Tag: architecture
Textures of Gdańsk
My company has an office in Gdańsk, where my favourite colleagues hang out. I've been down twice so far, and spent about two weeks there. It's a delightful town, and as i get to know more and widen my circumference i discover new treasures. Gdańsk is a lot more than just the main drag. You ...
Textures of London
Last year, i actually got my arse in gear, and went to London. Good thing, that, considering the pandemic of 2020 ...
Textures of Utrecht
I went to Utrecht last year, to meet up with two of the other squirrels, and attend a workshop in datavisualisation with Stefanie Posavec. A few days in Utrecht. You should stay away, so it always stays delightful for me. I am going again in april. Wonderful place. 36 73 tile tile 6 44 43 ...
Stave churches – medieval vikingry
Stave churches are curious buildings. They seem to try to mirror some viking age aesthetics, and in the process, produces their own visual premise. It has been suggested though, that the stave church is a translation of the architecture of bysantine basilikas – from stone to wood, with its closest architectual relations in Ireland. Maybe, ...
The art, design and architecture of birds
What is architecture? What is design? What is art? Conscious choices. Some kind of cognitive processes that says "naaah. that doesn't work" or "fabfunfantastic!" That is what bowerbirds do. I came across them for the first time as a child. A newspaper we subscribed to used to run a small "interesting-facts from the natural-world" section in a hidden ...
Hostile architecture – how dare you be homeless?
This is an old post once posted elsewhere: brought it here when Twitter user @olebjarkoy took a pic of spikes outside a hotel in Norway, tagged it with #hostile. The hotel replied, on Twitter asking him to remove the hostile tag, as it was negative. Does not take a genius to figure how that went ...
Thomassons: extinct architecture
The 99% invisible is a brilliant podcast. I was alerted to the so-called Thomassons. These are architectural artefacts who have lost their function, but, and this is crucial: are still being maintained. For – essentially – no reason whatsoever. It is surprisingly hard to find images that exemplifies it. What I find fascinating, is the ...
Islamic art and the patterns of the infinite
It's difficult, if not impossible, to determine what exactly encompasses Islamic art. The term is not specific to a religion, place, time or even a field, and instead spans over 1400 years and receives influences from Roman, early Christian, Byzantine and even Chinese art. Although some think Islamic art is a false concept, the similarities between pieces of the Islamic world ...
Central Asian art in a couple video games years apart
Video games are getting prettier and prettier. It's good to see that some of them incorporate actual works of art, sometimes in very distinctive styles. Even some old, very old games have had great art direction. Computer gaming is an old love. I had played multiple simple games on my MSX2 starting at age 8, ...
Kingdom: mineral
(According to Linnaean taxonomy, there are three kingdoms: vegetable, animal, mineral) After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains. – Walt Whitman The ultimate inspiration. Nature, the largest multivariate network there is ...