Vincent Olinet

The Times Style Magazine recently posted an item on their website on “Vincent Olinet’s mixed-media sculptures” which is currently exhibiting at Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris through May 15. Their accompany photo of the artist’s (intriguing) lipstick piece caught my eye and loosely reminded me of the Lipstick Building. For those of you who don’t [...]

World’s biggest house of cards

After 44 days of work and using 4,051 decks or 218,792 playing cards, Bryan Berg broke his own Guiness World Record for the world’s largest free standing house of cards. Although this is clearly a publicity effort for a Macau casino, the effort is impressive nonetheless especially since yours truly’s last futile house of cards [...]

ECOWEEK, March 13-20

The ECOWEEK logo and their cringe-inducing slogan. I was surprised to learn that ECOWEEK isn’t just a one week event, it’s the actual name of the NGO that hosts the weeklong conference as well as “eco awareness” all year long. To be honest, their mission statement is a bit naive: ECOWEEK was established because temperatures [...]

Remembering Raimund Abraham

A few hours after giving a lecture at SciArc in Los Angeles where he taught, experimental architect Raimund Abraham was killed when his car crashed into a bus in downtown. The lecture, “The Profanation of Solitude,” addressed his “enduring love for architecture and his willingness to fight for design discourse,” and surely the monumental buildings he left behind are a testament to just that. Abraham was most famous in the US for the Austrian Cultural Forum, “the most significant modern piece of architecture to be realized in Manhattan since the Seagram Building and the Guggenheim Museum in 1959,” according to architectural historian Kenneth Frampton.

We always knew modern design was bad for your love life

The things that once so defined him — shag carpeting, Room & Board sofas, monogamy — now suffocated him. — via UnhappyHipsters.com

If you’ve ever browsed the pages of, say, Dwell magazine and wondered how the hell anyone could even fart in such an antiseptic environment, let alone have an orgasm, then you’ll love UnhappyHipsters.com as much as we do. The site is genius in its simplicity: photos from the pages of Dwell magazine and, okay, mostly just Dwell, with one-liner captions guessing at the inner life of the dwellers in question. Sure, we’ve always been proponents of clearing clutter — especially in your bedroom — in order to focus on the task at hand, whether that task is dinner, email, romance, or an orgasm. But there’s lack of clutter and then there’s austere design and architecture that seems to scream, “I DARE you to have fun in here!” A sampling from a world in which “wet spot” is a dirty word after the jump.

Summertime pole dancing at P.S.1

In a time when it’s difficult for up-and-comers in any field to get jobs, especially those working freelance, prizes have become an increasingly useful means of getting your name out there. That can mean a magazine’s annual award, the upcoming Sundance Film Festival (42 of the 113 films are from first-timers) or P.S.1 MoMA’s Young Architects Program, which has helped launch designers like SHoP, Linda Roy, nARCHITECTS and Work AC into the public eye.

This year the honor goes to the Brooklyn-based husband and wife team SO-IL for their entry Pole Dance, 100 free-moving white poles centrally anchored in a shallow pool and held together by a net that’s only “taut enough.”

I.M. Pei rubbed out

In the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art the names of those responsible for its construction are etched in stone. Enter now, however, and you’ll see that architect I.M. Pei’s name has been, quite intentionally, rubbed out. The psychics of rubbing down stone aside, could it, perhaps, have something to do with the (estimated) $85-million renovation of the building’s “systemic structural failure?” The National Gallery, which was completed in 1978, has a facade composed of 16,200 panels of pink Tennessee marble, and all of these panels are currently being removed and remounted.

Eiffel Tower blueprints

Bookending my recent entry about Ferris wheels, which I wrote was partly inspired by the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower when it was unveiled at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, here are some scanned images of the blueprints of the Eiffel Tower. [Via]

Views out the window

Italian artist Matteo Pericoli convinced 63 notable and prominent New Yorkers including Stephen Colbert, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Junot Diaz (seen above) to permit him to illustrate the window views from their homes or offices for his new book “The City Out My Window.” Am I the only one that thinks only Baryshnikov could get away [...]

Mark Bennett’s Blueprints

Blurring the line between fiction and reality, Mark Bennett created detailed, if not slightly obsessive blueprints of domiciles belonging to various fictional characters and families, such as Batman’s mansion to Fred and Wilma Flintstone’s bedrock to Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s home. The blueprint of Jeanie’s lamp is also quite a trip. [Via]

The Visual Acoustics of Julius Schulman

If the name Julius Shulman doesn’t immediately ring a bell, what about names like Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, or Mies Van der Rohe? Julius Shulman documented them all. But he did more than just take pictures of famous buildings.

Build-On, old structures get a new life

When a structure breaks down in many parts of Africa (mud and straw don’t last forever), the inhabitants build a new one nearby without tearing the old one down or making use of its parts. In Las Vegas, casinos only a decade old are imploded to make way for something bigger, grander and most importantly, new. Everyone has their own methods, but, in general, they all involve too much waste. What if there was a way we could update and reuse old buildings, “bringing new life and function to existing structures?”

Lego house update

Earlier this summer I shared news that UK’s TOP GEAR host James May was building a house made entirely of Lego bricks. Well construction has gotten underway. Here’s a fun photo gallery update of the impressive progress so far. Maybe I was thinking a little too big and unrealistic when I heard the original announcement; [...]

Loft cabin

Blogger Guboogi’s friend Terri recently moved to Brooklyn and found herself that coveted New York City apartment, “a sweet loft with high ceilings and a ton of open space.” In fact, she has so much extra space, she’s decided to bring the backwoods experience into her apartment by building two life size cabins inside the [...]

A new approach to urbanity

function getSource() { return window.document.URL.toString(); } Who says architecture is just about buildings? To European design studios Feld72 and Raumlabor, architecture is a more loosely defined term that encompasses all aspects of social and urban interaction. Take the traffic jam project, in which members of Feld72 rode on motorscooters in between lanes of slow-moving traffic, [...]

Building a full size lego house

Popular UK auto show TOP GEAR (and admittedly one of my favorite shows as well) presenter James May has more than three million Lego bricks and is asking for the public’s help this Saturday, August 1 in building a full size two-story house made entirely of Legos for his BBC series TOY STORIES. As marketing [...]

ETERNAL SUNSHINE house for sale

Although maybe not evoking quite the nostalgia as Cameron’s house from FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF, which briefly ignited the blogosphere after news of its sale, another movie house located on 59 Orient Avenue in Brooklyn, New York is on the market. Kate Winslet’s character Clementine’s apartment from ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is currently [...]

Architects are pigs

My pal, the talented illustrator Steven Guarnaccia, has a new book out. The Three Little Pigs is an illustrated fable about, you guessed it, three little pigs. But, being Steven, these aren’t just any pigs. They’re Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, the three most famous modern architects. The architects, um, I mean, [...]

Beijing’s burnt Mandarin Oriental still stands

Back in early February 2009, fireworks during the finale to the annual Spring Festival/Chinese New Year celebration sparked a fire that quickly “engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings.” The nearly completed 32-story, 241-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel was designed by famous architect Rem Koolhaas. James Fallows points out over at The [...]

Big dig house

I really “dig” this beautiful house designed by architects at Single Speed Design and built with material salvaged and reutilized from Boston’s infamous and epic “Big Dig,” the most expensive highway project in US history. Originally estimated in 1985 to cost $2.5 billion, by 2008 the Big Dig’s bill ran upwards of $22 billion. The [...]

Trapped in the closet

An amazing photo gallery of Sergio Santos, an out-of-work architect’s $150 per month apartment, which was previously a small 77 square-foot electrical room that he resourcefully converted and decorated on a shoe-string budget of $64. Someone, hire this man! [Via]

LEGO + Frank Lloyd Wright

I could not be more excited for this news: LEGO in collaboration with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is releasing a new line consisting of 6 buildings, including two of Wright’s most famous designs, “Falling Water” and the Guggenheim, although NPR’s Edward Lifson commented “I can’t believe that in the Lego set they include the [...]

Defy gravity with design : FlyNY Kite Festival

Architect Heinrich Hohmann with his entry, “City of Glass.” Photo credit : Macy Lao.

On May 9th 2009, architects, designers, artists, and assorted kite lovers converged on Manhattan’s Riverside Park for the first annual FlyNY, an international kite design competition. Founded by architects Hannah Purdy, Aurelie Paradiso, and Victoria Walsh, the festival was open to novice recreational flyers to seasoned pros. The top three designs will be featured in an article in the June issue of Metropolis magazine, and all winning kites will be auctioned off at a party in Chelsea on May 28th, with proceeds benefiting Architecture for Humanity.

Juxtaposition

Conceptual home for a family in Namyslow, Poland. Versus The M House in Setagaya, Tokyo.

Modern architecture + ice cream

I scream, you scream, modern architecture themed ice cream! Natasha Case and Freya Estreller have combined apparently three of their interests, architecture, ice cream, and puns into a cheeky ice cream sandwich business called “Cool Haus.” Its cold and presumably delicious concoctions will be sold out of a truck that will be roaming the streets [...]