El sol

Officially in Guardamar de Segura since yesterday. Such a beautiful and interesting place. The internet situation is pretty bad, none of the apartments have a working connection and our studio space doesn´t have furniture at all either. Pictures and more will come as soon as I can get connected somewhere besides these internet cafes. I am alive though.

Every day I´m here I´ll be beet red from either the sun, the wine, or both.

No creatures in the closet please.

It should be 11pm right now but my clock is telling me it's 2am. It's reading eastern daylight time but my body is running on PDT. I flew into Dulles Airport this afternoon, catching the 7am out of Los Angeles. The last time I was at LAX security was a mess so I figured I would show up an hour and a half early. It took all of 5 minutes to get through through today. Didn't want to pay in blood for an airport breakfast so I slept most of the way. Getting rest was nice but I wish I had been conscious flying over the Appalachians. The cloudscape was amazing when I finally opened the window, and seeing plots of green as we approached for landing was a welcome replacement for the industrial parks and warehouses of ONT. Seeing IAD, the first thought that ran through my mind: Die Hard 2. Yippee ki-yay. Coming off the plane, the humidity hit me and weighed down like a gorilla on my shoulders. Yes sister, I should invest in khaki shorts. Finally got to Jen's around 5pm local time and we went out to walk Gretchen. Had dinner and met up with Mr. Palomar at Barnes & Noble before watching The Rock. "I'll take pleasure in guttin' you, boy."

Here's a few pictures from last Sunday's adventure in LA, when my sister, Alf, and I visited the three MOCAs, including the Learning From Las Vegas exhibit, and Angel's Knoll. The streetlights are actually at the LACMA but we drove by.

I felt like the CalTrans building fit the area much better than SF's Federal Building. Yeah there's no plaza but it's also not across the street from Greek columns.

Mic check 1 2 3

It's Memorial Day weekend and my last at home before leaving for my summer travel study. I've clearly been MIA with the end of the semester and relaxing at home but I don't think too many people follow me here anyway. Hopefully while I'm away I can post more regularly to keep my family updated on what I'm doing out in Guardamar and share some of the sights. I'm packed for the most part and disappointed I forgot to bring back a few things from Berkeley like extra sandals, maybe some slacks, etc. A few more things need to be done before I leave Wednesday like moving some files around, printing out information, and an essay on this book:
It's made up of a bunch of deceptively short vignettes (totaling less than 130 pages) that I find fascinating for Calvino's ideas about perception and making meaning. Maybe I'm reading too in-depth for this short assignment (why am I only on page 40) but I'm enjoying it. You have to love the very-appropriate Albrecht Dürer illustration of a perspective machine on the cover. The structure of the book has got me thinking of Hindu and Buddhist mandalas, particularly this one. Mandalas in general graphically organize the universe into specific geometries like a square, and the Vastu mandala most directly relates to architecture. We definitely saw this in architecture history class and talked about how it influenced temple design.

Vastu Mandala

I'm curious to see how others are reading the book and how our instructor will be incorporating it into our work. All right, that's just a little bit for today...more to come later.

Is there no medium

I realize I have this internal polarization where on one hand I absolutely love everything and on the other I hate it all. I don't mean emotionally but in critique of society. Between hope, wonder, and ambition to cynicism and misanthropy. I don't know where this is going.

Walking around Chelsea

Me: "San Francisco, I'm so over you."

--as a man on the street hands me free Ghirardelli chocolate.

Such irony.

Thanks studio

Bryan: Hey you know what I noticed? You don't look as miserable this semester.

Junkspace

"If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet...Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout."

"Junkspace is the sum total of our current put together, but somehow we do not register on the same scales. We do not leave pyramids."

"Because it costs money, is no longer free, [air-]conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace...When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. As if space itself is invisible, all theory for the production of space is based on an obsessive preoccupation with its opposite: substance and objects, i.e., architecture. Architects could never explain space; Junkspace is our punishment for their mystifications."

"Earthlings now live in a kindergarten grotesque...Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace. There is no form, only proliferation..Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation we honor, cherish, and embrace manipulation.."

"The curse of public space: latent fascism safely smothered in signage, stools, sympathy...Junkspace is postexistential; it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, undoes where you were."

"God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing...an insulting evolutionary joke..."

-Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace (2002)