NYC-based Rosemarie Fiore has a great process. She uses live fireworks to create these intensely colorful and layered drawings. The bright gunpowder residue is sometimes guided with a long staff and sometimes contained and concentrated inside various overturned buckets.

I just found the technique really refreshing — that her relationship with such a volatile media is part precise control and part unknown. She isn’t controlling much about the paintings other than the boundaries of the colors themselves, and even those lines are often compromised by the force of the explosions.

There’s also something very primal or elemental about the way the colors are bleedng and sitting on top of each other… a burnt black spot near the center of a circle giving a subtle clue as to the colors incendiary birth. In a series of controlled palimpsests, the drawings offer hardly any reference other than the method in which they were made. In some cases the traces of making can be read even further, as you start to notice the small white dots within colored areas, marking the location of a sparkling pipe on its end.

All this evidence of the artist is lost on first glance (at least it was for me) since the pieces are so brightly confrontational. But I thought it was nice to start to understand how certain forms were made, and slowly realize different details about what went into each composition. To me that gives a very intimate record of the artists intentions, and puts the viewer right there into the moment again, as if standing alongside Rosemarie as she drew.

Anyway it’s a new type of media I for one haven’t seen before… and it definitely gives new meaning to the thought of drawing as “marks on paper”, since this canvas is literally being bombarded with color.

found at booooooom.

I can’t believe I’m just now listening to Toe.

Definitely my new favorite band. And they are going on my must see live list for sure. I guess that means a trip to Tokyo/Kyoto is in order… since they only tour in Japan! (womp womp)

Anyway check them out if you haven’t heard of them, but you may have because apparently they’ve been recording since 2000…

Matt Siber cleverly removes traditional written language from his photographs, allowing a purely graphic city to speak for itself.

From the artist’s statement:

“The Untitled Project” is rooted in an underlying interest in the nature of power. With the removal of all traces of text from the photographs, the project explores the manifestation of power between large groups of people in the form of public and semi-public language. The absence of the printed word not only draws attention to the role text plays in the modern landscape but also simultaneously emphasizes alternative forms of communication such as symbols, colors, architecture and corporate branding. In doing this, it serves to point out the growing number of ways in which public voices communicate without using traditional forms of written language.

The reintroduction of the text takes written language out of the context of its intended viewing environment. The composition of the layouts remain true to the composition of their corresponding photographs in order to draw attention to relative size, location and orientation. The isolation of the text from its original graphic design and accompanying logos, photographs and icons helps to further explore the nature of communication in the urban landscape as a combination of visual and literal signifiers.

If you were in doubt about the power of color in the landscape… here you go.

These extraordinarily sparse graphics, made by Maria Zaikina, all depict basically the exact same scene, and yet manage to convey a huge variety of moods and places… simply by a considered palette of colors.

I was surprised at how moved I was, actually… and I think it is as a collection that they gain the most meaning as a wide survey of the seasons and times of day. This lonely structure is so easily transformed from a calm lakeside retreat, to an abandoned desert factory, to an idyllic barn in green fields, to a tropical beach cabana — all with a few choice swatches from Adobe Illustrator.

It makes me wonder how often we really notice our landscape for its detail, and how often we are just affected by the broad hue combinations in the view. How deeply ingrained is a fiery yellow wooden wall against a deep plum eastern sky at sunset, to signify a calm transition to night? What about a beach, and those three colors which remain unbroken: sand sea and sky?

I love this project, and how much it’s proven to me about the minimal pieces my brain can assemble to feel emotion. Josef Albers would be proud.

Bowsprit by Balmorhea.

Giving me the good kind of chills.

Going to the dentist is a dreaded experience for most people, but I think I would enjoy it a lot more if this was my clinic.

Keisuke Maeda of UID Architects has designed an office in Hiroshima, Japan which is more reminiscent of a zen retreat than of sterile surgery.

Oliver Wainwright of Icon Magazine says it all:

Squeezed into a long narrow plot, the building’s cedar-clad plywood shell deftly envelops a dental clinic, beauty salon and the architect’s own office -the kind of surreal mixed-programme that can only happen in Japan.

“We tried to rethink the values associated with a mixed-tenancy building,” explains Maeda. “The challenge was to give as much value to the interior spaces as to the street frontage.”

Through a sequence of porous walls that progresses from the street to the back of the plot and inserting “a little forest” of trees in the building’s open core, Maeda has softened the transition between the interior and exterior. “We wanted physical distance to become ambiguous,” he explains, “creating an environment that would spread out in an organic manner.”

Like a multi-layered stage set, each space is separated by a slender plywood screen with seemingly random openings, positioned to ensure privacy while retaining a sense of the adjacent conditions. These varied apertures set up a subtle spatial rhythm as they open and tighten through the different strata of the building, allowing glimpses of neighbouring activities through occasional alignment, but direct views are moderated by the central band of foliage.

While waiting for the drill, you might just be distracted by a glimpse of the curvaceous sunken workspace in the office above, sculpted around the architect’s assistants, they have holes for miniature trees to poke through. “We always tried to break down the borders between the building and the garden,” says Maeda.

I love the idea of the landscape making its way into the perforations of the architecture. It reminds me of why I like ruins: the alternation of walls and vegetation, rooms delineated by man made structure but dissolved in the softness of nature.

Very nice. We need more like this in the US!

In his project “A Spring in New York”, French photographer Frédéric Lebain imposes urban landscape upon itself in a contemporary nod to the surrealist concepts of altered perspective and irrational collage.

My question is, how long did he wait between exposures? Some of the prints look much more or much less weathered, more or less aged than their counterparts in the second photo, or in varying times of year. But it’s tough to tell whether that is a result of the artists delayed method, or the constantly changing environment of the city. In some places in New York, a scene could remain unchanged for years at a time, while others are in flux on an hourly basis…

Either way, cool project.

I would love to see these photos of photos printed, and back in the scenes again for a third exposure — and a fourth, and a fifth, etc… — gradually zooming out in scope, eventually to reveal the entire city from these specific lines of sight with successive incremental frames of view through time.

Maybe something similar actually happens with our real memory of someplace: older images and perceptions may be subconsciously overlaid onto the real place, somehow inset and attached to the scene. Yet that reality itself becomes yet another memory on the next visit, and repeated to the point where that place exists at so many scales in our mind that it forms a pastiche which comprises all that we know about the place.

My friend Jason from Cal Poly first introduced me to the Situationists. His architectural investigations are deeply cinematic and bring a complex dimensional montage to the constructed environment. Like his building design, his collages and prints are compositions injected with suspended, fragmented events, all superimposed as surreal escapes from convention.

So as I came across a blog post by Lebbeus Woods on the work of Situationist founder Constant Nieuwenhuys, I knew exactly why I remembered the architectural language.

Woods article outlines the roots of the Situationist International, tracing the motives of Constant and his peers. With ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde, Constant (along with Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, and others) advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, pursuing a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of primitive human desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations.

Constant Nieuwenhuys abandoned painting in 1953 to concentrate on the question of “construction”. It was to be a lifelong project based on a vision of a future society freed by a labyrinth of architectural and social spontaneity. New Babylon, as the project would be called, is “a situationist city intended as a polemical provocation.”

Lebbeus Woods brilliantly elaborates on the story of the Situationists and Constant’s work in his article, but I especially like this passage:

New Babylon was inspired by and contributed to the work of the Situationists, a group of intellectuals, theorists and writers, as well as artists who were anything but Modernists in the classic capitalist mold. …

Constant joined the Situationists early on and became their architect, much the same as Antonio Sant’Elia had done with the Futurists, half a century before. The spaces of New Babylon were intended to be spaces of disorientation and of reorientation, from rational, functionalist society to one that is liberated and self-inventing. It was meant to replace capitalist exploitation of human labor and emotion with anarchist celebration of them. Its architecture was to provide a complex armature on which could be woven endlessly new, unpredictably personal urban experiences, determined by ever-changing individual desires. In the end, however, the architecture of New Babylon seemed to overwhelm such playful, radical spontaneity by its sheer weight and monumental scale.

Heavy and sprawling as the vision may be, the work is beautiful. For me it definitely achieves the aspirations of layered and interconnected spectacle, and the creation of radical, mobile, and changeable architectural intervention in its surreal landscape.

What does New Babylon have to offer to contemporary architecture and landscape theory? A lot, I think…

Among the ideas generated by Constant, Debord, and others in the SI, the ones that resonate most with me are the concepts of psychogeography and the act of dérive (“drift”).

Debord defines psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals”. In other words, a playful and inventive strategy for exploring cities, as a direct consequence of the arrangement of urban stimulus. It takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. (a recent psychogeographic meet in New York City saw the practice of generative psychogeography, where participants followed algorithmic walking directions — “first right, second left, first left, repeat.” the results were neither goal-oriented nor random, structured but always surprising.)

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to articulate this theoretical paradox, and produced “Theory of the Dérive” in 1958, a document which basically acts as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive.

“Drifting” through the built landscape, as a series of scenographic events, I think young architects today have a lot to learn from Constant and Debord, especially since we are so accustomed to the type of fluid sensory pace offered by the internet. Spontaneous interaction with the city is often the most rewarding experience I have on the street, between the vestiges of older architectural icons and institutions of “style”.

And though the internet has the tendency to degrade real sensory experience, it’s that same instantaneous interaction that can be applied to the city, through strategic — or random — arrangement of architectural events. Instead of the disconnected drift you see with the computer and it’s blogs, the urban condition offers a drift more associated with the lifestyle of the flâneur. It’s a more immersive stroll of sentience and progressive cinematic experience.

Maybe it’s a bit rediculous to imagine the earth blanketed with these deep urban webs, suspended on pillars above freeways and seas… but the ideas generated by Constant are really valuable I think, in terms of reimagining the typologies of an interconnected city. It’s not that far-fetched to consider different scales of architectural engagement… using larger, more malleable architectural frameworks to provide enriched social games at an individual level.

These images of New Bablyon are from Lebbeus Woods.

Order Is by Louis I. Kahn, 1960.

Found this in my papers, thought I would share.

Okay so this has little to no design-related value, but let me just pass on this little gem if you haven’t seen it before.

I mean, I’m basically at a loss for words to describe the bizarre perfection of this routine.

Who knew they had championships for this?