Let's try this again...

Stop blogging for a few months and the whole world goes to pot.

So, I got a bit distracted with things over the last couple of months and the blog fell through the cracks (also, there's a new firewall at work, which prevents me from procrastinating in this particular venue). But now, with all the crises going on around the world I find I'm emailing a lot of interesting articles to friends. Then I remembered, "Hey, didn't I used to have a blog... and can't you use blogs to post you read so others can read them too..." Yup.

So let's give this blogging thing another shot...

Just watching the Olympics opening ceremony and learned this fascinating nugget of information: Omar Bongo, the president for life of Gabon, has offered any Gabonese gold medalist "A dream house and untold riches."

Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't trust central-african dictators-for-life, but isn't "dream house and untold riches" awfully ambiguous? Before winning the gold, you might want to see that house and be told just what sort of riches he has in mind. Then again, maybe its better not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Cleaning out the backlog of camera photos...

... if by "Way to Fashion" you mean cheap t-shirts and shameless plagiarism.

Some airlines want to project trustworthiness...

... others want to project South Park.

And we're back!

So this blog address was inexplicably shut down last month. No idea why. Maybe inactivity -- the last post I made was apparently in June. Sorry about that. The main reason is that my firewall at work now blocks blogs, thus eliminating my primary posting time. On the upside, productivity has increased. Life has it's tradeoffs.

I'll try to be more diligent in the coming months about posting regularly. Lots of interesting reading about Architecture, India, Technology, Society, etc. to share with you. So I hope you check back in!

Since the last post, I've gotten to see what the mystery of Bhutan is all about, catch up with some good friends from around the world, and figure out a little bit more of what I want to do with myself. Life moves quickly. You can't stand in the window watching for too long (but if you do, it helps to have a good friend with you).

Building the Cities of the Future

Great article in the NYTimes Magazine about the creation of new megacities that is going on in places like China and the Middle East. In the last 20-30 years metropolises like Shenzhen have gone from being unremarkable villages to having 8 or 10 million inhabitant. As you can imagine, this throws a bit of a monkey wrench into existing theories of architecture and urban development.

'Cities like these, built on a colossal scale, seem to absorb any urban model, no matter how unique, virtually unnoticed. A project that could have a significant impact on the character of, say, New York — like the development plans for ground zero — can seem a mere blip in Beijing, which has embarked on dozens of similarly sized endeavors in the last decade alone. “The irony is that we still don’t know if postmodernism was the end of Modernism or just an interruption,” Koolhaas told me recently. “Was it a brief hiatus, and now we are returning to something that has been going on for a long time, or is it something radically different? We are in a condition we don’t understand yet.”'

However the theory works out, these cities aren't waiting. They'll be built in whatever way they can manage because the economic growth in the region demands it. I wonder how we will look back at them in 50 years -- as collossal mistakes or remnants of a tremendously creative era?

Architects Without Borders?

Why isn't there more international movement among architects.  There's such a lot of building going on in places like Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai.  But much of the design is crap.  At the same time, places like New York seem to be overflowing with talented designers struggling to get work.  Why not go abroad and do projects here?  

Of course, the Rem Koolhaas' and Zaha Hadids of the world have figured this out.  Their biggest projects these days are coming in places like Beijing and the UAE.  But there must be room at the next level down -- the not-quite-starchitects and just-out-of-school designers... Go east young designers.

What sparked this?  Interesting article in the times about a Chinese developer who's brought in 100 up-and-coming young architects to each design a house in his residential development in inner mongolia.  Sounds like a complete clusterfuck.