punctum

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

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

shots, df

american pie

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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

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till i saw this



via angelosays

debris

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.

visit kabul

courtesy of archis

via archinect
more @ architecture of fear

stuck

recently i read a post dissing renzo piano's new nyt building, saying that pretty much the whole thing about it being innovative and "smart" architecture was pretty much bullshit, that it was more about surface and effects, the usual thing splashed with some fancy dressing. stepping back from the terms of my guy vs. yours or my style vs. yours criticism, a beautiful, subtle foto essay by anne leibovitz published in vanity fair hints at some of the contradictory issues behind the building (and building in general, we could say). the black and white photos seem ancient (early xxth-century ancient). beams and rough guys, like some twisted jazz age love song. other pictures look straight out of the seventies, village peopley. the slick and the wow of these huge cultural artefacts (skyscrapers i mean) usually have a dizzying effect, enough to make us forget the stale,conservative, out-of-date values and social frameworks they embody. leibovitz's behind-the-scenes pictures, unintendedly, maybe out of nostalgic urges, actually bring us to reckon with how little there is of our supposed innovative and progressive drive in this type of buildings, how small some of our steps have been.

via mark

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foto:lau