Public Art and Urban Interventions
Pierre Vivant, Traffic Tree, 2008 Pierre Vivant, Traffic Tree, 2008 The definition of what public art is has slowly evolved over the last two decades from large-scale sculptures to urban interventions […]
Category Archives: City
Hall of Mirrors
The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles was constructed between 1678-1684. The key feature of this famous hall was the seventeen mirror-clad arches that reflected the windows that […]
Why are so many cities afraid of colour?
I am finally starting to get settled. I have almost unpacked, changed my mobile number and have had my connection to the Internet made. I am now living across the […]
Streetlamps
I have been walking around my hood for one last farewell and I stumbled upon a street lamp that I never noticed before near a busy intersection close to where […]
Reconfigurations of the Urban Grid
Rento van Drunen, Gridcollages Rento van Drunen’s Gridcollages on pytr75’s blog put my mind back to Albert Pope’s book, Ladders which was published in 1996. This book was very influential on […]
Relocating
I am relocating and it is not to a neighbouring community or across to the other side of town but across the country. I am now knee deep in the daunting […]
Do Maps Create or Represent Reality?
Kim Dingle, Maps of the U.S. Drawn from Memory by Las Vegas Teenagers, 1990 Do maps create or represent reality? And what is the reality that they purport to either create […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
