Thinking Deconstructivism in a Canyon

” In recent years , the modern understanding of social responsibility as functional program has been superseded by a concern for context. But contextualism has been used as an excuse for mediocrity, for a dumb servility within the familiar. Since deconstructivist architecture seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesce [...]

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Beauty Of the Rain {Paris Days}

Everytime it rains in San Diego, I get giddy. I used to dislike rainy days but now, they are just…”Paris days.” The city acquires a new depth, a warm, poetic melancholy. That feeling of being inside a Caillebotte painting, where the real city, what I see, what i inhabit, what i fall into, is the image in the [...]

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Dispatch from the Blackout: Entre Chien et Loup/Between Hope and Fear

It has been ten long days since my last post, ten days of travels, of letters written and not sent, of (re) search. In the middle of it all, I experienced the ‘biggest blackout in the history of San Diego county’. Thursday, September 8th, 2011, power went off for millions of people in Southern California, Baja [...]

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Wabi Sabi, Dwellings for Imaginary Civilizations, Nightverses

Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional. From Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers Charles Simonds began building clay villages, ruins and what he termed ” dwellings for imaginary civilizations of little people” in the [...]

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What a Difference a Year Makes {Escape Velocity}

Escape Velocity I wake up in San Francisco. I attained Escape velocity From you and your gravity Your slate roofs ( to my terracotta tiles). The bee drinks from the flowers in the fields Liberally There is only So much happiness in one day. I lost words They slipped by and became dreams And in dreaming, perfect [...]

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Bruce Mau’s on Architecture, and more importantly, Life: An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.

Today I want to stray from the visual and go back to words (even though visual work is piling up by the scanner, waiting to be shared.) The visual permeates every aspect of a designer/artist life…it is the expected outcome: something that all can see. Here in sketchbloom I share works and progress/process in form [...]

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Rain of Frogs [fragments, poems, movie lines]

    The Pretty Parking Lot   I have dreamt of perfect poems faded like dewdrops upon awakening   About mice and buildings built by men   Cities are sentences that haunt me   Book thieves, foreign movies… the line is thin between memories and reverie   The fog has lifted the rain felt soft [...]

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Quotes from Jeremy Till’s ‘Architecture Depends’

  On April 08, 2011 I attended Till’s  provocative  lecture on his new book ‘Architecture Depends’. Here is a review from The Architects’ Journal (UK). Here are some quotes from that day, from my notes, which i hope to be as faithful as possible: The book was initially titled ‘Architecture and Contingencies’. The publisher made [...]

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Fragments of Dreams

This has started to be a weekly blog, and I am not too happy about it. This Quarter has been so intense in a stupendous way: I am involved in a myriad of exciting projects at the school and became involved in new committees – and that has meant less free time, but an overall [...]

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A Time to be Revolutionaries: Thoughts on Books, Poetry, Bourgeoisie and Revolution

Students revolts have spread in Italy and England in the past few weeks. The images that I see coming from my country remind me of interactive urban installations organized by Coop Himmelblau in the 1960′s and 1970′s . These are called ‘soft explosions’, such as the covering of a street in Vienna with foam,or the [...]

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Dispatches from Vladivostok: Architecture, Poetry, the Oneiric, the Grotesque

  John Hejduk has been called one of the most influential architects and educators of our time.. He was also a poet, an artist and the Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the uber-prestigious Cooper Union in New York. I am reviewing couple of his books, Vladivostok and The Mask of [...]

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An X-Ray of my brain

The board is done and up on the faculty display wall. In the process, I refined my skills with Illustrator, pondered philosophy, practice, pedagogy,and  crystallized what I am, do, stand for — in a tangible format. A welcome tall order.

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Architecture is built politics, (un)built poetry

Choi+Shine, a Massachusetts-based design studio has recently received the Boston Society of Architects Unbuilt Architecture Award for their creative concept Land of Giants™, transforming the generic steel-framed electricity pylons across the Icelandic landscape into unique, individual humanised forms. Read the World Architecture News article here. In contrast to the poetry of the unbuilt, and whenever [...]

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