Living in the mill

The Photo at the top is from Joost van den Broek and was published last friday (27 november 2009) in the Volkskrant.

2D - 3D

Parque Joan Miro / Parque de l'Escorxador in Barcelona has at it's entrances this beautiful tactile map for people with a visual handicap.
Like a common 2D drawing there are lines and hatches. But in this case these are three dimensional. The legend at the bottom of the map uses the international Braille system.

See for location example of the map:
http://maps.google.nl/maps?q=parc+miro+barcelona&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hl=nl&ie=UTF8&hq=parc+miro&hnear=Barcelona,+Spanje&ll=41.378769,2.149503&spn=0,359.961419&t=k&z=15&layer=c&cbll=41.378862,2.149379&panoid=uAYE2ImAb94_-y07d37WVA&cbp=12,197.02,,1,8.19

Hanging massif.

Chillida's "In praise of water/Elogi de l’aigua/Elogio del agua"
in Barcelona. Amazing to enter, being in it as going around it!

Abstraction.

Looking around while driving one can see a lot of car navigation screens in adjacent cars. Who doesn't have one yet? Maybe not so strange: the images presented on the screen are amazingly appealing. The slightly higher perspective than regular car view, no buildings that block the view, only simple lines and surfaces*. *and the car that you really like!

"In Welcher Still sollen wir bauen?"

This overview of current villa's for sale is taken from one of the latest more critical progressive Dutch newspaper (NRC Handelsblad).

According to the movie 'Oscar Niemeyer, A vida et um sopro' (2007) from Fabiano Maciel it's obvious: The master brings up an anecdote of a journalist asking him how he can project such modern buildings in such an old context of Brazilian cities. "What weapon would you choose when you would go into war" he counters..."an old version or a modern one?"

Moon II

Tomorrow it will be full moon again! Together with so many falling leaves a super beautiful moment.

The image above is an abstract version of the great moon phases calendar on following site:
http://www.moonconnection.com/moon_phases_calendar.phtml

Parasol.

In Rotterdam the 5th edition of the Architecture Film Festival (AFFR) is finished again. This weekend a program of more than 100 movies related to the field of architecture were shown.
We only watched 4 of them (unfortunately)
"Infinite Space, the architecture of John Lautner" from director Murray Grigor was one of them. A super beautiful movie made in 2008 which was also possible by the contribution of architect Jan Richard Kikkert. He together with friends visited all of Lautners villa's. Google Earth turned out to be a very helpful tool for finding all addresses. In the movie a beautiful shot is when villa Elrod reveals it's position on the globe by the image of it's beautiful roof.

Nowadays, actually only 2 years later Villa Elrod from John Lautner, is easy to find with Google Maps. First hit! Let's hope the Streetview cardriver will do an architectural tour soon...

See for the total AFFR program: http://www.affrblog.nl/lang/en-us/program/