super_productive

Thursday, February 29, 2024

kazuo nakamura

inner structures

on view at the AGO
kazuo nakamura
https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/kazuo-nakamura

Friday, November 10, 2023

roby dwi antono

red ranger

roby dwi antono
https://www.volerygallery.com/roby-dwi-antono

Monday, October 9, 2023

felix gonzalez-torres

untitled (double portrait)

untitled

felix gonzalez torres
https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org

Saturday, September 16, 2023

ugo rondinone

zwölfterjunizweitausendundzwei

ugo rondinone
https://ugorondinone.com

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

federico díaz

resonance

federico díaz
https://www.federicodiaz.net/

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

yukiko suto

house with blue roof and red door

house with the gate with peeling paint

yukiko suto
https://www.yukikosuto.com/

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

gensler

oklo aurora nuclear fission power plant

[via time]
gensler
https://www.gensler.com

Tuesday, July 27, 2021

$#!+ house

"The dining room, deep in the hotel, is a broad space of high ceilings and coving, with thick carpets to muffle the screams. It is decorated in various shades of taupe, biscuit and fuck you."

- Jay Rayner, reviewing the restaurant Le Cinq in Paris, 2017

Someone will ask me of the hypothetical house I designed for myself, “why do I have a slide going down from my loft sleeping space? why not just the stair?” To this hypothetical question, I would not just simply answer “why not?” as if to say “all the other possible, typical, or predictable options were considered and this was just the most practical solution from that space to go down in elevation”; or “that its novelty was too good to pass up”. For me, “I like slides. I just wanted one” would suffice as an answer.

I’m not sure that’s a good answer, but I don’t think it’s a wrong answer. Saying that “a slide is a playful way to go down” could be said, written off as just a shortcut for thinking how to design a playful way to traverse downward, that I could have done that with a playful stair; or that I haven’t gone far enough, that I could have had a fireman’s pole, or a crash pad, or a zip-line. Or that it’s not even interesting: “I mean, have you googled ‘houses with slides’?” I could also be accused of not being serious, or real architect because I can’t be taken seriously as an architect for designing a slide in my house. Or that it’s tasteless or dumb or lazy or shit design or whatever other countless criticisms.

Somewhere in this point I think of what is everyone’s favorite color or what percentage of people prefer to sleep naked versus clothed, or if they like cilantro, and of the countless of things dictated by personal preference that go beyond taste or style or expectations of the norm. I think of our collective average screen-time calculated by our phones (4.2 hrs) or how 38 percent of video game players are between the 18 to 34 age, and as society we can say ‘that’s good’ or ‘that’s not good’ but we can’t deny that that is in fact the “new normal”, which may even lead into some digression about ‘what is normal? vis-a-vis what is deviant or unexpected? But also, that could be just dodging the question, and I don’t know if that’s even relevant to the initial question. The answer ‘why do you care?’ just seems rude and unnecessarily confrontational. But sometimes a middle finger is a too good as an answer as any.

“Enjoy your slide.”

“Thanks.”