Seoul National University Museum

OMA/Rem Koolhaas - Seoul National University Museum :: arcspace.com
This is a building I visited last year - inside and out, but was unfortunately unable to take the interior shots shown in this Arcspace entry. Definitely fun though very much a visual one-liner with the large cantilever emphasising the simple rhomboid form as shown by the near end in the photo.






Having visited this and the Casa da Musica in Porto, and been impressed by both these little jewels, I find it hard to imagine that this is the OMA outfit responsible for their proposed Louisville fugly building. (See the earlier post on eyesore of the month web site).

Archinect - online journal AND people who developed blog of architecture schools

Archinect - Making Architecture More Connected (since 1997) I have checkedand found that I have apparently not pointed to these people before... Strange. Because their blog of blogs from architecture students around the world was something I found around two years when setting this blog up. Check out the Architecture School blog - it still has many blogs from many schools - but quite a number are defunct and archived: including the one from our school. A couple of years ago the blog of blogs looked like a brave new experiment in world wide communication. It begins to look more and more like a failed experiment...

I can only speculate what the issue is. It seems to me that the problem may be that there were no linking issues. In its early days it looked like a collection in one place of online diaries - with no other linking theme. Without that theme I wonder whether there is any major incentive to return to the site to participate.

That said, the news value of the site is high. The RSS feed is definitley worth subscribing to. The writing is hardly the insight yet of a Beard Goldberger or Huxtable (Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3) - it seems to describe rather than critique (but then I have not read it all).

Pictures of Ugly Buildings!

Eyesore of the Month by James Howard Kunstler The pictures here are just SO much fun. Don't always agree that the buildings photographed have no redeeming features, but this seldom misses the mark pointing out 'how little clothes the emperor is wearing'. Perhaps he could borrow from the fashion mavens who coined the term used here:fugly?


Interesting opinions about buildings. This is apparently someone who likes this:

Romantic at heart?












Hates buildings like this: (understandable)













And has nothing good to say about either of these buildings: (which I have to say I like - from the pictures). We've even modelled this first one in the Digital Craft course.

A Blog to promote a book

City Comforts, temporarily known as Viaduct, The Blog Despite the book promotion focus - this has some interesting comments. I really like the review of the Disney Hall in LA. The description of what works and doesn't work expresses my own conflicted feelings about this jewel of a building and its relevance / position in a street as a contributor to urban quality.

I should add that attending a concert at the icon made me feel a lot more comfortable with the building as a place / destination. The quirky circulation serves only to enhance the spatial experience.

Museums to model in the UK...

And yet another potential source of inspiration.

Museums to model in New Zealand ...

Another source of ideas...

Virtual Museums

Possible source of information on Museums to model - Virtual / unbuilt?

Makng "Algorithmic Forms" with Revit

1-2-3 Revit: BIM and Algorithmic Form Finding - Parametric change engine provides advanced modeling techniques for exploring innovative real-world building designs. - Cadalyst AEC Check this out... Something to try if you are bored with the Villa Savoye tutorial!

The Digital Craft course 2007 began today

Two hour lecture - February 27 2007:

After Catherine Nelson had presented the excellent self-help guide to healthy use of the computer, we covered the following topics:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives
Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD ADT and Revit - plus Viz render
Task 2 - collaborating in the construction of a complex digital model of a daylit gallery
Task 3 - creating a blog and web page to summarise the digital modelling
The Assessment Contract - and its role in reducing stress and workload
Workload management

And an introduction to Web 2.0 - merely promising to talk about it soon.
Web sites mentioned:

• Flickr - look for the tags
• This blog
• The 1998-2005 web sites produced by students in this course
• The 2006 web site/blogs produced in this course
• Del.icio.us - more tags as a means of organising my bookmarks
• Youtube - tagging videos
• Myspace - tagging friends' web pages
  

AND a late night footnote: 'Are you blogging this?'

Frank Gehry is interviewed by the Wall Street Journal - and it's insightful!

OpinionJournal - Featured Article
Apropos of nothing in particular: I was searching for some stuff for the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course and came across this interview. It's not often pieces like this give you an insight - no matter how processed by the inevitable interviewee desire to sound good...