lwsdm

OK so I’ve been thinking and dabbling with weblogging for about three months now with lwsdm at blogsome. I have a busy life and I wanted to know a couple of things like, could I keep up a weblog up after the first burst of enthusiasm wanes (& when no one is watching!!) and could I learn abit of html and ccs and programming I thought I needed to sort out my blog properly. Well I like to blog it has started to feel like a natural extension of my online reading and somewhere to put my thoughts and references, photos anything really, and keep them. But my life is too busy to learn many languages and Finnish is ahead of html & the rest I’m afraid. So I have decided to regenerate myself to a hopefully permanent home over here at lewism.org. All of you who have linked here I’m really sorry to be moving on you but hopefully you will follow.
Thanks again to the blogsome team for the last three months.

I spent most of yesterday at work in a quiet frenzy at work because of the Cricket. I was so tense I could hardly concentrate on anything else but the Radio coverage on the internet all passed by obliviously by my Finnish work colleagues. Such are these times you truely feel like a fish out of the water and yesterday was the first time for a long time I truely wished I was in a pub in central London with a few friends not so quietly toasting the return of the ashes after 16 years. Strange how the cultural dividing line can become a sporting occasion which engulfs one nation and which I quietly shared as an expat by proxy in turns feeling sickness, relief and elation while the rest of the world around me passed by in ignorance.

Phew we have two cats!

Most of the great men in history have loved cats : Churchill, Newton (inventor of the cat-flap), Dickens, Abe Lincoln, P,G.Wodehouse. By contrast, many of the villains have hated cats , or preferred dogs: Hitler, Napoleon, Mussolini, Stalin.

The Block lamp by Harri Koskinen is part of the permanent collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Koskinen has done some great designs for Issey Miyake and Iitala also. But the block lamp is my favorite.

abandoned is a great photography website of abandoned buildings, full of poigniant photos.

Mo01 the latest in town planning and design, but maybe not surprisingly as this article shows its not a complete sucess but I’ve added Malmo to the list of places I want to visit as Calatrava is there to with a beautiful looking apartment tower with a twist!

Archinect has a great resource for this here also bottom drawer blogs pretty well about it from an archtects perspective in the usa. Events in seeming slow motion have ratcheted up about this, and it feels hard not to write about this and yet to say anything constructive yet. Flickrs Katrina tag shows so many different perspectives. I really hope that the city can be rebuilt in a sustainable way so that the city of New Orleans can be properly prepared next time.

(Rating 4/5)
ISBN: 952-5195-20-1
Language: Finnish/English
Publisher: MFA

From Wood to Architecture presents 17 projects from around Finland which use wood in different ways. Wood is perhaps the fundamental building material of Finnish architecture and recently has enjoyed a new life being used more and more again not only in traditional ways but also as this book shows in modern uses as a tecnical product, eg glulam beams, cladding or premade insulated panels, and the projects here show off almost all of these uses in recent Finnish Architecture. The exhibition, accompanying the book runs for only a few more days but the book adds four well written essays about wood more on which I will write another time. The book is excellent with the summer houses and the Kärsämäki wooden church in particular the pick of them.
Note I can’t locate this book for sale at amazon.co.uk or .com. Go to mfa website to order, the text is both in english and finnish.
photos of exhibition and press photos below (here for full size)
For a full list of the 17 projects see below….
(more…)

A wise old man once told me, if you’re looking for someone to have sex with, you live in the city; if you’ve got someone to have sex with, you live in the suburbs. Sometimes I think it may be as simple as that.

the article this quote is from is actually about density in cities and what role it plays in the life of the city. But I couldn’t resist te quote.

(from kottke.org)

For the Architect or product designer it can still be quite hard to track down products on the web if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, but one website materialexplorer is really useful. You can search by type or property (if you want something soft and fluffy for instance!) or how about trying to track down those funky tiles that mvrdv used in their last project, then just type in the arcitects name. Only a couple of problems, you have to register, and the database doesn’t appear so large at the moment. I think they are specialising in new materials and definitely better for product and interior designers. The registering is not all bad either, you can build up a neat folder system of materials, forinstance for differet projects. A really nice idea well executed it will become more and more useful as more products are added. Check it out.

photos left to right are;
sensacell an interactive led surface mountable almost anywhere.
liquidfloor walk on the tiles, the liquid inside moves and swirls around.
plywall element by Finnish designer Jouko Kärkkäinen.
vectogramm for transferring images onto sheet materials (concretes, mdf, plastics) by means of milling technology. This is so cool!