eca degree show 2005
Come see the work in progress that has been consuming my life for the past few months (aka my architecture degree project) at Edinburgh College of Art from Friday 24th June. Project website coming soon! [eca degree show website]
Nearly finished!
IMGP4776 Originally uploaded by scottishchris. Just finished our final pinup for the degree exams which happen over the next couple of weeks…Very tired. Going to the pub. Now.
Turning flags into graphical propaganda
By Lisbon advertising firm Foote Cone & Belding. [Full Campaign selection] via Newsdesigner.com
Articles on the city
No proper posts recently or for the next few weeks while things get hot in the studio. In the meantime, some recent writings on the city: Metropolis reckons there aren’t enough yuppies to go around and that “to retain an important role in the future, a city needs upwardly mobile people whose families and businesses [...]
Changing cultural landscapes under climate change
The permanent snowy peak of Kilimanjaro has been a constant for 11,000 years, but not for much longer. Initial estimates suggested the snow might disappear in 2015, but revisions have brought the date to the next few years. “Recent photos show that very little of the mountain’s snow remains; what’s left will probably be gone [...]
Take one powerful projector, several national monuments and some wacky images
I know nothing more about this than what shows up in the slideshow (click ‘weiter’ to move to the next slide) [Monuments of Switzerland] via waxy.org
Recent architectural awards
A couple of recent architectural awards. Firstly: Thom Mayne Named 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and, ahem, seeing as we’re on the subject of awards: 2004 Edinburgh Architectural Association Awards – J R Mackay Medal
"6000 miles" at The Lighthouse
From 25 March – 7 June 05, this exhibition will feature responses from Blockarchitecture gm + ad Architects, Graven Images, GROSS. MAX. Landscape Architects, Wiszniewski Thomson Architects to the changing coastline of Scotland. 6000 miles tells the story of this changing landscape and speculates upon how our relationship with the edge of the nation might [...]
Emergency buildings – inflatable structures impregnated with cement
Much cheaper than traditional emergency shelters, quick to erect and sterile, the bags just need water (which you don’t even have to measure) and air to form thin-walled compressive structures. Markus Hohl, a lecturer on the Industrial Design Engineering course, praised the successful teamwork of Crawford and Brewin. “They’ve come up with a design that [...]
David Skinner Memorial Lecture 2005: Christophe Girot
Christophe Girot, Chair of Landscape at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology will be the guest speaker for this year’s David Skinner Memorial Lecture to be given at Edinburgh College of Art. Christophe Girot’s designs are based on simple geometry and restrained plant vocabulary. Invaliden Park in Berlin, completed in 1997, won critical acclaim. The [...]
Digtal Shelter Kit
“DIGITAL SHELTER KIT focused in developed a shelter from scanscapes that provided not only a technical but also an aesthetic view to this mode of inhabitation in the context of the city. This proposal also provides a visual aid for inhabiting this new urban condition: a shelter that reveals the surveillance nature of our environment. [...]
gravestmor { tales of architectural propaganda }
You’ve got to love a website that features a machine praying in a church in Milan (see above), a picture of the Scottish Parliament titled in such a way that will guarentee you never regard it in the same light again and has ‘architectural porn’ as a category for the writer. More please. [gravestmor]
Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape
Opening tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art and running until May 16th, “Groundswell” has an diverse lineup of firms and projects with old favourites such as West 8′s Schouwburgplein thrown in for good measure. It’s good to see that ‘traditional’ landscape architects (those that don’t necessarily build buildings but concentrate on the landscape) are [...]
Introducing Muji home
Muji, Japanese designers of fine ‘no-brand’ home products of the spare and grey persuasion, is moving into the architectural world. Their design for a single bedroom unit uses a central atrium with a mezzanine bedroom floor. All dimensions fit snuggly with standard Muji shelving and storage solutions and so there is a generous amount of [...]
Happy birthday hello kitty
Hello Kitty is 30, and to celebrate, Sanrio commissioned a crop circle in her honour. Obviously. “It could only be viewed from the air — which was not a problem since every flight heading south from Heathrow went directly over it.Our goal was to make something that would add to the mystique of Hello Kitty’s [...]
Get pumped! It’s Super Sunday!
Go Eagles! Today the Philadelphia Eagles play the New England Patriots in SuperBowl XXXIX. This SuperBowl has been a long time coming, with the Eagles losing in the Championship finals the past 3 years. I’m really hoping they win tonight, and will be staying up late watching. This is their first season in the new [...]
Ben C. Collier – Estimating the Future
China is constructing faster than we can even imagine (10 weeks for a full construction set for a 10-storey tower etc etc…). Badarchitecture is one website which documents the more garish of these new constructions, and they recently featured the photography of Ben Collier who has been documenting the illustrated hoardings that surround the many [...]
Re-using the big box
As K-mart, Walmart etc abandon their sheds to move onto their next victim, they leave behind a specific building type that is now beginning to be reused in surprising renovations: “Julia Christensen began investigating how Communities are Re-Using the Big Box in January of 2004. Throughout the spring and summer of 2004, she traveled over [...]
Christo Jean-Cluade Central Park project to open Feb 2005
The latest work by artists Christo and Jean-Claude will be constructed in Central Park, New York from January 2005, with official opening in February. The renderings are as atmospheric and beautiful as always, but the truly breathtaking aspect of the project is the sheer scale of the undertaking. Is it really possible? “The 7500 Gates, [...]
Tokyo’s “G-Cans project”
“The G-Cans Project is a massive project, begun 12 years ago, to build infrastructure for preventing overflow of the major rivers and waterways spidering the city (A serious problem for Tokyo during rainy-season and typhoon season). The underground waterway is the largest in the world and sports five 32m diameter, 65m deep concrete containment silos [...]
Ballet of the Steel Dinosaurs on Radio Scotland
The Arts Show on Radio Scotland interviewed me yesterday about the Ballet of the Steel Dinosaurs competition project. The piece was broadcast as the penultimate segment of their show today. You can listen to the whole of the archived show for the next week here. The segment about the cranes is available as a 2Mb [...]
Visit to St. Peter’s Seminary, Cardross
A week ago, we visited the fantastic modernist shell that is Gillespie Kidd and Coia’s Seminary for the Archdiocese of Glasgow. Inhabited for only a few years, insufficient student numbers, construction and maintainance problems and a change in the methods of training priests led to its abandonment. It stands, ruined, in a fantastic woodland setting [...]