http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/

Tokujin Yoshioka was born in saga prefecture, japan in 1967. He studied design under shiro kuramata (1987-1988) and issey miyake (1988-1992) and went free-lance in 1992. He established the tokujin yoshioka design office in 2000. His works include shop design for issey miyake,space design for nissan, bmw, shiseido. He planned exhibitions for issey miyake, hermes, muji and peugeot. His product design series known as ‘tokyo-pop’, based on his previous ‘honey-pop design, has been introduced by driade. recent works include a street furniture piece at roppongi hills entitled ‘chair disappears in the rain’. Please check out his work (especially his 300,000 transparent straw window installation for Hermes).

For some reason, twisted tower is becoming very popular in architecture in recent years, from SOM’s early version of the Freedom Tower, to Calatrava’s Melmö in Sweden. H&dM’s new Roche Tower in Basel takes an asymmetrical approach which is quite interesting.

How to deal with existing historical structure is often a tough task for the “modernists”. This is an exception. SeARCH is one of the Dutch firms feature in Taschen’s new Architecture in the Netherlands.

One of the 10 finalist entries to the master-planning competition in Singapore called “Garden by the Bay” by Ah’be Landscape Architects and George Yu Architects, it is another way to merge landscape and architecture called “manifold”. George Yu was my thesis advisor.

For those who doesn’t get AIA weekly e-newsletter, this is an interesting short feature on Thom Mayne, who, for some reason, becomes the “face” of the AIA, talks about the responsibility of architect, not as professional, but as citizen and human being… In short, no matter what we do, it is a result of what we believe in. So what do we believe in? Transformational design? Change design? Integrated design? Or cool and sexy design?

I have to say the new lines of Samonite are quite nice (and expensive too). The one designed by Newson is very much along the design when he did the 021C concept car for Ford, not so much of my favorite Felt Chair. More on Newson, see Design Museum UK’s designers profile.

Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia

Un espacio para todos.

Come, see some of the finer things Madrid has to offer.

The late chainsaw wielding artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, has been referred to as an “anarchitect” because he literally deconstructed abandoned buildings in the act of creating his art. His work was fundamentally difficult to document, and as a result his total body of work is composed of fragments. Fragments of buildings, strips of film, montages of photographs, and scraps of paper were all on view in Madrid last month. The obvious relationships between architecture, art, sculpture, and space were fascinating, but the catalog of materials and media strewn about the gallery in composition was captivating.

Finally, it seems very appropriate to me that I’m sharing this mish-mash of websites with you as an introduction/reintroduction to his amorphous oeuvre.

Cai Guo Qiang, one of the well known Chinese artists outside China. He has done a lot of installation and performance art all over the world about some kind of abstract symbolism. I found this “Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows” very interesting. It is the famous “Battle of Red Cliff (Chi Bi)” during the Three Kingdoms (San-Guo) period in Chinese history, where a weaker army was able to defeat the stronger by a clever tactic of sending boats with grass-stuffed figures into the enemy’s territory and collected the arrows for use as weapons. Chinese artists (and architects) often find it very difficult to express themselves artistically in the modern world without comparing to the West and looking back to the long cultural history. How can we be not western but also not traditional?

Eliza (my wife) said to me the other day, “There is no Chinese or American contemporary art anymore, it’s all global now.” There may have some truth in it, given that Cai is actually living and working in NYC.