After a bit of searching, I came across this short-but-sweet  “symphony” of present-day Berlin (it’s high-def, so make it big):

I will keep searching for more to share; new cities, new music, new perspectives. And at some point I will get out there and start documenting Dallas for you.

He writes: “Imagine if you could do this with your CAD drawings – a different way of drafting.”

This got me thinking about another interesting application of this technology: architectural education. Picture a game where students are given a kit-of-parts, perhaps a big pile of bluestone and sarsen blocks, and they are asked to re-construct Stonehenge. How’s that for interacting with history? Or give them a bunch of bricks and have them build an arch, a dome, a barrel vault and a groin vault. Let them explore cantilevers, and push tensile structures to their limits. Structures class 2.0.

Key point: they’d be doing all of this with pens, not calculators. They’d be drawing, not taking notes. The muscles of their hands would be forever connected to their understanding of the physics of architecture.

All of this from a crayon game.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

First, a cake modeled after Perronet House in London: “…ingredients included four chocolate loaves, two boxes of chocolate fingers, a packet of bourbons, six custard creams, a family pack of own label “chocolate break” biscuits, ground nuts, rice paper, fabric flowers and one chocolate mini-roll.” Nice landscaping, too. Click on image for a closer look.

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How great would that be if your final model was a cake? Imaging cutting it up, right there in front of the jury, and handing out section slices on plates with forks.

The next two are birthday cakes for architects:

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How about some gingerbread houses? But is a gingerbread house a cake? Close enough.

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This guy built a very cool gingerbread study model for an actual house and montaged it into a site photo.

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Will Alsop was commissioned by the Toronto Star to make a gingerbread house. So he made a gingerbread Peckham Library:

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I like this next one for two reasons. One, it’s pure genius: a Toblerone bar with holes drilled for candles. Two, it’s a Toblerone bar…they’re good.

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And finally, my favorite of the lot. This is as simple as it gets: a house-shaped cake tin. Pop a candle in the top, a surrealist chimney on an otherwise archetypal home, and you have the perfect birthday cake.

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Happy birthday, Ro!

I’ll start with our trip to Barcelona. A group of us flew down for the long weekend, with no concrete plans other than to wander Las Ramblas and drink sangria. Check and check. What else did we do? In a word: Gaudi.

That is to say, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), the incredibly inventive Catalan architect who designed some of Barcelona’s wildest buildings (and parks) before rejecting secular work and focusing on one building: the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. Gaudi truly devoted himself to the Sagrada Familia, the last great cathedral. By “devoted” I mean he gave everything to this building: his time, his money, his heart and soul, and ultimately his life. And he did this knowing he would never see it finished. If the projected completion date of 2026 proves true, it will have taken 150 years from first sketch to last stone.

150 years from first sketch to last stone. Question: will that ever happen again? Think about that while you look at some of my pictures (lots of better ones on Flickr):

In the elder days of Art,

Builders wrought with greatest care

Each minute and unseen part;

For the Gods see everywhere.

- Longfellow, The Builders

From the courtyard (glassed-in by Lord Foster):

And now we’re inside:

The workspaces were great:

My spot, H8. Because I “hate” homework. (Just kidding, I didn’t really have a spot. I do hate homework, though.)

This is an aerial shot of Mir Mine (via BLDGBLOG), an “abandoned” open-pit diamond mine in Eastern Siberia. Can you imagine something like this being abandoned? Sure, it was a mine, but now it’s geography, and you can’t abandon mountains.

It is 525 meters deep. What does this mean? If you tipped the Great Pyramid of Giza onto its point and jammed it down into the bottom, you could stack three more on top before reaching ground level (good luck stacking pyramids, though).

During operation, this mine put out 2 million karats a year. Of diamonds! Starting from the bottom, heavy-duty trucks would have to drive for two hours before they could make a left turn (sorry Nascar fans). Two hours to drive out!

It is a perfect geometry carved out of the earth. Is it a wound or a monument? I say both. If the lake at the bottom weren’t toxic, I’d like to go down to the bottom on a clear night and lie on my back and watch the sloped walls spiral off into the stars. The reverse-perspective would make the sky look like a giant perforated disk, close enough to touch.

I’ll start with the drawing hanging over my desk. This was an early exercise where we chose a photograph, and then recreated it in charcoal, but only through erasure (i.e. start with a dark black rectangle, then use an eraser to create tonal range). For some reason I did not record the name of the photographer or the cathedral in the shot. I’ll get to work on that.

Next, a drawing by Lebbeus Woods recreated using dry pastels on brown paper. A very useful exercise, in retrospect.

Now to the models. Models on a dresser:

Models and drawings on shelves and on the floor:

Model and drawings under the bed:

And yes, models in the closet: