Photographs from Trip to Palermo

I have posted some photographs from my class's recent "research" trip to Palermo on Sicily on our studio blog, here.
Palermo is a beautiful and strange city, it contains a palimpsest of old Italian architecture layered with the Islamic architecture of the Saracens further layered with 12th century Norman influence, a breed of distinct Islamic-Norman-Italian architecture that can't be seen anywhere else. The landscape of Sicily is rugged and picturesque, clearly informed by its volcanic origins. Nearby, in Segesta, we visited an ancient Greek temple, dating I believe from the 6th C BC.
Enjoy the photos!

Hi Ho, Hi Ho . . .

Here's a picture from the NYT today of Harper, Bush, and Calderon pretending to work as they assure the exploitation of workers in Columbia and elsewhere through their mutual support of free trade.


They look like they're having fun, eh?

Working Site Model - Ground Play - (un)Canny Inhabitations

I have built a site model for my studio project and am having some fun playing with the ground plane. The project will essentially be some sort of secular temple / park / public swimming pool. How this is going to turn out I have no idea!

Pictures from Around Rome - 08-03-23

There is an exhibition on at Trajan's Market displaying the work of Japanese-Italian sculptor Kan Yasuda. His objects, large smooth sculptures in stone, are especially uncanny in relation to the rough brick and stone of the market. His work seems atemporal, perhaps because of their general lack of referentiality, which contrasts powerfully with the perceived historicity of the market.

This temporal perplexity persists - here the timeless sculptures contrast against the rough hewn quality of the very old market, but also against the historical faux-historicity of the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele Due.

The sky, framed behind the Baths of Diocletian

One of the bronze doors to the Baths of Diocletian, representing martyrdom

Rome can always be counted on to present strange vignettes such as this one.

Myself, Christina, Ryan (visiting from London), Ryszard, Shane, Jeff & Bri (visiting from Victoria) eating out on the street in Trastevere. The restaurant was too full to accomodate us, so they set up a table outside.

Yi-Fu Tuan

Today I happened upon this quote from the Cultural Geographer (I hope I can use that title, I'm borrowing it from elsewhere) Yi-Fu Tuan and I find it remarkable. From his book, Cosmos & Hearth:

"Singing together, working together against tangible adversaries, melds us into one whole: we become members of the community, embedded in place. By contrast, thinking--especially thinking of the reflective, ironic, quizzical mode, which is a luxury of affluent societies--threatens to isolate us from our immediate group and home. As vulnerable beings who yearn at times for total immersion, to sing in unison (eyes closed) with others of our kind, this sense of isolation--of being a unique individual--can be felt as a deep loss. Thinking, however, yields a twofold gain: although it isolates us from our immediate group it can link us both seriously and playfully to the cosmos--to strangers in other places and times; and it enables us to accept a human condition that we have always been tempted by fear and anxiety to deny, namely, the impermanence of our state wherever we are, our ultimate homelessness. A cosmopolite is one who considers the gain greater than the loss. Having seen something of the splendid spaces, he or she (like Mole [in The Wind in the Willows]) will not want to return, permanently, to the ambiguous safeness of the hearth."

I think it is a wonderfully lucid description of a condition I think most people are familiar with. Slipping back and forth between these realms is an art form and I believe situating yourself with any degree of permanency is an impossibility.

Some preliminary sketches for Uncanny Inhabitations

I am trying to reinvent my working method for this new project by starting with vignettes and sections . . . here are a couple of my initial explorations. For more, go here.

Tempietto

By combining a perspectival sketch with a section I am attempting to capture something of the experience of the space around Bramante's Tempietto.