fabric: perpetual sunshine.

Created by the amazing design, architecutre, and research geniuses at Swiss genius-factory Fabric, their travelling exhibition “Perpetual Sunshine” is pure feel-good. Giving seasonal affective disorder the heave-ho, “Perpetual Sunshine” is a data-based sensory installation made up of 334 high-intensity infared bulbs. The light and heat emanating from the bulbs is calibrated by a computer to match the current temperature in any other part of the world where the sun is currently shining. So even though it might be night-time where you are, you can still be bathed in the exact light and heat glowing, at that moment, on the other side of the world.

Most recently on display at Madrid’s La Noche En Blanco festival, the installation has appeared at both indoor exhibitions and public outdoor events across Europe.

All images © Fabric Ch 2005-2008

claude cormier: “pergola”.

To celebrate the inaugural year of the Arts Le Havre Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Montréal-based landscape architect and urban designer Claude Cormier constructed a beautiful impressionist tribute to one of the world’s most famous painters – Le Havre’s own Claude Monet.

Meant to mirror the wisteria flowers that showed up in so many of Monet’s works, “Pergola” is made up of 90,000 plastic balls draped into the trees outside the Le Havre City Hall. I like the weird juxtaposition of the technicolour plastic balls against the organic green of the trees. I kind of want to yank them all down, create a ball pit, and throw some children in it… but this is good too.

Via Lost At E Minor

erika janunger: weightless.

Swedish artist and designer Erika Janunger’s short film “Weightless” is one of those things that you watch, and while you’re watching you’re not totally sure what you’re seeing or why you even like it, and then you realize you’ve watched the whole thing. Then you watch it again. Then you realize you’ve let it sink in and feel like an ass for not loving it the first time. But that’s the thing sometimes about breaking new ground – it’s so new you need to digest it and let it breathe until you really catch on to what you’re seeing.

A combo of dance and interiour design, this short film was Janunger’s masters project and is her way of exploring the intersection of architecture, choreography, and music. Though she’s not the first film maker to tilt a set to create the illusion of defying gravity, I’ve never seen it done so quite unapologetically before. It’s not a gimmick or just a visual trick – this weightlessness is part of these girls’ reality. Counter to our normal fantasies of the freedom of flight, they seem (in a crazy paradox) weighted down by their very weightlessness. Like it’s a cross they bare. When brilliant dancers Malin Stattin and Tuva Lundkvist gaze right into your eyes, you can tell this isn’t a state of being they’ve chosen for themselves.

She’s also almost shockingly multi-talented. She not only directed, art directed, and set designed “Weightless”, but she also wrote the music and lyrics to it’s haunting soundtrack. She’s got a Tori Amos-esque sound that I clearly dig, and she’s an equally accomplished liver performer. In fact her site divides into two sections – design and music. On the music portion you can download a few tracks for free and order her debut album “Hazy”. Plus, you can see a video of her performing live at the Lilith Eve’s Gala in Stockholm here.

On the design side, her site is a trove of various projects, including “Workshop in the Woods” where she lit up a forest near Gothtenburg, Sweden.

In fact the more you look into her work, the more it seems like there’s nothing she can’t do. Holding a masters in interiour architecture and furniture design from the College of Art, Craft, and Design in Stockholm, Janunger clearly has an eye for design. But it’s her drive to explore the art of how people interact with her creations – with lighting, with a chair – that sets her apart. She is driven to create, as her statement on her site makes pretty clear:

“Creating architecture and design, is like making music. By using three dimensions – three notes, you make a chord. By using many chords, shapes and spaces – you can create an entire world… I want to understand how all that works, I want to create surroundings and objects based upon peoples lives and feelings. I want to create worlds, I want to play God.”

Via Brian Fichtner @ Cool Hunting

jiyeon song: “one day poem pavillion”.

How much do I love this? Let me count the ways…

Proof yet again that the most elemental concepts, envisioned in a different way, can have the most dramatic results. We’ve got words. We’ve got sunlight. We’ve got shadow. And Jiyeon Song has combined them into a breath-taking piece of public art.

Through a matrix of perforations, sunshine gets converted through the dome into lines of poetry underneath. For the text, Song chose classical Korean poems called “Sijos” and translated them into English. It takes about 8 hours to see the entire poem, with each line visible for about an hour. The design actually shifts poems based on the season (how they managed to get it to do that with only one set of holes in the top, I have no idea…). During the summer the poem focuses on a theme of “new life”, during the winter it turns to “reflection and the passing of time”. The time-lapse video showing the the delicacy of the words moving through the shadow of the dome is a must see.

On Song’s thesis site you can check out some incredibly detailed info on the project, from experiments and calculations on how the project would work to some amazing drawings from its developmental phase, like the chart below showing which words would be visible during which phases of the day…

Via draw.kyu via NOTCOT

nikola basic: sea organ.

It’s always a thrill to come across a project so unique you don’t even know what to call it. I guess this would be a landscape architecture sonic sculpture. Or at least that’s what I’ve decided to classify it as. Whatever the name, this is one of the most achingly poetic and beautiful things I’ve ever seen. It’s the personification of nature, the song of the ocean played for human ears…

Designed by architect Nikola Basic and built in Zadar, Croatia, “Sea Organ” is a set of marble steps that descend into the sea. Built inside is a series of 35 calibrated steel tubes of various lengths and tilted and various angles. The movement of the waves pushes air through the tubes and into whistles; each whistle can create up to 7 different chords of five notes each. The pitch and colour of the music depends on the strength and flow of the waves, creating a rolling, organic melody that’s, I guess not surprisingly, reminiscent of whale song.

I almost can’t stand how beautiful this is. “Sea Organ” truly is a musical instrument being played by the sea…

Basic very-deservedly won the European Prize for Urban Public Space for this sublime project.

Via The Pompomist via NotCot

contemporary arts muesum of castilla y león.

I now know where I want my ashes to go when I die. That place is the Contemporary Arts Museum of Castilla y León (MUSAC) in León, Spain. I think these pictures pretty much speak for the pure awesomeness that awaits my cremains…

I’m not entirely sure yet where I want my ashes to go. Either mixed into some kind of windex cleaning fluid and then shot onto the outside with a firehose, or perhaps displayed in one of MUSAC’s many gracefully sloping and multi-hued hallways…

In 2007, Spanish architects Mansilla + Tuñòn very deservingly won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – the Mies van der Rohe Award – for the prismatic peep-show. It’s almost hard to believe that the thick, lustrous blocks of colour are an actual building’s façade. They seem almost too rich and beautiful, like they should still be in the design phase somehow. The glass panels surrounding the entry plaza, though at first glance they could seem to have been inspired by modern art or a paint can or a pack of Skittles, were actually created by enlarged and then digitally pixelating a high-resolution photo of El Haconero (The Falconer) – a stained glass panel in León’s 13th century cathedral.

No matter how man pics I see of this joint, they never fail to thrill me. You simply can’t take a bad picture of it…

The interiour of the Museum is in stark and simple contrast to the gleaming, coloured outside; pre-fab and unfinished concrete beams, smooth woods, and simple glass follow an organically unfolding system of inter-connected halls, similar to a honeycomb. The Museum’s organizational nature is unconventional as well; MUSAC has no permanent exhibitions. Just as the architects were inspired to create the space as “covered, sheltered market streets” inspired by Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, the actual artists represented will constantly shift with that same sort of vibrant but temporary energy.

gaston bachelard: “the poetics of space” + desire paths.

Sometimes remembering is even sweeter than learning. I first read about Desire Paths in an endlessly fascinating book by French scientist, philosopher, and poet (not a three-way combo you come across every day) Gaston Bachelard. Dedicated to the study of the poetry and philosophy of science, Bachelard’s 1958 book “The Poetics of Space” looks not at the origins or technicalities of architecture, but how the lived-in and human experience of architecture affects and shapes it’s development.

One of these experiences creates a Desire Path -“a term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points”. Just as Bachelard examines, it shows how the human use of an architectural or pre-determined flow through space will sometimes over-ride the intentions of it’s creator. Just like nature and evolution itself, life will always find the most expedient route to what it wants…

Also known as a Desire Line, I love this because it’s such an undeniable, physical interpretation of something so ethereal: “desire”. Yet you can’t argue with the solid proof of the path; the man told us to walk here, but human will chose to walk here. We were given concrete, and we chose the grass and earth instead. And so many followed that the human path was clearly worn in; sometimes it almost seems like they’re challenging the concrete paths close-by just by their very existence. Not as crisp and laid out, but more confident in that it was created in experience, and not by design. Plus, just the name itself proves that’s there’s always poetry in the most unexpected places. “Desire Path”…

This whole memory of Bachelard came up when I stumbled on a Flickr group dedicated to pictures documenting Desire Paths around the world.

Sometimes new concepts unexpectedly burst into existence all around you as soon as you tune your brain in to realize it. Now that you “know” about Desire Paths, you’ll start to see them everywhere. One day you’ll be walking along and see those little trails of history criss-crossing the land and say “oh, that’s where someone followed their desire”.

Speaking of finding poetry in the everyday, Bachelard himself said “Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language. The words of the world want to make sentences”.

oslo subway: tunnel of light project.

It pains me to look at this. Living in a city (Toronto) whose transit system (the TTC) lies somewhere on the public opinion scale between being an abomination or a total joke, I can’t even fathom experiencing anything this ethereally beautiful during my daily transit excursions. An “art installation” on the TTC is anytime they manage to put cardboard over the gaping holes in the tiled walls – unless you can consider ceiling drips an aquatic sculpture of some kind.

Not in Oslo, Norway. Leave it to those damned Nordic geniuses to not only have a public transit system that works, but to actually put effort into making it an experience. It doesn’t take a massive amount of effort to create a difference between dragging your ass to work in some dirty grey afterthought and being subtly motivated to go to work and turn your country into a design superpower. They’ve obviously gone for the latter.

Built around an escalator in Oslo’s Nydalen subway station, this 27 metre translucent glass tunnel houses a brilliant shifting light installation created by a team of artists let by the station’s architect Kristin Jarmund.

random website friday: weburbanist.

Sometimes you’re in the mood to wander the ‘net aimlessly but you’re not feeling Perez and all the usual suspects. Say you’re in the mood for something intellectual and architectural, yet completely random, with some culture and a good dollop of modern art thrown in. When you’re in that mood (and who isn’t, really?) that’s when you need to head to WebUrbanist.

This site is the shit. There hasn’t been a single visit where I haven’t come across something unexpected. For instance, right now the latest posts are on shopdropping (the subversive art of reverse shoplifting), the 3 most bizarre micronations in the world, the 7 smallest hotel rooms in the world, and urban camouflage.

If you’re saying “shopdrop who?” and “micronation what?” and “urban camowhazzit?” then that’s precisely why you need to go there. Now. Go now.