kazys

Today, I received my long-awaited copy of Future City, edited by Stephen Read, Jurgen Rosenmann, and Job van Eldijk.

The book describes itself as follows: Future City mixes the experience of particular urban places with a more general discourse about the nature of urbanism today. Well-known urbanists are asked to look at sixteen cities around the world and the different ways they are changing and discuss their vision for the future. The book features a widely exhibited collection of images by NEXT architects comparing and contrasting eighteen metropolitan cities around the world. Interleaved throughout the book, are short theoretical pieces on issues relating to urban change written by leading urban theorists, offering a series of critical perspectives. This unique book links practical examples and theory though its accessible visual and writing style. It provides a stimulating source of ideas and vision for both student, practitioner and the general reader.

Contributors: Stefano Boeri, Ramesh Kmuar Biswas, M. Christine Boyer, Lindsay Bremner, Gary Chang, Penelope Dean, Dirk Frieling, Andreas Huyssen, Jim Masselos, NEXT Architects, Stephen Read, Jurgen Rosemann, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Abdou-Maliq Simone, STEALTH Group, Erik Swyngedow, and Kazys Varnelis

My own contribution is the essay, “Los Angeles, Cluster City,” first presented at TU-Delft in 2000.

The long gap in updating the web site can at least partially be explained by my being in Europe for the last two weeks.

Now that the position is official, I am delighted to announce that I will be spending the next year at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, as Senior Research Associate first annual research theme, Networked Publics.

Dutch Design studio OOMS has created the “City Hideout,” a cardboard box meant to look like a piece of street infrastructure. You can use it to either escape from the world or to spy on your surroundings undetected. See Coolhunting.com for more. The City Hideout seems like a natural complement to AUDC’s own Cardboard Orthogonal Blob of 2002. See the cardboard blob on display here.

In keeping with the incremental upgrading of the site to work on Drupal, I reworked the main page of Varnelis.net to highlight the weblog while breaking up content into separate pages for [articles] [appearances] [projects] and [students]. Code for these pages is XHTML 1.0 compliant and has been tested with Firefox, Safari, and Explorer on the Mac and Explorer on the PC. The latter is a dog of a program and required me to convert the entire CSS layout to Ems instead of pixels so that text could be resized. This is a problem that web designers have to work around, unfortunately. So no more complaining about the site not being bigger text friendly, Ron, but you should upgrade your browser to something modern. The next step will be to redo the template for the content pages themselves so that articles and projects are more readable for the web and standards compliant as well.

Here is the world’s biggest open pit diamond mine. It makes architecture kind of unimportant once you see it. Note the runway in the first image! Read more.

Architecture after Couture has now been updated to varnelis.net’s new format. This article, first published in 2001 in an issue of MIT’s Thresholds on “Fashion,” explores the history of architecture and couture to proposes that if the “death of theory” and the lack of a compelling new paradigm have left architecture adrift, the field could profit from a serious consideration of fashion’s turn from top-down to bottom-up.

This article, first published in 2001 in an issue of MIT’s Thresholds on “Fashion,” explores the history of architecture and couture to proposes that if the “death of theory” and the lack of a compelling new paradigm have left architecture adrift, the field could profit from a serious consideration of fashion’s turn from top-down to bottom-up.

Read more

Land profiteering comes to the Owens River Valley. Now it’s Richard Walters, a professor of religion at Loma Linda University, setting out to build a housing development at the foot of Mount Whitney. See the LA Times article Anger Piqued Beneath a Peak. Just what we really need, a wedge of exurban sprawl in a national treasure instead of affordable housing in areas of need. Time for some land ethics classes in the university?

Brett Steele, previously director of the Design Research Laboratory and now the director of the Architectural Association has a blog. It’s surprising that with computers so pervasive for the use of architectural production today, more faculty in architecture aren’t web savvy. Is architecture falling behind? Steele certainly isn’t. His blog is full of interesting information and the AA will surely be a place to watch in the upcoming years.

The site is steadily being converted to the Drupal system. Most recently, I have updated A Brief History of Horizontality, Towers of Concentration, Lines of Growth, Cathedrals of the Culture Industry, as well as Images of Quartzsite, Arizona. If you haven’t visited these links, this may be a good opportunity to catch up with your varnelis.net reading.