Paris Post-it Wars

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Paris is in the grip of a post-it war:

Hostilities were first engaged on the gleaming facades of Montreuil office park, east of Paris, home to gaming giant Ubisoft and BNP-Paribas bank’s IT systems. The conflict has since spread to the business district of La Défense, and to the equally besuited enclave of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which houses France’s greatest concentration of telecoms and media companies. In fact, across the French capital, the summer has been enlivened by a corporate collage contest known as La guerre des Post-it (the Post-it wars).

Two questions spring to mind immediately, what is it about the French that they seem to be all born Situationists, and I wonder if the war could be spread to Leppävaara?

Of course a website has started in tribute to it. Postitwar.com. Here is a video also.

Guggenheim Redux

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A couple of bloggers I follow report on last weeks interview in HS about the Guggenheim proposal in Helsinki. JHJ & Arkkivahti. Following on from my post about the Guggenheim, its clear that the city are serious. But if I was to make a crazy guess it would be that the Katajanokka site, important and controversial as it is, is part of the leverage that the city will make to get the funding it needs. World class site , world class client….needs world class funding.

For fairness I’ll note that in this economic climate it might be the only realistic way to get the Guggenheim here.  I’m not totally opposed to the scheme but I stand by my earlier words, there are other alternatives that are better. The Didrichen could be approached, or even inviting the hermitage from St.Petersberg might be more interesting and relevant for the city.

Finnish Wine

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Temola Winery

The most northerly wine in the world is produced in Olkiluoto in Finland1 with the help of nuclear powered waste water. But what I find more interesting is that Finland actually has a small network of farms making their own wine from Finnish berries (Blackcurrent, Blueberry, Whitecurrent, Cloudberry). Who’d have guessed that there is a nascent wine industry here.

There are signs of a kind of underground renaissance in Finnish food but it’s two faced with the basic food industry mainly monopolised and industrialised. I wish we could get back to producing, and eating in a more natural and direct way.

  1. according to wikipedia [↩]

101 Things I learned in Architecture School

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101 Things I Learned in Architecture School 101  Things I learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. (Amazon .co.uk / .com)

A friend loaned this book to me and before I hand it back, long overdue, I thought I’d write a few things about it. I read it through once, at the beginning of my loan from cover to cover, then again coming back and dipping when the book happened to appear on my radar as it did from time to time.

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Soulreasons

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I have been helping my Dad set up his own blog. It’s called soulreasons. Drop by to read writings on consciousness and other phiosophical issues.

Summer Listings

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So I’m about to go on holiday for a month and with about 30 half finished posts, 3 or 4  half read books at home and a partially updated website, this is all par for the course so I’m not going to worry about updating anything in particular (also par for the course).

It might be worth pointing out a few things about the redesign though. Firstly its based on Scherzo by Leon Paternoster, go over there and check it out. It’s html5 and a responsive design try checking it out by resizing your browser, then look at it on your phone. Also it supports Internet Explorer with the respect it deserves, so try using ie8 or up.The redesign was prompted by a rethinking by me of my footprint on the web.

With the partial demise and rebirth of delicious and the current stagnation of flickr both services that got me into the social side of the web I have kind of rethought this webspace as the safest and only place to really put my non physical stuff. Mandy Brown summed up better than I could say about my attitude to how things are preserved on the web. Everything else then, twitter, facebook, whatever, is just a conduit, and a conduit that will close or monetise my stuff at some point in the future in a way I can’t accept.

So everything else from now on becomes a place through which I go. Everything that’s really mine stays here. That means that I’ve started a shadow site called hyper.lewism which is just my collection of things I do on the web whether it be bookmark, tweet or comment I want to keep or find a building or picture I like. lewism stays as it is mostly my thoughts about the built environment, hyper.lewism is a bunker and linkblog of everything else I’m interested on the web that’s mirrred back to me so I can keep it. We will see how it goes.

Anyway in the real world I have some major things to do to sort out our new house and I’ve been thinking about how we live in conjunction with that. So hacked from Saul Griffiths‘ talk & Jyri Engeströms‘ list here is a rough list of how I’m going to enjoy my summer a little better.

  • Eat Less and More Healthily.
  • Exercise More.
  • Spend more time with my family.
  • Live Closer together (in a philisophical way also).
  • Breathe cleaner air.
  • Drink cleaner water.
  • Relax & Listen to some muisc.

Serlachius Competition Results

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The art gallery Serlachius has just announced the reults of it’s international competition for a new gallery wing. MX_SI studio from Spain won with a really beautiful and tasteful entry. The results pdf is worth reading as there were quite a few good entries. I knew a few people who entered and they both put their buildings on the harder and more interesting side of the site but only one of the top entries is on that side.

Conformity and Experimentation in Architecture some notes

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Three weeks ago I attended my office Spring day at the Dipoli1 building in Otaniemi. It was my first time visiting this slightly less well known Finnish design classic. At the time it was built it was apparently controversial and a ‘brave’ building. I couldn’t really see it form the outside. It has a kind of Elementalism a raw natural aesthetic of rock and tree cover, at least that was my interpretation. Something maybe between Brutalism and Romanticism where you can see these ideas, cross over to good effect. Anyone even vaguely familiar with Finland will realise these are themes played out in public and private in Finnish society and their art and as such it’s really nice to see them so clearly referenced and effected in a building.

Continue reading Conformity and Experimentation in Architecture some notes

  1. Dipoli is by Reima and Raila Pietilä 1966 [↩]

Helsinki is 1st in July/Aug Monocle Magazines most liveable city survey (see video) but 13th in ECA most expensive city survey.

Update: and there is alot in Monocles weekly podcast about Helsinki, including an interview with Dan Hill of Sitra.

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Finland Built Modern Libya

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A nice article in HS about the Finnish construction industry in Libya through the 80′s which was as a market second only to Russia for them. There are lots of quotes here including a good one about having to remember about the different social and cultural structures they had to design for;

The dwellings in Ras Lanuf had to be big – an average 160 square metres. This is because there are no one-person households in Libya. The elderly and unmarried siblings live under the same roof with the nuclear family. The living rooms had to be big so that the men of the village would fit in to hold meetings. Women and children needed space of their own. When bathrooms were built it was important that the toilets did not point toward Mecca. -Pentti Murole

Our old company I know was involved in projects in Libya as well as other parts of Africa at that time, how much of it now rubble I don’t know.

Glancey Rips into Modern Helsinki

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Helsingin Sanomat took Jonathan Glancey for a tour around Helsinki and published the results yesterday1 in the Sunday paper. He didn’t like the modern stuff. Not at all. Ruohlanti, Kamppi, Eiranranta, Töölönlahti all got criticised. This goes along with his luke warm criticism of the new Music Center from last month. All the modern stuff could be from anywhere, like its been dropped in by helicopter. What was good? The Old White church and square and the Jugendstil stuff.

My reaction would be too long to unpack fully here, I see his point and agree with much but I have some big reservations too. Ruohlahti and Kamppi all qualify for at least a little praise, and the old Carl Ludwig Engel Church and Square is no less dropped from a helicopter (it would have to be a steampunk helicopter wouldn’t it!)  than the modern stuff he criticizes in the early 21st century! The key point the Glancey makes about places like Ruohlahti and Salmisaari for example in how they (fail to) meet the street and work as part of the city which is very valid, but does certainly not apply to Kamppi which is a great throbbing, living development…….however it looks kind of samey! Although Glancey is more right than he is wrong this kind of melange of Architectural criticism and place tourism is a little too breezy. Perhaps its just a problem when a critic is dropped in from a Helicopter.

  1. This article is in Finnish and only a part of what appeared yesterday. I’ll add to it if HS take the rest down from behind their paywall! [↩]

“We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” Jobs told the Council members, “Architecture students will come here to see this.” Ideally Apple wants to move into the campus in 2015. (via)

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A great post at bldgblog about slow landslides.

For more than a month now, a “slow-motion landslide” near the New York/Vermont border has been dismantling a small town, day by day, square foot by square foot.

These are natural unlike the slow moving destruction at Kiruna.

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Lacking Concept of Time or not

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The Amondawa tribe in Amazon discovered in 1986 have no concept of  abstract time according to a study from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil.

We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time…Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of event,….What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occurring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.

Evidence for this includes that the people do not refer to their ages, but that they take different names at different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

Other theorists are not so sure however. When a tribe with a limited vocabulary refers to things in the external world time might not be mapped onto it. In other words the Amondawa might well experience and understand time as we do, its just that it isn’t or can’t be articulated within the language…..(via)

Mikael Granlund goal against Russia in the 2011 Ice Hockey World Championship Semi Final.

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South Harbour Competition

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The south Harbour right at the centre of Helsinki is subject of an open international design competition running until september of this year, see southharbour.fi. This is the most difficult, controversial area to develop in Finland at the moment. Most everyone agrees that it needs a major overhaul but what to do? Since the Herzog & DeMeuron hotel was cancelled last year the city has responded well to the critics and called for an open design competition. I’m looking forward to seeing some bold proposals.