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archatlas

Peter Rush

archillect

http://twitter.com/archillect

rjzimmerman

What do the G7 leaders do at these G7 parties?

At the one that just concluded, they produced a document entitled, “Leaders’ Declaration,” which addresses everything from finance through public health, international security, and climate change. Here’s the link to this year’s “Leaders Declaration.” Go to page 12, where the climate change issues are addressed. I summarized some of them in another post, but they read better in this Declaration than they read in the media reports.

But here are the other things they did. (And invent your own story behind the third photo.)

RED CUP PROJECT trash flash mob! #redcupproject #publicart #syracuse #syracuseuniversity #sunyesf #architecture #landscapearchitecture #designactivism #trash #recycle #garbage #party #collaboration

itscontemporary

Lee Boroson - Tang

massmoca

Lee Boroson is coming to MASS MoCA in Octoober 2014! Just a few short months away.

kchz

#installation

massmoca

MASS MoCA, in collaboration with the Harriman and West Airport, hosted the annual Movie at the Airport. This year Apollo 13 was screened. Just another way we like to mix it up here at the MASS MoCA.

Photo Credit: Caleb Blansett

arquicomics

Fairy tale city: Copenhagen. By Eu Jin, Lim.

This short story is part of a work progress I have used to enhance the story telling process of my architectural thesis project. The thesis takes its form as a repository for the collections of fairy tale culture in Copenhagen, Denmark. There is a constant shift between the reality and the imaginative while developing the thesis. Therefore, the comic medium has been used to better deliver some of its thoughts.

This short story is also an attempt to use ‘comic’ as a form of story-telling media to portray how Copenhagen city, Denmark has always been given the ‘fairy tale city’ title. The story revolves around a boy in his pyjamas chasing after an unknown shadow that resembles Hans Christian Andersen’s to return the book he had dropped. Through the chase, I am able to introduce both the reality (Copenhagen actual site and its details) as well as the imaginative (the thesis project and the characters). The story also owes much of its reference to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Eu Jin, Lim

[email protected]

5th year thesis at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Arts.

arpeggia

Zhang Huan - Family Tree, 2000, New York, USA

Artist’s statement:

"I have been feeling pain on the left side of my chest for over a year, which lately seems to have gotten worse. I sense an ill omen and am afraid that something unpredictable might happen.

When a mother squeezes out the last bit of her energy, a new life eventually emerges. There are numerous events in our lives over which we have no control.

More culture is slowly smothering us and turning our faces black. It is impossible to take away your inborn blood and personality. From a shadow in the morning, then suddenly into the dark night, the first cry of life to a white-haired man, standing lonely in front of window, a last peek of the world and a remembrance of an illusory life.

In my serial self-portrait I found a world which Rembrandt forgot. I am trying to extend his moment.

I invited 3 calligraphers to write texts on my face from early morning until night. I told them what they should write and to always keep a serious attitude when writing the texts even when my face turns to dark. My face followed the daylight till it slowly darkened. I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared. This work speaks about a family story, a spirit of family. In the middle of my forehead, the text means “Move the Mountain by Fool (Yu Kong Yi Shan)”. This traditional Chinese story is known by all common people, it is about determination and challenge. If you really want to do something, then it could really happen. Other texts are about human fate, like a kind of divination. Your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, cheekbone, and moles indicate your future, wealth, sex, disease, etc. I always feel that some mysterious fate surrounds human life which you can do nothing about, you can do nothing to control it, it just happened.”

See more Zhang Huan posts here.

likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015

sevenknotwind

Julie Mehretu - Aether (Venice) (2013) via: likeafieldmouse

This woman is a genius

iblogaboutmesorry

agritecture

China’s Surreal Urban Farms

As its leaders often remind the world, China has 22 percent of the world’s population, but less than 10 percent of its arable land (as much as one fifth of which, it was recently reported, is severely polluted). People find ways to make up for the shortfall. For centuries officials have complained of peasants cultivating marginal lands, and for just as long Chinese farmers have been geniuses of agricultural improvisation, making use of whatever land they could find when they needed it.

Today, the country is in the midst of a massive shift from countryside to city. Much of it has occurred at will, as ambitious migrants have left the fields to seek new jobs and new experiences in the factories of China’s booming cities. But many others do not move at will. Instead, they are expelled from their homes and into strange new lives as city folk as the fields they once tended give way to new roads and shopping malls or slip under the rising waters of newly risen dams. Still others fall somewhere in between. They may find themselves following their children to new lives and new status as members of an urban population that, for the first time, in 2011 exceeded the number of those remaining in the countryside. China’s leaders hope that 70 percent of the country will be urban by 2030.

In cities, old rhythms of life die hard, and even as more and more farmland on the outskirts of urban areas disappears, new transplants and old holdouts continue to find patches of ground to plant.

Tim Franco, a Shanghai-based photographer, has spent time on these “microfarms” in the heart of the megacity Chongqing, where the changes underway across the country appear especially stark. Some farmers grow food to feed their families, others to supplement their incomes, and some because, with the city closing in all around them, it’s the only thing that makes them feel at home. Please click on images to enlarge.

While performances shift according to conditions, time, and space, hope is a constant motivator to do everything we can to bring abundance to lives in need and to expand what is possible. Of this, we can be certain.

-hope + certainty project statement

an amazing semester!