design, architecture, urbanism… with a grain of salt

I’ve caught onto blogging in a big way. I’ve now got a feed reader. Do you check 4 or 5 different sites in a day? You need a feed reader. It puts all the updates of your favourite sites in one place. You can minimise wasting your employer’s valuable minutes with one of these suckers.Ahh how I love RSS.Anyway, to the Architecture. I “feed” on numerous Architecture sites, and the best articles I come across I highlight. You can see these in the “feeding on” section of my side bar.One of the articles I thought I’d include photos of and include in this rant. It is of a Meier apartment in NYC. A really nicely detailed building.  [photo from curbed]  [photo from curbed]   [photo from curbed]   [photo from curbed]    [plan from curbed] 

It is time once again for me to chuck out all the “stuff” that has been in my house that doesn’t seem to have a place. Various movements and changes that have taken place seem to force a pile of stuff that once had a place right out to the verge, right next to that sentimentality that kept it in my place for so long. All those bits of broken house and green waste that have been inhabiting the over-sized, underutilized parcel of land I live on now find a place.

The rubbish collection is as much a part of the suburban street-scape* as the cars that litter the verges and street edges after business hours. Green bins also have a place in the suburban street-scape. They are kind of a transient object. They are there 1 night/morning of the week. Then they get hidden. A piece of ornament in your neighbourhood.

Other people love when Rubbish Collection comes around. Scavengers is a bit of a strong word, so I’ll call them Treasure Hunters. Treasure Hunters are known to ring councils to find out when the rubbish collections are scheduled so they can come and sift through my stuff and my neighbour’s stuff. I’ve even been a Treasure Hunter, but I find too often stuff that is thrown out is often thrown out for a reason, and it ends up on my verge the next time Rubbish Collecting season comes around. 
So the point of this little spiel is to bring your attention to the Rubbish collection. An ornate feature of the suburban street-scape. As important as the decorative trim aaround the eave of the front verandah, and the brick letterbox you built to stop people driving past and smashing the s*&t  out of an inferior model.

  Don’t agree? Write what you think in the comments section below…

**A street-scape is a combination of the word street, and landscape. This is what Architects and Landscape Architects do to make themselves sound smarter. They invent words. Words that don’t exist in a dictionary, that don’t even exist on Wikipedia. Homer Simpson invented the word “d’oh”. We aren’t as important as Homer Simpson so we shouldn’t invent silly words that people don’t understand.
NOTE: The photos in this article were taken with a camera phone. A good camera is all about the lens, not the amount of pixels you pack.

Click here to view the article.

This one we’ll keep an eye on. We all know it’s possible, probably moreso with a Gehry building.

The building in question is the Stata Center at M.I.T.

[Image from Wikipedia]

I like flicking through flickr. I also like flicking through photo sites like 1000 snaps and Picasa. Flickr is best, but really any will do. I just love photos.

Facebook is a waste of time as far as photos go, and even though most people use social networking, photography always is second place to the person taking the photos. Social networking is also a competitive industry. I mean its only time before Microsoft, Myspace and the other big guns want to reclaim market share, and what happens to your photos then? You’ll have to transfer them to yet another place, if they are even worth keeping. As far as storing them locally (by this I mean on your harddrive), well this is a passing fad. Who wants to keep your treasured memories on such a volatile piece of machinery like the computer?

So there is a place for photo sites, and I believe they offer more longevity to your memories than any other place both in the virtual or the physical realm. So with this, I’ll linke to some beautiful photos of some beautiful buildings from none other than flickr. The giant photo resource of the world wide web.

[Picture sourced from threecee via flickr.com]

[section sourced from arcspace.com, photography by Nic Lehoux]

[photo sourced from arcspace.com, photography by Nic Lehoux]

I was thinking of writing a critique on the above building. It is by the firm Morphosis if you don’t recognise it. Instead, I’ll link to the arcspace bio of the project, which I tend to agree with. Parts of the project begin to appear excessive. Folds in materials for the sake of making folds. In my opinion though the massing, intention behind the facade treatment and the proportion are spot on.

Below is a photo of the de Young Museum by Herzog and de Meuron. Again in San Francisco, a beautiful though slightly excessive example of facade… contrasted against the beautiful formal exercise which is the Guggenheim New York by FLW.

[Picture sourced from threecee via flickr.com]

[Picture sourced from threecee via flickr.com]