quintessential lndscp coordination

sorry- no 'library as internet' diagrams or monsters or tree man (wtf?), but seriously awesome synchronized dog yawns.

my brain hurts

program diagram of czech nat'l library. eat your heart out, puppy. i am still trying to figure out where the romance basin, vice strip, activity plinth and rideable burms plug in. maybe i should make a few strip fields or color halftones...

Deep Thoughts

I don't know about you, but I think the fact that these so called "Death Monsters" need cars to get around makes them a whole lot less scary.

Theory Comes to Life

Save the hollander

Last weekend I went to Amsterdam and met with Jayon (aka the hollander). We had a great time in the city. We visited museums, walked around some nice neighborhoods, visited the red light district... and I visited some coffeeshops of course!! After our lovely days in Amsterdam we went to the garden she is working on.

I think our hollander is living the worst experience ever in her life... I mean... She is living in a castle.... with a huge lovely garden and a lovely family.... she has awesome meals every day... meat straight from the farm... vegetables straight from the kitchen garden.... she has to cut some roses, pick some fruits... even eat them if she wants...









Who is up to go and "save" the hollander?

workin' hard in grottydam

"I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.' " --John Cage

What I learned with Marcinkoski

Ok!! Here it is!

I'm finally done with the competition I was doing at Topotek 1. The competition was to design a public plaza in the center of the city of Turin. The office was one of the 4 finalist of this competition, and they put me in charge of the design since the first day... Very cool, but also to much work for so little money and so little time to explore the city (the real reason I came to Berlin).

We decided to design a park on top of an existing underground parking instead of a plaza... It was a great project and I enjoyed a lot doing it... I was a little hesitant of putting it here because I felt a little ashamed that the project ended up looking like a copy of another project that you should all know!! But, fuck it!!! I like it a lot... I spend a lot of time doing it... And I'm very proud of making a very good copy!! Like if we haven't done this before!! Right?







PS: enjoy the Italian text!!

summer camp!

fresh from the FO website: a few of our favorite characters...
Jeipi cleans up pretty good, huh?

continuing the nostalgia tour

meg's throw back inspired me to dive into my photo archives from the past year. below is the highlights tour. today i was yearning for the scarf and sunglasses from the first semi-warm day of spring, since it was 90 degrees in new york and thus the entire city smelled of baking trash. ah, summer...

i am missing everyone as well. if anyone is in or around nyc, give a shout.

old news (or the lack there of)

well, thanks to irene, i'm adding oldclass cahoots (sp?)to the blog today. sigh, warm, fuzzy pink nostalgia...

in spite of all the dirt i encounter daily at the prison and bartram's (and my personal play with illustrator and rhino) , i feel like i'm losing the landscape touch. plus, the escalating exhaustion is setting in.

summer has hit the point where it is 100 degrees and all one does is work, shower, and spent their weekends at high-school aquaintances' weddings. i am sooo tired of china patterns!

guys, come back!

Je suis en Suisse.

Sorry to have neglected the blog for a couple of weeks. The office has been busy, and the competition I'm working on in South Africa is a monster. Originally I was supposed to work on an icelandic park project, but apparently the prize money was nothing compared to the Southbank, South Africa project. Instead of working on Bjork's homeland, I'm working on a sustainable community development project for 1000 units of housing within 100 hectares of fallow and agricultural land. It's a crazy urban design project sponsored by a private company which I think is more interested in residential development and profit than the well being of the future residents, but, hey it's interesting nonetheless...

During the weekends, I manage to get some free hours to roam the landscapes of the Swiss pre-Alps. Last weekend all of the interns went on a 7-hour hike to get a view from the top of one of the mountains down to the village and to the real Alps. The landscape here is so incredibly beautiful and peaceful...I've never been felt so at ease. I miss you all, but I think I will be a bit sad to leave Suisse.

Anyways, here's a photo of one of the beautiful spots we stopped at during our hike...

Ciao for now!

Early Favorite

Allison.






Yes, it's because she's good looking.

rambling to encourage rambling

i was definitely just thinking, as i was writing a comment on a previous post, that its really sad that there are quite a few names on this blog who dont ever seem to post anything. and who i miss quite a lot. and who i would like to read some inane ramblings from. so please. do. make a studio smile.

little miss holander and i had a wonderful day bicycling through an alternatively very lush oak forest / dry barren sand dune (holland=landfill) park last weekend, on bicycles they give you FREE at a wonderful national park/art museum (which megan born never visited despite my pleas). we took a bottle of rose (vraiment european) and lay on (fell off) and walked for *miles* to get there. and also visited a WWII war museum with a fantastic video/illuminated map combination (wet dream of landscape dynamic diagramming)
it was all very interesting and sadly unphotographed except for jayons 'friend' who thought jayon and i rather improper (aka pissed).

other than that i am just working real hard at the moment. 2am/all-niter hard. on a show for the venice biennale, on cities, on dubai/abu dhabi/RAK( another emirate)/Kuwait/Qatar/Bahrain ummm, and Lagos (yes, in nigeria, quite randomly). i dont know that anyone cares. but i will continue like you do. v quick. the sh*t going down in dubai at the moment is incredible.



developments creating the palm islands are underway (yes, all that in the gulf is man made). the first palm --with luxury villas on the fronds, is almost complete but it has already started eroding the coast (the sheik --sheik Mo.--says no problem, they can rebuild it every few years). It sold out within days of being on the market (to david beckham et al.) another coastal-fractalizing insane development is the 'world islands' NOTE, israel does not exist (you can't get into the UAE with an israeli stamp in your passport). you can buy any (other) country you want. and rebuild it to your taste. the building there is incredible. an estimated 20% of the world cranes are in dubai. 10,000 of the worlds trafficked sex slaves. They IMPORT SAND. another development in RAK in the DESERT would require 25 million years of UAE rain (at current rainfall patterns of 33mm/year) to sustain it. and you know what, they dont care! they can afford it (for now, till 2010 when the oil runs out) its insanity. we should all move to the uae and start work immediately.
in Kuwait they want to build a tower 1,001 m high. THAT is a KILOMETER! jesus christ.
anyway,
i also wanted to post a picture of the garden i was designing/digging in scotland, cos i said i would, not really a thing to follow the most epic current building scenario in the world. but at least it is not really like a platypus etc. miss you all.

Hot Spot, "Singapore"

Do you know the ongoing design competition in Singapore?Now is the 2nd stage and teams in shortlist are pretty interesting.
http://www.gardensbythebay.org.sg/articles/35/Shortlist_Announcement_13April06.pdf
Woo...see, fO,OMA,MVRDV,...and my former office, Keikan Sekkei Tokyo is in the end...

I look on what is going to happen...

http://www.gardensbythebay.org.sg/

Hargreaves love...

Just thought I'd put in a little picture of a visit to a hargreaves project... yup, part of the UCDavis campus ...

Foggy Beaches and Redwoods, oh my....

So I thought I might post a few pictures from our last adventure... Liz, Doug, and I rented a car (a pontiac cruiser turbo engine convertible, no less - thanks to the pride parade in SF we got a free upgrade)... and drove down through the south bay (palo alto, los altos, saratoga) to Big Basin Redwoods State Park... note that the trees completely dwarf liz & doug!!




I cannot tell you how much Doug liked driving this car ...



Doug is inside of a tree. W00t.
Ahhh, look at that lovely CA skyline... foggy and overcast. The whole white line is actually the Pacific Ocean, you just can't tell. We had great views... drove out to the beach from Big Basin ... but the drive was a little windy...
Ahhh, liz, you look so cute inside of a tree :)

Every time we passed a tree, liz would say,
"Oh, there's a big tree"
"Oh, there's another big tree!"



We hiked to a waterfall.
Some waterfall.
Beachhhh party with people from Hargreaves...

sore after sleeping on the sand ...

and that's pretty much it for our little day trip / weekend adventure...

fuck the urban fabric...

i'm moving to belize/guatemala/nicaragua for the rest of the summer where i'll be island hopping via kayak, surfing, kayak-surfing, sleeping on beaches, and swinging in hammocks.... all in the name of transboundary conservation zones.

Crazy Friday!!!

These are pics after the Germany aginst Argentina game... The whole city went crazy!! For those of you not following the World Cup, Germany won in penalty shots (it was the best game so far). I also have a realy cool video, but I don't know how to load it... if someone knows , please tell me.