weird and wonderful news

John likes squares

University of Melbourne students of architecture made this oddball piece in 1965. There are probably a few familiar faces floating through it. The short contains appearances by the brand new architecture building (soon to be demolished), an unfenced Sidney Myer Music Bowl, and a chicken.

26.07.11 in weird-wonderful video-clips

Cate the architect

Cate Blanchett going on like she’s at Pecha Kucha. I think she (and creator Nathan Coley) might be trying to take the piss out of us!

19.07.11 in weird-wonderful video-clips

Not Frank

The cheek. Metricon probably got me most offside when they named a house the Arkley. But more recently I noticed in The Age that they have a new really, really large house, just when we thought they were an aberration of the Naughties. This 456 sqm 5 bedroom, 5 en suite, 5 STAR energy eater comes with three facades. If you like those So Frenchy CDs you could go for the Provincial, if you think yourself a touch more modern you might go the Vogue, or if you would like your house to be architecty but won’t pay, you might try the Oak Park, an unfortunate rip off of the 102 year old Robie House in Hyde Park, Chicago. Nowhere near Oak Park. Nowhere near Frank Lloyd Wright.

08.05.11 in weird-wonderful

Comment [1]

Lift to view

OK, so you’ve paid $32M for a site in Point Piper, but it’s not on the sea side of the road, and its pretty damn steep. First thing to do is clear the existing historic mansion. Next, build a new one. Then build a Bat Cave, but swap the bat poles for a bat lift.

05.01.11 in buildings weird-wonderful

Springberra

ACT Planning Minister Andrew Barr this week compared Walter Burley Griffin to an American cartoon character, in a blog post entitled Walter Burley Griffin is Dead .

05.11.10 in urban-planning weird-wonderful

Birdcage slide

The old Birdcage hotel in Auckland is sliding very slowly up the hill to temporarily make room for a new tunnel (which will help that city’s enormous traffic jams for a wee while). The move is pretty slow, as this time lapse shows, as the old brick hotel was not very strong in the first place. The last thing it needed was to be put on skates.

01.09.10 in buildings weird-wonderful

Related?

Wind right back to 2002, when Zaha Hadid’s former employer, Remment Koolhaas (OMA) won the competition for the Chinese CCTV tower . Here is a scale model by his wife and OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp .

23.08.10 in weird-wonderful

Melbourne in miniature

A new 90 hectare suburb in Tianjin, China, is set to get a Melbourne theme. This doesn’t mean that it will be encouraged to sprawl with inadequate public transport, we ‘re talking more of a postcard version of Melbourne.

22.05.10 in urban-planning weird-wonderful

Going underground

Hey, if you’re worried about solar flares (not solar trousers), planet X, pole shift, nukes, mega-tsunamis, social anarchy, the flu, 2012 (and so on), then why not invest $50K in a fractional share of a fallout shelter. Plans are here , and the first is being retro-fitted into an old nuclear shelter “strategically located approximately halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas”.

16.05.10 in weird-wonderful

Madden's meeting

Big News has covered the email schemozzle to death, so I thought I’d leave it to them. But I can’t resist this screenshot from ABC TV. Masterful composition. Here is an isolated Madden looking more like Jim Hacker than he would probably like. He had just gate-crashed his way into a very important inquiry into his own department’s pants-down on public consultation. The other lads appear to be leaving him out of their chat. But what on earth has that guy on the right drawn? A legless pelvis? In confident strokes. Great work for a pollie.

13.03.10 in planning weird-wonderful

Comment [10]

bella vue

The byline made me click: “Copper dome adds Europe to Gold Coast Real Estate”. LINK Life would be dull without the disneyland architecture of the Gold Coast, non?

03.11.09 in weird-wonderful

Comment [29]