my next move

After meeting with Sonny Coates earlier this week, I've realized that I have made a lot of awesome artifacts but since they weren't perceived as the final object (aka the architecture) they have been passed aside and put back in to the hard drive.

I count this lack of "being enamored with the immediate object" with my architecture education. More specific that that, my first week in freshman design studio my professors Tim Hadfield and Marsha Berger took us out of the studio and we followed them to the student center at cmu. There a group of Tebetian monks were making a mandala. I was 18 and had never seen anything like it before. It was beautiful. They were finishing it up and then the ceremony began. And what happens is that after hours and hours of laboring on this beautiful sand sculpture, the monks push the sand into piles, mixing the vibrant colors back to a mush. And as trippy as this might sound, Marsha said one of the most important things that I have kept with me to this day. And to paraphrase, it is to remember that you have to walk away from your work and its in some one else's hands. Someone will destroy your building, aka some one will kill your building. And its not for you, its for those who you make it for. (Wink wink.. how does this relate to my Inhabitable Organism??!!!!)

This video is very similar to the mandala experience I had. I used to have some of the sand and now I am kicking myself because I have no idea where it has gone to through all my moving about. But the sand is just an object as well.

So back to my little story. I am putting a book together with Kendo of our work. I am putting images I have made and am making now. The long story short here is that my architecture training has taught me over the years to not just make. For art, that's how I do alot of it. You can just make due to its rapid turnaround and monumentality. Architecture needs to be stripped of 1. the pretension that soo many folks have in its community and 2. its permanence. It's time we loosened up and got more like Picasso. (and to quote.. art can only be erotic...)

LA TEX CITY

SITE 03::
an overpass
999 yale street LA CA 90012

LATEX CITY
MARCH 7TH
2PM

Please make your way to 999 Yale Street LA, CA 90012 on March 7th at 2pm. Go up the giant pedestrian ramp and join up on the overpass. There will be a sighting of LATEX CITY. Come and experience the space! Come see how balloon people dress, feed, and even listen to music.

This time, it's a completely public space.
Help us make this act of open urbanism a reality.

los angeles unicorn hobos

do you believe? French photographer Jean Yves Lemoigne is a amazing.

for my video jockey-ing

this is where i want to be......

we are the world...

Chris Harrison from my alma mater Carnegie Mellon University has made these beautiful diagram of the Internet Map of the World. H retrieved his information from the Dimes Project which provides several data sets that describe the structure of the Internet. These magnificent drawings use their most recent data at the time of their creation in Feb 2007.
Chris created a set of visualizations that display how cities across the globe are interconnected. This is by router configuration and not physical backbone. So even if you try to zoom into your house, we wont see you with your laptop in your underwears. There are 89,344 connections total according to the Dimes Project. I have recently emailed him to find out how he made these, what software, and where he got his info. How reminiscent is this work to the flight 404 action? mmmm It smells like open source urbanism to me!

!!!!!!!

This was featured on the STREETS blog LA:: my ParkingDayLA exhibit!


"Nina Barbuto, the principal of the fledgling Awesome Studios earns bonus points for setting up her park in a pay parking lot near the corner of Rose and 3rd just east of Little Tokyo. She gets double bonus points for providing shade with a tarp made of 200 black bras."

making shaking

So I have been getting in to this. I want to work on this becoming more of a series. The crowds.


Tonight I went to see a friend from college, Jacob Ciocci's work at cinefamily theater on Fairfax. He is simply inspirational. Here's a small sample.

His work, as awesomely stimulating as it is clearly wraps up in a bow what my/our generation is exposed to. No wonder most of us have add or something along those lines. I mean it is great for multitasking. Even Benjamin Bratton said something about this in the class I had with him over the summer. He was commenting on how architecture students will have multiple screens and be watching multiple things at once while working on a maya model. I always found having a movie on the side or listening to books on tape/this american life/pandora.com or hulu I get more done. We have been growing up with a vomit of images in our faces from saturday morning cartoons to every pop up on the internets. (Please let there be no pop ups in Web 3.0!) So. The question is ... now what? Why isn't our archiectures conveying this also? Is it? is it too subtle? I want media vomit architecure. This is BEYOND surreal. Welcome to the AWEsome.