VICTIMS

VICTIMS: A WORK BY JOHN HEJDUK

Hejduk’s combinatory methods of applying fiction to architecture and architecture to fiction are just amazing during the reading.

Wonderland Manual for Emerging Architects

Wonderland manual is a cultural version of the NATO Cold War strategy of ‘flexible response’. Pursuing the military analogy, the manual is a continuation by other means of what Wonderland has been doing for the past years: accelerating the exchange of information among young architects in Europe.

The Wonderland manual differs from other architecture books in that it is not about architecture but about architects, not about the work that architects produce but about how they produce it. It is first and foremost a guide containing facts and figures, tips and experiences and as such can be seen as a handbook for European architects at the start of their careers.

Wonderland manual reveals a remarkable commitment to sharing knowledge and experience without any self-interest. While such altruism may not be typical of the entire generation of young architects, it does characterize a considerable portion of it, and most certainly those who have worked in front of and behind the scenes on this book. This young generation is the first to reach adulthood in a Europe without the Iron Curtain. It is also the generation which, despite all the political, economic and cultural complexities of this new Europe, was the first to develop a European mind-set and, in many cases, to lead a border-hopping European lifestyle. It is also the first generation for whom Europe is not an abstraction, not merely a symbol of regulations and bureaucracy, but a self-evident fact, and an equally self-evident field of activity.

BOOK WEBSITE

livloving: Haruki Murakami’s interview with The Guardian “Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven’t changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That’s a confidence. If you don’t know what you love, you are lost.”

livloving:

Haruki Murakami’s interview with The Guardian

“Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven’t changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That’s a confidence. If you don’t know what you love, you are lost.”

31 Dic 2011 / Reblogged from livloving with 21 notas / books haruki murakami 

THE CRAFTSMAN

NewYork Times Book Review

PROJECT JAPAN

 

Back to the future

Visionary architecture in postwar Japan

“Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs… then the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think… although they were very different characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an activist state… after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the world with a new architecture—Metabolism—that proposed a radical makeover of the entire land… Then newspapers, magazines, and TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly modern men… Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining example… when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic….” —Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich Obrist

Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle.Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from thetabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokoy, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.