feel like…

On Friday, July 8, 2011 – the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park celebrated the completion of the Room.

Lesson / Koan : Design should be free.

Louis Kahn’s utopia in the East River off Manhattan is coming along nicely…reflecting his lifelong dream.

” I want to build modern structures which feel like ancient ruins.” – Louis I. Kahn

BTW,

In the late 1960s, during a period of national urban renewal, New York City Mayor John Lindsay (pictured above with architect Louis Kahn back far right) proposed to reinvent Roosevelt Island (then called Welfare Island) into a vibrant, residential community. His planning team welcomed an appropriate new name to reflect this community.
NOTE :

Keep your eye on this project @ http://www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org/

illuminate relationships…

The city’s infrastructure is crumbling, and there are few funds for repairs, but one artist may have a solution: Legos.

@ Central Park east 85th street & 5th avenue.

Lesson / Koan : Fill in.

German artist Jan Vormann and a team of volunteers began filling in cracks in city buildings with the plastic building blocks. The repairs across the city were done as part of Vormann’s “Dispatchwork” project.

BTW,

Utopia, one brick at a time.

Across from Penn Station-madison square garden-7th ave & 32nd street.

“The combination of stone bricks and plastic bricks creates all kind of different contrasts that, in my eyes, illuminate relationships between aesthetics and functionality,” the artist said. Using the colorful blocks, Vormann has repaired centuries-old buildings in Europe, as well as the wall of a fast-food restaurant across from Penn Station.

The Lego patches were designed to fit precisely into holes in the walls surrounding Bryant and Central parks, as well as building facades in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

NOTE :

Berlin monument.

The Lego brick has a nostalgic value amongst different generations worldwide, but at the same time it is up to date.

Vormanns’ Berlin series of “Dispatchwork” he selected buildings still damaged from World War II and filled gaps, holes and clefts in walls and streets, public buildings and private houses with plastic bricks, and mostly with Lego.

jan vormann @ work.

 

 

open to…

Considering yesterday’s post on the topic of water, another speculative image proposes a public arena to experience this natural element.

Swimming Manhattan.

Lesson / Koan : Pool is another name for group, open to one’s own creation.

Could Manhattan, and other U.S. cities listen to the invitation the public is waiting to receive as an act of conservation?

BTW,

San Alfonso del Mar is located in Algarrobo, Chile, and opened in December 2006

The world’s largest swimming pool is 100 km West of Santiago de Chile, in the lagoon resort San Alfonso del Mar, with an artificial pool more than 1 km long. The artificial pool is almost one-fourth of the length of New York’s Central Park.

NOTE :

The extremes of the examples given above range from the utopian to the absurd. At a closer look, there is only one really difference between the two pool types.  The differences is Public vs Private.  Should either the utopian or the tourist experience involve buying a ticket?  The price of imagination is extreme only when taken away from the collective memory of a person, a city and a nation.

Ask yourself today, and hopefully on a regular basis, what is the really price I’m paying for this experience?

artificial :

1. artificial flowers :  synthetic, fake, imitation, mock, ersatz, faux, substitute, replica, reproduction; manufactured, fabricated, inorganic; plastic;informal pretend, phony.

ANTONYMS – natural.

2. an artificial smile :  insincere, feigned, false, unnatural, contrived, put-on, exaggerated, forced, labored, strained, hollow; informal pretend, phony, bogus.

ANTONYMS – genuine.