Drawing a line
Maps, for easier legibility are simplifications of actual places. Through mapping projections – the practice of transforming the three-dimensional surface of the earth onto a two-dimensional plane – the graphic description of […]
Monthly Archives: April 2012
‘Fake’ Estates
Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties: Fake Estates, 1973-74 Uranculturalstudies’ recent post, “Deconstructing Reality: Gordon Matta-Clark” highlighting Matta-Clark’s well known body of work ‘building cuts’ (architectural interventions consisting of the strategic removal […]
Ghost Town
I was reading an article posted on Arkinet titled, “Another New City in China Bites The Dust.” The year old post got me thinking again about Celebration, the planned community created by […]
Psychogeography
Urban Cultural Studies posted “The City as You’ve Never Seen it Before” and it got me thinking about mapping and the Situationist Interntional. The Situationist International, an international group of revolutionary […]
Can density be beautiful?
I saw this image of Shanghai’s 20 year transformation and I was really mesmerised with the amount of urban development the city has undergone. Unfortunately, its not a very flattering image […]
Continuous Moment
If on arriving at Trade I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I […]
Non-Plan
In 1969, Cedric Price with Paul Barker (writer), Reyner Banham (architecture historian) and Peter Hall (geographer and planner) published ‘Non-Plan: an experiment in freedom’ an article in a social affairs […]
A house is not a home
I saw Yabba Dabba Doo on Honestly WTF blog which highlighted legendary Dick Clark’s Malibu house. Clark and his wife affectionately nicknamed their custom-made house ‘Bedrock’ which sits on top of […]
Buckminster Fuller and the Geodesic Dome
Buckminster Fuller, US Pavillion in Montreal 1967 I saw that Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area opened in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the end March […]
Parking Garages
I was thinking about Ed Rusha’s Thirty-Four Parking Lots series that he completed in 1967. What I like about them is their complete banality of subject matter, an urban landscape constructed […]
The City seen as a Garden of Ideas
I have borrowed my title for this post from Peter Cook, a British architect and founder of Archigram, a collaboration of six architects known for architecture through drawing. The City, Seen […]
Metabolists
In the late 1950’s a group of young Japanese architects and city planners joined together to form the Metabolist group. They conceived of cities as living, moving and evolving organisms […]
