The Crux about Unlocking a Bike.

Die Krux mit dem Fahrradschloss - Departure Cycling Affairs. from Christoph on Vimeo.

How simple is handling a car key compared to the ten little steps you have to take while unlocking your bike! We suggest to adapt this technique to bike locks: no more wasting time, no more cursing.. Just press the button on the tiny little key that you store in your pocket - jump on your bike and go!

Please vote for our competition entry at Cycling Affairs.

Windows of New York.

The Windows of New York project is a weekly illustrated fix for an obsession that has increasingly grown in me since chance put me in this town. A product of countless steps of journey through the city streets, this is a collection of windows that somehow have caught my restless eye out from the never-ending buzz of the city. This project is part an ode to architecture and part a self-challenge to never stop looking up. (text from Windows of New York)
(via swissmiss)

Library and Student House - Georg Lippert 1969.

Students' home Vindobona - the building is 30m high with a low library tract in front offering a large roof terrace. It replaced in 1969 the Wiener Stadttheater (on google maps).

Bottle Timeline.

50 years of bottles. The Nivea bodylotions from 1963, 1975, 1981, 1993, and 2004. Bottle 2013 is by fuseproject - Yves Behar. (image from page magazine 02.13 - p. 48).

City of False Hopes.

Games of change occupy an important place in the leisure industry. They usually function in secret, in back rooms, private circles or on the internet. In the last two decades the presence of games of chance has become more visible in Vienna. Betting "cafés" and arcades have opened on shopping streets and in residential districts. In Vienna (2011)  there were around 3,500 legally installed slot machines outside casinos. It is impossible to estimate the number of unofficially installed machines.

Slot machines have a special attraction, as a winning payout seems to permanently beckon. The operators are exploiting an addiction, and their profits come mostly from pathological gamblers or those at risk becoming so. It is a business of false hopes, because players - usually young, almost exclusively male, often with a migration background - have no change in long term: "Those who claim to have won," goes an old pearl of gaming wisdom, "have just not played long enough." Studies talk of the "heroin of the 1990s": the profits go to private individuals, but it is society that bears the follow-up costs.

(text from the exhibition: Game and the City, in the Wien Museum)

Betting cafes - by Miriam Scheffknecht

Werkbundsiedlung.

Werkbundsiedlung, Vienna - model from the 2012 exhibition at the Wien Museum. Now overgrown at google maps [link].

Open Competitions.

Exhibitions of competition's panels (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst / Wettbewerb Neubau Medienzentrum).

Sol Le Witt.

Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes by Sol LeWitt.

Erwin Wurm - De Profundis.

While in Gothics period suffering was accepted, pain is excluded today. "Whoever grows old, witnessing his gradual physical decay and facing his unavoidable approaching end, is on his own, thrown back upon himself, and will remain so." (source: wall text from Vienna Albertina's exhibition Erwin Wurm - De Profundis)

"Erwin Wurm deals with the human body in a cross-media approach by confronting the real manifestation of the body in the 21st century with the body language of Gothic art, which results from the spirit of internalization and asceticism." (source: www.albertina.at)

Other Erwin Wurm projects on anarchitecture:

• Distorted Home.
• House attack.

David Hockney about Photography.

from the book True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney

"I mean, for instance, wide-angle lenses!" Hockney exclaimed as we stood that afternoon on the deck overlooking his pool. "After a while I bought a better camera and tried using a wide-angle lens because I wanted to record a whole room or an entire standing figure. But I hated the pictures I got. They seem extremely untrue. They depicted something you never actually saw. I wasn't just the lines bending in ways they never do when you look at the world. Rather it was the falsification - your eye doesn't ever see that much in one glance. It's not true to life." (chapter 1,4)

To escape this dilemma Hockney developed a collage technique: individual Polaroids arranged into compositions. On contrary to photography it takes time to see those pictures. You can look at them for a long time - but more importantly the pictures came closer to how we actually see: we see not all at once but rather in discrete, separate glimpses.