December 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Celestial Home Button
A series of explorations on the idea of “Home Buttons” for JUNKJET nº5.
Palace, “Dimensions of Home”, 2011
We are used to looking back to understand the origin, we click on the home button as an act of renewal, and reference in real-time.
Palace, “Home Button Series”, 2011
Palace, “Home Button Series”, 2011
Palace, “Home Button...
5 tags
Merry Materiality
Objective: To exchange material goods wrapped in the symbols we identify as our contemporary immaterial goods and tools of exchange.
Process: Strip off these symbols and slow bits and bobs that are soon to consume our precious space and occupy our living rooms. Take away the flat image-buttons and instantaneously begin to devalue what is inside.
Enjoy the sensation of tearing; the sound of...
August 2011
1 post
13 tags
What Architectural Images Do
Recently I was at a large London architectural office for a meeting to discuss whether spandrels on a residential tower in the city’s south east should be expressed in glass, metal or stone. The end of the discussion took a different tack and became an opportunity to discuss how the building was to be represented to the public in an exhibition of the design in its respective borough. It was...
July 2010
1 post
8 tags
The Social Home
There is a peculiar habit of “Austericans” (members of a society whose New culture takes over its indigenous civilisation) Robin Boyd was ever the serial neologiser (Featurism, Austerican, Bushmanist, etc.) whereby they find privacy in their own car. Marshall McLuhan called this a “hidden ground” behind the use of the car. Australians paradoxically go outside to be alone...
June 2010
1 post
16 tags
Wiry Ghosts and Informed Decisions
Again, this post takes snippets from a forthcoming article commemorating the 50th year in print of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness:
Boyd insists, that Featurist things are ‘non-intellectual, non-emotional and entirely optical’1 and that ugliness is class relative: ‘Georgian for high income, numb conservatism for the low, and for the great central majority coloured...
April 2010
1 post
11 tags
Suburbs as a Representation of Diversity (and a...
This post is selected from a forthcoming article tentatively entitled Consumption, Immobilisation, Aspiration: The Australian Ugliness at 50 celebrating 50 years since the publication of Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness. The article challenges Boyd’s argument about “featurism”—meaningless and “non-intellectual” decorative misdemeanours—as a product of...
September 2009
2 posts
20 tags
Plastic-Profit Offices (Architects as...
How Resilient is your Organisation?
Melbourne University’s Paolo Tombesi’s fine-tooth comb through the rise and fall of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) in Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994) provides a relevant starting point when looking at the make-up of today’s profit-driven architectural office. It pieces...
7 tags
Restricting Through (Re)defining
I can’t help but think that Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” of the world system of capital relies entirely on the self to process its complex organisation. For example, just thinking about the profundity of calculating labour-value--with its many social and geographic parameters (and each parameter having another organisation)--it seems beyond human grasp (and if that’s not...
August 2009
1 post
16 tags
(Advanced Capitalistic) 'Planned-Neglect'
The behavioural patterns of the rural and the city have now been reversed. Rural land is now meticulously organised, perpetually executed/exploited beyond what could have been imagined when the industrialisation of agricultural land began. Today, as Jameson (2004, pp.49) puts it, ‘it is the city and the urban that grows wild like the state of nature… whereas it is nature which has, in...
July 2009
1 post
5 tags
Passive Consumerism to Counter-Intelligence
The explanation of the nature of speculation and the bogus decision-making that governs prices/values clearly forms a logical argument for rejecting such powers of subjectivity. The worst we can do is be passive consumers. If the system can form a presiding subjective ‘intelligence’, we have to form a ‘counter-intelligence’. The sellers may have (we can call it)...
April 2009
1 post
15 tags
The Commands of (Architectural) Language
Speaking about the constructed reality is made easier because there is physics embedded within language and language has the flexibility and innateness of becoming reduced to simple forms to just “consist of language and the actions into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, pg. 7). Success of the process of construction is based on communication and the dialogue learned by...
March 2009
2 posts
6 tags
Voluntary Common Land
Kibbutzim were created before the first Jewish settlement in the 1950s by Zionists that were mainly Russian-Jewish emigrants. The first funded community was called ‘Degrania’ in Israel, 1909. Kibbutzim became independent-social, economic and cultural units, somewhat like cooperative-socialist islands in capitalist seas. A community can not be free if does not produce resources to...
9 tags
Notes on Arabic Adoption
Dubai is a double-edged sword. At once there is an encounter with tarnished terrain – a lucid, lagoon of baroness propagated into hard-scaped, impenetrable reality of unprecedented scales. The other, a more global and serious reality, deals with the question of the fixed, temporary and the permanency of architecture now. Dubai garners the wealth to exploit construction at a never-before-seen...
February 2009
1 post
7 tags
Semiotic Mythologies and the Green Agenda
The frontier of the post-icon era, brought about by the downward-spiralling economy/ecology, has formed a new breed of architect of less moral stature than the capitalist’s ‘building designer’. Previously embedded as part of the marketing strategy of a brand, the architect today is tailored for a token green agenda. Governed by state dictation, most buildings today ...
January 2009
2 posts
5 tags
Interview with Junya Ishigami Recorded at the...
6 tags
Ted Nelson: Social Architecure's Future
On Sun, Apr XX, 20XX at 2:00 PM, XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX@hotmail.com wrote: Hi Ted, I am just laying the groundwork for my XXXXX project at XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX. And I came across your work. Like you I am not a tekkie. Nor am I attached to the physical form of architecture. Cities, like cyberspace are full of rubbish and the constructed environment has enough physical construction for ...
December 2008
2 posts
6 tags
The Garden in the Machine
Topographical contours. The body belongs to the earth as the building belongs to the earth.. Reinsertion of local landscapes into the city: Looking to different neighbouhoods in any city, mean activities could be mapped and linked to open plazas, skeleton infrastructures and aerial gardens (forests). The idea is to generate new identities inside the city, between the citizens, the...
7 tags
The Notion of Building
Our intentions now are have a clear objective of placing no hierarchy between any media, tools or space to complete a task. The choice and use of each media, tool or space must pass contemporary criteria of sustainability and functionality. As with navigating through the commercial landscape or the democratic/anonymous web, a rigorous process of filtering, selection, concentration and...
November 2008
3 posts
6 tags
Occupying Voids
Urbanity asks us to add function to void space. A space which superficially might need little design concentration - by natural selection it is the body and chance that are the vessels to perform this request. Why is it that voids occur? In some cases they seem to be architectural devices paying homage to the built, or dead-space for alternate foci, or purely for transience - similar to...
3 tags
Interview with Tezuka Architects (Takaharu Tezuka)...
6 tags
Interview with Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu...
September 2008
1 post
4 tags
Landscape of Ambiguous Spaces vs. Built Form
Junya Ishigami Daily life, artifacts, minimum uses, are related independently in an environment. What is actually happening is transparent to the view. The building skyline, the apartments, all existing windows, every wall, tell stories. The system of objects provides and generates the scenario for the stories. The container for the action is dissolved - the walls are dissolved. ...
August 2008
1 post
6 tags
Suburban Survival
The plight of the traditional American way of life will lead to a reassessment of one’s way of being, the regulation of consuming, a new urban infrastructure and a civil war. The genesis of the suburb was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution of 1850s America. In it’s original form, the suburb was considered relief from the industrialised city, complete with it’s...
July 2008
2 posts
6 tags
State of Play and the Illusion of Freedom
For some years now,
Paul Virilio has spoken about the state of play in our technologically
vexed context. He advocates that it is “interesting while maintaining a
critical attitude”, that we should not just be the player, but rather play
as if to know, or better still create the game itself. Virilio suggests that
there are two ways to look at play, one pertains a...
3 tags
Palace Launch
Welcome to Palace first edition. Now, in the early stages of its inception we form this as collections of imaginations and facts. We imagine Palace as kind of a universe of objects, thoughts and spaces that we explore and then combine to form and produce new commentaries and questions. Forums and discourse open it wider to allow for deeper investigations and cultivations. NIMBY (Not In My Back...