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. 

Jean Nouvel

Nice article in the Times about Jean Nouvel, who just won the Pritzker Prize (sort of the Nobel for Architecture). I like a lot of his buildings. And of course, everyone should be able to have their museum designed by someone who looks like a Bond villian.

Some of his other works:

So you want to live forever...

This article in Wired talks about Ray Kurzweil's quest to prolong his life until technology takes over to the point that no one has to die. I read his book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines," and loved it. He's got a very cool take on technological progress and artificial intelligence. Basically he says that the rate at which technology is advancing isn't linear; it's exponential, so it keeps accelerating (as in the graph here). That means all kind of cool things, like artificial intelligence, are pretty much bound to happen.

"But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us."

If you're interested in technology and where things like AI are going, I highly recommend picking up a copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines. Very easy read. The only issue I've got with him is that I think a lot of the immortality business he talks about is motivated by a serious fear of death. Impending immortality or not, everybody's got to come to terms with the possibility of death. Preferably in a graceful way... Other than that, Kurzweil's a great thinker.He lives a couple blocks away from where I grew up. I also used to carpool with his son, Ethan.