The Schröder House, is by far the most exciting thing I’ve seen here. To imagine spaces formed by extrusions of the planes, lines and colours; to think of architecture as derived from the composition of a painting; it’s mind blowing! With precedents like this, how can architecture not be fun!
In almost the opposite way, Dick Bruna reduces everything into a very flat but extremely cute little bunny Miffy. In the illustrations, there’s never any depth nor any three dimensionality. I love it that everything happens on a singular flat plane (parallel to the plane of the viewer); If ever the cute fluffy (illustrated) bunny and its friends turn sideways, they’d all become a single line, hehe.
Architecture/ art talk aside, we’re happy that we finally found someone to host us for our first couch surfing experience. He’s pro marijuana, into neuro plasticity and shamanism (?!?), a very good cook, and he stays near the hippie freetown Christiania; how exciting can it be! Though slightly nervous that my mild little heart cannot take all the crazy psychedelic stuff that he does, we’re definitely looking forward to some great conversations and exchange.
From daily food preferences to the over competitive mentality that we can’t help (hehe), we’ve definitely become a lot more aware of our Asian-ness since we got here. It’s awesome to meet all sorts of crazy people from everywhere, try all sorts of new foreign things, and at the end of the day, still being able to go back to being a conservative little Chinese girl who likes to cook and paint her nails.
And likes cutesy stuff like Miffy.
Food and Clothes
I just realised that the Mid Autumn Festival is coming up pretty soon, and now I have a craving for a slice of triple yolk lotus paste mooncake. Or a yam paste snow skin one.
About dinner the other day, we made Wiener Schnitzel for a dinner party for 12 people. The two of us, Christine my neighbour and I, made a grand total of 30 slices of schnitzel, each managing 3 oil filled cooking pans at any point of time.
I haven’t deep fried anything in a while (the horror of the oily face/hair/clothes afterwards!) but I’m reminded once again that a big outdoor wet kitchen is always a necessity in any house.
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I’ve been following the Spring/ Summer 2010 Fashion Week updates. I’ve never realised how many second or third tier (from Central St. Martin’s, nonetheless) designers who have shown for years during fashion week, but have yet to get enough publicity, if any at all. I wonder if their clothes sell at all.
Of course, the big names deserve their share of fame and publicity, it takes a lot of talent to make inherently unfashionably things like shiny, sequined tie dye print look good.
Thankfully the studs and leather look is out for good, I wonder what the blogshops are going to do with all that stock in 6 months’ time.
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The other day, a friend had a bicycle accident that resulted in a chipped tooth and a big bad scratch across her cheek. Of course we were thankful that the curb missed her eye by just a teeny bit, and her tooth, not nose, broke her fall, but I feel a bit apprehensive at the slopes now, especially during horrible traffic jams in the morning.
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I’m appreciating this method of designing from a form. Analysing the graphical patterns of a city is sometimes more substantial than filling our heads with airy fairy urban theories. Perhaps semesters in architecture school should be organised like that- vacations for reading and generating ideas, school term purely for execution and testing out of ideas.
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Because I have talked too much, here is a compact camera photo to end this post.
Copper Rust, by canal in Amsterdam
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