-Another review this week. Not quite the disaster of 2 weeks ago, though it was certainly an improvement. Mateo said no less two times, it was the best images I had produced all semester. He never said it was good, or that the design itself was okay-- but certainly better than what I got two weeks ago.

-I've been watching this stuff about UC's budget cuts via the internet. I don't really know all the details, but is this 931million figure correct? If these numbers were passed on from the state, shouldn't protests be directed at the state level? It would seem like the hands of the university system are tied to generating 931million in one way or another.

-Another political debate--- but this time on my side of the pond. In Switzerland there is a fierce battle ragging over a proposed ban on new construction of Minarets at mosques. These posters have been put up all over the city and I am sure the rest of the country as well.

Here is the poster, it is quite scary.


And here is the logo of the SVP (the political parties largely behind the initiative)


My head is pounding from all the subliminal messages that just got rammed into it. More information about the controversy here.

Themals Vals this weekend. Hoping for snow.

Oh yes-- and buying a Thanksgiving turkey (Turten) in Zeurich is not easy. For future reference, they have frozen turkeys at Migros (the 10th place I went) but none bigger than 6.2Kg. And they still cost an arm and a leg.

Hello everyone, below is the mission statement of my project:

The community of the Niger-Delta have witnessed the slow poisoning of their waters and destruction of vegetation and agricultural land by oil spills which occur during petroleum operations. There has been less concern and effective effort on the part of the government, let alone the oil companies to control the environmental problems with their operations.

All people have the right to self-determination, by virtue of that right they freely can pursue their economic, social and cultural development, create their own energy with their natural resources run by the people, ‘A community of self generators’.

I NEED HELP ON HOW BEST TO REPRESENT NIGERIA, BE IT ABSTRACT, ARTEFACT, INSTALLATION OR ARCHITECTURAL.

Any comment welcomed.

Abu

On my desk are a number of things:
1 book by the philosopher Lacan which explains where the origins of serial killing behavior lie. This is for a paper on Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture.

13 kenetic sculptures in lacra which bloom open or closed as passers by pull and push the wires embedded within.

1 Arduino board, 4 working servos, 2 burnt out servos, 1 hacked power supply, 2 flex sensors and a tiny ‘zzzzzzzzzz’ sound as it does its thing. These will eventually be hooked up to the lacra sculptures

Trying to crawl up my desk is 1 light sensing robot that obviously feels my labtop screen is the preverbal light at the end of the tunnel.

It is fairly common to be confronted with such a diversity of objects at the DRL in the morning, all begging for attention and potentially dangerous to touch.

TODAY

Garth Myers, University of Kansas
Informality In African Cities

5:30 pm
KSA Auditorium
FREE



See you there!

The Return of Nature is apparently a series of symposia held at Harvard GSD in which a historian, a theorist, and a hysterical woman discuss--and I quote here from the official description--"the question of architecture's autonomy in relation to contemporary debates." Each of the three panelists presents a thesis, perhaps positioned polemically relative to the other two, and then engage in discussion: first, among just the three panelists; second, taking questions typically from the bigwigs (or the big haired, in a few prominent cases) in the front row; and third and finally from members of the peanut gallery. These events have been heady and entertaining, and very well attended. The conversations have been a bit too glib and theatrical to get at some of the potential intersections between the three presentations in an orderly (and therefore accessible, for us little peanuts) manner, but overall they've been pretty exciting.

One of my professors, Michael Hays, was on the panel tonight and I thought he gave us a very lucid and touching moment in a response to an audience question. This is a very loose paraphrase, but what he said is that the reason why he's so interested in the sublime (a topic to which he's returned frequently this semester in his lectures) is because in a world where everything has become so ever-available and immediate, it has to do with negative reasoning, in that it calls up and faces that which is absent. In this anecdotal and rather garbled form, this may not seem like that profound of a comment, but coming at the end of an event that saw both a good amount of high-level discourse as well as tussling egos and extravagant claims, this very simple and heartfelt statement of one person's position somehow struck a chord with me.

Anyways. That was the third installment of this series, but we have not yet had the second, which unfortunately had to be postponed. But I really hope to see Liz Diller, Mark Jarzombek, and Andrew Payne up there at the front of Piper auditorium sometime very soon.

Took a two-week trip to Thailand with my brother... for research purposes (cough cough)..

Really though, I find myself having to be very critical of observations here, navigating the chasm between A) business-as-usual/nothing special Tokyo and B) hey! this could something interesting..



























So, even though traveling offers a somewhat naive perspective... its always refreshing to come back with new state of mind...

On a sidenote, if anyone is interested in the Yakuza among other things culturally interesting, take a look at Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice... he was on the Daily Show two days ago



I'll try to post some of my thoughts for thesis soon; until then.

Manila. This ain't no vanilla. Stinking hot sweat stepping over fish heads pig intestines. Big guy with a big backpack on getting looks getting stared at squeezing through the market crowd. Jeepneys belching smoke choke cover the face no use no way out but through. Swimming through air hop on a tricycle munching a 3 peso donut motors rip the air horns honking in your ear. No way out but through.



One day later on a bus stop. Stop. Slow delicious AC watching Ghost Patrick Swayze on the way out of Manila takes eternity. Hello Angeles City Sin City place where the air force dudes bought booze bought girls lived it up til Pinatubo popped. Philippines senate said no more bases 1991 adios soldiers packin it out under two feet of ash looters come in backlash. Casino man business man Philippino Air Force man keepin' the girls workin Sin City still alive. Walkin' down the main drag through girls hangin on my arm I'm saying "I got a wife" that doesn't seem to matter I need to scatter.




On the old base people camping out selling flutes. Duty free shop big aisles American crap just like the base commisary before jars of peanut butter fake nacho cheese as seen on TV. Near the Philippino barracks barber shop I go in ask for "Air Force Cut".




Clean cut hit the streets catch a flight to Guam by the skin of my teeth. I am ready for the military island paradise.

Hello Archinect,

I wanted to follow up on last week’s post with some thoughtful prose about the GSD, my experience of it so far, and what I’m learning. But—and maybe this is the best sign that I’m starting to be a real architecture student—I can’t seem to muster up the words. So I’ll show you some images and will try to narrate them the best I can.

The best way I can describe what it’s like to be here—and this probably goes for most architecture schools—is that it’s like a really advanced kindergarten. Or maybe a really rigorous one. We play, we invent, we get immersed in our own fantasy world, and we push ourselves so far that the normal conditions of the civilized adult world cease to apply and only a thin shell stands between us and a temper tantrum or, say, complete loss of continence.

With this in mind, here is a time lapse video, taken by one of our TAs, of our class setting up our inflatable projects for our materials and construction class which ended a few weeks ago. [follow the link for the video: ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kqwe5eqf0Z4] The giant one at the front totally rocked—this team was the only one that realized you could create air locks and actually inhabit the inflated structure. To keep it together, so that the air pressure didn’t just push the plastic out into a more or less spherical blob, they built these tensioning elements (like columns, but acting in tension) that cut through the space. This created strange orifices on the exterior that passed completely through the structure but which you couldn’t see through without moving them with your hands, since the air pressure from the inside closed them off.

It’s also a giant playground because every day there are all kinds of events, most with eye candy, food for thought (and often food for the belly), and opportunities to see and mingle with Important People, or indulge in perfectly uneducational play with absolute seriousness.




[The above is Dean Mostafavi speaking the opening of Le Laboratoire at Harvard, which is run by scientist/artist David Edwards.]
[This is Mark Jarzombek from MIT responding to Marcel Meili's talk in a symposium on Materiality + Construction in Swiss architecture that is going on at this very instant.]
[This is my desk space.]
[This is a party.]

But let’s settle down for a moment and talk about the work. I had a little mid-term discussion with my studio prof (Danielle Etzler from SHoP Architects) about what I should work on for the rest of the semester, and we talked about wanting to be more deliberate in achieving something specific through each artifact, whether it’s a drawing or physical or digital model. So I need to strategically deploy my (limited, but growing) skills so that each representation is not just trying to “show the project” but is a testing ground to develop a complete thought. This thought should neither be identical to nor developed in a linear fashion from the previous thought, but instead stand in a kind of genealogical relationship to it, so that at the end of a project I’ll have a series of artifacts that document the development of an idea over time. It’s basic, in a way, and it’s something we talked about quite a bit in my History and Theory program at McGill, in terms of the history of representation—but actually doing this in studio on a daily basis is another story. So wish me luck!

[This was my desk crit from yesterday, one week into the "Locks" project: analysis of one artifact so I can extract its essential juices to congeal into a new form.]

Before I go, a few more pictures. Here is the review for our third project, which was called “Hidden Room” and for which we were only able to present our ideas through two plans.

Our critics are so passionate about the work and about our pedagogical adventures that they get pretty excited in their conversations, to the point where sometimes they forget that there are sixty students standing or sitting behind them, trying to see and hear what’s going on. So much of the review looked like this.

And this last picture encapsulates everything that I find wonderful and frustrating about the GSD. I’m sitting in on an class taught by Sanford Kwinter that I find pretty awesome—it’s about the last 30 years or so of architectural theory, which is really crucial to understand where we’re at today in terms of parametrics and fabrication all the software we use. But this Wednesday was Veteran’s Day, and the GSD doesn’t take a coherent stand on these kinds of minor holidays, so what ends up happening is that we all have classes but without the normal technical and logistical support—and Kwinter has to show his slides on his MacBook Air. Those of us with laptops were able to follow along on our own screens, so it wasn’t a complete loss, but still.

Thanks for reading!

Lian

I’ll start at the beginning. I entered my thesis year in September. I started off the semester digging back through the last four years to understand what I wanted to research, trying my best to tackle issues that I investigated through my projects. I narrowed my issue down to how to provide temporary infrastructure to informal communities to further reduce their ecological footprint. My trip to the Philippines last winter had a profound effect on me. Strolling around the slums of Manila absorbing the sounds and smells of the shanties not romanticizing about what we could learn from them but just accepting the facts about their living conditions. So……the semester continues. I choose a site to tackle in the Makati district of Metro Manila. The settlement is on one of the tributaries pouring into the Pasig River, which is on the brink of being pronounced dead by the ecologist of the Philippines due to the pollution distribution of the factories and the effluent of 200k+ families living along the River.


here is the site.

On September 27, Monsoon Ondoy struck Manila and totally flushed my site. Here is an article about the Monsoon. A bit jarred I continue through with my material investigation.


here is a picture of the site a few blocks down from the original image.

I was working mainly through analog means with sketches, drafting, and physical modeling with the exception of some digital diagrams. I live about half an hour away and moving work back and forth is a bit tedious. So the bulk of my creations stay on my desk. A month and a half later Hampton Roads receives one of its own storms, a Nor’easter, flooding our campus and pouring water into our building or what I call the “Bleeding Bemis.”







I arrive at the studio to find myself in a swimming pool and soaked analysis, bleeding from all the ink and soggy models. Final presentations are in two weeks. 60% of the original work is lost but I have my paper and one model. A single tear moment happened right there as I sat in the pool of water.























Lesson learned, mother nature is unforgiving. At least I have a roof over my head, some trace and a laptop to continue moving along. Two weeks more, Two weeks more.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police provide quite a bit of information regarding each ward: (http://www.keishicho.metro.tokyo.jp/index.htm) if anyone is interested.. (I recommend using Google Translate)

The "koban" system is quite unique here. According to the website, there are close to 1,000 small police boxes carefully planned and dispersed throughout the city. If you look carefully at maps, most are concentrated 1) around JR stations and popular subway/metro stations (typically express stops) in combination with 2) major cross-sections of roads: Yamate-dori, Meiji-dori, Meguro-dori, Waseda-dori... etc.


Police Box in Ginza


Police Box near Kabukicho


Conventional Police Box near Yaesu, Tokyo Station

Some are commissioned to architects carefully designed and detailed, others blend right into the conventional landscape where you can barely even notice them.

So, as I mentioned before, you can imagine what this means when someone looking suspicious rides their bike around the city. During the day, it's completely fine. But when the public transportation system shuts down at around 1pm, the kobans along and around the major roads and road intersections are on high alert..

Major crossroads koban along Nakano-dori

For example, if I were to ride home (Shinjuku -> Shinagawa) around 2 or 3 pm.. there is no doubt in my mind I would be stopped by a policeman (and yes man, not woman... during my time here I have never been stopped by a policewoman) Since the distance is quite a bit, I would actually expect 2 or 3 actual halts and maybe close to 8-10 occurrences in one night.

The kobans seem to work together: if one sees someone suspicious pass by, they notify the police box down the street, and next thing you know, you are being chased down by policemen on bicycles waving their flashlights and passionately ringing their bells commanding you to stop.

Other times, there are stealthy policemen waiting at unconventional intersections, hidden within the shadows of small alleyways or roadside buildings. Stunningly, the police really have all areas covered at night..

Although I am a foreigner, since I LOOK Japanese, I really believe I acquire an authentic experience. I think the police would be less inclined to halt a non-Japanese looking person, saving them some time and embarrassment forced to use English... but I have heard they do stop foreigners as well so make sure your bike is registered!

Usually what entails, is they ask for your information. I hand over my Gaijin card, and then they question why I am out so late. They don't fail to inform me working as a foreigner with my student status is strictly prohibitted... i'm not coming home from work am I? Or more offensively, since I'm a student, should I not be sleeping or studying in my laboratory?

So I respond very bluntly, that I attend so-and-so University and that I'm researching some things about the city. I show them my University card as well, and since the school I attend is quite well-received in the eyes of Japanese, their attitude immediately changes from offensive to casual. They check my registration number on my bike (Every bike MUST have a registration number or you may find yourself in some major trouble..) but interestingly enough, they also tell the individual on the other end of the radio one's exact location as well.

For a person as suspicious as me and who HATES police, I think this is just another way of keeping tabs. By now, I've probably been red-flagged... I kind of envision a whole database of bike registration numbers linked to individuals and where they have been specifically stopped.

It could be my own paranoia.

But I guess the more important question is.. why does Tokyo need so many Police stations and servicemen and women in the first place?? I guess you could argue that the police are making the city safe, but I think in reality, it's something more inherent within the social structure... how people perceive and treat one another, and also the general psyche, that reinforces the priority of safety in a country that has constantly had to redefine and rebuild itself after disasters (wars, fires, earthquakes... etc)

I also question, what kind of impact the police are having on public spaces.. are they merely reinforcing the behaviors, and in turn, desires of Tokyo-ites? Or are they having a real, detrimental impact, thus limiting the possibilities of appropriated public space, specifically at night time?

A laboratory friend's bike was recently stolen right outside his apartment. He didn't lock it to anything permanent, someone just picked it up with the lock around the wheel. The pricetag on the bike was Juuman Yen (roughly $1,000)

Tokyo is safe.. but then every once in awhile a story like this comes along, and you just kind of shake your head and go what the fuck, really?