The RHS image shows eight blocks of grey tints, with a pure white stripe running across the middle. The numbers on each block show the pixel value that block contains. (That is, the block labeled 251 has red, green, and blue pixel values of 251, 251, 251.) On a perfectly calibrated monitor, you’d be able to distinguish (if only just barely) the difference between the white central row and the block labeled 254. More typically, a “good” monitor would let you see the boundary between the center row and the 250 or 251 block. How many blocks can you see? Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and and ARM’s institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In Mark Wigley’s “White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture”, a daring revisionist history of modern architecture, Wigley opens up a new understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores the most obvious, but least discussed, feature of modern architecture: white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by nineteenth-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing—the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design.

Onsite motion detection camera for website monitoring.

The name’s Digger.

Recessionary times: boat builders as house builders?

Simulacrum. Philosopher Fredric Jameson offered photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, where a painting is sometimes created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real. Other art forms that play with simulacra include Trompe l’oeil, Pop Art, Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. In the images below, the thin blue line represents a proposal sited within the existing. It’s a low budget, hand-craft technique.

Jong tells us that the Korean window is usually assigned an ancillary function such as a table, a desk, a door…

We say “Wonky curtains” as in the curtains are not rectangular because the floor and ceiling are not parallel. Modern architectural haberdashery dictates that for such curtains to be drawn correctly (i.e. that the curtain covers the wall in its entirety), wonky curtains must have their standing position at the highest point on the wall: a wonky curtain draws down. In the depiction below, the track is shown exposed but of course it would be recessed into the ceiling. Adrian having worked out the wonky curtain solution, frustratingly at first learns that someone has created the same solution: Maison Martin Margiela. Or is it that great minds think alike?

Featuring Jean Luc Godard’s Le Mépris and the Casa Malaparté. Obviously the rocks around Capri are a long way from trees of Ponsonby park but you get the drift…