Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Labyrinthine City

Imagine a city for 400 million inhabitants, a labyrinth 650 miles square... ONECITY

The Opaque Civilization - ONECITY - Will Insley

The artist Will Insley did; a huge project exhibited as architectural drawings (paper architecture) and explanatory notes at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1984 - "situated" between the Mississippi and the Rockies its main residential blocks will form the Outer City: 14,000 square nine-story buildings, 2.5 miles per side, divided into an 'Over-building' and an 'Under-building' with up to nine underground levels. Located in the center is a single building known as the Inner City. At the heart of the Inner City is the "Opaque Library" containing the secrets of the city, which no one may enter.

The Opaque Civilization - ONECITY - Will Insley
The Opaque Civilization - ONECITY - Will Insley

The artist described his own interests as having "very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present" and no relation really at all to the "utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity."

The Opaque Civilization - ONECITY - Will Insley
The Opaque Civilization - ONECITY - Will Insley

"These mythic fragments of a city that never was thus take their artistic power more from suggestion—of possible archaeologies and future extensions, impossible events this civilization of the plains might yet undergo—rather than any sense of intended realizability." -- BLDGBLOG

More info on http://thenonist.com/ & http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

WILL INSLEY'S VISIONS OF A LABYRINTHINE CITY - NYTimes.com

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Addicted to Consumerism

After months of hard graft (squeezed between jobs) we've finally managed to get the new work website up and running with our shiny new identity:

Dry: Addicted to Consumerism

Dry: Addicted to Consumerism

Dry: Addicted to Consumerism

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Superficies

Christoph Engel - Superficies
Christoph Engel - Superficies
Christoph Engel - Superficies
Christoph Engel - Superficies

Christoph Engel
»Superficies«, 2008-2009

"Dense housing developments take on the appearance of an ornamental mesh of interwoven lines, the flat roofs of countless greenhouses become a thick mosaic carpet. Golf courses in a barren, rocky landscape suddenly start to look like the palm of an outstretched hand, and the outlines of farm fields could almost pass for a pattern of sequins adorning decorative cloth. Detailed structures of natural and urban landscapes merge in the distance into expansively laid out constructions. The transcendent gaze from above allows abstraction into surfaces and lines, and creates an ambivalent overview of formal clarity and deceptive beauty: the subject matter of these works visualizes the consequences of human interventions into nature and the radical transformation of entire swaths of land, pushed to the brink of ecological catastrophe.

But the Superficies-series not only unmasks landscape as a human construction and as artificially planned nature; the images themselves reveal that they are also constructed. Engel does not photograph the landscapes himself; his works are digital collages comprised of many hundreds of individual photos, except sparse adaptions in matching the multiple layers there was no further digital manipulation. The source materials are images freely available through Google Earth, which Engel fits together, picture by picture, into a larger whole. Using this method, he challenges his position as photographer and author. Who actually took the source photos? Can his pictures even accurately be called photographs? It was not he who pressed the shutter release; he was not even present when the pictures were taken. Furthermore, the photographs lack concrete temporal references. The image material shown by Google Earth is taken at different points in time – as evidenced by the different nuances of color in some works. This juxtaposition of different temporalities within a single picture undermines the apparently documentary character of the photographic image. Furthermore, Engel consciously leaves out any concrete, comprehensible reference to place and any details about location – although this information was undoubtedly available to him when he downloaded the photos. He thereby calls into question both the overarching structure of landscape, which is constructed within the image independent of place and time, and the resulting unique reality of the picture itself. In the tension between picture and representation, the artist engages in a creative recasting of the image surface.
"

Arranged Cities

Artist Armelle Caron abstracts urban city plans, deconstructing them to identify fragments and classifying blocks by size and shape:

Armelle Caron - Villes Rangées - Paris
Armelle Caron - Villes Rangées - New York
Armelle Caron - Villes Rangées - Istanbul
Armelle Caron - Villes Rangées - Berlin

"In this way, Caron reveals a hidden experience to any pedestrian, by reshaping the banality of diverse urban fabrics. She translates them into a sort of notes on a score. And in this score, one can re-read the rhythm of a city with rectangular blocks, mega-blocks, super-blocks, medieval corners, triangular Baroque language, or longitudinal coastal strips."
via deconcrete

Monday, February 7, 2011

Ace Knits

I love these hats from Annie Larson's shop, All for Everyone:

All for Everyone - Cerulean Multi Triangle Hat
All for Everyone - Triangle Stripe Triangle Hat
All for Everyone - Coney Triangle Hat

Looking forward to receiving my Coney Triangle Hat (the bottom image)!

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Kafka

OMG... how good are these Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund?!

Kafka covers by Peter Mendelsund

Freakin' awesome! Going to hunt them down for the collection (mind you it looks like they will be published in the US in mid-2011 by Schocken Books). There's a lot been written about these exceptional covers already, with the pick of the bunch being this post on The Casual Optimist - Peter Mendelsund and the Art of Metamorphosis

Via JACKET MECHANICAL and Frank Chimero
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