Austrian architecture studio Splitterwerk made this “holiday residence which relates to the slope in an alternative way”.

I can’t verify how well it works as a house, but I think they did a nice job in taking what could be very alien looking and composing it in a way which somehow mediates between our boxy requirements and the uneven earth.

And I wouldn’t mind if I stumbled across it in the wilderness. There’s something so sterile about it that gives it such a good juxtaposition with the land beyond. That’s the kind of unexplainable mystery that I really enjoy when I find buildings I don’t understand — these structures that seem to draw from many typologies and end up becoming more iconic in the way they respond to their context.

I’ve been hiding.

Getting used to the short windows of free time I have these days.
So this site has been on the back burner.
You understand.

But I hope to get some images and thoughts up more often now that I’m a bit more settled where I am.

This series of hides and stands in the field is from German photographer Rainer Wengel.  I admire the unpretentiousness, the raw materiality, the impromptu nature of some of them, and the common need for a slightly more elevated survey of the surrounding landscape.

I know for me as child, I would never want to enclose myself, but to get higher. Trees worked well to some extent, but there was also that basic instinct to build with the branches lying around on the ground. And what better complement to a tree than a ladder and a platform?

This is so great:

MoMA and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation’s largest city: sea-level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructure is currently focused on “shovel-ready” projects that will stimulate the economy, we now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City’s harbor and coastline. As in past economic recessions, construction has slowed dramatically in New York, and much of the city’s remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation.

An architects-in-residence program at P.S.1 (November 16, 2009–January 8, 2010) brings together five interdisciplinary teams to re-envision the coastlines of New York and New Jersey around New York Harbor and to imagine new ways to occupy the harbor itself with adaptive “soft” infrastructures that are sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology. These creative solutions are intended to dramatically change our relationship to one of the city’s great open spaces.

This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, drawings, and analytical materials.

I am now incredibly inspired. Kudos to MoMA and PS1, for realizing the opportunity for such a collaborative and highly relevant challenge. They are so right: it’s times like these, when offices are struggling to find immediate work, when big-picture plans are often neglected. Instead, what they’ve done is in the same vein as the projects themselves: turned a worst-case scenario into a prospect for change — an endless recession into an extended design charrette, and keeping the gears turning and pushing ideas forward until the funding comes around again. Rising Currents is defined by its ethos of “Optimistic Innovation” and I think the same should be true of all of us looking for things to do in this industry right now. 

Check out all the info and updates on the Rising Currents Blog, and if you are in New York between now and October 11, definitely check out the exhibition at MoMA

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.

For an even better experience of this little house, check out the entire set as a slideshow, set to fast speed.  So nice.

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.

Petur Thomsen is an Icelandic photographer who captures the impact of human consumption of the landscape, among other things.

His work is beautiful and tragic, highlighting man’s terrible and precise extraction of earth across Iceland. It reminds me of how powerful we are, and also how small we are to wield that power. There is definitely a beauty in the colorful trucks and tarps which sit in the mountains, but for me it’s a combination of awe and helplessness. One one hand I’m proud that we can achieve almost anything, literally moving mountains for our own benefit… but then again just depressed at the cost of it all. Sometimes I think the boundless ideas of man can easily surpass what is obviously our natural scale.

At least the pictures tell the truth about what’s happening.

It reminds me of an essay by W. G. Clark, called “Replacement”. Clark proposes that “building is the reconciliation of ourselves with the natural land.” Because we are largely incapable of living directly on the land, we engage in the practice of building to sustain our presence in a place.

Since our methods and scales of building have changed dramatically in the age of industry, we’re no longer faced with a small debt to the land. Instead we’ve had to resort to the heavy mining of distant places - landscapes which seem unimportant or out of the way - to acquire our material. No longer, or much less often, is a modern building made with material directly from its site. The question is, how can that building offset the cost of the damage?

In Clark’s essay, he cites the example of a mill from his youth. It was a building which deliberately obstructed the natural flow of the river, to allow the mechanized production of flour. The dam and mill house permanently altered the waterway, forming a large pond. To Clark, it was a necessary and respectful relationship, where the mill made a beautiful calm pond, and the pond made the mill work.

Since architecture involves the necessary destruction of terrain, it’s inevitable that the natural landscape will be scarred by man somehow. But when human needs for resources reach such a colossal scale as in recent times, the affect of our extraction reaches far and wide to places completely removed from the final work… It’s no longer a symbiotic relationship. Now it’s just taking from the land, without creating anything special in it’s place.

Anyway, sorry to be a downer… I just think it’s a case for more efficient construction and industrial design, and for builders to make sure they are making use of the landscapes they’ve destroyed.

Dominic Stevens isn’t your typical architect. he does no more than one or two projects per year, he is a farmer (breeding goats, chicken and geese and produces cheese), and also doesn’t think twice about doing his own on-site carpentry work during building phase of his projects. he’s also one of those elusive architects: i coulndn’t find much information on him besides a few brief descriptions and images of a couple of his works.

anyway, the Mimetic House is probably his most prominent project, built in the village of Dromahair in County Leitrim in Ireland. the owners, Grace Weir and Jo Walzer are both conceptual artists (no surprise there…) the site is a lush green plateau (after all, this is Ireland), with a small valley that the house is placed on top of.

the innovation in the house is the ingenious forward slant of the curtain walls to reflect not the sky, but the earth. while so many people are going to great pains to make living walls and lattices to hold vertical vegetation, the Mimetic House uses reflection as a visual continuation of the landscape onto the buildings exterior. the result is a surreal transparency - a ghost of a a house that seems to exist only as skeletal ark of joints and lines in the green hills.

loving the sense of vast expanse in the photography of New York based Christoph Morlinghaus.

i could use some space like this.

stunning set of photos from the hoover dam bypass project, near boulder city, nevada.

the bridge was built to alleviate traffic on the crest of the dam, reducing potential for costly accidents and decreasing traffic bottlenecks on U.S. 93 as a result of tourist interest in the dam complex.

what i loved about the pictures was that i immediately read some of them as if they were in axonometric projection. the first picture shows one of the massive structural masts, as well as kayakers in lake mead - thousands of feet away, with little to no perspective foreshortening. you really begin to notice that as you pull farther out, your lines of sight are approaching the the geometry of rays of the sun, which are as close as possible to parallel projection.

anyway it just reminds me of an idea i’ve had floating around for a while now… imagining architectural renderings that are as as photoreal as possible, but are put into parallel projection, giving the scene a surreal, uncanny distortion only possible in the mind of the architect. these shots of the bridge give me that feeling, as if they were drawn first on paper using a 30-60-90 triangle, then mapped with the textures of real life.

also worthy of note is the incredible feat it must have been to construct that dam. i mean wow, what an engineering masterpiece. then to add that insane bridge with a transcontinental-railroad-style meeting in mid air… just crazy.

thanks Phil, for the pictures.