The Toaster Project.

"Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it." (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams)

Arrogantly Thomas Thwaites decided to disregards the lesson from Douglas Adams and tried to make - a toaster. “There’s a lot of effort, intelligence and history that goes into making even something like a toaster. On the one hand that's great…On the other hand, is it worth putting all this time, effort and energy into something that is a pretty marginal addition to our existence?” Thomas Thwaites asks in his lecture.

(see Thwaites book on amazon.com:  The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch)

The One & The Many.

Linked urinals - spotted this summer at the Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset show "The One & The Many" at the Submarine Wharf, Port of Rotterdam.

Walking Rollercoaster.

I love roller-coasters, and now you can walk on them. The landmark "Tiger and Turtle" is an art project in the South of Duisburg in the Ruhr area, part of the transformation process: from a heavy industry area (steel and coal) to a landscape park.

"Tiger & Turtle - Magic Mountain" is the name of a huge sculpture by Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth being built in the south of Duisburg as a stunning new landmark for the Ruhr region. Resembling the shape of a rollercoaster, the sculpture will be located on Heinrich-Hildebrand-Höhe in the Angerpark, which opened in 2008.

Street Art - Mentalgassi.

Sweet urban disrupt. Street artists (like Mentalgassi) make our urban world less ordinary. Thank you!

Architecture In-Print.

I love print, and the ambition to resist the ongoing flux of online publishing. Pause and visit archiziness.

"ARCHIZINES is a showcase of new architecture fanzines, journals and magazines from around the world that provide an alternative to the established architectural press. Launched by Elias Redstone, with art direction by Folch Studio, the project celebrates and promotes independent and alternative publishing as an arena for architectural commentary, criticism and research, and as a creative platform for new photography, illustration and design."

Discover a world of alternative architecture journalism.

World of Chicken.

Atlas - map with chicken, Alois Mosbacher, 1997

Chicken world map, seen at the Essl Museum, near Vienna. "For each villager I started to draw a chicken - following numerous chicken paints, also a world map" Alois Mosbacher explains. Still an up-to-date painting, isn't it?

CCTV - by Zou Jian

Drawing of the CCTV by Zou Jian during construction. The image was shown in the 2010 exhibition "La Ville Dessinée", at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, in Paris. The exhibition has showed how artists use architecture as a source of inspiration to enrich the look of a comic book.

Dear Photograph.

“Take a picture of a picture from the past in the present”, that is the tagline of the tumblr photoblog dearphotograph: A unique way to recreate photo memories. Nostalgic is trendy!

Christmas City.

Only five weeks till Christmas!

Urban Intimacy.

During long winter nights, already beginning in late afternoon, the look of the streets changes: illuminated windows reveal the building's interior - let you invade - accidentally - someone's private sphere. "The interior takes precedence over the exterior, and we can glimpse moments of people’s intimate lives."  In "Scenes of Intimacy" Anne-Laure Masion captures these intimate moments and assembles them to a snapshot of urban life. See the limited poster series at wall30.

Murmuration (Happy Friday).

murmuration /merr’meuh ray”sheuhn/, n.
1. an act or instance of murmuring. 2. a flock of starlings.

That's impressive (architecture).
[via swissmiss]

Architecture is...

from Project Japan, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Stop-Motion Models.

Love this stop-motion animation by the Italian studio BAUKUH. It presents sketches for a National History Museum - a study assignment by the Berlage Institute to develop new architectural concepts for the Netherlands. The resulting project suggest new possible relations between the public and the museum interior.

"The NHM is a museum without a collection. It is empty. The emptiness of the NHM suggests a possible form of urbanity. The NHM is an open empty box waiting for aggressive metropolitan appropriation. Everything can happen inside the NHM: markets, exhibitions, political rallies, spectacles, concerts, fairs."

via @elliswoodman