Estádio Municipal de Braga from Metropolis

Eduardo Souto de Moura, the architect of one of my favorite buildings, Estádio Municipal de Braga, won the 2011 Pritzker Prize. Congratulations to him and his studio.

The All Nighter has simplified famous architects quite a bit. I love this.

Back in October 2007 sometime after midnight and before the first trains rolled into regular service, qx and I took our first timid steps onto the tracks of the Paris metro. With more nervousness and care than I’d like to admit we gingerly stepped down between the metal rails just off the end of a platform wondering what madness had possessed us to do so. We’d never done Metro like this before and this scary new world was full of elements we didn’t understand at all. Looking at every rail critically working out which carried the power, asking ourselves so many questions: how far could the electricity arc, would that even happen, could the cameras on the platform see us, did security wait in the tunnels after hours, were there any trains after service, if so how fast did they go, did anyone live in the tunnels, would we encounter writers? We’d heard lots of stories about RATP security forgoing the usual legal punishments and simply beating up those found in the tunnels and kicking them out onto the street. We weren’t packing paint but would that matter?

Sleepycity’s travelogue from an illicit exploration of the Paris Metro.

Filip Dujardin, a Belgian photographer, makes both subtle and jarring architectural photo constructions. These digital assemblages made from photographs of real buildings taken near his home in Ghent, take the ordinary and make it implausible, and interesting.

I actually want to play at being an architect, instead of only recording the buildings of others.

via Kitsune Noir and File Magazine

Image via USC Architecture Dept.

Fiat Automobile’s Lingotto Factory in Turin Italy.

Lady Gaga as architectural cipher includes comparisons to works by Zaha Hadid, Marcel Wanders and as above, Buckminister Fuller.

Designed by: Mark Francis Tynan, William Hailiang Chen, and Shireen Hamdan

ResoNet employs Low-Fi techniques to visualise the resonance frequencies inherent in the natural environment, via the interaction of the public and surrounding elements detected by a LED net.

Reso-net.org and there is a blog chronicling it’s development, including some nice detail shots of the LED components.

Newark Gateways by Pentagram Architects to create a series of gateways to the city of Newark New Jersey. Painting a series of cartographic type symbols into the Newark streetsccape, in actual physical space, with the intention that they will eventually be incorporated into google earth & google maps satellite views. There are two very interesting ideas at play here – deliberate alteration of the physical environment to affect the display of its digital representation, and the cartographication of the physical space, placing the visual language of representation into the actual.

Map symbology has a long and storied history. The process of representing the three-dimensional world as flat and map-like requires a notational language. Our proposal places a new set of distinct symbols “on the map” by creating them for the Google Earth point of view. With paint and little else, Newark can define itself, celebrate its entry points, and address a global audience, all in one stroke. The painted “events” are visible and engaging on Google Earth, while the real locations would be signed with images from above that explain the colors and patterns on the ground.