just answer –well, i'm going to build buildings, but by computer.

4. on of the things i hate most about architecture today is the fixation on renderings; second only to future-of-architecture review boards:

5. i don't see how we can become enthralled and jolted by architecture anymore. i think architectural ideas and concepts might still hold some sort of power, but architectural practice right now seems just about as promising as investment banking.

6. architectural remains, on the contrary, will be more significant than ever, particularly as we move away from physical and visual concerns, into the abstract yet predominantly material domains of program, process and hidden meaning.

fear

2008-09-23T16:23:00.006+02:00

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jordan wolfson, nostalgia is fear (2004)

ditto

receptacle

2008-09-19T13:14:00.007+02:00

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this morning i woke up. i rose and shone. i put on a pair of flannel pants. i went to the kitchen and made scottish breakfeast tea. i poured the tea and drank it. i took a shower. the drain was clogged. a gooey velvety whiteness remained. i dried myself well, especially between the legs and between the toes. i rubbed my armpits with an unscented deodorant stick. i sprayed my wrists with man perfume, rubbed them against my arms and neck. i put on a pair of underwear, baggy black pants and a gray t-shirt with skinny horizontal yellow stripes running across it. i chose a pair of sneakers. i brushed my teeth with tooth-whitening paste, proceeded to floss and mouthwash. i called my boyfriend and caught him lying. i pulled the laundry off the rack and threw it into a pile somewhere. i locked the door and took the elevator. i said hi to the doorman and walked the usual fifteen minutes to the metro, spotting the usual construction workers swallowing their usual foot-long subs wrapped in tinfoil for breakfast. i smoked two cigarettes and listened to country music on the way. i thought about the beautiful persons that died over the weekend, and about the downfall of the american empire and about mexico burning with narco-anxiety attacks. everything was terribly familiar, and yet terribly different. i realized how cities are the perfect imperfect receptacle.

we heart crisis

2008-09-18T10:46:00.006+02:00

– – – – – – – – –

1. the party is over. take a look at all those little downward charts in the newspapers

2. a crisis is a threshold

3. architecture—like any other productive enterprise sustained and fed by the long lost boom—is near the low, quiet breaking point between the tipsiness of the last of the few-too-many and the start of a brutal hangover

4. hopefully we won't have to look at those tawdry glowing renderings everywhere anymore

piles

2008-09-12T11:49:00.001+02:00

cities as piles, composed of:

abetments
abstractions
addresses
altars
aspirations
backdoors
backlots
bad metaphors
binaries
brandings
breakouts
breaks
burning sensations
calls
categories
carcinogens
characters
climates
conflicts
crusts
days
degradations
deprivations
deviations
diapers
doubts
drivers
drives
duties
empty containers
encounters
epicenters
episodes
erotic transfer
erosions
exchanges
expansions
failures
falsifications
fetishes
frames of reference
generations
gradients
group dynamics
half-finished structures
hidden alternatives
hierarchies
hues
inflections
inequalities
inscriptions
itineraries
latencies
layers
lingerings
malfunctions
(processed) materials
(raw) materials
names
networks
parasites
peaks and valleys
pointless systematizations
power struggles
procedures
products
(chinese) products
questions
radiofrequencies
reactions
rebirths
refractions
regressions
regurgitations
reproductions
sadness
scars
scenes
scores
searches
secretions
smells
songs
squares
strategies
symbolisms
things dead
things living
things we’ve lost
things we’ve forgotten
threads
threats
totems
trials
variations on themes
visual impressions
wants
waste

plus whatever else you might want to add.

babylon

2008-09-10T17:20:00.009+02:00

dash snow, untitled ("dead man"), 2006.

one of my personal highlights from the babylon: myth and truth show at the pergamon museum in berlin, along with a tiny engraving of louis XVI as the whore of babylon, blake's nebuchadnezzar, the posters from d.w. griffith's intolerance, and the early modernist portrayals of the metropolis as babel, was the dash snow series of cum-stained, glittered tabloid portratis of saddam hussein.

the show in general was hot and unorthodox, like anything you would expect from berlin.

wasilla

2008-09-05T10:43:00.005+02:00

much has been said about barack obama's globalized upbringing and his sousing in chicago city politics. but what about his contender? no, i don't mean mccain. think more moose-hunting, gun-loving, hockey-mom-cum-vicepresidential-candidate. slate treats us to a lovely journey through dame sarah palin's hometown (and even sheds light on the great architectural feats of her term as mayor there). not to be missed.

off

2008-08-28T12:26:00.001+02:00

off to berlin for a microvacation. new post next friday.

shaky

2008-08-22T17:54:00.004+02:00

i don't know
if it's the news
about foreclosures
and airplanes exploding
on runways in madrid,
or if it's just
all this stravinsky i've been
listening to
doing shitty text corrections,
but i'm feeling terribly shaky.

loos note

2008-08-18T15:48:00.003+02:00

"a work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it, a house meets a need. a work of art has no responsibility to anyone, a house to everyone. the aim of a work of art is to make us feel uncomfortable, a house is there for comfort. a work of art is revolutionary, a house conservative. a work of art is concerned with the future and directs us along new paths, a house is concerned with the present. we love anything that adds to our comfort, we hate anything that tries to pester us into abandoning our established and secure positions. we love houses and hate art. so a house has nothing to do with art and architecture is not one of the arts? that is so..."

adolf loos, architecture

introduction to dodospace

2008-08-17T13:07:00.005+02:00

1.
the word dodo comes either from the portuguese doudo or doido (stupid) or from the dutch doodaarsen(fat-arse). the dodo was a large non-flying bird native to the isle of mauritiana, famously exterminated by human senselessness. It was also known as walghvogel (disgusting bird) , for its unpleasantly tasting meat. a queer, unattractive and relatively unaggressive specimen that had adjusted to a detached environment, the dodo was only dominant because it remained secluded and free from menace. the arrival of foreign colonial exploiters, pigs and other prowlers sealed the fate of this lowlife yet innocuous creature. before the dodo disappeared, a few live specimens were taken to fairs and colonial shows, but the bird never generated much interest, and its ugliness prevented it from being collected and bred like other more attractive exotic creatures— the peacock, for example—. very few people had actually seen or known about the bird, to the point that it came to be considered a mythological creature. around the nineteenth century, two events brought the dodo back to human conscience: the discovery of a fossilized dodo skeleton and lewis carroll’s self-portrayal as a dodo in his alice tales.

2.
as the name implies, dodospace is extinct: a space that has disappeared and left little evidence of its former existence. even in the likely case of remaining fragments—a familiar detail feature, a hint of the former structure, a trace of paint—dodospace only survives in recollection. thus, it is deformed; renditions of it are usually (helplessly) inaccurate, clouded by nostalgic—or even mythical— delusion. dodospace is what is left of the useless architectures isolated from chronic, accelerated change in a city. dodospace is like the lingering after the clearing of crash sites, those sudden, violent standstills.

3.
what is the use of dodospace? before it actually disappeared, dodospace did have a function, albeit a marginal one. nonetheless, this minor role was deemed unimportant—occasionally dangerous, or at least uncomfortable—and the space was therefore ruthlessly and carelessly erased. dodospace was once a place for outcasts and odd types: unproductive twelve o’clock drunkards and hookers switching shifts, petty thieves and pushers, queers out to mingle, class clashes and infrasocial frottage.

loosing my ballardian virginity (part two)

2008-08-14T11:25:00.008+02:00

i felt like an atheist touring a church, like a skeptic lured by an outlandish cult, on verge of giving in. ballard’s work, his style, his writing, his contributions themselves became irrelevant. it was his obsessions, his morbid lucidity, his flair for shocking and rocking that were on display. the autopsy show is a lesson in fetishism –the author as a substitute pop totem.

the show turned to showmanship in the “pornography and technology” room, which very much looked like a crossbred between bride of frankenstein and a cheap xxx film with a visit to the dentist theme. you had these creepy operation tables with pictures of car-wrecks. you had cronenberg’s crash playing. you had a letter report about wanting to fuck ronald reagan. you had joy-of-(twisted)-sex-style documentaries from the seventies, and a huge video pastiche of clinical, endoscopic porn.

i moved on from the awkward and fleshy to the cold, pasteurized “asepsis and neobarbarism” section. here the layout was more basic: a couple of digital signs hanging from the roof, again, with fragments of text that, unless you’d actually read whatever book they were from, one couldn’t really make sense out of. then four or five screens showing the shoddy 3D promos for hypothetic luxury developments that have become the staple of post-dubai urban marketing. “only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible,” read the little tag for the room. but isn’t that what all these new developments are about, spoonfuls of sugared violence? isn’t dystopia the new utopia?

the last part of the exhibition is a series of rooms that basically amount to the church of jgb. first off, a “reading room,” or all you can eat buffet, with a neat encased row of first editions—like the plastic foodclones on display in low-grade japanese restaurants—dominating the tables stashed with library copies that visitors can flip through. even though this was the perfect chance for me to at least read a paragraph of ballard, i avoided the books and just kept moving. i really like the idea of reading rooms in exhibitions, but not once have i seen anyone actually taking the time to sit down and read anything. let alone a novel.

the ballardly altar room was my favorite of them all. it was presided over by a fragment of the unlimited dream company, a 1983 film by sam scoggings, were ballard is asaulted with 90 two-second questions from eyckman’s personality quotient. do you enjoy meeting new people? are your feelings easily hurt? do you often feel fed up? do you enjoy hurting the people you love? would you call yourself a nervous person? Are you a warrior? do you worry about awful things that might happen? do people who drive carefully annoy you? as the postmodern inquisitional trial unfolds, the camera zooms into ballard, till you can see the sweat on his forehead and his eye looks like a fly trapped in a jar. in the context of the exhibition, the film feels like a contemporary relic of sorts, digital cartilage stripped from the ominous saint.

the show closes with visual epistles of ballardian apostles. a full iconography can be drawn from the black and white pictures of ana barrado, or from the barrage of michel lord’s future ruins series. the preaching of the word is present in the bits of ballardian techno-following (the ballardian blog, jgb groupie homevideos playing on cellphones).

the autopsy reveals the voice of this man that lives in a world that can’t believe anymore, but doesn’t know how to stop believing.

loosing my ballardian virginity (part one)

2008-08-12T12:39:00.006+02:00

having never opened a j.g. ballard book in my life, it seems terribly inadequate that i cover and review the very first exhibition dedicated exclusively to his life and work. still, adequacy has never been my forte, and after being seduced by the show’s promotional poster planted right in front of the door to my building—“crec en res,” it read, I believe in nothing—i decided to go to the cccb and see what all the fuss was about.

upon entering the exhibition, i found myself sucked into this darkened, blue neon nothing. it was a little disorienting. there was probably an opening statement and bio pasted on the wall, but i skipped it and decided to make my first time as visceral and uninformed as possible. after a boring strand of interviews with writers on the subject of ballard, and a terribly anticlimatic “conceptual” “videoart” piece (very barcelona. if there is one thing i hate about the culture scene here is that it's overstuffed and heavily subsidized, meaning that practically anyone with decent connections and a catalan pedigree can show his or her crap in even the more established museums and galleries.) the show actually began setting its pace.

a striking ballardian background room featured a caged “inside” collection of mementos and minute watercolors of the lunghua internment camp where ballard and his family were detained during ww2. at the end of the room ran a projection of the bbc documentary home, where ballard return to the camp in the early 2000s. on the “outside” half of the room, behind a wooden pallet divisory wall, are eerie black and white snapshots of wartime shanghai. the overall effect of the room is subtle and shattering, a very effective way of exposing the roots of ballardian spirit.

soon enough, it struck me i really wasn’t as ballardly vestal as i thought. even though i’ve never had a go at j.g. himself—i’m still not sure why—i realized that a certain ballardian sensibility had penetrated my development early on, that it was very much a part of my pop upbringing. from the re-run of the empire of the sun movie—which impressed me as a kid, and might have led to some preemptive crush on christian bale—to the melted cheese aesthetics of stop-motion sci-fi and illustrated pulp, i began to fathom the idea of a non-ballard-reading ballardian…

to be continued

liveability: pretty but bland

2008-08-08T11:53:00.007+02:00

i won’t judge monocle on a design basis or as an editorial project; this has been brought up elsewhere. i'm only concerned with monocle’s pretenses at having a say in what cities should be, do and aspire to. who does mr. brulé think he is, playing urban consigliere?

most likely, it comes natural to him, considering he sees urban problems and opportunities being a question of image, cities as subjects of prospective makeovers. a teacher of mine once said that to know the work, the first thing you need is at least some faint notion of the person behind it. according to the wikipedia entry that he himself must have written or commissioned, brulé is the product of a superstar football playing father and an artist mother, your typical class of 1960-something yearbook dream couple: pretty, ambitious and a perfect fit for stereotypical molds. mr. brulé came to being in canada, which explains his fixation on worldliness (canadiannes has to be one of the blandest identities out their, together with austrailiannes). his hardy middle-class background would also account for his intensely aspirational, straight-to-the-neck competitiveness. add the fact that he’s gay and relatively goodlooking, and you have monocle. brulé and his products–like big-sister wallpaper*–have that nineties whiff of bland, numbing conspicuity and unrestraint. monocle reads like a douglas coupland case study, without the absurdity of it being intended.

likewise, the monocle strand of urban understanding is stuck in the past, stale and out of tone with reality. at this point, we should be over the idea of urbanism as product placement. in this sense, monocle is hyperconservative; brulé is a believer, a faithful of the status quo. just when you thought you had it bad with richard florida, there comes monocle with its top 25 list and its recipes for livability. (by the way, they actually interview richard florida).

the issue’s opening statement reads:

governments around the world are realizing that it’s no longer enough to be just a financial center, you also need to be a design capital, an ecological champion, a hub for knowledge and a magnet for creatives.

translating this from monclespeak, this means thriving on high-end retail, greenwashing, and an uncritically informed media-saavy culture industry out of adorno’s worst nightmare.

cities were put to the test in areas like criminality rates (murders and domestic break-ins), education, medical care, sunshine, tolerance (for some reason limited to acceptance of gay people), environment (bike routes and parks), with an added recommendation, or “moncle quick-fix” on specific issues: more shopping hours (zürich), more reasonably-priced lattés (helsinki), avoiding vespa-sized potholes on the roads (montréal), and countering bans on sunday alcohol-sales (minneapolis). with this type of detail how can one blame monocle for being superficial? it's obvious they’ve done their homework; the problem is the superficiality is embedded in their worldview.

it pervades the retro illustrations reminiscent of victor gruen urbanism that dot the issue. it runs through the soft porn-quality portraits and the foodporn and productporn and all sorts of porn and fetish that make up the graphic contents. it oozes from the crisp types and the subdued diagrams that dress this everlasting lovesong to global consumerism. monocle guards, flaunts, and counts on people feeling bad because they’re missing out as a way to praise–and hopefully sustain–a model with all its flaws and distortions.

monocle thrives on the clouding of success. according to the magazine, europe is this wonderful place where life is basically high-quality. nothing is mentioned about soaring unemployement, crippling salaries, inflation, the lethargic labor market, xenophobia, growing inequality, a much-battered aging population, etc. after a couple of years here I can confidently affirm that living in europe is no candy. true, you can be miserable in lovely parks, in the clean and functional metro, on your rental bike, watching government invest in publicity, reassuring you of how happy you should be to be here, because you won’t be mugged or have to deal with ugliness. not on the surface, at least.

the issue also saves a spot for “winning losers” (the city equivalent of sarah jessica parker’s louis vuitton rental bag carrying, diversity quota-filling assistant in the sex and the city movie): beirut, buenos aires, istanbul, etc. but again, more than presenting an alternative to the dominant, money-driven urban success stories of the top 25, these cities are portrayed as swanky but not-quite-there-or-quite-like-us-yet.

you do have to give the monocle team some credit for their efforts, specially comparing this cities issue to last year’s. possibly the most interesting section is the “global expert” brief interviews part. you can skip richard florida and ricky burdett (saying the same old thing they would anywhere else) and read some decent bits of thought from alain de botton on bad british planning, or jonathan raban on the gradual evanescence of diversity in cities. some of these people actually contradict the overall thread of reasoning behind monocle’s urban viewpoint. one of my favorites is–again–pedro reyes, replying bluntly to a question on livability: quality of life equals boredom.

it is difficult to imagine monocle ever proposing something that will challenge our understanding of cities and our daily lives. they’ll never change because their origin is fundamentally rotten. (profit-driven). cities are sustained on purpose and struggles for meaning and/or survival. comfort and prettiness aren’t enough of a purpose to endure the violent onslaught of everydayness.

coming soon

2008-08-06T12:03:00.005+02:00

friday, august 8
tyler brlûlé, urban consigliere?
candyland embarks on its (belated) yearly monocle-urbanism-bashing spree.

monday, august 11
loosing my ballardian virginity
a visit to the autòpsia del nou mil·lenni (autopsy of the new millenium) show at the cccb.

wednesday, august 13
introduction to dodospace
ugly architecture, neglect, and urban extinction.

heat

2008-08-05T12:30:00.001+02:00

the heat and the recession have me down. posting will resume shortly.

muckracker

2008-07-24T14:00:00.001+02:00

i never knew i had a calling.

habana, d.f.

2008-07-24T11:13:00.004+02:00

reading fantastic journal and seeing wax commando statues of el che made me homesick (again). café la habana, c. 2001. alone under the half space-age, half tropicomodernista ceiling. the whole place rumbled when the big trucks drove by on bucareli. i loved bucareli before i read bolaño. i loved it because it was wide and empty and dirty and regal, unlike any other street in mexico city. i loved the ywca nearby when it was closed and its pink déco facade was all rotten. i loved how all the buildings and sidewalks where so covered in soot and muck they were soft.

i would cut class to walk around there. just walk and stare at everything. i don't do that anymore.

maggi sabe mejor

2008-07-18T15:05:00.005+02:00

i believe marketeers call this targeting the bottom of the pyramid, or something. maybe it's just an offshoot of slumpsploitation.

quest

2008-07-15T12:27:00.005+02:00

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technology
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architecture
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self

ruskian metaphysics

2008-07-07T17:37:00.002+02:00

"if we consider how much less the beauty and majesty of a building depend upon its pleasing certain prejudices of the eye, than upon its rousing certain trains of meditation in the mind, it will show in a moment how many intricate questions of feeling are involved in the raising of an edifice; it will convince us of the truth of a proposition, which might at first have appeared startling, that no man can be an architect, who is not a metaphysician."

john ruskin, the poetry of architecture (1837-8)

tis the season

2008-07-07T12:37:00.005+02:00

summer is here, and candyland is getting all watery-mouthed at the prospect of monocle bashing. issue 15 is out featuring the livability report or whatever they call it, with the magazine's take on what makes cities tick. this year the team has made and extra-big effort of sounding more like actual people, and the volume is fat, rich and obviously cared for. so, it is only fair that i likewise dedicate myself to a comprehensive and lengthy fustigation. i just hope my stomach holds up.

stay tuned.

méxico lindo

2008-07-02T15:44:00.007+02:00

paul outerbridge, travel agent, mazatlán, mexico, c.1950
via loudpaper

xxx

we've hit tropical mode in barcelona. people are half-naked on the street. men wear mustaches and nylon shortshorts. protoqueer emotions of my childhood in southern california c.1984 all over again. i am sweaty and dizzy. i miss the cool rainy summer nights in mexico city.

identity crisis

2008-07-01T17:06:00.004+02:00

mr. ole bouman landed in barcelona last week to lecture at the cccb. i was terribly excited to see what this courteous and brainy oddball had in store for us. his tall, dark and toned-done elegance contrasted with the hodgepodge of a presentation he delivered, true to the spirit of volume. mr. bouman shot back and forth between hypertechno-looking architecture, dubious renderings, illustrated indian learning aids for kids and low-res headshots of george clooney drinking nespresso; all this to put through the fact that, in mr. bouman's words, "architecture is a profession in trouble." the causes of this architectural identity crisis were treated as obvious, but not really pinned-down: chronic boom and bust cycles, professional fragmentation, managerial skills filling in for analytical and creative skills--the problem solving approach against the true "constructive," critical approach--, the decline of western values and of western dominance, the threat of the collective and the "network" to the identity and worth of the individual, etc, etc.

there were two key moments in the presentation, though; both were instants of mr. bouman distilling guidelines for helping architects and designers out of the mire. first, he reassured the audience that architecture is still a profession for those who want to "make a difference", this is, either change the state of things in the world, or at least leave some sort of imprint on it. for those who want to "count" in architecture, mr. bouman enumerated five alternatives:

1. be ultraconservative and stubbornly or fashion (the believer)
2. be "topical", stick to the here and the now (or the media type)
3. be hip (the peer amongst peers)
4. be relevant (the politician)
5. be visionary (the prophet)

i wasn't too convinced up to this point, and quite shocked to hear that mr. bouman himself thought one should opt for the last one. i think the notion of the architect as prophet is undesirable, possibly dangerous. as the argument advanced, i understood the visionary more as a critical and creative type than as a true soothsayer, someone who can go beyond received ideas and given concepts in order to actually understand, discuss and alter culture and production. mr. bouman defended the notion that architects should still strive to "address culture and participate in it" at the same time.

so what should the architect focus on? again here mr. bouman cut to the chase: he called for architects sticking to the "essence" of the profession, the most basic values of architecture:

1. dialog
2. fairness
3. sustainability
4. security
5. shelter

is this where the future of architecture lies? will these values prevail in the context of our dubious, profit-driven, swindling times? can architecture--a profession that is too often looked down upon for its superficiality, its egomania, its dabbling approaches and all encompassing views--remain true and relevant?

if you ask me, i really couldn't say. i'm not an architect.

tea

2008-06-26T12:04:00.005+02:00

teahouse, jun igarashi

two-in-one lunchtable plus underground tea room. i want.

muschamp, loos, george michael

2008-06-20T12:33:00.007+02:00

"even if architecture cannot reform society, it can clarify our vision of the status quo."
herbert muschamp

fact hunting on the subject of adolf loos's three-year stay in the u.s. of a. i found this charming (i daresay retro) little muschamp piece, called "austro turf." try to pay as little attention as possible to the fact that he quotes george michael.

rosy

2008-06-18T11:16:00.003+02:00

"nostalgia (in architecture) convinces the viewer because the actual events of the past have been forgotten. in fact, the past is not the issue at all; it serves merely as a 'rosy' container for the anxieties of the present."

norman m. klein, the history of forgetting

faraway

2008-06-13T15:02:00.007+02:00

how far back do we have to dig to find the roots of exotica? les baxter? the 1931 exposition coloniale? robert stacey-judd? the aztec palace? orientalist painting? mestizaje? marco polo

looming

2008-06-12T15:43:00.003+02:00

"fractals with les baxter"

summer looming. first official hot day in barcelona. water shortages and no eggs due to the transportation strike. calls for exotica.

to the fair!

2008-06-12T11:37:00.002+02:00

since the eighteen-hundreds, the world had never seemed so nineteenth-century.

bipolar living

2008-06-10T12:09:00.001+02:00

the aftercity is bipolar, neurotically split. compare recent reports on contemporary urban living, here or here with here. tijuana spilling over to san diego, mumbai tearing itself into bits (healthy and diseased, although it remains unclear which is which), and london just tearing itself apart from the rest of us, dazed and glazed it its preciousness. which one hints at things to come? they all do.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

bury the architects

2008-06-09T17:39:00.005+02:00

architecture and urbanism graced the pages of this past weekend's nytimes magazine. i wasn't particularly surprised, but a bit disappointed, that even in a relatively forward-thinking context (and possibly my favorite day-to-day source of information), architectural perspectives still smell of the old and spent. a long nic ouroussoff piece on the instant city phenomenon not only stutters on the same 'ol viewpoints (koolhaas, et. al.) and themes, but dangerously contributes to the clouding and distortion of these wild contemporary afterurban situations.

these are architects working on huge commissions from autocrats and sharpening the divide between wealth and poverty, with the pretext that “the old contextual model is not very relevant anymore” (jesse reiser dixit). maybe not the usual pulling shit out of your ass waxing on aesthetic and historical (authentic) as "contextual analysis" crap. but here and now the context -immediate, quick, shifting and crude- is as big of a deal as always, probably even more so. the tabula rasa b.s. is sustained on supersaturated political and economic strata. there is no possibility of "fine-grained texture of a healthy community" (at least not in the mean time)(see this proposal for "cohabitation", i.e. aesthetic apartheid) because this scheme doesn't coincide with the purpose of what's behind the architecture: money and power.

i'm fine with koolhaas being fine with building massive instrumental artifacts for authoritarian governments. but i really can't take mindless remarks like steven holl's:

“in america, i could never do work like i do here...we’ve become too backward-looking."

where is the context in a place like dubai or new chinese cities? it's the politics, stupid (not the style). urbanism is not about implementing an abstract, physically-driven "model": it sprouts from basic forms of social and economic threading. koolhaas is right, the heroic architecture of the xxth-century is dead. but modernist spoils (basically, in the form of style and approach) are still thriving.

"the particulars of place no longer matter." says mr. ourossoff. oh but they do. they are everything. without the political and economic particularities of places like dubai or shenzhen, there would be no architecture of this sort. period. the particulars of these places are making the architecture happen.

can you bury modernism without burying the modernists?

the architect as punk

2008-06-05T17:25:00.007+02:00

santiago cirugeda gave a conference at the cccb last night. he's shorter than i expected. actually he looks like a kid, a little rascal, a rollicking misfit. he's cute and scruffy and has a big fat smile. he has to be the most unpretentious architect and speaker i've ever met (bordering on reckless). in a messy presentation, spiked with a foul mouth that delighted the audience, cirugeda did a quick overview of his heavier, hands-on building projects, like the aula abierta student shack at the university of granada, the art barracks on the roof of the university of málaga or the i want a house! temporary rooftop housing project (including a coquettish playmobil reenactment video).

cirugeda's work takes architecture as a means of confronting legal and political intransigence. his basic premise is that one can still do architecture without money, without a client, without a program, and even without a project. his philosophy is do now, ask later (or better sorry than safe). negotiation–be it in politics, architecture, or both–is never even or lineal, but a discontinuous process of positions and tactics that are constantly in flux. this adds to the spirit of an architecture that is quick, dirty, pragmatic and ephemeral. someone asked him what he hoped the future of his buildings would be. he replied, without haste: "i hope they disappear. imagine you fuck something up and it's standing there bugging everybody for years and years. who the hell wants that kind of responsibility? buildings should always be designed with and expiration date in mind." he admitted to creating fugly architecture, but charmed his way out of the muck, comparing his cooperative buildings with the ill-favored best friend that you can't help but love. for cirugeda building has to go back to its popular roots, understood as binding (and bonding).

he complained that most of the people in the practice take him for a buffoon, a sort of archicourt jester. there's something to it (he did a fantastic impersonation of richard rogers staring at infinity on the roof of the T4 in madrid), but hey, after all, clowns are usually the highlight of the circus. when i asked: santi, what drew you to informality? he said: my dad is in the military, and showed his pearly whites.

shit

2008-06-04T18:58:00.002+02:00

speaking in the broadest of terms, cities are basically great complex piles of shit; accumulations of active waste, both physical and abstract.

mexurb

2008-06-04T10:13:00.008+02:00

this is one of the original ca. 1960 promotional tv ads for ciudad satélite, the first american-style planned suburb in mexico (the 1940's-50's el pedregal, with its posh barragán-style modernist caserones scattered over a volcanic rock landscape and tied together by winding one-way circuits doesn't really count as middle-class suburb), the bastard brainchild of mario pani (mexican le corbusier, father of the multi, a developmentalist take on the unité d'habitation). satélite was supposed to be a "green belt" and provide "working class housing" but it was fueled by dirty interests (the land was property of former mexican president, miguel alemán) and turned into an aspiring middleclass nightmare of over 3 million people scarred with water scarcity, crime, congestion, informal subdivisions and a name for being mexican whitetrash heaven.

it takes spanish and at least faint notion of what satélite is these days to fully appreciate this, but here it goes:

lookie lookie lookie!
city ahoy! ahoy!
city ahoy! for you and for everyone to see
with its wondrous realities
don't look anywhere else, ciudad satélite has it all
water! electricity! telephones!
true and existing services
concrete pavement, sidewalks, sewage
everything finished with the best of qualities
public lighting, trash collection
everything working, not only projected
a unique shopping mall, open everyday from 9.30 am to 10 pm
where you'll find, just a few steps from home, everything that you need
schools! sunday mass!
in other words, a complete and finished city
...

rainbowbrite

2008-06-03T19:04:00.004+02:00

my first barcelona rainbow (over the rooftops)
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.
. . . . faggoty-ass post

debris

2008-05-30T19:23:00.008+02:00

bas princen, future harbor III. van kranendok gallery

standing out among the many fascinating bits of informal flair on display at barcelona's centre de cultura contemporània as part of the post-it city : occasional urbanities show, curated by martí peran, filippo poli, giovanni la varra and federico zanfimarti, were the massive prints of bas princen. in due time i'll do a brief review of the entire show, but for now i want to concentrate on princen's utopian debris series, which documents various public works projects in china.

in princen's photographs, we are confronted by vastness devoid of romanticism. one particularly beautiful shot has workers digging a future cruiseship harbor into the earth. a hill is perforated by a highway bridge, cuts etched into its sides, poured with concrete, trees left in random patches. an unfinished skyscraper peeks behind the hill like a fairytale monster. on the skirts of the hill a "floating population" of workers are having a jumbo impromptu campout. a closer look brings out little scenes of everyday: showering, eating, cooking, resting.

princen's china pictures bring to mind the lavish absurdity of d.w griffith's babylon set for intolerance. despite the seeming grandeur of the interventions, these are landscapes maimed by insignificance. there is little of the proud, viril dominance of technology over nature. princen's vision is dour. in his work, monumental progress offers little solace. these scenes of the almighty man and his brave attempts at terraforming are a withered déjà-vu of the grand infrastructural photography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. princen himself mentions asahel curtis, in particular a photo of his depicting the regrading of denny hill in seattle, in the early 1900's, as a reference for his work. the feel of princen's photos is full of doubt more than awe at the scale of the enterprise. in a sense, he has reversed the spirit of curtis's photography. before he left mountaneering and treehugging for boostering and promoting the tourist development of mt. rainer national park, curtis said in face of the summit:

"the trivial things of life; the petty cares that to us seem so great slink back in the presence of this majestic mountain."

in bas's work, on the contrary, it is this human "pettiness" that exudes a strange power. these little ant people, going about their everyday business, have a particular resonance, not in the sense of progress and success, but of our own misplaced power that we misunderstand as helplessness.

nycorbusier

2008-05-29T12:13:00.003+02:00

le corb sailed towards manhattan and:

"saw a fantastic, almost mystic city rising up in the mist. there is the temple of the new world. but the ship moves forward and the apparition is transformed into an image of incredible brutality and savagery. here is certainly the most prominent manifestation of the power of modern times."

he named nyc the catastrophe féerique, the great enchanted catastrophe.

foodscare

2008-05-29T11:17:00.002+02:00

supermarkets are getting scarier and scarier. never mind the mutant three-bulb in one onions, or the gargantuan squash, or the seedless pitless plastic-like bell peppers. it's the weekly rise in prices that's got me worried. last week i bought the same old bag of onions (4 or 5 depending on the size) for about 1.3 euro. this week, same bag of onions (brand and everything) had not 4 not 5 but 3 fucking tiny onions for 1.39 euro. same thing with garlic, three instead of the usual five, for the same price. cherry tomato canisters are now sold half-full. my weekly trip to the super for 2 (which ran me around 50 or 60 euro only a couple of months ago) has turned into 2 or 3 visits a week, never paying less than 35 euro. for the first time ever i've refrained from buying lemons (not parmigiano reggiano, not cojonudo white asparagus, not overpriced english jam, but lemons, for chrissakes!) because i felt they were way too expensive at two-fifty a kilo. i've cut my weekend trips to santa caterina in search of fresh seafood, herbs and mushrooms. the little cocina económica around the corner from work has also reduced its usually generous and colorful sides to half a baked potato and half a tomato. times are pretty bleak for my poor little gourmandise tripa.

moho 2008

2008-05-27T12:55:00.005+02:00

following up on eikongraphia's yearly review of the most popular architecture blogs, i've decided to create my own list: moho 2008, or the most hottest of them all architecture blogs of the year (or the semester i guess). my method is completely impartial and authoritarian: i just pick the ones i think are the hottest. here they are:

1. pruned: alexander trevi has done what very very few people thought possible: squeeze literature out of BOTH architecture (landscape, no less) AND blog posts. passion and intelligence abound @ pruned. it is therefore a true rarity.

2. strangeharvest: taste, wit, pop, spike. what else could you ask for?

3. things: ok, this might not really count as a blog, but things magazine is simply outstanding.

4. archinect: again, not really a blog. still, archinect injects more into the blog scene than most personal blogs out there.

5. varnelis: always sharp and always relevant.

6. we-make-money-not-art: some say wmmna isn't an architecture blog. true: it's more than that. régine's blog is what architects SHOULD be reading.

7. where: more urbanism than architecture, which is exactly why it should be on any architect's blogroll.

8. loudpaper: mimi zeiger has put together a savvy and eclectic site. suave. shame on those who think women don't architecture blog.

9. lifewithoutbuildings: manages to go against the current without departing from architecture.

10. a456: total snob. in the good sense.

11. kosmograd: scrumptiously soviet. brutal and brutalist. please post more.

12. a daily dose of architecture: if you're an architect stranded on a deserted island and can only pick one architecture blog, this should probably be it.

13. subtopia: at his best, bryan finoki is combative, potent and dirty. never forgets architecture is politics.

14. brand avenue: if it didn't take itself so seriously, it could make the top 10. not to be missed, all the same.

15. angelidakis: i'll never understand why neen hasn't picked up among architecture bloggers. coolest of the bunch.

16. part iv: unleash the antiarchitect within.

17. bldgblog: ok, so i was a bit harsh on geoff before. i just felt i had to, everybody loves him, and it's sort of gotten to him. but there's no way he could be left out of this top 25. i just really liked the old bldgblog, and feel he should keep pushing himself instead of just basking in the sun.

18. dezeen: amidst the shimmer, the occasional pearl.

19. city of sound: who knew blogs based in austrailia could be so refined.

20. iconeye: so mainstream, so posh, and yet so great.

21. inhabitat: i can't help but smell greenwashing whenever i come in, but just the effort of sticking to sustainability and posting at the rate they do generates respect.

22. bollocks to architecture: just the name is enough to get it into the top 25.

23. architectradure: architecture as a yummy gizmo.

24. the sesquipedalist: if the next best thing to building is publishing, then the next best thing to criticizing architecture is criticizing architecture books.

25. noticias arquitectura: i only wish latin america truly looked this good...

* 26. eikongraphia: i forgot to put it in. should be on your toplist.

* 27: bloglikeyougiveadamn: colin is on leave apparently, but he has to get back to posting.

my thoughts on eikon's mopo 08

2008-05-26T12:45:00.008+02:00

1. bldgblog
snowball effect. yes yes, genderbender refreshing exceptional and novel view on architecture. in 2006 maybe. has become rather stale and formulaic. too many new scientist references. good as starting point for external links. i really can't take much of geoff manaugh's writing or his dorkish fixations (over and over again). populist.

2. city of sound
all in all smart and wholesome. good writing. a bit elitist, but there's nothing wrong with that. i can't stand the random book reviews and other promotional bits, though.

3. archidose
the same old fantastic source for things architecture on the web it always has been.

4. pruned
tiptop. never fails to lure and surprise.

5. interactive architecture
don't really know this one.

6. architecture.mnp
wallpaper* ish, but lighthearted.

7. subtopia
sometimes dense and gripping, sometimes just stuffy. i would keep the posts shorter. out of the "niche" or themed architecture blogs, this is one of the better ones. maybe just because i like the theme.

8. life without buildings
clean, unceremonious and a little eccentric from time to time. doesn't conform. i dig.

9. tropolism
a little too sparse and irregular for my taste. but then, so am i.

10. mirage studio 7
only visited a couple of times. can't really say.

11. strange harvest
i *heart* sam jacob. reading makes me wanna lick my screen.

12. architechnophilia
nothing new. spottings and pretty pictures.

13. the where blog
where is a dweeb, but a totally likable dweeb. brendan's efforts to make urbanism/planning interesting and accesible are something to admire. come back!

14. the arch
never been there.

15. super colossal
i liked gravestmor better.

16. sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy
never seen it. but sounds way too british for me.

17. brand avenue
again, great "theme", less than great blogging. if i have to choose, it's thumbs up.

18. architecture chicago plus
don't know it. how does a blog on chicago make the top 18 architecture blogs, ANYWHERE? there's probably something wrong here.

19. hugh pearman
victorian.

20. varnelis
i love kazys too. he's like the not so old teacher or uncle you wanna hang out with instead of revere. but that doesn't mean you can't learn a shit-ton from him.

21. lebbeus woods
nineties. late (blog) bloomer. i'd rather read on lebbeus than lebbeus himself.

22. part IV
naughty. a little too local. i likey, though.

23. eye candy
the name sounds too much like my own blog, without the sarcasm.

24. architectural videos
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

25. kosmograd
would be superstupendous; if he actually posted every now and then.

now reading : bayley

2008-05-26T12:32:00.003+02:00

"the very many awful modern buildings that scar the towns and the countryside are not awful because they are modern. they are awful because they are...awful. simply, bad architecture: badly briefed, poorly conceived, badly proportioned, poorly excecuted, badly maintained."

stephen bayley, general knowledge
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. . . > (welsh)(1951)(likes manchester)(and tom wolfe)

toppings 12 : night and the city

2008-05-23T17:29:00.012+02:00

in 1949, jules dassin left the states fleeing mccarthy and his blacklist. this is how his 1950 night and the city got to be filmed on location in postwar london.

the city is fog and grey and like eliot on crack. in the opening sequence, we're dropped into this thick stew of soot and scoundrels: the smoke (i.e. london) is portrayed as a foul underbelly of streetlife and nightlife and streetypes and angels of the night. it seems the whole city, scarred and traumatized form the war, sustained itself on vice and swindle: from the petty thieves and information peddlers (taxi drivers and waiters are the prized informers of the main character in the film, harry fabian, a nightclub "promoter", conman and hustler) to the usual big bosses that control the law enforcement, the quids, and the entertainment (sex joints and wrestling). picaddily is clogged with street vendors and black market traders and hordes of professional beggars and drunkards. the effect isn't quite dickensian: more than victims and pour souls, we're presented a merciless jungle of every man and woman for him and herself. and all of it is accepted, planned, choreographed, market-driven. the quest for development (for power and advancement) is suicidal. progress is reduced to making it big, which in turn requires falling (in the biblical sense). the city is the dark after-dark, the darkness after darkness (even the daytime shots are full of darkness). the remains of urbanity, the gentlemanly ways and the civilized conversation are part of the farce: "excuse me sir, would you be so kind as to allow me to break your neck, please?" but before you can reply, out of common courtesy, you've already been snapped.

compared to night and the city, cronenberg's eastern promises is cotton candy exotica. it's not the russians that are rotten.

* i'm recovering the toppings themed posts, but since this whole blog has pretty much become a shameless deviation from architecture itself, i'll just stick to poking at architecture and citythings in film.

vacío

2008-05-22T17:25:00.002+02:00

today is empty

cavity

2008-05-20T19:01:00.006+02:00

barcelona is full of cavities. i love the weary industrial remains of poble nou or poble sec, the empty, windowless weddingcake castles of older parts of the eixample. even though the city pains itself in presenting a dazzling and sophisticated face for tourists and urban consumers (formerly known as citizens), barcerlona can't really help herself from exposing her dirty bottom every now and then. i love the for sale signs popping up everywhere like bad weeds, hinting at the housing crisis that should sooner or later have spain by the balls. i love the failed attempts at wiping the naughty away in sake of tourists (the raval, or the little "forest" in glòries that still caters to midnight–even midday–cruisers in search of a quick fix, despite being right next to nouvel's cucumber)(actually, it probably serves as inspiration to do the nasty). i love the after-tourist dawns down the ramblas or the gótico, with the day's refuse piling up, and the fresh stench of piss and guts.

dirty

2008-05-19T17:11:00.006+02:00

i'm staring at the cover of the latest issue of harvard design magazine. it's an ugly cover, with this generic ciudad perdida shot (could be bogotá, rio de janeiro or the outskirts of mexico city) and a really bad render of some sort of wacky aluminum-clad community hub connected to a ludicrous aerial tram system (public transport, i assume). this is typical of the "western" (first-world) or "westernized" (u.s. or europe-trained) perspective on what architecture (formal) can do for "non-formal" cities.

first off, there is no such thing as a non-formal city (just like there is no such thing as a "formal city"). you can speak of informal settlements, economies, housing, interventions, dynamics, processes, architectures ... but not cities. the clear split between formal and informal, especially at the city scale, is pretty much useless. one always pervades the other and vice versa. one engenders the other and vice versa.

i open up to page 3, the editor's letter. i find it relatively insulting: he talks about dirty work and third world urbanization, and then goes on describing the rest of the issue (computer-generated ornament and parametric design) with a terribly narrow statement of: "meanwhile, back in the developed world..." this is the usual inability i find most primermundistas have when trying to grasp the extent and pervasiveness of informality, and recognize it not as a localized or "culturally determined" phenomenon, but as an active product of globalization.

it reminds me of the speech impairments most gringos (and spaniards, and french people for that matter) suffer from when they try to learn a foreign language, they are so little exposed to this type of difference, and feel they have little to none incentives to actually make an effort.

but the thing is they do need to make an effort, now more than ever. it's not a matter of waiting for informality to creep up on the pure and pristine and algorithmic west. they're already knee-high in it.

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