once again... CDs

Bruce Munro and his last creation "Blue Moon on a Platter"... But this time what I like the most is the making of video...

«This time-lapse video shows the creation of 'Blue Moon on a Platter'; at the Amphitheatre at Waddesdon, one of two light works by Bruce Munro. Bruce was commissioned to create two installations for our Christmas season, with further pieces due in 2013. His second work is called 'Angel of Light', on the North Front immediately in front of the Manor. Both use thousands of second-use CDs to capture and reflect light, and were made with the help of a team of volunteers. They are only here for the six weeks of our Christmas season, so make sure you don't miss them.»

laughing with the king...

Elvis Presley... he couldn't stop laughing while the choir was singing... (26th August of 1969 at the International Hotel, Las Vegas). Even if the 'moment' is very known hear it from time to time is a really laughter therapy!...

Pay attention at 00:47... he says "Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?", it seems he saw someone at the audience with a funny toupee... but not much hair! The choir didn't help too much with its endless huhuhuhu...

skyscraper... rethinking the slums

Torre David:
 Urban-Think Tank, Justin McGuirK and Iwan Baan

«Torre David, a 45-story office tower in Caracas designed by the distinguished Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez, was almost complete when it was abandoned following the death of its developer, David Brillembourg, in 1993 and the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in 1994. Today, it is the improvised home of a community of more than 750 families, living in an extra-legal and tenuous occupation that some have called a vertical slum. 

Urban-Think Tank, spent a year studying the physical and social organization of this ruin-turned-home. Where some only see a failed development project, U-TT has conceived it as a laboratory for the study of the informal. In their “Torre David / Grand Horizonte” exhibit and in their forthcoming book, Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities, the architects lay out their vision for practical, sustainable interventions in Torre David and similar informal settlements around the world. They argue that the future of urban development lies in collaboration among architects, private enterprise, and the global population of slum-dwellers. This film is a call to arms to architects and everyone--to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future.»

The Golden Lion award at the 2012 Venice Architectural Biennale it's been very critizided... I think it depends on how you focus it:  who has really been awarded? what are really awarding? Does the award categorize Torre David as an architectural project or as a social project? Does it point to an actual problem it needs serious attention or it just some other fashionable architecture project to pack and sell in a book?... Or maybe the way to exhibit it as Gran Horizon restaurant installation in Venice has trivialized the slum dwellers' lives... for the glory of the 'artists'? There are always two sides to every story...

This is one side... the justification of  Justin McGuirK:

trash and... improvised design

based on "Microsituations" is Marc Trotereau's "Basura Project": improvisation literally on the streets with the trash, he sets-up his 'movil atelier' (a bicycle) and collects new objects made from those wasted things. I feel really close to this project, that I found fascinating, maybe because of my own attraction for all those objects rejected and abandoned on the streets (a modern custom pull and replace the things without blinking... that is unthinkable in some parts of the world... as it was in the western civilization until few decades ago)

I want to thank Marc Trotereau for send me his pictures to share them on "lo que miras y no ves"...

microsituations...

this time is Marc Trotereau who takes 'all those little things around us' and creates special and spontaneous little places that, transformed by him, catch passerby attention... who only is able to react in front of the unexpected order... "Microsituations" made in Londres, Paris and Sèvres

«The city, the street, complicated entanglement of events, of situations, of moments. The machine city generates motion. Each second fertilizes a thousand situations, each minute bears this implicit vibration. Hours pass, stories appear, desappear, endlessly repeat. Even a very small event participates in this overall rumble, this huge energy. This little situation... is of the order of the micro, unimportant. It is repeated, amplified and may be affecting a passerby, may be not. Participation in this universal movement. Creation of something that is next to nothing, which for someone can become the major event of an ordinary day.» M. Trotereau