Picturequote

Dear Mother, 

I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't think there's anything left for me but to be an author. 

Nathaniel [Hawthorne]

A square in Berlin near the Altes Museum. The sign you can only kind of see on the right is Weihenstephaner - my favorite brewery.

Sketches

These are some sketches I did while in Europe this summer that I have yet to actually scan and post. I used a straight object to mark out the vanishing points but everything else is freehand.

8 House by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on newsprint - 9" x 11".

VM Houses by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on bristol board - 9" x 11".

Street along the river in Cologne, Germany. I was sitting in the grass drinking for this one. Pencil on newsprint - 9" x 14"

Bayer Headquarters by Hurphy/Jahn near Munich, Germany. Pencil, India ink, and watercolor on cotton rag paper - 10" x 7".

B&W Europe Photos

I still haven't finished posting my photos from Europe on here but here's a few of the B&W 120 film photos made with my Mamiya 645.

A note on my film: The borders of the negatives are shown because my particular view of photography requires that I show what I saw when I took the photo. Hence, the images are not cropped. I rarely if ever dodge and burn. The only adjustments I make are to brightness and contrast - especially since my film of choice is the newer Kodak TMY-2 whereas this is Kodak's older 400TX, so a lot of my film turned out grainy and overdeveloped - I was being willfully dense when I developed it. C'est la vie.

The following three photos are of the Sony Center in Berlin and were hand held at night...

The Cathedral in Cologne.

The lead covering on Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome.

Richard Meier's Jubilee Church in (the ghetto of) Rome.

Pantheon in Rome - excellent.

Random Rome. Plants grow everywhere and here some vines had turned into a shade for this small gas station. It reminds me of those bridges that people grow in Asia.

Pompidou Center in Paris by Piano and Rogers. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter's Tietgen Dormitory in Copenhagen. This was one of if not my favorite contemporary building I've ever visited. The concept/program actually works to form a community.

BIG's (Bjarke Ingles Group) 8 House in Copenhagen.

Big's Mountain Dwelling in Copenhagen.

Picturequote

"When the single masterpiece is struck down, the act is attributed to a madman, but when the coherence of an entire society is vandalized, the destruction is viewed with proud arrogance as evidence of progress." - Frederick Sommer speaking at Richard Nickel's funeral. The quote refers to of the smashing of the Pieta, which had just occurred, and the destruction of Louis Sullivan's buildings to make way for a new urban landscape.

The entrance to Dachau near Munich, Germany.

Munich - 2010-7-3

Just a random lazy walking around day.

Germany beating the crap out of Argentina in the World Cup.

Berlin - 2010-6-28

A cemetery in Kreuzberg - Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor... I think.

The Velodrome - self portrait.

Munich Dachau - 2010-7-2

I went to Dachau. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting - it just wasn't that horrifying, that is, until I went to the cremation sheds.

The "shower."

Among the upsetting things about the whole camp was the obvious amount of technical prowess that went into building something like this. This combined with that fact that Dachau is really not that far from Munich makes it seems rather obvious that the whole country knew what was up.

Work makes free.

Munich - Day 27 - 2010-6-27

Marienplatz in Munich late at night. I just like their UBahn system.

Brandhorst Museum by Sauerbruch Hutton, the same firm that did the GSW building. I really like this firm. This building has colored vertical strips of terracotta cladding covering a perforated metal rainscreen underneath.

This is the most complex shading system I've ever seen. It even tops the GSW building. Vertical fritted glass panels rotate to regulate incoming light while a metal grating provides a fixed shade, ventilation, and a walkable surface...

... then on the inside automated louvers that wrap around both vertical and horizontal surfaces, in this case the ceiling, adjust to bring in the perfect light. A very impressive feat of both engineering and design.

The inside is muted (which I think is great for presenting art), very well lite, the rooms are all the appropriate size (unlike a certain addition in Chicago by Piano), and the detailing is well done - down to some mitered edges on a continuous running vent near the wall that wraps around the room.

This is Funf Hofe Shopping Center by Herzog and De Meuron. It's a bunch of old buildings combined, refitted, and added to new buildings to form a partly covered partly open shopping space with multiple looks.

Munich - Day 26 - 2010-6-26

Frei Otto's and Gunter Behnisch's 1972 Olympic Games Tent. The entire roof is a sort of plexiglass held up as a tension net or tensegrity.

We may have hopped a few... "barriers."

This is year old student housing that I found really interesting. In an area no bigger than 4 or 5 acres there was enough housing for 1,200 people... so about 300 people per acre. That's the same density as Hong Kong but done with dual story single residences.

It's all precast concrete. The units are small, most have green roofs. The pathway between the buildings in no more than 2 m wide.

BMW Welt (world) by Coop Himmelblau.

Allianz Arena by Herzog and de Meuron. The outside is inflated bubbles that can be lit from the inside and change color.

My crazy Brazilians in front of the Munich Rathaus (town hall - I know, the irony). They're a blast.