You spin me right round...

Look closely, tell me what you see...

Liverpool Biennial's Flickr Page

Launched on August 20th, 2008, Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Joyful Trees was a hit at the Liverpool Biennial MADE UP.

Celebrating 10 years of commissioning ambitious and challenging new work by leading international artists, the fifth edition of Liverpool Biennial’s International exhibition is MADE UP, an exploration of the power of the artistic imagination.



What's more to this than just a simple installation are the eerie sounds that escape the city in the background as the trees spin, complimenting the mechanical movement of the organic landscape. You can't help but think of the cars and buses as factory noises, pushing steam and popping hydrolic lifts, spinning the tress in circles.

Liverpool Biennial's Flickr Page

As a practical concept, think of the installation in terms of blocking heat gain. Perforated steel and other materials could be replaced with waltzing trees and spinning shrubs. It's a stretch, I know, but what really isn't in this day and age?

I've landed...

I've been in Seattle all week, posts will resume shortly....

Von's in Seattle, with over 450 bottles of booze behind the bar.

Jennnnnnga...

From ARBITARE.

Next Generation House is a small housing module for weekend use, located on the edge of a forest overlooking the River Kuma at Kumakura, opposite the temple of Shibatatehime.

The client is a timber merchant. The small pavilion, a 4x4 m cube, is made by assembling solid Japanese cedar blocks kept in place by their own weight and connecting metal cables running through vertical drill holes. Some of the inside cubes are laid off-centre to create shelves, small living areas and even steps to move from one level to another.

Offsets in the wall cubes also create windows with views of the surrounding countryside. The oblique glass windowpanes are held in place with plastic plugs. The mobile sheets are in transparent acrylic. Two roof skylights provide extra natural light – an architectural feature over which Fujimoto takes special care. At night, artificial light visible from the outside helps to dematerialise the cube by mixing the warm tones of wood with the amber glow of incandescent bulbs, emphasising the ways in which a structure made up of heavy wooden elements can seem so light and airy.

Sou Fujimoto (Japan, 1971) architect. He lives in Tokyo, Japan. His children’s mental health centre won an AR Award in 2006. He has taught in several Japanese universities. In addition to his work as an architect, he writes for international magazines like A+U. He is currently working on a series of housing projects: House N, Tokyo Apartment and the Future Primitive House.

He had a pretty interesting start at the ripe age of 20. Worthe a quick read HERE.

Let's go throw the proton around...

Over at DVICE, they've got 30 stunning images of the Large Hadron Collider. Judging by a quick summize of Twitter, we're all alive and (still) cracking jokes, albeit poorly written ones.

Be careful not to step in any strange matter.

String cheese theory and hard-on jokes seem to be especially popular.

It's raining regulatory code, hallelujah...

Catching rain water is against the law

August 12th, 2008 @ 11:49pm
By John Hollenhorst

Who owns the rain? Not you, it turns out. You're actually breaking the law if you capture the rain falling on your roof and pour it on your flower bed! A prominent Utah car dealer found that out when he tried to do something good for the environment.

Rebecca Nelson captures rainwater in a barrel, and she pours it on her plants. "We can fill up a barrel in one rainstorm. And so it seems a waste to just let it fall into the gravel," she said.

Car dealer Mark Miller wanted to do pretty much the same thing on a bigger scale. He collects rainwater on the roof of his new building, stores it in a cistern and hopes to clean cars with it in a new, water-efficient car wash. But without a valid water right, state officials say he can't legally divert rainwater. "I was surprised. We thought it was our water," Miller said.

State officials say it's an old legal concept to protect people who do have water rights. Boyd Clayton, the deputy state engineer, said, "Obviously if you use the water upstream, it won't be there for the person to use it downstream."

"Utah's the second driest state in the nation. Our water laws ought to catch up with that," Miller says.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

It came with a wrench...

Building with the Swedish system of closed panel wall elements in Sigtuna, Sweden.

Want.

My new guilty pleasure...

...is surfing the web...

...for a different kind of porn...

...known as stair porn.

Thanks to this website, I don't have to look very far...

Stair Porn

1. Wooden bookcase images from Living Etc, Elle interiör
2. Tolo House, Alvaro Leite Siza
3. Roarockit Skateboard Company Deck Stairs
4. Hanging Spiral Stairs, Didden Village, MVRDV
5. Wexford Hotel, Montego Bay, Jamaica

A homegrown post...

When we die, let's donate our land to the city with the hopes that they turn it in to a field of cement corn. Think of it, Eulalia...cement corn as far as the eye can see!

Flickr user jfsl3.

I'm not sure that that's exactly what Sam and Eulalia Frantz envisioned for their land before passing from this life to the next. Actually, I'm sure nobody envisions such an image. Regardless, that was the fitting tribute they gave this corn farmer and his wife.

Sam Frantz had/has a rich farm history in Dublin, OH. He is most well known for his corn hybridization techniques, most notably from the 1930's to the 1960's. And from my perspective, as a child, Frantz road really was the heart of Dublin. Aside from the upper-echelon houses and neatly-cropped golf courses, there wasn't much in the area but expansive farmland and soccer fields, all of which stretched along the perimeter of Frantz Road.

Today, however, farm titles have been bought Sam Walton-style in favor of track housing, "upgrade-available" condos, and malls, malls, malls - I can even remember (a number of years ago) one of our independent papers running a contest to come up with a new city motto, and a jaded reader submitted the wonderful, "Columbus: Malltastic!"

Such is the feeling for a good portion of Columbus development, including but not limited to, the outskirts of Dublin in the mid-1990's. Many other areas, such as Hilliard, Gahanna and Westerville experienced the same sort of development. Some fared the storm, while others folded in favor of the next housing development or mall expansion.

The Field of Corn

Also known as Cornhenge, the Field of Corn with Osage Orange Trees was conceived by artist Malcolm Cochran, and commissioned by the Dublin Arts Council in 1994. The site sits in a large grass field adjacent to Nationwide Insurance. Around the time of completion, 1,500 employees had relocated from Nationwide's downtown office in Columbus to the Dublin suburb - a trend omnipresent with the Central Ohio business model of that time. In fact, many other companies did the same, opting instead for the bright lights of the highway outer belt, over the parking-choked commute nightmare that was/is downtown Columbus.

Given the influx of residents to the suburbs, the decision was an easy one for most executives, even if it meant driving the city to one of the highest downtown vacancy rates in the nation, a trend that reached its worst from 00-02.

Now, however, with the development of the Arena District and surrounding areas --in addition to 10-year tax abatement programs for housing and other businesses-- Columbus is seeing a reurbanization of sorts.

So why the corn fields for a post?

Well, I've lived in Central Ohio for 80% of my life and never really explored some of the established attractions. As a result, Malcolm Cochran's cornfields caught my eye (or recaught, for that matter) because I've seen it surface every now and again on the interweb; from Scott Beale's experience at Laughing Squid to Neatorama's post, even Roadside America. Some people have even made videos of the field, like this one of a crazed man running through the corn sculptures. So it obviously catches a lot of peoples' attention, whereas I've kind of mentally written it off.

So again, why the fields?

They're odd, but they're the good kind of odd, and we don't get much of that good-kind-of-odd in Ohio. Not to mention, I think Cochran was trying to make a statement about the suburbanization of of our culture by permanently establishing a cornfield as, well, a cornfield!?!? And an absurd cornfield at that! 109 pieces of 8'0" friggin' tall corn.

From plaques on the site:

Corn has been cultivated in Ohio for approximately 1800 years. It was known to prehistoric Native American Hopewell peoples (A.D. 100-500). Prehistoric and historic Native Americans combined plantings of corn, beans, squash, and gourds in their fields and small garden plots. Two important varieties of corn were Northern flint corn, which had 16 to 20 rows of kernels on long, thin cobs, and Southern gourdseed corn, which had short, stubby ears with up to 32 rows of kernels. By the mid-1700s, Native Americans in Ohio grew great quantities of corn, often in larger fields. Particularly along the Scioto and Miami River valleys, it was not uncommon to see thousands of acres of cornfields. The Wyandot Indians, who are known to have camped on scenic Indian Run just north of Dublin village, were prominent among the historic Native American cultivators of corn.

OK, so the installation's plaque might not expound on my theory of cornfield-as-a-development-statement, but I still thought it was worth a post. And given the recent influx of cheap condos, loft-style apartments and plastic buildings going up in our fair city, who knows? Maybe one day we'll see a public park downtown with 109 strategically-placed tiny buildings scattered across a grass field - a fitting tribute to the over-development currently taking place.

Check it out when you have time:

Field of Corn (with Osage Orange Trees)
4995 Rings Rd
Dublin, OH 43017

Try it out in Google Streetview.