Art visual np2

Posters by Peter Doig for films screened at studiofilmclub . Posters were eventually published in a book, STUDIOFILMCLUB , published in Cologne. This week studiofilmclub, based at the Fernandes Industrial Centre, Laventille, screens Chris Rock's Good Hair . WATCH trailer below.

In the first post of Crab Studio 's (see previous post ) new blog , Peter Cook evokes the existence of the incredible building that is the Biblioteca Publica of Mexico City by Alberto Kalach . This Mexican Architect seems to have succeed to create a library influenced by both Borges' fantastic atmosphere and Kafka's ambiguous and intriguing fascination for bureaucracy. The beautiful pictures from Tomás Casademunt succeeds to reinforce in an incredible way this feeling.

La Periferia Domestica who is still following our theme of (UN)WALL just posted this amazing work of Dante Ferreri for Venice's Biennale 2007.

House with Balls is a house built outside Ahmedabad (see the previous posts about this city of Gujarat where Corbu, L.Kahn and B.Fuller have built) and designed by Matharoo Associates . Its name refers to the numerous concrete counterweights that open and close the heavy curtains which form the side wall of the house. Counterweights are always interesting to me in the continuous equilibrium they tend to achieve, thus creating a poetic suspension state that allows two heavy forces to acquire lightness. thanks Martin!

Trinidadian Peter Chin Poon, born in Coffee Street, San Fernando, and now resident in Canada, playing Indian mas in a design by Lionel Jagessar sometime in the 1980s. Photo courtesy Jagessar. FROM THE ORGANISERS: A museum exhibit featuring the traditions of local Indian Mas, including the Fancy, Warrahoon, Red and Black Indian mas will be launched on Wednesday at the Carnegie Free Library, San Fernando and will then be open to the general public until April 10. The exhibit is the project of Jaime Bagoo, Carnival Studies student at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts (DCFA), University of the West Indies. She has chosen to archive an aspect of our carnival history in the form of a community museum dedicated to one of our traditional mas stalwarts-Indian Mas. “This project is about the transference of community cultural heritage," she notes. There will be a focus on Indian Mas in San Fernando, more specifically Lionel and Rosemarie Jagessar’s band. Amidst concerns over the

Francesco Cingolani is one of the associate of CTRLZ architectures we already published here ; he also works for Hugh Dutton Associes in Paris and take part of the blog Complexitys related to this office. He recently asked me to answer to a short interview concerning the relationship between engineering and architecture. The original version in French follows the translated one. (nb there are four other interviews on Complexitys with people coming from very various backgrounds) Francesco Cingolani: In your vision, what is the relationship between architecture and engineering? Léopold Lambert: In order to answer to this question, it is important to define what we understand by engineering. If I define here engineering as the discipline that tend to rationalize, diagrammatize, optimize space so then, in my vision, architecture has to try to evolve to the opposite side of this discipline. Of course, architects would always have to do concessions to technocracy, however to resist to

You can find Marlon Darbeau's complete image interview here . For the past week, PLEASURE has posted, one day at a time, a series of images produced by Trinidadian design artist Marlon Darbeau.  Darbeau, whose work has been featured on this blog, had been asked to do the 14th interview in our artist interview series This/discourse/has/no/start(middle)nd . For the interview series, artists are asked to respond to a set questionnaire that includes the questions WHO? WHAT? WHEN? and WHERE?  Darbeau opted to produce an image in answer to each of these. And we opted to post the images one day at a time to allow the images to stand individually, yes, but to also accumulate gradually; to let readers literally get a better picture of Marlon over time, in the way that people come to know each other bit by bit, day by day. All through the simple medium of a blog. The result is an image interview that is playful but also stands on its own as a series of graphics. They have been accumulated a

This building must be very well known by people who live in Chicago, but until yesterday I never heard about it. Designed in 1975 by Harry Weese's office, the Metropolitan Correctional Center is a vertical prison in the very center of Chicago. The buildings definitely uses a feudal vocabulary of dungeon but is also striking by its discretion that makes it be easy to confused with an average office building. (the corollary is probably also true)

See larger image   here .

Usman Haque In the last year or so I've become once again very interested in non-monetary economies (1) and, more specifically, in twisting prisoner's dilemma (2) for useful and practical outcomes. This means I've been looking at cooperative systems and altruism (in an economic sense (3)) and how offering the option to be non-altruistic has, anecdotally, often seemed to be more successful in encouraging altruistic behaviour than systems in which the only other option is to *opt out*. Our consumption (and creation) of energy is of course particularly poignant in these kinds of system. More specifically, with respect to conversations and 'debate' around climate change and the environmental crisis, I've become particularly interested in how members of the public can themselves contribute to the evidence gathering process; how people can convince themselves of what's going on, so that they don't have to rely on merely selecting which authority figure (scien

See larger image   here .

See larger image   here .

Holey Space [espace troue]: the 'third space' of the machinic phylum (of matter-flow), inhabited by itinerant mettalurgists, and by extension the 'underground' space that can connect with smooth space and be conjugated by striated space. Holey space is the subsoil space of 'swiss cheese' that bypasses both the ground [sol] of nomadic smooth space and the land [terre] of sedentary striated space. In this bypassing, holey space is suspect; for Gilles Deleuze, the mark of Cain is not the biblical mark of the soild, but a mark of the subsoil [sous-sol], since holey space is conceived of by surface dwellers as created by theft and betrayal. Holey space has different relations to nomadic smooth and State striated space. Cave-dwelling, earth-boring tunnellers are only imperfecty controlled by the State, and often have allied with nomads and with peasants in revolts against centralized authority. Thus the machinic phylum explored in holey space connects with smooth spac

See larger image   here .

See larger image   here .

After yesterday's post about Constant's New Babylon's drawings, today is the one about his models. Once again, the same pictures are always visible but it exists a multitude of others; those following are only the visible side of the iceberg. If you want to read more about Constant and New Babylon, I recommend the excellent book from Mark Wigley, Constant's New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire Those models pictures are excerpted from two books: - Libero Andreotti & Xavier Costa. Situationists. Art, politics, urbanism . Actar 1996 - Mark Wigley. Constant's New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire. 010. 1998

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Marlon Darbeau at Alice Yard. Photo courtesy INDIgroove We asked Trinidadian design artist Marlon Darbeau to do the 14th interview for our interview series This/discourse/has/no/start(middle)nd . Darbeau, like all our interviewees, was asked to respond to a set questionnaire including the questions: WHO? WHAT? WHEN+WHERE? WHY? In response he opted to produce a series of images. These will now be posted at this blog, one day at a time, right up until Palm Sunday. All of the images will also be collected and displayed in a much larger space which you can fin d here .  "I share ideas with people, they either verbally respond or play with something I make and then I think about what they said or did... I go oooooooooor there it is, that's what I've been looking for," Darbeau says on his blog . "My ideas come from people. "Because what I make is for them anyway." FIND out more about Darbeau here .

It strikes me to observe how much pejorative the word utopia has turned out to be. This shift seems to be a trick of the system in order to operate an easier normalization of architectural projects. The Metabolists and Western Utopian projects from the 60's were definitely not perfect and they owned some bureaucratic totalitarian characteristics that recalls Kafka despite the fact that Izosaki seems to be familiar with this literature. However, the very important quality of these project is that they increased in a tremendous way the field of potentiality of what architecture could be. Those projects were Utopian in their participation to what the great French Philosopher and Poet Edouard Glissant calls Imaginary. Imaginary and Imagination are two different things in this regard. Imagination is the ability of an individual to produce virtual images based on memory. Imaginary on the other hand is a collective construction based on a common horizon to work towards to. U

" The labyrinth as a dynamic conception of space, as opposed to static perspective. But also, an above all, the labyrinth as a structure for mental organization and creative method, wanderings and errors, passes and impasses, luminous breakaways and tragic seclusion, in the generalized mobility of the times (more apparent than real), the grand dialectic of open and closed, of solitude and communion ". Jean-Clarence Lambert. Situationists. Art, politics, urbanism . Actar 1996 I am surprised how much the same images are being dwelled on when one writes about Constant's New Babylon . However, it exists a lot of drawings and models (next post) that are rarely shown and I thought it would be interesting to bring them on. This issue is actually symptomatic of the fact that most amazing projects are being seen in a very narrow vision forgetting their very essence. New Babylon is a labyrinthine city that host the nomadic behavior of what Constant calls "the homo ludens"