Random green thoughts

So, I’m back from Germany, and amidst a slow weekend and monday sleeping off the always late and occasionally booze-filled nights in Deutchland, I’ve been catching up on the news and events of our dear world.
Aside from Tiger Woods and his many mistresses (I bet some of them are fake), the UN COP15 (15th Conference [...]

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Studio MSN?

You know how design tutors always go on and on about working together in a studio, where interaction will then happen between classmates…. an exchange of ideas, a “fruitful discussion”, et cetera et cetera and then they moan that “students nowadays” just don’t seem to have that sense of camaraderie anymore, or seem to work [...]

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Hey!

I don’t have internet at home, so that’s a convenient excuse for not blogging.
But this post is not about saying I haven’t updated for ages. It’s to say that studying for years and years in university lends you a certain depth and growth in your thought that is different from the sort of lessons you [...]

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Look ma, slimy houses

A lecturer once told me (along with the whole class) that after a point in history where technological innovations in architecture and construction were leapfrogged by other industries reliant on the latest technology, later innovations in architectural technology had all come from those industries. His list of examples included aerospace engineering and the automotive industry.
Well, [...]

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The Elgin Marbles

Remember when I mentioned that I was surprised to see bits of the Parthenon lying about the British Museum? Well, they were chiseled out from the ancient Acropolis ruins and brought back to London for Lord Elgin’s amusement (he was the UK’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who ruled Greece at that time), and he [...]

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A (un?)fortunate turn of events

http://www.oobject.com/category/15-skyscrapers-on-hold
To be frank – I don’t like any of them. Put on hold? Not a loss in my book! I admit that those are just renders and the built buildings might look different when built and might actually look nice, but still I think many, if not all of them are badly designed, and some [...]

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Ice Spires

This is old news, but I chanced across it again the other day and I thought I’d post it up. I believe this is a project in Dubai, though I am not sure. I can’t say I am interested to find out more, to be honest. I mean, seriously?
It looks… I don’t know, really strange, [...]

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Wins Art

Last week a former classmate told me that Uncle Win had passed away. I don’t think Uncle Win was his real name, but he was the proprietor of Wins Art, an art shop selling all sorts of art supplies. Because of its relatively cheap prices, it was a hit with most design students studying in the [...]

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Allianz Arena

It was really cold for a summer night, and it was wet and rainy in Munich, the last stop in the former West Germany before making our way up north to Dresden. On what was the most miserably wet night of the entire trip we went well out of the way from our campsite and [...]

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Mind Boggling

You know you really have a problem with procrastination when you even procrastinate thinking. On my old uni projects I always delayed making decisions. Even when drawing something I’d draw the easy lines first and refuse to ponder about the difficult, critical lines. It got so bad I’d spend hours fixing tiny details that are [...]

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Just a quick note

So i spent today poring over books in preparation of the Architecture History & Theory essay. A particular book which was interesting was about tourist-historic cities, which are the type of cities most people visit when they go to Europe. I bet you didn’t know that for different types of historic cities there are different [...]

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Stabbed to death by vector lines

Ok I’m bloody tired. More than 14 hours spent rearranging and editing plans punctuated by only two 20-minute frisbee breaks and 2 meal breaks is enough to kill my back and neck because i have a stingy landlord who doesn’t believe in buying good chairs. Or it could be those endless mess of vector lines [...]

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Medusa Tower

Ok, i know right now it looks like Medusa had a bad hair (snake) day, complete with flattened snakes. Believe me, I’m working on it.

I love Vray for Sketchup. Ever since I’ve installed the plugin last night I’ve been rendering non-stop and marveling at the remarkable lack of effort needed to achieve nice renderings. and [...]

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How Fitting

Over a series of unrelated events today i came to the conclusion that people and things don’t change, only the perception changes. By perception i am referring to both our perception and also the perception of the people/objects that are being perceived. Yes i know objects can’t really “perceive”, but i mean that in a [...]

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Omg they’re demolishing the Bok House!

Just to clarify following the last post, i am actually against senseless demolition and development… i just think many people miss the entire point of preservation. In my opinion, it’s not so much the authenticity of the facade or the accuracy of the ornamentation that should be preserved, but the intangible character and the atmosphere [...]

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Lost in perspective

On pretext of researching for my architectural anthropology presentation, i have been reading up on many diverse and frankly unnecessary topics, brought on by a fast increasing interest in the three interconnected subjects of history, economics and politics.
My tutor Marc Dujardin lectures about the role of anthropology in architecture, citing his own research in Bhutan [...]

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the question hangs in the air: Is it still worth it?
somewhere, further than ever, fainter than ever, comes the answer………………. yes..
and so, i work through another night.

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Dilemma

Me and Puisan did well for our first project and now we are eligible for an exchange program to a bunch of different European countries for a semester, from january to may.
hm…. to go or not to go? that is the question.
don’t normally ask for comments, but… please give your opinion!

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Fuck it, i’m going to sleep.

I talked to another architecture student i met on the plane to Dubai and it’s cool because now i have another person to whine and complain to. she told me she slept almost every night throughout the 1st 3 years and did very well to boot. I now look to her for sage advice. I [...]

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The People HEre

Studying here is interesting, to say the least. On one side we have a disillusioned academic, a professor who bitterly attacks anything with modernist traces, especially works of le corbusier (and the guy himself), resenting his own indoctrination of modernist-based architectural education. And now he is disseminating his own dogma, the ecological worldview, where [...]

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