SketchUp competition "Out of Place".

The open competition solicited renderers to submit their most outrageous decontextualized 3D models, generated with SketchUp and Maxwell Render.

Read on.

California Crazy

Heimann, Jim (2001) California Crazy & Beyond. Roadside vernacular architecture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Rules for modern design

coffeewithancrchitect.com

"Great design comes from appropriate restrictions. We can’t just go off willy-nilly designing frivolous trite, full of decorative representations of a by-gone era. No, indeed. We’re not completely uncivilized. 

Modern Design needs rules."

Written by Jody Brown for Coffee with an Architect. Read/watch the whole article.

Kitsch Oklahoma

 

Kitsch Disney II

Polvos azules

Beneath Its Polished Surface, a Black-Market Shopping Center Thrives

In one of the busiest shopping complexes in downtown Lima, thousands of Peruvians squeeze past each other in narrow corridors and jockey for space in tiny rooms. Music blasts from stalls as shopkeepers try to lure customers with their seemingly infinite rows of goods. The smell of food and plastic lingers in the air.

This is Polvos Azules, an epicenter of retail activity in Lima and a place often referred to (in oxy moron) as the city’s “official informal market.” Legend has it that Polvos Azules, Spanish for “blue powders,” got its name in the 1540s from the material used by leather artisans to dye their skins on a small street behind the Presidential Palace. Five centuries later, the capitalist spirit embodied by those early merchants is alive and well, their leather goods replaced by faux-Levis jeans and bootleg Magic Mike DVDs.

Lima is a city where the formal and informal are naturally spliced, a condition exemplified nowhere better than the bustling and raucous stalls of the Polvos Azules. In the 1980s, semi-ambulant vendors began congregating in Polvos Azules, selling Walkmen and VHS video tapes, and eventually growing in number to upwards of 5,000. In the early ’90s, they organized, forming the Association of Owners of the Polvos Azules Commercial Center. The association negotiated a relocation program with the city, and built a large shopping complex with 2,400 stalls.

Keep reading.

Vigo, Manuel (2013) Beneath Its Polished Surface, a Black-Market Shopping Center Thrives. In: Informal city dialogues. http://nextcity.org

Tabula non rasa (S. de Maat)

globalenvision.org

"In a slum, one can often not afford the luxury of demolition. Building a larger home usually means extending an existing house by a floor on top. Choices from the past remain visible and set implications for further development. Continued building means puzzling with the existing situation. The current situation imposes restrictions on the new design. It requires much creativity and inventiveness to get all connections, both spatially and technically, of old and new quite right. Design issues and building projects are therefore in a slum more complex than average. As a result, especially proven techniques are used. Style architecture makes little chance. Avoiding risk is crucial, because of financial constraints. In his book How Buildings Learn1, Stewart Brand shows how not only the initial design determines the shape of a building, but also how the subsequent existence leads to growth and change. In a slum, especially that growth and change are built, not style and originality.

[...] Although an architect will never design a slum, the architecture of a slum is an essential source for designers."

Keep on reading at The Perfect Slum.

Kitsch Disney I

Multiple floors (S. de Maat)

theperfectslum.blogspot.com

"Adding a floor to your house is the best way to let your home grow. An additional floor and four walls is all you need. And of course stairs to get there. Everything else is already in place, the foundation, the front door and the roof. This roof can be reused by just lifting it a few meters.

The staircase is of course the most notable new thing in the house. In this house the staircase landing of the first floor is conveniently doubling as the front porch of the house below. Note that a tarp lies over the clothesline, to protect the washing against the bright sun and down whirling dust. In the dry season dust is blown into Mumbai from India’s interior. Everything eventually gets covered with a brown layer. Not a drop of rain falls in nine months, therefore the blanket of dust is always present. The first rain of the monsoon washes everything clean and brings happy faces. Buildings, streets, plants and trees get their original colour back."

Keep on reading at The Perfect Slum.

Recalling the Aesthetic Spirit of Architecture (R. T. Meeker) II

"The aesthetic sense is a synergetic capacity involving intellect, emotion, motivation, memory, communication, and perception. The magic of the aesthetic experience, in both nature and art, exists in the marvelous potential for communion between kindred spirits. Since belief in this notion has little currency in our time, we nostalgically turn to works of art fashioned in more spiritually imbued times and cultures. When spiritually impregnated, nature and art may raise consciousness and arouse the soul by charging the emotions, stimulating the intellect, stirring old memories, firing the imagination, provoking us to act, to reach out, to communicate. We are moved by the aesthetic experience because it reconfirms our belonging in the cosmos, in nature, in the community, and ultimately in ourselves.

architeacher.org

A critical method for evaluating architecture aesthetically should account for and examine all of the parameters of the architectural problem holistically: people and their purposes, physical and cultural contexts, historical and topical precedents as well as functional requirements, building technology, and budget constraints. Then, when the critic refers to what is "appropriate, right, and fitting" about a building, these terms may credibly refer to one or more parameters of the problem. Parametric analysis as a critical method raises the critique above the level of tastes by addressing the whys and wherefores of our personal preferences. After all, the critic can only persuade; he cannot dictate an aesthetic evaluation. This method situates aesthetic evaluation where it belongs: among the contending values, intentions, and impulses of the designers, builders, observing participants, and historical precursors, whose mindsets and world views may be compatible or irreconcilable. Parametric analysis further permits the critic to relate his subjective considerations about architectural intangibles-such as light, shadow, space, ambience, vista, proportion, harmony, beauty, formal dynamics, and other aesthetic terms-to the architectural tangibles expressing the built form in response to the parameters of that particular problem."

Meeker, Robert T. (1983) "Recalling the Aesthetic Spirit of Architecture". Journal of Aesthetic Education. pp 97.

Recalling the Aesthetic Spirit of Architecture (R. T. Meeker) I

arch.umd.edu

"What is the domain of architecture? What is the nature of the architectural problem? How should we perceive and define that problem? What is the nature of the aesthetic sense? What is involved in the aesthetic experience of architecture? Since the aesthetic experience is subjective, what is a viable concept of the self, of the individual? What is the relationship of the individual to society? Since architecture is a collective cultural expression, what does it say about and how does it reflect the culture of its time and place? What does architecture reveal about the structure and dynamics of a society and that society's relationship with nature? What is the role of the architect in society, both as a public professional and as an artist? Is the architect an artist, since often as not the architect is a member of a collective agency? When is architecture an art? How does architecture achieve historical significance?

Architectural aesthetics could become a central focus of architectural theory again, for it conditions most issues concerning the nature of architecture. If authors would recall the aesthetic spirit of architecture, address the issues squarely, illustrate them aptly, and discuss them in terms that architectural practitioners, educators, and students understand and use, then the countervailing arguments could revolve around common themes and begin to resolve the dialectic of architectural theory."

Meeker, Robert T. (1983) "Recalling the Aesthetic Spirit of Architecture". Journal of Aesthetic Education. pp 93-94.

Kitsch (F. Gualdoni)

"Around 1860 in Germany the expression Kitsch starts to grow, indicating an aesthetic operation of counterfeit and pastiche. The etymology is indicative: Kitschen means the act of building old furniture with old parts, and Verkitschen, to sell something different that what has been announced. At the same time, then, the term refers to something related with the non-authentic reproduction of something that already existed, and suggest that its main object of said action is to satisfy a need that has something to do with taste, with expectations of cultural consumption.

The moment is determinant. The start-up of the second half of the nineteenth century is that in which bourgeoisie and small bourgeoisie are definitely established as the main components of an evolved European society, or rather the German, French and English society. Said social groups do not present specific cultural forms that identify them, as what happens in one hand to aristocracy and to the other hand to the lower classes, still anchored to popular culture, limited but defined. The bourgeoisie aspires instead, by the attraction that naturally pose the more mature lifestyles to those inferior, to be precipitants of the aristocratic culture of the high classes: such involvement is rather seen as an essential element in the climbing up to an eminent and acknowledged social role, to distinctive traits of a long cherished exclusivity."

Gualdoni, Flaminio (2008) Kitsch. Milano: Skira. p 7

Corbis