However as this is a new company they many not yet know how much will be donated, yet it appears there is a partnership. It will be interesting to see if we ever find out how much is actually donated that is verifiable. It’s a shame that intelligent consumers are so leery of this type of site, yet we must be if we are going to make a difference.

Its always important to know….to really know where you send your money, or who you support or what companies you use. Especially when you want your actions to be for a greater good you need to be especially careful.

A lot of what is used by those guys on their websites does not add up. Google has already banned their “save the forest” part of the business from using their platform. If Google banned them, they must be sure that they are not really donating 80 or 90% of the money as they claim.

I can understand the reason for writing the article. A lot of newspapers picked up the story. If you look at it it was a paid press release that was distributed to news agencies and journalists. Most news services just copied the press release. It was an easy way to write an interesting article. The problem with this is that this is one of many websites from the same guy all saying they are just donating money. Donating money seems to be a good business as they are growing fast and being able to afford really expensive websites and marketing material.

Thumbs up to you guys for making me look deeper into Ecosia, Forestle & company.

You don’t see a lot of “fun” mortgages such as the offset mortgages I keep reading about with envy

More more!

In fact pretty much all of the areas fall into the same category. Lutakko and Arabia just being modern versions of that. What makes me happy is that all of the areas are ones that are close to the city centers (or have an easy access to it) and thus use services of it.

Thanks, yes it was an inspiring evening I really want to help in some way….just going to go and check your website now!

try here

I’m nothing to do with it officially you should visit the website I linked to and follow your nose from there…

thx for shearing

I am a Spanish girl interested in Design and I think that you blog is very interesting.

Please visit my own blog if you have some time:

http://gooddis.blogspot.com/

Kisses,
Carmen

Nothing on the web about it – totally crazy! I’m not advocating a twitter account for a Lecture or anything but doesn’t someone at safa / Aalto Institute want to get the message out? (still looking for a babysitter or I will have to read up your report about it?)

It seems interesting, but I might in Oulu presenting some school projects.

Is this British humor or what? )

I don’t like this project. Looks heavy and unproportional… If you want to make something heavy please take care of proportions a little bit… :I

Looking FF for your words! I’m feeling really curious .

Awsome post BTW.

But yeah, it is a very cold wind that’s blowing.

And what is your opinion?

Yes it is…! 3d visualizations suc*$ sometimes! Take a lot of time and give a sensation of emptiness when it is finished…

I am quite familiar with this sensation… )

(<<<Just finished a small 3d building for rapid prototyping today .

What do you have inside your toolbox Lewis?

The subject is very interesting BTW… I agree that the whole teory looks simplistic

Maybe we should also study water reflexion properties because It looks similar to white… And the planet has a huge water surface…

Just the application to the real world kind of makes me raise a whole load of questions like….what percentage of the reflected heat is absorbed by the atmosphere?..what co2 saving would you really get in real life? etc….

I end up with the feeling it’s way too simplistic an argument, so I’ll still be sticking with green roofs.

Second: he is proposing to “paint” some surfaces with white and others not… What about the amount of reflexion on non-white surfaces inside huge cities (i mean… white reflexion X non white surfaces; diferent heights)? That’s dangerous! People can read it wrong and the result an be catastrofic…

I don’t like this idea… Fisrt thing to stop global warming is to stop doing things and low down consumism a lot!

Well i guess its time to turn my computer off ) Good night for all!

More: http://www.blendernation.com/2009/01/05/blender-used-for-hospital-design/

Geometry and proportion make great architecture — ‘ugly’, like ‘mediocrity’, can be ascribed to buildings lacking them, regardless of style, size, cost or finish. Although a modest and austere box, the building illustrated above has a playful asymmetrical geometry, and something about the place suggests Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. But ‘ugly’ also has a lot to do with context, specifically its violation. The building would probably be considered daring and chic in a natural setting like his, but would cause heart failure if dropped into neoclassical Williamsburg, Virginia. In that, taste and appropriateness (not ego) are key.

Like… Sorry i don’t get it…

Can you add something?

Thank you!

Don’t get me wrong I generally like H&M’s work, and hope it turns out to be jewel on Helsinki’s waterfront, but I wonder if it needs to fight so hard to be ‘different’ for the sake of it? If the recession doesn’t kill it off that is…

Fu%3ing beutyfull!

@enndee,
H&dM proposals are a little worrying to be honest. I posted about them here. It’s really unclear to me just how good or bad the proposals are.

@Jukka,
Sounds like you have just about written your own blogging platform, I’m suitably impressed! Maybe one day we will get to see it.

I never got the WordPress (or any other blog-engine) to do all the things I wanted it to do, not matter how much I tweaked and added plugins. Usually the tweaking would’ve required such a huge amount of work that using a ready-made engine didn’t make any sense. Finally I decided to do my own.

And even if I haven’t (yet) gotten where I want to go with this approach, at least I’m moving there slowly.
I must admit that some of the new projects that are out there can do most of the stuff I want, but not quite… Like I’d like to have the blogging features from WordPress, lifestream capabilities from Sweetcron, quotes from Tumblr, status updates ála Jaiku etc One feature from there and one from here and polish it all with a nice AJAX interface.

Currently I have the backend done. The backend takes care of the tags, scheduling, database queries, searches…

In theory, all should need to do is to code a very simple plug-in for a service/feature and that would be it. In reality, I just haven’t taken the time to do it.

PS. Have you seen the H&dM hotel proposals yet?

on those crazy days when i try to go messing with my own i do tend to get bogged down in “start again” or “tweak some more”. i always tweak some more and invariably break somethings

if you use dreamweaver i really liked this: http://www.themedreamer.com/ – i’ll have a look at the resources you mentioned the next time i have a fit of madness and go messing with php

I think photography generally is daily becoming more like text and hypertext. In that it becomes links, dairy, commentary, memo, speach, fiction, and still maybe sometimes art. It is all of these things now wheras before like in cinema the shear impact of seeing a mirror to our reality gave it a kind of shiny gravitas which has almost worn off.

But like the great books, recognising truly great photography from the surrounding noise is hard, but maybe a worthwhile search non the less.

Oh and by the way have you read Errol Morriss’piece in the NYT about the Roger Fenton photo ‘In The Valley Of Death‘ it’s one of the best bits of journalism I’ve read…Ever.

As for the gallery link you are right, I thought it contained all the entries but it seems not. I’ve updated the main post with a link to the Holl project on his website that has some excellent drawings.

But like many, having taken the two year photography course in higher education, then onto university with our own dedicated photographer coaching us in the architecture school…my interest has completely dried up – replaced completely with an enduring admiration for real wold creativity – painting and architecture.

Maybe its the digital revolution, I mean these days if you are missing a holiday snap, you can grab ‘that view that I missed’ from Flikr and even photoshop out the loud American standing beside the hand rail and replace it with missing scenery taken from an identical photo, also loaded onto Flikr or sim.

Photography seems have lost the risk element, which makes it less amazing. Imagine if watercolour painting had an eraser. Don’t ask how, but imagine if you could lay on the colour wash, then change your mind and take it off again. I think that’s lost from photography – there now 1000 photos in a shoot rather than 24 or 36. And there is no suspense as you whip open the envelope to view the developed shots to find that they are all duds, or the wonderful feeling of seeing the image develop in the liquid of the developing tray.

However, I think that the future beyond photography is interesting but I don’t know what that means. In a world full of perfect images – what will we crave and where will we find the satisfaction for it.

I think ‘live’ is where we might end up. We just want live, lots of it – hence the return of the live concert in force on the global circuit. But as I say, I’m not exactly sure where this leaves us with the still image – as believable or unbelievable as it may be.

“not just a post-modern abstract philosophical theory bootstrapped onto architectural thought like so many post-modern theories over the last 20 years”

is a classic…I’m sure we all have similar misgivings for the hoodwinking and ‘wool over the eyes’ that the academic community has subjected architecture and art students to over the years.

I’m sure skating can re-interpret the way we experience the city, but skaters grow up and grow out of thrill seeking. The thing that remains, is of course, the friendships skaters made with each other in all those years on the streets – which are then played out in a whole new way – a much more sustainable and amicable way, amongst the urban fabric.

I notice that tagging has gone crazy in Espoo recently, with Espoo Hardcore hitting a number of buildings along Länsiväylä. Yes, I could appreciate this new urban experience, treat it as a changing urban wallpaper expressing the feelings of restlessness and championship from the cities aspiring creative class…or I can just say that its as artistic as starring at a car crash and it just ruins idyllic city moments (like the quaint yellow cottage on Karhusaari – now completely splashed in clashing tones)

Banksy can graffiti. He adds. I lived in Shoreditch for 7 years. Banksy was the local hero.

Espoo Hardcore is pure vanity. It replaces.

Maybe its like the multi-valence postmodern theory (but instead of taking a ‘reading’ of an aesthetic, take a reading of ‘program’. Any activity which has a single meaning or completely dominant use is a detraction. Things like H&D’s new Madrid gallery, which includes external public (probably skaters too sadly) space on the ground floor, makes for a rich addition to the urban story – even if it’s so small – it’s inclusive. Of course, once the skaters move in, anyone else in there sheltering from the sun, will just have to move on to be able to hear themselves think…

Thanks for the comment. I had a few friends who used to skate so guess I was on the fringes of the skater fraternity without ever really being one. Maybe I’m looking at their world in a slightly longing and therefore uncritical way. So the point you make about it being an exclusive activity and even agressive to non skaters did not occur to me and is very well made.

Skating in of itself has a conciously maintained ant-social attitude to non skaters I think, and the act of skating a city itself you could say makes others just additional hazards for the skater to overcome. Still spatial and city rebellion are good things to learn from.

Maybe it’s something to do how overplayed skaters are in the understanding of city. For starters – I would venture to say that they utilize the city in inovative ways but they are an exclusive activity – they don’t add – they replace ‘use’: I wonder how many people are actually happy when the skaters turn up on, I can’t remember ever seeing an audience for the skaters on Southbank in London – and it seemed people were simply relieved when they had gone after coming behind them on the pavement.

I’ve watched plenty of skaters, watched the movies, kicked a few ollies and even had shared a bowl or two with them on the trick bmx.

The movies are amazing but the real life drama played out on handrails, stairs, stone seats etc around the city is much more mundane.

..need to stop there, back to work

I got a sense of what it might be like to be a drug addict when I became temporarily obsessed by Panini trading cards during the Euro 2008 football championships. For a while they were in quite short supply, and not wishing to frequent certain shops too often, I started to form a mental map of the city based on the retail outlets that stocked such goodies, a grid of likelihoods and potentialities. I would go on long mazey journeys seeking out my fix. For a while, London was refigured purely on it’s density of trading card stockists. I’m sure it’s the same for skateboarders.

(You know you’re in trouble when you start hiding packs of trading cards around the house so your girlfriend doesn’t find out how much time and money you’re spending on them).

No joke: this is Joe living my life.

(h/t: Lewism)
……

First thanks for stopping by. Yes Mimoa has come along way in a short time infact it’s starting to become indispensable. My suggestions turned out to be pretty good predictions too, so I’m going to have to update this post I can see.

Just missing the Google Sketchup suggestion!

Cool.

There are maps like those you mention in the last paragraph of this post. They’re a type of haptic map, originally intended for use by the blind. I haven’t seen any applications using a cell phone, but that’s certainly a great idea.

I couldn’t find an immediately useful resource, so here’s a link to an assemblage of links and resources for you to wade through:

http://blindreaders.info/mapgraph.html

Greetings from Brasil,

ChicO.

My view is yes, probably. The book lovingly discusses the particular historical, natural and social contexts that have shaped Scandinavian architecture – and, I hope, this will continue to be the case, as architects design in response to, and complement, those contexts.

besides, BBC Foreign Correspondent came up with Vanuatu being number one happy land recently, interviewing some bloke who owned a tropical island but didn’t have a cent to his name – but was happy as a butchers dog with his family within coconut throw away and – yes, well plenty of fish (the edible variety) in his sea – more than enough to sell should he venture for some indulgent luxury like perfumed soap or toothpaste.

..he’d just better keep his fingers crossed that Bush’s disregard for sea level rise predictions are science afterall..

H&dM were and probably will always be best at materials and the ‘materialisation’ of a project. I would cite Goetz, SBB, Allianz Arena just as the tip of the iceberg to illustrate my case.

However they seem to me very average in space planning and spatial design.

So this project will really succeed or fail purely on this waveform glass cladding. That case really is still there to be proven.

Have you read the latest ark magazine by the way, they really don’t like the whole scheme, and bring up a number of important points?

One last thing, I don’t think a very average plan is necessarily a big problem for the design to be sucessful, but size, cladding and realtionship with the waterfront are really all key here and that’s all still to be proved for me.

The wave form glass cladding may be a redeeming feature, but who knows how the value engineering will drive things. Finland has its own brilliant architects, do we really need a clever and aptly successful Swiss bloke with a second-rate idea watered down by harsh commercial decisions? (hey it looks like a ice palace – not particularly innovative)

Charlie

Since I don’t, currently, really have a place were to post this, I post the sentences here, if that’s allright by you? I promise my blog will be running soon and I can repost there and tag people too

For Perret, reinforced concrete was the perfect homogeneous system with which to reconcile the two-hundred-year-old schism lying at the very heart of the Greco-Gothic ideal, that is to say, to combine the asperities of Platonic form with the tectonic expressivity of structural rationalism. Three seminal buildings testify to Perret’s synthetic approach, as he passes from a brilliant adaptation of the precepts of Viollet-le-Duc to the more idealized forms of classicized rationalism in which he would, nonetheless, remain committed to the primacy of the frame. The three buildings in succession are the Casino at St.-Malo (1899), an apartment block at 25 bis rue Franklin, Paris (1903), and a four-story parking garage completed in the rue Ponthieu, Paris, in 1905.