1. 15 December 2007

    Documentaries

    355 days ago

    I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).

    Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.

    Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.

    These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.

  2. 20 June 2005

    The Very Small Home

    Azby Brown

    1263 days ago

    Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.

  3. 26 May 2005

    The Long Emergency

    James Howard Kunstler

    1289 days ago

    Our world as it stands these days is on it’s way down, just as the production of the oil it’s leveraged begins to tank. The way the world reorganizes itself will be spectacularly different – more local, more sustainable, and yes harder – resembling somewhat the world of earlier epochs.

  4. 14 April 2005

    1330 days ago

    The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Architecture Review | Walker Art Center: An Expansion Gives New Life to an Old Box

    I’ve been walking the new Walker expansion grow for the last year or so, and it’s going to rock when it does open. I’ve always loved the museum1, and can’t wait for the reopening. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the architects behind the new space, seem to kick some real ass in designing a new venue for the coolest modern art museum I’ve ever been too.

    But the Walker’s new tower is clad in a pattern of gray aluminum panels that fade into the dull Minneapolis skyline rather than engage the eye, a minor but unfortunate blemish on an otherwise enchanting design.

    I disagree – I really like the aluminum panels. They shine – but not quite as much as stainless steel, and have wavy embossments in them which don’t fade into the skyline at all. Not what I would call a blemish, but tomato… But I guess it could have been even better:

    The final version [...] is far less hypnotic, especially from a distance, where the intricately worked surfaces are barely visible.

    1 googling for my name comes up with this, the webpage for something I did in fifth or sixth grade with the walker through my school. I’ve been ignoring it out of embarrassment for the last few years, but look at how kick-ass I am! But if I had know in advance this was all getting put on the internet I might have tried a little harder.

    via Kjell Olsen1330 days ago

  5. 04 January 2005

    1431 days ago

    Lagerling - objekt

    A small, sleek but crowded (and in this sense it’s a good thing) modern flat in Sweden(?)

    via Kjell Olsen1431 days ago

  6. Also somewhat recently

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