I LEGO NY

Christ, this is beautiful.

During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York. Christoph Niemann models symbols and snapshots of New York in Lego. [via archinect] His previous illustrations are great, simple and witty and smart and well-executed, and the Bathroom Art makes me want to go crazy tiling or just grin myself to death thinking about it.






IMAGES: CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

richard nicholson

I like typological photos a lot and am knee-deep in a small project with them. The mundane gets more interesting when aggregated, for me, and I like the mundane a lot to begin with. Finding a aggregated collection is like a year's supply of hand-flappingly, stutteringly exciting treats.

Richard Nicholson's Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light is a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms [via MeFi]. I think this might be at least a month's supply of awesome, and the text is great too.

What really got me excited was the East End Lock-Ups and Pram Sheds on his main page, after the series of vibrant portraits. I think flat-on, elevation-style photographs are firmly on my list of Favourite Things by now.


Image: Richard Nicholson

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Meanwhile back with the thoroughly mundane, I'm really enjoying my Instax [Mini] project. I'm not doing anything too stunning, but there's been one or two where I felt like I almost nailed it. So far, it's meeting its brief to combat joylessness.

astray

A mix cd for a swap on MeFi. There are times when I wonder whether I find mix swaps more anxious-making than fun, because I worry about being super-obvious and then I decide I'd rather make a mix of what I like, and then I wonder if things mesh only because I have a web of micro-associations between the songs, and maybe nobody will listen to it once they see it has _____ on it, and on... But I've found new things I like through them, and received beautiful post, so I join in like a sucker again and again.

This is heavy on my Westport staples, and as my music-listening's been a split nearly straight between melancholy and country-tinged on one hand and rap 101 on the other, a narrative of heavily-played songs pulling others in between them fell together...I think.

(I made Michael a rap cd for Christmas, because I didn't get it together for his birthday. I'm still exploring and figuring out what I really like, so I wouldn't inflict it on anyone who'd be shy to tell me it was shit. Or, you know, anyone I would hesitate to get coordinating tattoos with.)

The track list:

1. to go home - m. ward
2. leavin' on your mind - patsy cline
3. whiskey you're the devil - the clancy brothers, tommy makem + jack keenan
4. you will never see morning - the pine hill haints
5. home from the blues - coming soon
6. southern girl - your heart breaks
7. that summer feeling - jonathan richman + the modern lovers
8. here comes my baby - yo la tengo
9. brilliant grey - the waxwings
10. texas to ohio - damien jurado
11. bobby malone moves home - casiotone for the painfully alone
12. lonely weekends - jerry lee lewis
13. no fun - cap pas cap
14. so. central rain - r.e.m.
15. a minor place - bonnie 'prince' billy
16. born to run - paul baribeau + ginger alford
17. underground - kimya dawson

It's deffo less melancholy and more playful than the not entirely dissimilar one I made in June, which I still like but find it slightly difficult to hear without wanting to travel back in time and give my seven-months-ago self a hug. They're sort of a set, hence the map covers, although maybe I'm also a one-crap-trick-pony.

While it's a mark of great restraint that I kept poor, played-to-death June Carter Cash and Roy Orbison out of it, the repetition of Paul Baribeau and Ginger Alford covering Bruce Springsteen is because I still get a thrill every time I hear it. And I've heard the whole of Darkness on the Edge of Your Town a shocking number of times.

Oh, and the solipsism? I'm ready to shake it off any day now.

instax project - 1

I started a new project today, to take an Instax Mini photograph every day for about a month. (Longer might be fun but the film is expensive, so I'll start small.) Lately, I've been feeling like I come across as joyless, and that the things I find interesting are either a bit joyless or are utterly joyful but not that interesting to other people. This ain't right, and I'm trying to do something about it - this project is one tiny part of it.

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The Carrowbeg river this morning on my way to work. It's been stormy and raining heavily all weekend, and after seeing the river at a slow, flat trickle over Christmas, I've really noticed the gushing and often peat-coloured water in the past few days.

banyoles - MiAS Arquitectes

I've been thinking about this project all week, since flipping through the Urban Space + Landscape issue of DETAIL over tea at work. The most striking part initially is the unprotected openings to the irrigation canals - it's hard not to look and think, they were allowed to do that?

Once the health and safety reflex eases off, next comes a slow examination of every bit of the project shown. I love the angles of the cuts in the pavement, which remind me of the geometry in the paths of Jardi Botanic by Carlos Ferrater, in Barcelona. I love the margins of canal along the sides of the streets. I love the slim profile of the guard rails. I love the benches curling low on the pavement. And most of all, I love the paving.



It's travertine, which is local but seems incredibly extravagant over such a huge area. The colour and texture make it hard to place in age, and the paving pattern is this genius thing that looks like it's evolved over the life of the town, without seeming ersatz.

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MiAS is Josep Miàs and a long list of collaborators, based in Barcelona. I'm poking around the website wishing I had dug into it when I was involved in planning an architecture itinerary (map) in Barcelona last year. An intriguing project is the market in Barceloneta, with the text about the context reminding me to some extent of what my friend Miriam said about Barceloneta when I met her for a walk one evening while I was in town.

Also interesting is this:

Ever since I started, since my very first projects, I have translated drawing into wire. I believe our architecture describes precisely that which makes it possible, and tries to make visible those essential lines, necessary to its comprehension. I am not so interested in the structural purpose of these lines as I am in the role they have in the conception of the project. It is these lines that are responsible for verifying the potential of any drawing, its necessity.

Model images here. It's quite lovely, skeletons and paper lanterns, delicate and free three-dimensional sketches. I'm used to feeling excited about the clean, planar cards models that represent planar architecture, but there's curves in this that are quite persuasive to me, even aside from the projects represented.

ALL IMAGES FROM MiAS ARQUITECTES

darkness on the edge of town

I get Friday night euphoria, maybe as a habit from coasting to the end of an all-nighter and wanting to burn up all my remaining energy before the crash. In Westport, it's strange, because I don't know enough people to find company whenever I want it, and I don't want to lean too hard on the people I'm getting to know.

Coming off a week where I doubted my future here and then secured it as home again until the end of February, I felt a surge of love for the town and a surge of premature sadness after coming close to packing up and leaving it. I wrapped up warm and walked out to the quay, to sit drinking takeaway tea and watch the harbour channel lights blinking red and green below the stars.

I like the kind of bravery that's about stamina, about coping with change and loneliness and knotted inward challenges. It was never clear in Dublin how much the ambient threat, especially living in the Liberties, hemmed that desire in. I did walk through the city alone at night, walking just to see the streets and pass by people as they lived around me, but the threat is so much lower here that I can sit alone and isolated at night and know it's not asking for trouble. Loneliness seems very little about actually being alone, and more about feeling anchorless and cut off - I felt the same loneliness surrounded by friends and in a relationship as I do six months after moving to a town where I knew nobody. It's not a shortcoming.

I am an embarrassment when I love something or someone. It's frequent but it's never hyperbole: it's a rush of sentiment and a giant, messy, throbbing heart open to the world, and things are wrong when that stops.

In town, walking up into a vertical row of streetlights and buildings, nobody passes me without saying hello; I pass nobody without saying hello.

I came here thinking of it as escape and recovery, maybe recuperation - time to be by myself and step away from having my days full and from chasing heartbreak. It felt like anything I might care about would end as a lesson in "this is why we can't have nice things", and that was true at the start but it's changed. Having the chance to think about the rest of my life as a continuum rather than as a peak followed by decline or chasing to meet milestones, I am now wondering if this might be more than a place I visit, and I realise I'll get to choose.

I walked out to the quay listening to M. Ward, music that (aside from She & Him) seems like it was made for me and fits in a niche in my heart carved with just it in mind. Poison Cup is better the four-hundredth time than the first (A sip or a spoonful won't do - I want it all). To Go Home hit me in the gut tonight. I walked out to the quay with a surge of emotion burning off like I was putting it to use; I walked out to the quay walking hard.

Maybe just one more - Chinese Translation. And I said, what do you do with the pieces of a broken heart? and how can a man like me remain in the light? and if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

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Greendale has the most amazing map, the answer to the love letter to Westport I wrote in September/October. It's an enormous, beautiful thing and I think it'll be crawling deeper into my heart for a while. I think you need to see it.

baby strike

I spent August knitting furiously for two pending babies. The cardigans are both the Debbie Bliss Classic Baby Cardigan, both in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino. I don't have a secret raging brand loyalty - it's lovely yarn to knit with and comes in less anaemic colours than most baby lines, and her patterns are super-clear.

The cardigan for Charlie, my cousin and her husband's baby, is pistachio green and features a bizarro fuck-up on my part which made it sort of v-necked. I panicked about time and finished it, making the buttonholes to suit, and it's a little embarrassing but at least it wasn't a third arm.

My colleagues' baby Maud was born about a week later and her cardigan is a gorgeous deep red, because I reckoned her parents would be forgiving about the deviation from baby palette. I try, at least, to learn from my mistakes, and I managed to make this one button to the top without any unplanned distortion.

Baby knitting is super satisfying because a jumper takes less time and yarn than an adult scarf, but I'm hoping there's a respite in people's good news until I can find a new favourite pattern in the teeny-wee category.

obsessions make my life _____ and my work _____

I keep going back to looking at the winning design for the commemorative Dutch 5 Euro coin, for which the brief concerned 'the Netherlands and architecture'.

It's clever, but I'm not sure. Architecture represented as a list of names seems more like celebrity culture than relating to the built environment, especially if - as the artist's description mentioned - popularity in Google determined the name order. Sure, someone might be intrigued and go looking into, say, Nathalie de Vries just because they're intrigued by the name, but being interested or affected by the work and then finding out who's responsible seems more interesting than cementing Rem Koolhaas as a star.

The Queen's portrait also seems to suffer the same fate as any image made up of sparse points, which isn't too flattering. I love the idea of the books and their edges forming the outline of the country, but the books as a representation seems even further into celebrity and unrelated, external validation.

(It did remind me how many Dutch architects make work I like, though.)

I wonder whether it's ever possible to make a successful icon - not because architecture is any more special or complex, necessarily, than the other things distilled into a symbol. The architecture of big names and awards is made up of photographs, sometimes rendering, and maybe even drawings, and those images come to represent the buildings for the huge percentage of the world who will not make it to the buildings or spaces themselves. It's a pity that the image would supplant the thing itself, the environment constructed for its users and inhabitants and passers-by and passers-through, and reducing it further in this way loses even the small remaining connection, like band names written on the canvas schoolbags of kids who can't hear, like food as menus that will never be tasted.

The reverse faces of Euro banknotes are just as reductive, though. Styles, periods, names and rules, like a frozen lesson in art appreciation that fails to engage and stays as an aesthetic elite, beauty for highbrow smalltalk's sake.

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Photo by rotkehlchen

Another project involving Euro coins which has been on my mind lately is Sagmeister's obsessions make my life worse and my work better. It's my favourite project in THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN MY LIFE SO FAR, and its fate is almost as interesting as the piece itself.