102. _

You can do complicated things but make your life simple.

101. Seven by Philip Zimbardo

Seven social Processes That Grease the Slippery Slope of Evil

- Mindlessly Taking the First Small Step

- Dehumanization of Others

- De-Individuation of Self (Anonimity)
- Diffusion of Personal Responsability

- Blind Obedience to Authority

- Uncritical Conformity to Group Norms

- Passive Tolerance of Evil Through Inaction, or Indifference

Taken from: Philip Zimbardo on the Psychology of Evil

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html


By the way, I noticed I like a lot writing by hand on a piece of paper. It's a meaningful way of communication. Would it be possible to communicate in such way more? Or would be enough to invent your type of font?

100.Malcolm Gladwell

Three things - autonomy, complexity and connection between effort and reward are - most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not that much the money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five

Malcolm Gladwell

Maybe money doesn't make us happy but still it is one measurable quantity of how our work is important to the society. There might be many more things that could show us this relation. If you are willing to put it in general terms it is about the social range, the impact in the society that your work brings you.

Michal Kempinski

099. A Note about Bunker

Pojechałem do Bunkra.
Nie wiem, czemu zacząłem rysować mrowisko.
Nie. Wiem czemu.

098. Sample of Simple

097. Everything is everything

The culture is the nature
The object is the space
The cause is the effect
Allways is everywhere
Everything is everything

096. I was wrong

Wszystko można ubrać w jakąś skalę, jednak idzie za tym od razu wartościowanie. Liczby od razu pokazują, co jest dobre a co złe. Ale czy musimy wszystko wartościować? Jeśli nie jesteśmy w stanie wydać sądu, spójnej krytyki, lepiej wszystko jest akceptować takie, jakie jest? Po prostu opisywać świat. Czy liczby nie pozbawiają nas umiejętności lepszego zrozumienia, za duży skrót, zbyt duże uproszczenie?

Czytając Outliers Malcolm'a Gladwella trafiłem na PDI, Power Distance Index, który mierzy zależność pomiędzy podwładnymi a zwierzchnikami na tle kulturowym. PDI został wyodrębiony przez holenderskiego socjologa Geerta Hofstede jako jeden z parametrów, który opisuje zależności pomiędzy kulturą organizacyjną a kulturą narodową. Świat opisany w ten sposób można obejrzeć pod tym adresem: http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/power-distance-index/

Jednym z parametrów jest Masculinity Index. Co to znaczy w praktyce, że Holandia ma wartość 11 a Szwajcaria aż 70?

095. Co porabiasz?

Bawię się taśmą klejącą, niebieską. Mam też kawałki styropianu na biurku i coś w nich rzeźbię z pomocą papieru ściernego, różne gramatury różnie ten styropian ścierają. Patrzę na swój cień.

094. Wywiad

http://www.tvnwarszawa.pl/rytm-miasta,news,warszawa-nigdy-nie-bedzie-nalezec-do-przyjezdnych,48197.html

093. A Word about Stasiuk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydnl74spyV4&feature=related

Pilch:

Najwyższym jak do tej pory osiągnięciem pisarskim Stasiuka jest książka pod tytułem Powieści Galicyjskie, która jest właściwie stopem bardzo różnych kruszców literackich, nad którymi moim zdaniem świadomość pisarza nie do końca panowała. To znaczy to jest po części jest to zaczęta powieść niedokończona, po części jest to zbiór opowiadań a po części jest to zbiór tekstów reportażowych pisanych do Tygodnika Powszechnego. I ten stop trzech gatunków literackich, prozy powieściowej, prozy nowelistycznej i prozy reportażowej, który ten stop był przez Stasiuka nie zamierzony, bo on poskładał rozmaite teksty, które złożone co się rzadko zdaża okazały dosyć intensywną integralność. Okazuje się, że to co poskładane z pozoru przypadkowych elementów rozmaitych, to nad tym wszystkim zatryumfowała siła pióra jego. Że pióro Stasiuka jest mocniejsze od podziałów gatunkowych, że jego osobowość człowieka piszącego, jest wyrazistsza od immanentnych porządków panujących w literaturze.

Stasiuk:
To żaden pomysł, wiesz, to po prostu odruch, opisywanie świata, który jest dookoła. A nie jakieś kombinowanie. Ja nie jestem postmodernistą, ja jestem z dziewiętnastego wieku.

092. Note from Herbert

"Brzmiało to przekonywająco. Znam dobrze, nadto dobrze, wszystkie męki i daremny trud
opisywactwa, a także zuchwalstwo tłumaczenia wspaniałego języka malarstwa na pojemny jak piekło
język, którym pisane są wyroki sądów i powieści miłosne."

How can we describe architecture in any other language than architecture? Architecture is space, it is being in space. Why should we translate this experience into different languages?

091. Lo

I always believed in numbers. But after a lifetime of such pursuit I ask - what is logic? Who decides reason My quest has taken me through the physical and metaphysical, the delusional and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life. It is only in mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found. And I am here only because of you, you're the only reason I am. You are all my reasons. Thank you.

Rusell Crowe as John Nash in Beautiful Mind

090. Out

089. Million miles away

088. The blue of the sky

087. Contents of my head

This is the book I never read
These are the words I never said
This is the path I'll never tread
These are the dreams I'll dream instead
This is the joy that's seldom spread
These are the tears...
The tears we shed
This is the fear
This is the dread
These are the contents of my head
And these are the years that we have spent
And this is what they represent
And this is how I feel
Do you know how I feel ?
'cause i don't think you know how I feel
I don't think you know what I feel
I don't think you know what I feel
You don't know what I feel

086. "I love space so much"

- said Elisabeth Cha - "...so I want to be an architect"

Elisabeth Cha studies architecture in Liege in Belgium. She seems to be very talented and passionate about what she does but recently she had some downs and wasn't sure about the directions she wanted to take in her future carreer.

What she told me made me think. I also like space a lot but on the other hand I have a lot of problems with it. Sometimes it makes me feel lost, sometimes it frightens me when I discover lonelines in space. Sometimes space makes me happy when I am walking on a street I start seing it automatically in section as in a simple urban study that shows the proportions of space. Most of the times though I have difficulty in thourougly understanding the space. I only recall a couple of moments during, say, last 12 months, when I was deeply moved by the presence of the surrounding. Every time it happened it actually involved a couple of senses in the same time. Strong presence of people was also required for the overall experience. How do you call a state fo yourself when all your senses are hypeactive in the same time? One might argue that only then you truly feel a space when you experience that kind of state.

It might seem that more interesting are objects. Maybe not more interesting but easier to understand. I see objects everywhere, shapes appear and speak to me in most unexpected places. Shapes can be materialistic and durable or can be made out of shadows that overlap with glittering lights. Shapes also appear when something in the foreground is overlayed with other things in the background and then the small and distant parts dispersed in undefined space start composing a single entity. These shapes are oftentimes very strange. I feel most passionate about the shapes that are strange, that don't reveal their nature on the first encounter and also, when they don't let you know easily about the way they where rendered.

Experiencing space is something that requires a person's true presence in the concrete place. An objects nature is much more visual. Does experiencing an object require less the objects itself but more just an image of it? It is much easier to immortalize an image of an object then to find an equally efficient mean to communicate space? During last decade at least architecture has been dominated by experience of an image. Images have been over flooding us in such quantities that they have become meaningless, have become trash in a studio bin and spam in you mailbox. This makes me think about the concept of understanding media - extensions of man of Marshall McLuhan. We find ourselves in ever crazier pursue of extending our presence and every time we take a step in that direction we find ourselves even further away from fulfillment.

So space should be a multi-sensory experience as opposed to mono-sensory object. On the other hand to experience an object is advisable to touch it, smell it and sometimes for some objects to even taste them. This is something that I do very often since I was was a child. This sense of touch when experiencing objects remains especially strong for craftsmen who manufacture things with their own hands. The feeling of cutting material, assembling it, adjusting, sanding and refining has something to do with the divine creation.

They say space and objects have an intrinsic and never-ending relationship. Many questions arise. How to understand it in the daily life and practice? Sometimes it is rather easier to follow the opposite direction, namely to build up your architectural positions with regard to objects being something in opposition to space but not complementary. Maybe we are just lacking sufficient technological means to communicate space but we think we have sufficient language to talk about objects? This might be wrong when we stick to the assumption of equivalence of object and space. Maybe then experiences of an object and a space have the same principles. Maybe it is the quality of experience that should be taken into consideration. Sometimes it is simply shallow and temporal, in other times it is more enhanced through the activity of more senses?

The domination of the sense of sight in present day media is something that we should deal with. That one is too easy and longer exciting any more. Maybe we should rethink the position of Marshall McLuhan, assume that the media will never be sufficient for our dual psycho-somatic nature? Maybe finally the effort should be taken to let our whole bodies deal with more architecture, more objects and more spaces for better quality of experience and excitement? 

085. Publish post

- You are a lonely wolf. But if you don't feel comfortable with that, it is never too late to change it.
- Should I become a dog then?
- There are very many positive things about dogs.

084. The News Tree

083. Pneuma

082. Saving Private Ryan?

The transition from private to public is a profound and individual experience which involves the mind and the body. By transition from private to public I mean the personal way from exclusion into inclusion, from disjunction into connection. This has happened today.

081. The spirit of an age

"It is said that what is called "the spirit of an age" is something to which one cannot return. That this spirit gradually dissipates is due to the world's coming to an end. For this reason, although one would like to change today's world back to the spirit of one hundred years or more ago, it cannot be done. Thus this is important to make the best out of every generation"

080. Emptiness is Form

Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "Form is emptiness" That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, "Emptiness is form." One should not think that these are two separate things.

Good source for information on the philosophy of space from the Far East:
http://theendlessfurther.com/?p=1839

079. What you see is what you see

A study of "a when-you-just-can't-hold-all-the-shit-around-you-anymore-and-you-have-to-do-something-on-your-own form". 2010, Lodz + styrofoam

078. Winter blur study

On a magic bus from Warszawa to Amsterdam. 1st of January 2011. Cloudy, chilli

077. 11 Angry men and one Architect

076. Parabox in the Leidseplein

075. Kublai and Marco

"And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced" Kublai said. It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations"

I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others" Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."

074. Shadows preview

073. Here there and everywhere



072. Everything will become housing

On a gorgeous spring day like today people literally dwell their city, everybody's outside with the kitchen tables and other elements of furniture that normally is reserved for the interiors. Kids have provisional sandboxes and small swimming pools, barbecues are running. Also boats are in the move where everybody's having the traditional composition of beer and cheese. The city is becoming again a peaceful domestic space for everyone with squares being nothing much else but bigger living rooms not to mention the amazing boats which are the same rooms but floating around the city center where ever you want to go.

Will then the city scape as one can conceptualize it become a permanent variation of a "house". Will architecture actually be housing?

Environmental psychologists categorize space by the degree of human control over it. In this context psychologist Irwin Altman differentiates private territory (an apartment, one's own house, bed or computer) where the control level is highest (including legal sanctions if the private territory is invaded) from the secondary territory used by a group but not necessarily in the same time (stairwell, backyard, shared workshop or office, schools, etc) and public territories accessible to all (libraries, park benches, squares, streets, etc) The are of highest risk from the psychological point of view is the secondary territory, because it is here where conflicts most often arise about who has the right to use the area. From what I can see around me, here the stairwells are brought to the most minimal dimensions possible, backyards don't even exist and the shared spaces are well funded, very tidy and multi-functional (an old church is at certain hours a community building, a concert hall, etc) which removes the dilemma of who has the most right to use them or the question of temporal dis-occupancy.

The notion of semi-public/semi-private space becomes out of date. Is the city scape now an amalgamate of something that is public and private in the same time? How to grasp this new feeling, how to put into the right word? Public-Private fluidity? My City is My House?

I have found one clue in one of the recent press reviews of UNStudio on the Tax Office in Groningen. The building is designed so that it can be transformed into housing in the future without any major structural modifications. Therefore, the locations of elevators, stairs and technical spaces have been carefully considered and a structural grid of 1.20m has been deployed rather than the conventional office grid of 1.80m?

Why is it being considered that a brand new and fabulous office building will transform one day into a housing estate? Will all the work be transferred to the virtual reality and people could work at home. Finally could work be performed in close distance to the home address, in one neighborhood, so that mobility could be brought to the minimum.

Should architecture point out to the flexibility or already give a more progressive programmatic and typological answer to the public/private questions?

071. Who are you

I am a fool
I am a sinner
I am a tool
I am a passenger

Looking for own limits

070. Fifty contours of hands from Amsterdam.

Amsterdam waving for goodbye? Hands collected in the Westerpark on the 25th of April, each hand from a different person. Sunny day, 25 degrees.

069. Cell phone colour and shade study



068. Inception

067. The Indispensable Connections

066. Louis Vuitton

One of my favorite UNStudio Projects:

Why is it favorite? I like the clear language that is being used - the motive of the leaf. Still it has been developed in a very entertaining way. Sometimes it reveals everything what is inside, sometimes it retains it from our eyes. The true secret lies in proportions though.

065. Darkscapes

Notes for the Bunker Project:

"Within the densifying conditions of society, vast amounts of programme are more and more being pushed underground. Water reservoirs, electricity plants, parkings, storage rooms, archives, leisure spaces, factories, offices and even houses. Quite disparate lines of reasoning such as monument regulations and historical sentiments, ecological notions and security objectives seem to be behind this process. It is almost as though the ideological notion of the "deck", the modernist level in the air, has gradually found its position and is going to be realized at zero level. In doing so, the existing earth is going to be loaded with underground programmes, with the more acceptable parts of modern society oin top, like the peaks of icebergs.

Can we accept this phenomenon and explore it as an enormous potential reservoir? Can we adjust lifr to ots logic which is mainly defined by technical and logistics parameters? How can one live within this calustrophobia, the lack of light, the difficulties of escape? What type of behaviour or orientation can be imagined in these places without context, without reference? How would we imagine an underground termite life to be?"

MVRDV, Farmax

064. Homo Ludens in the Dam Square

Amsterdam has seen it all. The Dam Square has been converted to a funfair. Homo Ludens! You are all most welcomed!

063. Stacking

In the drive for density, not only houses of offices should be stacked. Factories, agriculture, parks and retail would accelerate this imagined 3d life. How can one in this respect generate on a modets lot, a vertical city centre in which complete automobile accessibility can coexist with a promenade where cars are prohibited?

MVRDV

The Inntel Hotel in Zaandam an imaginary stack of the Zaanse Houses, a type of vernacular buildings of which the Amsterdam Noord and the Zaandam area are famous for. The programme inside is all 160 hotel rooms. Part of the hotel lies on a motorway tunnel. The whole building is meant to be a landmark for the transit area of the main Zaandam station.

The project was conceived at the studio WAM Architecten. Their fate seems to bring them more and more into public attention also after another one - the biggest mosque in the Netherlands which recently has been opened in Rotterdam.

More info

http://www.wam-architecten.nl/index.php

062. My City is my Home

My canal is my Home. Halfweg

My block is my Home.
MVRDV. Housing. Amsterdam West

061. The Notion of the Dwelling Career

Since modernist times every architect seems to feel oblilged to design the ideal house. But is there such a thing as ideal place? Given the increase in the number of times we move these days (from 2.2 times per person per lifetime in 1950 to 7.8 in 1994) the feeling that a house is a temporary place to stay increases with it. The house has become part of our "dwelling-career" with the longing for diversity seemingly paramount: everyone should have lived in a loft at one time, in a house on the lake, in a squat, a bungalow, a commune, alone, with kids... The demand for a greater variety and even more extreme dwelling forms is gaining momentum. The ideal home doesn't exist anymore, there are thousands of ideal homes. The permanent ideal has been supplanted by the temporary.

It seems as though we buy homes instead of houses, rather than making them by ourselves.

This opens up unprecedented opportunities for the role played by home catalogues. The cultivation of a maximum choice of housing types fulfils the wishes of the potential client and covers the uncertainties of the market. This extension of the known ideals can be set up through a series of extended or extrapolated "permutations" of the average house: This would lead from the straightforward front to back type to the stair type, the house with the superwindow, the house with no roof, the house with the towers, the disconected house, etcetera. All specific and characteristic spaces that wait to be inhabited, to be urbanized, to be appropriated, time and again. The housing block can be constructed as a Chinese puzzle of these ideals. But the placement of these ideals within the building envelope causes in-between houses with even more unexpected spaces and qualities. Is unexpectedness not the sublime goal of one's "dwelling career"?

MVRDV, "Proximity"

060. 1-2-3 Sculpture

A sculpture in front of the Hermitage, Amsterdam

059. Densification

"Large-scale densification makes it feasible to develop a vertical zoning of the city following the horizontal one: shopping on the third floor, keep fit on the eight, public transport on the tenth, jogging on the thirteen, parking on the eighteenth, and so on. The city can be literally stack of networks. The question then arises as to which parts are to be kept open and which filled in."

MVRDV, FARMAX, New! New Babylon, p. 313. Rotterdam, 010 Publishers.

058. Redical house

Almere

057. Craziness and self-confidence

Holland doesn't need to make branding anymore, it is self-confident and already has an established position in the world of architecture and business. Therefore when others were busy pumping up their muscles often showing off with something they never had, the Dutch could show to the world the Happy Street, a proposal of a walk through an imaginary multilevel amusement park which finishes off with a bar serving Wurstel with mostard. Poland has indeed made similar proposals a couple of editions of Expo ago. But it was no joke at that time.

The same kind of aesthetics is present in some places in the Dutch landscape. One example I have discovered in Almere. It is a children's common house designed for children and by children. The sponsor was a local TV station which uses the interior as its studio for Sunday morning shows.

How high should we aspire in Poland we sometimes deserve a little bit of circus. 

056. Perception

Every time the perception of time and space is different. Sometimes your feel that your mind is filled with flashes, one coming after another, everything is sharp, precise and defined by a time frame. Some other time there are days when you cannot tell precisely what happened when. Your experience becomes a continuum of time and space, your mind is rather filled with gradients of colours than with sharp contours. On a sunday morning I found a perfect illustration for my state of mind when cycling through the Ijburg. Water and the skies had the same blue hue and sometimes you couldn't even tell where one ends and the other begins.

Perception is not a passive reception of the external signals though. It is highly influenced by what we have already learned previously and by different kind of expectations we are developing. Then the harmony must be a fascinating mixture of many ingredients which may happen only when brought together in the right proportions and in right time.

055. Homo Ludens at the Library

The main Public Library of Amsterdam is situated in the Oosterdok. On the right hand side of the Library there is the conservatoire. As you enter to the Library on the right hand side, the side of the conservatoire, there is a piano... Everybody can stop by and share a little bit of his or her talent with the public. Contrary to what I expected there are very many people who want to play and actually can play!

The way the building functions makes me think about the image I have about an ancient Roman basilica where everybody could enter and accommodate freely. Here indeed everyone gets the possibility to read the magazines for free and to study in private. But the building is as much about education as it is about social interaction. The architecture enables a lot of visual contact between people. Many parts of the interior are structured in a thoughtful way to form cascades where people accommodate themselves and can observe the environment around them. This situation has something in common with how foyers of theaters used to be shaped. The idea for social interaction was for everyone "to see and to be seen". The theater piece was only part of the show, equally important if not even more was the part of the social life that was happening everywhere between the lines, before and after the play. Now, when peeping secretly into the screens of others you discover that most of the activity that is happening there is either mail, chat or facebook!

Did observations similar to these bring Johan Huizinga to the development of the idea of the "homo ludens"? According to that a human being is a social entity for whom the play factor has been the most important social bond in social history. To be precise - Homo Ludens examined the role of play in law, war, science, poetry, philosophy, and art. Huizinga saw the instinct for play as the central element in human culture - all human activities are playing: "Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play".

Maybe it doesn't matter any more what a public building is specifically until it is public? Maybe the same principles should be employed when designing a public library, a shopping mall and even a museum? Each time a different proportion of ingredients should be added but the stock should be composed of main factor of play. It's interesting how boundaries are waning, everything is becoming one, a mixed use sewed together with  invisible but efficient forces just in the same way as the music the spaces of the Library and connects all the floors and nooks.

The piano in the hall way provokes social interaction also in very prosaic way. Once, just in front of my eyes a scene took place when the piano player was almost punched. Wrong piece? He played Phillipe Glass. Wrong audience? The music "lover" was a bit drunk already and by coincidence turned out to be my compatriot. Maybe what could help would be an inscription "Don't shoot the piano player" as we know it from saloons in the Wild West? This West surely remains wild for some of us.

I want to learn to play piano so badly. It is of course not about any groundbreaking talent that has been asleep within me until now and it is not about ever getting to the main stage. It is about playing one day a short entertaining piece for everyone at the doorstep of the library.

Building highlights:
http://www.jocoenen.com/

054. The Notion of Gezelligheid

You say "gezellig" when the beer you drink is gezellig, meaning tasty, savoury
You say "gezellig" when a person you meet is gezellig, meaning entertaining, funny
You say "gezellig" when a house you visit has a cosy, inviting atmosphere.

Gezelligheid is a meaningful word in Dutch which is hardly translatable into other languages but is in the same time is a key word to understanding the heart of traditional Dutch culture. Witold Rybczynski in his book entitled "Home" is devoting a whole chapter for investigation on how the concept of Gezelligheid has developed in the Netherlands starting from early 17th century. When tracing historical, social and economical factors one precisely learns about the origins of every architectural element of a traditional Dutch house. Logical growth and organic evolution of the vernacular can be then easily translated and perceived within the Dutch architecture of the modern times.

My investigation into Dutch culture will continue and will conclude with a book "Homo Ludens" by local historian Johan Huizinga. On the basis of observations of the Dutch he discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga uses the term "Play Theory" within the book to define the conceptual space in which play occurs. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture.

053. A pretty pretty map of Amsterdam

052. Ornament ist kein Verbrechen (Ornament is Life!)

This is a piece of old newspaper torn as found in a train in Utrecht. The building depicted on the photo is a Neutelings Riedijk Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid. The lady on the left is Eva-Maria Westbroek an opera singer in the role of Anna Nicole Smith. Her full picture you will find here. Would you go for the eyes of Mrs. Westbroek or rather for a strip of Neutelings?

Interesting thing about this finding is that a normal newspaper in the Netherlands (Nrc Handelsblad) makes a thorough investigation into the issue of Facadenarchitecture. The reader is being presented with quotations from Learning from Las Vegas and theories of Mies van der Rohe. Later on the author calls out many contemporary Dutch architects to make their statement later contrasted with some facts from Italian chapters from History of Architecture.

This trend is increasingly present that architecture is being popularised by the media worldwide. More popular understanding of aesthetics, construction methods and philosophy of architecture could be a future ingredient in the process of the cultural leap forward Poland is making in the present. Maybe one day we could bring the level of public trust and awereness to such levels that anyone could be given a possibility to design and build his/her own house on his own.

Translation of the article after the break.

051. Einmal ist keinmal

On monday I prepared one 3d model at work, I ate a sandwich with chicken for lunch and went with a bike to the seaside in Zandvoort and back. Before going to sleep I read one chapter of a book. On the next day it turned out that the model I prepared was by mistake erased so I needed to repeat everything. But when doing it for the second time it took me half of the time as previously. For lunch I ate a sandwich with chicken but this time I prepared it on my own and I spiced it up my way. And on the evening I also went cycling and took the same route as on monday. But this time I didn't loose my way and my tempo improved by twenty minutes. Before going to sleep I took the book back again. By mistake I started reading the same chapter but after realising it I just continued to let the beautiful idea fulfill.

I found the repetition very comforting.

050. How to change the world

Through the art of collage

More collage, more collegues!

049. Bunker Landscape

http://www.rietveldlandscape.com/en/projects/7

Rietveld Landscape - a very interesting maverick architectural studio, authors of the Dutch entry for the 2010 Biennale in Venice.

048. Something else

So many ideas cometo your head when you are not thinking about them, when you are doing something else. For example when watching photos of Chris Jordan

047. Point

I like people who go straight to the point.
I like people who grow vegetables. They do go straight to the point.

What we do first is we devote time to an architectural school, then we become architects and make architectural projects and architectural models. Then we wait months for the client to pay us and only then, if this eventually happens with our honest penny we go to the market and buy some vegetables.

"I would like to do this form. It's a nice shape. I like it"
"Why don't we do some research first?"

046. Laser power, solar power

045. Monday meeting

Monday meeting was concerning the Shenton Way project in Singapore where UNStudio is developing a project (Design Development phase) for a residential and office towers. On the picture you see a model of 1:50 scale of a fraction of the plynth together with a lobby. The space has been designed in such way that the pathways and spaces for people and cars smartly intersect. Ramps and parking are becoming an added value to the overall apearence of the lobby. The team all together consists of fifteen people, everyone was present on Monday. When designers are busy with facade patterning and material research in the meantime the research and development section is in pursuit of numerical goals of the project.

044. Urbanisation in China - Happiness is seen everywhere

http://www.16x9.nl/urbanisation-in-china/

043. Good Morning

In my today's dream I saw my future daughter. She had beautiful blue eyes and some dark curly hair. We were walking in one street in Warsaw, playing and having a good time. Just round the corner the dream was over.

I woke up and the city was waking up too. Through the window of my room I saw red morning sky. It had just the same colour of the street lights but they were fading away and the day was about to start with sunlight.

Then for a brief moment of this scene I felt as if standing in an architectural model of a scale 1:50 as a small plastic human and in the same time being the 1:1 scale man that has taken off the ceiling of the model and is looking into the interior. It was a feeling of seeing oneself from oneself's prespective from the future.

I kept the beauty of my daughter's eyes and of the colour of the sky throughout the day. In couple of past days I have been experiencing more great moments of enchantment or enlightment, infinite joy, unruptured love and harmony with the world.

042. Once you have tasted

Once you have tasted life in a developed country you inevitably have to start enjoying the local lifestyle, reasonable wealth, a specific easiness, a sense of security and a developed social life. Why not do that? You can just start using the opportunities and possibilities created here just as it happened to every migrant in a foreign country. Their aim has always been to connect to the new while to disconnect with the old.

But the the true "creativity" and ambition is only where there exists an indispensable need for it. How can this happen in a complete and stable world like in the Netherlands? One of the things I miss the most is the powerful internal life that I used to live back in the home country.. When there is no chance for seeing beauty and living harmony and when you don't feel capable enough to make the change happen, the change simply starts happening in your mind. The world here marked by the harmonious urban environment and the social cohesion of the Netherlands is a place where the change has started to happen and people's dreams have been actually realized. But experiencing such a lovable city as Amsterdam eventually will not give you that same amount of satisfaction unless you will have an opportunity to build a small portion of it, to inspire some people of your time.

Living the life of your imagination brings you the type of comfort that is very intimate and thorough but in the same time inaccessible to other people and if it ever becomes it may be a disillusion to others. I bear within me a constant impotence when it comes to communicating with the outside world. Anda Rottenberg once mentioned that if an artist can't find the right language to communicate with the outside world it is only his problem, not the world's. My mother's language is a ticket for a musical or theatrical piece that she sometimes offers to others and pan cake formulas that she shares with family. My father's language is a power point presentation at work and sometimes playing piano at home. Isn't it the mainstream world's problem that it doesn't have the sensitivity to incorporate some of us, or am I just being too fastidious? The means and tools for communication are in front of us.

041. Where art thou?

Questions with no answers, answers with no directions, roads with no ends, life with no meaning, journey with no conclusion. How do we carry on?

On the search for the architecture that I envisage, I frequently experience stifling moments of emptiness. Nothing I can think of seems to tally with what I want and cannot yet envisage. At these moments, I try to shake off the academic knowledge of architecture I have acquired because it has suddenly started to hold me back. This helps. I find I can breathe more freely. I catch a whiff of the old familiar mood of the inventors and pioneers. Design has once again become invention.

040. Lovers

On Sunday Market in Westerpark Gasfabriek I have found a small sculpture. It was called "Lovers". Apart from delicious food samples this was the most interesting discovery of that day. The material was polished alabaster. The massing and curves give you many readings. At first glance what you notice is an abstract shape. After the title is revealed you really start to understand the object as a metaphore of two people. The beauty lies in uncertainty. Have they always been together as a single entity and have been divided only by their separate earthly bodies? This is what the natural process of modelling of the stone would suggest. But the curves suggest also an opposite direction the simple and trivial one - a discovery two bodies that grew aside of one another from one single core. When following this line of thought one starts to realize about something that has happened to the stone. The cold material is not an abstract piece anymore but at this point starts to convey life.

How much of this poetics can one bring to volumes and materials in architecture?

039. Paint

Architects can dare again to bring colour to architecture. Introduction of colour gives much more meaning. You start reading the building in many more ways I have seen recently the way Guyer/Gigon Architects deal with the use of colour. Their concrete was coloured. Brick buildings have been roughly painted black or white since long ago. I can imagine them being yellow, green and other. The texture could be shiny, the brick could have a porcelite skin just like the one made out of the mother of pearl. The bricks that are shiny and the bricks that are matt could make up for another reading of the whole building volume.  

038. Considerations

Gigon / Guyer interview in El Croquis 2008 V

Q: "... How would you characterize your projects up-to-date? What would you like to keep from experience to use in the future projects?

A:  The most important component is authenticity. An architectural design always has to come from an inner truth and energy.

___

In todays conversation with Jan, my new landlord I told him: "Your house gives me this feeling of being at home from the very first moments. Actually riding my bike on the I was singing/shouting I am coming home." "This is one of the greatest compliments I heard recently. Making your home a place filled with authentic energy has been one of the most difficult tasks of my life"

Jan is a 59 year old hippie. He is a taught phylosopher and a retired psychologist. He is one of the youngest from a 14 people pack of brothers and sisters but most of them never come to pay him a visit. He describes their life styles as "same old story, family, children, a house with a garden". Despite the age he relentlessly keeps on asking himself a question What will be my next thing? What the hell does this mean to me that I find immediately his house as home?
___

Everybody's life is composed out of many elements. These elements may be very basic notions like love, children or carrier. They may be also the attributes like dynamism, introvertisism, steadfastness etc.

One may try to depict it with an image or animation of a mosaic of for example bubbles fluctuating with time. Some elements are stable, some change a lot. At some points one bubble overtakes in size other bubbles. At other times there are three or four bubbles that are tightly competing and remain stable in size but they differ in color intensity. That's it for the diagrams.

If Architecture strives to be connected with life how does it relate with life? Is it about showing the whole spectrum of life-composing elements and their fluctuations. This could be done for example under label >constant change<. It has been proved already a couple of times though, for example in projects of Cedric Price or Jean Nouvel that constant change cannot happen in architecture because of for example technical limitations.  One can argue, a building is not a mechanism, architecture is not an animation. It enables change and does change in a subtle way, for example by wheathering, but it cannot change projectwise. Otherwise there wouldn't be any project.

On the opposite side there is the belief that architecture should be a tribute to the constant where certain monumentality is expected. This makes me think about the paradigm of the three things that a man needs to do in his life: to plant a tree, to build a house and to conceive a child. In all three of these there is the sense of constant potentiality and a momentous decision as opposed to the paradigm of constant change. Is change in architecture a feminine factor and constant a masculine factor? Despite everyone's natural inclinations in real life it's too hard to subsribe to extreme points of view in architecture.

A couple of months ago I watched a movie entitled "The Sailor". The main character developes so-called biographical volumes where with certain scripts he produces shapes that in a dramatic way correspond to everything that has been "scripted" previously in a person's life time. I first thought if the script would have existed it would be a great tool/toy for a process in an architectural design. You almost cannot resist the temptation of seeing the biographical volumes as a one-to-one models of ideal "houses" that could shelter one's whole life.

Scripts determine a lot the appearence of an architectural project but they cannot help us establish the architectural positions. To be continued the research on design methods, formal solutions and authenticity.

037. Form study

From 2d into 4d...
tbc

036. Imagination / Inagination

Imagination is essentially a rejection of the tyranny of forms,

of anything fixed, a movement towards the heart which by intuition breaks

through the crystallization of life and allows for growth.

(Attributed to Bachelard)

A Flock of Birds, Meester Visserplein, Amsterdam, 2011

035. MVRDV out of the context

"...As it has liberated itself from the necessity of having to be constructed, the discipline is moving from the paradigm of constructing buildings into the paradigm of offering new methodologies for analysis of our built and unbuilt environments..."

034. The Undutchables

The Netherlands is reputed to have the highest average density in the world. Yet nowhere in the country itself is there impression that this really is the case. Certainly not when compared to Hong Kong, New York or Rio de Janeiro. The Netherlands may be well populated generally but not unduly so. Vast areas of it seem to be filling up with a suburban 'matter' of low cost housing-with-gardens, low rent offices, warehouses, factory-style farms, motorcycle scrambling areas and other elements with a lowish density.

The country can steadily be regarded as a city-state, a northern Monaco of sorts, filled with this low-density, lightweight urban matter lacking a clear form of organization, consisting as it does of development that has to be varied all over and perhaps as a result, ends up looking the same. This urbanity is more concerned with quantity than with quality. How then are we to dope with an urban matter that cannot be considered entirely valuable? Accepting this condition as fixed and simply continuing the present trend will cover most of the areas still open and envelop our entire society in a greyness. Is it possible to reconsider this situation by carrying densities to an extreme and rufflling the texture with inserts or polarities?

Is it possible to imagine ultra-dense areas that can soak up program like a sponge and save our pastoral landscapes from being totally suburbanized? Might we go so far as to regard our territories as a confluence of areas with a dense and more permanent, near monumental status and others with a much lighter mode of urbanism? Can we examine the possibilities and impossibilities of these extremes and discover their prospects and limitations?

Strong idea and visual impact, effective numerical performance.
Can this be a solution for suburbanization in Poland, too?

On the photo a new office building in Utrecht-Alendorp Business District

034. Loveless

Too late for repentance,
You have to accept your death sentence.

4 Hero, Loveless

033. Dutch invention no.1

Ice skating as depicted on a 17th century painting entitled Ijsvermaak by Frederick Avercamp (1585-1634)
The Dutch started using skates in 13-14th century mostly for transporting goods. It was in the Middle Ages in Low Lands when blades have been added to the skates. The designed remained essentially unchanged until the present. First being a practical solution for transportation in winter time, the new activity was discovered to have a potential of becoming a sport only when all year long ice skating rinks have been discovered. This happened also in the Netherlands around year 1880 in the city of Amersfoort.

032. Why are you distracting me?

Note: Distraction as a method

031. Quote of the day

Relax. It's just another building. World is full of buildings.
Faiz Zohri

030. Rationality VS Crazyness

They say in the culture of the Netherlands one can find a mixture of rationality and crazyness. How can anyone stand such a strong contradiction within oneself? I have been always obsessed with investigating the factors that shape culture within the natural conditionings. It has not been a fair investigation I must admit, I have been rather concentrated on finding arguments that side my preconceived and imagined assumptions. Why are Dutch a mixture of rationality and crazyness then?

Back in Polish mountains the wind called Halny blows in the end of each winter. Then, from time to time there makes the news an information about increased number of suicides presumably caused by the wind. It's true that some humans are particularly vulnerable to alternating air preasure. When a strong and unexpected wind hits an unstable individual this might indeed cause a problem. Here in the Netherlands I felt creatively excited a couple of times just when it was blowing hard, although I think I was still quite far from committing a suicide.

Dwelling in the Netherlands has always been marked by a harsh relationship between the man and the sea. But it was habitable land that was always in shortages and step by step had to be stolen from the sea. Implementing complicated engineered structures and mechanism has always been a challenge. It required a lot of co-operation in society and personal discipline in an individual. Subordinating wind was crucial for the organization of communities but it still affected many individuals.

Is then the "land" - a mass, a definite structure - responsable for the rationality within the people as opposed to the "sea" or actually the "wind"- fluid or invisible undefined entities - determines the crazyness factor within us? Is this to be translated into the dialectics of form in the architecture? A relationship between a somber straight line and some funky dancing polycurve? What elements define us the most back in Poland?

029. Palermo shooting

028. Buildings as tools

Picture 1: An open-air model of the Zollverein industrial complex. Essen, Germany

Picture 2: Workshop inside the Kokerei building. Essen, Germany





027. Duende

Yesterday I went for a flamenco evening in one restaurant in the city center. There was a vocal, a guitar and a drum. Three people were playing, thirty people were listening, eating and drinking. What I heard was indeed full of energy and passion. Some of the few words the beautiful voice uttered and I managed to fish out were: esperanza de primavera. But they don't have a direct meaning here. Important was that the lady was singing about love, hate, friendship and death, notions present in everyone's life everyday.

I thought this: Flamenco has just the same content as any other folk and ethnic music around the world. The story is just being told in slightly different way, the special way the Flamenco nation sees it.

I felt comforted by the thought how we, the people of the planet Earth, are united by the mundane. I feel comforted time and again when I reflect on housing issues in architecture. A need for shelter is one of the most basic demands for humans and other species. Therefore designing shelters for architects should in fact be a mission full of devotion and compassion. Let's not be borded by the daily routine. Let's realize about the the beauty and importance of the mundane and find at least some amount of comfort there. Let's find our own version of beauty and tell others about it!

026. A sheet of paper found at UNStudio

025. Building as a body, client as a plant - Developing and testing a thesis

Conclusion preview:

Dear client. A scientific methodology has been developed for the design process of your house. We will establish if your place is in the world of animals or plants or somewhere in-between. A series of associations, abstractions and materializations will serve as necessary catalysts in the process. The final design will derive directly from the performed research. Please transfer the first payment to the account number specified in the tender document.

024. Objet trouvé

This is a 1920s house from north of Holland. A functional form is involving imagination. Is this enough or shall we look for less definition and more abstraction? Architectural tasks need a lot of consideration not only on the compositional level but also on the dialectics of every architectural element. How building touches the ground, how building articulates its entrance, what do the windows point at. - let's not take all these things for granted. Nobody will ever care to distinguish architecture from mere building engineering if not us.

Image of the house found on Nai's Flickr photostream