I House

Japanese Architects have been doing wonders with small projects and small sites. This one is no different. Katsufumi Kubota of Kubota Architect Atelier took this harbor site of merely 2,500 or square feet and designed this 1,100 square foot house.


A white concrete slab rises from the site to block the views from the street blocking intrusive glances, at the same time it bends towards the ocean welcoming it and giving every space in the house wonderful views of the harbor. This is where the beauty of this house lies, in its surroundings. I think the rows inside the background waters are seaweed crops, they look remarkably like the hops fields for beer you find in eastern Europe.


Enjoy the simple but dramatic shapes Kubota managed to give in order that we could learn a little bit more...


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Casa Mila 2.0

Continuing with my Gaudi research, I have found a couple of interesting videos on Gaudi. I'm posting the first one here... although it might be a little difficult for non-catalonian speakers. But it has beautiful grainy black and white images from the 20's and 30's, and video fragments from who knows when. Anybody that speaks Spanish will make out about 80% of it, knowing French helps a little bit more.

Casa Mila

Image from wikipedia.org

The Casa Mila, better known as "La Pedrera" in its native Barcelona, is a building that has fascinated me long before I studied Architecture. I remember my dad brought me several books on Gaudi from a trip he made to Spain, he thought I would like them, he was right. He probably knew long before myself that I would become something like an architect, with my long hours spent playing with my legos (I still have some of those). I digress...

The thing is that as I learn more and more about Gaudi's architecture, I learn more about his genius. The Casa Mila, contrary to the standard of the time, has no bearing walls, only columns hold it up from the basement to the top floor. This was so for the simple reason that it allowed him to build curved walls, in plan and in section. So this, as far as I know, is the first free plan house.

According to history, Le Corbusier created the open floor plan in his Five Points of Architecture created during the 1920's, and epitomized in the Villa Savoye finished in 1931. The Casa Mila, with a very similar concept behind it was finished in 1910, 20 years before Le Corbusier published his Five Points. It is surely conceivable that, since Le Corbusier and Gaudi were contemporaries, they had met and talked about architecture over coffee, or that good ol' Corbu had studied Gaudi's work.

It is certainly something to think about... Gaudi is definitely a prophetic architect, and his architecture is definitely a premonition of modernity and Modern Architecture.

Stimuli 0802

Public Records Building in Basel, Switzerland, by EM2N.

Stimuli 0801

Father's House by MADA s.p.a.m. in the Chinese province of Xi'an. Found on the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition "China Design Now".

Muxtape

I have just discovered Muxtape... It's an amazing website where you can upload mp3's on a playlist, much as the way we used to create mixed tapes on cassettes. You can email the link to friends and loved ones, and other people can stumble upon your mixed music playlist. The downside is that you can't search the site to find music, you just refresh the homepage to get a new set of mixed playlists that you can click on. The idea is that you find new music that you haven't heard before. I've already found some pretty cool stuff... like jessicalouise's mix of 80's electropop and other eclectic sounds.

Expect the unexpected... enjoy some new adventures in music...

Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies

Finally something I can say I like from the Explorations in Media Modifications or Altered Books world. Brian Dettmer's probably been around for quite a while, but just now I've started to discover him.


It's surreal, chaotic and organized like the flow of ideas, like my own imagination creating images from within the pages and the words of the books I read. I love, or maybe need (I am a visual kind of guy) to create these kinds of magical images in my head drawn from reading, that's why it takes so long for me to finish reading something. Multiple layers of overlapping imagery, sometimes I have to drop the book to be able to assimilate what I just read.


Congratulation to Brian for evoking and reminding...