design, architecture, urbanism… with a grain of salt

Does that title even make sense?

Click here to read an interesting article

A little more archiporn. Though this is quite nice. Client Takeo Obayashi’s new domus, somewhere in New York City. A ceramic tiled courtyard space.

[Photo by Robert Mcleod, sourced from Archidose]

Tadao Ando - nice work - always. This guy is self-taught. Most Architects are in some ways, this guy didn’t go to Architecture School. He grew by drawing the modernist works namely most of Le Corbusier’s works.

Head over to this post for more sexy pictures.

A Danish firm with a website well worth checking out. Great body of work, and giving the big guns a run for their money. They recently knocked Norman Foster and Perrault off in a competition to design Deutsche Bahn’s new building in Berlin. www.3xn.dk. An effortless piece of interactive design. Too often these sites are convoluted and hard to navigate. Not this example.

A nice precise article on the decentralisation of “work” by Tim Harford of Wired. Click here to view the article.

I agree that the complexities of the modern world have hindered working remotely, creating more of a need for meetings. I’m sure we are currently testing our collective boundaries, and will move towards simplicity, generally speaking.

An article, and a nice photo of how Rem’s CCTV is going over in Beijing.

Head over to USA today for an Update

[CCTV - Photo from USAtoday]

To see a schematic breakdown of the job from Arup, click here

Thanks to Archinect for the heads up.

daft punk.

[DAFT PUNK B&W. Alive 2007. Hedi Slimane - Beautiful Photos]

Amazing live show no doubt, people can’t fault it. Me included. They can put forth their opinion, and their skepticisms about if it is being played live (which it is by the way), but that is not criticism my dear skeptics. That is still opinion, and no one gives a shit. Listen to these words you masters of the airwaves at triple J. I noticed many of you were the ones pushing the doubt. Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter set out to put on a fantastic theatric experience. They spent time and money, and endless man hours formulating said theatric experience. They had a concept, they set out with this concept and developed it, all the way to implementation, and they succeeded. The people that worked on this show rival broadway production dammit. Can you imagine? Daft punk on broadway? Ha! They’d need to set up a permanent show!

[DAFT PUNK CLIP. Alive 2007. The bar has been raised yet again.]

But wait? Isn’t that just my opinion? Opinion rates as criticism too easily these days. Which is rubbish. Criticism loses its constructive nature when it becomes opinion. I’ll tread carefully from here onwards.

[DAFT PUNK B&W. Alive 2007. Hedi Slimane - Beautiful Photos]

Daft Punk weren’t there to rip it up improv. style. They wanted a show, a show they can take to numerous cities to wow the crowd and raise the bar they set all those years ago, when Homework was formulated in their spare time on some tinny Behringer mixers, some Moog Synths, non-de-script drum machines, samplers and some fuck off mad FM compression skills. That is why they remain at the top. Because they always raise the bar. They did early on, they do now.

Others in the Ed Banger crew come close, thanks to the brilliant leadership of Daft Punk’s old tour manager Pedro Winter (aka the busiests of P’s), but every time this French alliance moves higher, so does Daft Punk, and they have the capital now. Duos like Justice can only afford the cross they bare and 2 mad stacks of Marshall amps. Though I still reckon they’ve got the marbles. That song genesis just blows my mind.  As for the Aussies? Bah, a long way to go. A long long long way to go. 

history.

It is not uncommon for such theatrics to be associated with live performance. Just look up videos of Pink Floyd. They are the He-men of the theatric/music universe. Roger Waters still holds a hell of a show. Though Daft Punk would give them a run for their money in terms of the “art” of rock theatre. I’m talking about a 30 year difference in eras here though (here comes my opinion) the formula still rings true. It could only be the substances the crowd consumes dictating any change in the show. If we were all still blazed on acid I’m sure we all wouldn’t be dancing to this electro/rock/dance/disco infusion, we’d be standing there admiring the “post-whatever” thought process of some rock musician pushing the envelope. Deep down I’m sure every Daft Punk fan is in some ways a rock fan just wanting to dance. Busy P himself set out with the intent to make rockers dance. I think he pulled it off. 

[DAFT PUNK B&W. Alive 2007. Hedi Slimane - Beautiful Photos, courtesy of djredboy]

24 Hour Party people is a damn fine movie. I reckon if you view western music globally, that movie saves me from having to write about how 70’s punk/rock/psychedelic moved through to the late 90’s revival of dance. New Order had a lot to do with all this. This is a blog though not a book, so I’m not going to go into length.

Yes Daft Punk did tour in the 90’s. While the music world was still recovering from the Seattle grunge scene and the collective youth was taking the needle from its tracked up arm,  a new world order had started to evolve, led by a revival of sample based dance, and the Daft Boys had their finger right on the pulse. I’m not sure what their live show was like back then. I’ve watched some early Bangalter ripping it up on the decks and assume it wasn’t too far removed.

If someone wants to comment on this I’d appreciate it.

Anyway from early on, Daft Punk were about music and visual art being symbiotic. They did a few low budget clips with Homework, but then blew everyone away by teaming up with Leiji Matsumoto, a king amongst the Japanese anime community, for their second coming Discovery. Then Human After All has Electroma. These two art forms are transient and should be together. Like a fifth member of the band. The “lighting guy” should have an instrument that controls the lights and rock out on stage. The silent musician. The visual musician.

MTV defined music video as an industry at the turn of the 80’s. For some reason most bands still don’t get this though much to their demise. It drives me crazy (Hold the opinion Dan). A boring lifeless stage show is about as bad as a badly sound engineered stage show. Give us something to look at dammit! and give it meaning (Too late). 

perspective.

This symbiosis is essential to Daft Punk Alive 2007, and when you listen to their new live release you can’t help but imagine the depth and richness of the lighting. The whole package. The theatre. Watching it on youtube ruins the memory. Listening to the album imagining is amazing. Now where was I, that’s right I was standing somewhere in a mass of people, on a grassy knoll looking down at a stage through all the rich second hand tobacco smoke filtering from the lungs of some 20000 plus Melbournites.

Nothing beats a pitch black night and glorious cityscape as a background to watch such a spectacle, especially in Melbourne. Architecture and theatrics are closely entwined. Its all perspective, man. The whole Alive 2007 show was a flurry of light, stage smoke, and giant pyramid made of TV. You can imagine. Its best not to watch it too much on youtube. It jades the mind’s eye. I embedded a couple of clips anyway.

[DAFT PUNK CLIP. Alive 2007. Search Daft Punk on youtube.]

If I recall correctly there was about 3 layers of lighting all stacked on stage in front of each other, and  when  viewed from the audience gave great depth to the show. By altering lighting patterns on the triangular highly-spaced mesh hanging in the fore, the audience was sent into hyperspace down tron-esque landscapes. This was used for a good old fashioned game of snake in the encore too. How technologic!When this went dark and the over-sized pixillated back screen lit up with words colour and moving image it silhouetted the two leather clad controllers almost too perfectly.

 Imagine the facade of a building with this much depth? Imagine designing a building and taking a client to Daft Punk and saying, “This is what I want your building to do”. We designers could only dream. Dream they had a huge maintenance contingency in their management plan.

The third layer? The pyramid. The brain. Centre stage, coated in TV (TV is what I call the material. If it was made of brick, I’d call it brick.). When this transmitted images of moving through a gridded Euclidean landscape, the mesh that surrounded it started “perspecting”, destroying the notion of the TV frame and extending itself beyond, like 3D TV…almost. The images of faces in the encore were cool too. Images of faces synced to the beat, while on the back screen the word “together” scorched the retina. 

 I got to see the show in arguably Australia’s premiere outdoor amphitheatre, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. This thing was recently polled as one of the top 25 Australian Modernist Works. The canvas underside to the enclosure had a slight reflectivity to it, which could annoy some, and captivate others.Enough said. Some stills are below with a link to Daft Punk’s myspace page.

Anyway, I hope I described it for you without too much bias. I tried but knowingly failed. It f&cken rocked. It blew my mind. Ahhhhhhhhh! So good, so good, so good! The bar is now so high, it’s literally light years ahead of the next generation. It’s going to take another 30 years for someone to take this crown.DJ

Daft Punks’s Myspace Page - Friends with many nice musicians

A blog on Hedi’s Images

 [DAFT PUNK more Hedi Slimane. The black and white ironically gives back a sense of imagination]