Saturday, March 21, 2009

Happy New Year























Today, the first day of spring, it is also Persian New Year: Nowrūz. The same length of day and night will be celebrated.

Today's sunschedule in Rio de Janiero: Sunrise: 5:56 AM, Sunset: 6:02 PM.

Must be amazing being on the equater today. Happy Nowrūz!

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Otto Wagner

Steinhof. Otto Wagner.

An amazing space with a sneak preview to heaven through the modern horizontal windows. A beautiful translation of Gothic Architecture? This Kirche am Steinhof (also called the Church of St. Leopold) is situated in Vienna.

B architecture



These beautiful little buildings along the Johan Jongkind street are part of the architectural ensemble 'Soterhof', in the western expanding area of Amsterdam.
Build in 1957-1960. A period in which Dutch architecture explored forms of systematic building fuelled by poor building budgets and a need for high building production. The system used here is from Nemavo-Airey orignaly developed in Great Britain by Airey. Architect is probably H. Klarenbeek, an assistant of the architect of Sloterhof, J.F. Berghoef. The artist of the brick work mosaic on one of the facades is unknown.
The movie industry also knows high budget and low budget production, the latter in some cases defined by B-movies. The B though, character defining 'second' in table order, doesn't say anything about quality or better maybe, the ingenuity of the end result.

Wikipedia tells about B-movies : "...there is ambiguity on both sides of the definition: on the one hand, many B movies display a high degree of craft and aesthetic ingenuity; on the other, the primary interest of many inexpensive exploitation films is prurient. In some cases, both are true." One of the driving forces behind the production of B-movies, were movie house managers who supported a "double-bill" feature: movie tickets for two movies, in which the B-movies is the less publicized bottom half, for the price of one!

Will current economical climate be ideal to develop B architectural production further?

Friday, March 13, 2009

The Non Transparent Facade.

Cloesd Facade

Situated in the middle of Vienna - in the touristic "Inner City" (Stubenbastei): A building's facade without transparent elements. What's behind? It's an "electric power transformation substation" (Umspannwerk)! A good place to come to a rest. Electricity instead of real estate.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Kaleidoscope.



A graphic experiment done with processing - the open source programming language. A new approach to ornament.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Spring I.


the pollard willow,
shows just before spring
it's first new willows