Aesthetically, I have always hated down pipes on facades - like pit lids, they always seem to be an afterthough which wasn't thought through... Atypical of this, the Funnel Wall in Kunsthofpassage in Dresden, Germany plays music when it rains. 
It was believed that it was purchased for a private exhibit, and is unlikely to be put on display to the public or auditors, in the immediate future. ‘Pay Day’, a piece comprised of empty envelopes and which was expected to make between 4,000 to 5,000 people happy, eventually went to administrators Price Waterhouse Coopers for well over the asking price.
Art critic Mathias Van-Leer praised Hirst for his courageous decision to sell all these works from his Financial Meltdown period. ‘It is a remarkable that Damien has been able to command these sort of prices,’ he said, ‘especially as we are seeing a lot of similar pieces suddenly coming onto the market.’
The success of the Hirst auction is in contrast to the fortunes of artists and brothers Jake and Dinos Lehman who were unable to find a buyer for their latest work, ‘White Elephant’. This has led some art experts to claim that the market will be unlikely to secure the same sort of money for other historic banking institutions, and some predict that the bubble will burst sooner rather than later. Daily Telegraph art critic Mark Walker-Brice is one of the sceptical voices; ‘I mean we’ve seen this all before, haven’t we? I mean, this is just Northern Rock Bank Clerk, given a transatlantic sheen and passed off as the next big thing.’
Meanwhile, Hirst’s agent said he was delighted at the amount raised by the sale of his latest work. ‘Although we’re a bit worried about where he should deposit the cheque.'
via NewsBiscuit
I have been having an "interesting" time recently with the concept of canopies and shade structures on a project in the Middle East. We suggested 'em > the client wanted 'em > we designed 'em > the client doesn't want 'em anymore > somebody found the shadow studies and realised that we don't actually need 'em > but now the boss wants 'em... just great... anyway, the One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Sung is an amazing project that tracks the sunlight with a moving poem. These is a time lapse video too. I wonder if this can be made to work on a very large scale. 
Some props to help those of us who over analyze everything and talk to ourselves to get through the day.
Recently I have been working on a project where there are too many designers with very different ideas, none of whom are willing to come to a compromise and merge the ideas into one working concept. This wouldn't be a problem except the client wants a landscape to cut a red ribbon in front of next september and the contractor is already on site pouring concrete (!!). 
Project Statement:
interesting use of the statistical correlation between homelessness and alcohol abuse... 
I pronounce the Silly Season... OPEN ~
"Fulton Fence is installed on the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway in Manhattan, New York and can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The project is on of the three interventions that make the pilot Re:Construction public art program organized by the Downtown Alliance and the LMCC. Project Description
Accents of orange and yellow plastic construction meshes, industrial caution lights, safety signage and the chain-link fencing that universally signify construction-in-progress will be collaged into a vibrant op-art mural bounding the water main retrofitting on Fulton Street. These treatments will be affixed in segments following the 10-foot long section frames of chain-link fencing that currently encircle the construction site. At the time of installation the team will establish a primary linear pattern along the line of the fence that combines 30 or more of these modules. As these modules get moved around by the contractors due to on-going construction needs, these new arrangements will create unpredictable patterns conveying the very history of the construction as it progresses.
As part of the piece, the team will continually be building a web-based project, which will become the location of an online intervention that seeks to parallel the construction of the physical site with the construction of a ‘space’ within the Internet. This digital destination takes the form of a continually scrolling web page as both an organizational tool and analog of strolling down the perimeter of the project on Fulton Street. Just as the physical installation weaves elements of vernacular construction materials into the frame of the fence, the website will embed media driven ‘interventions’: process documentation, location information, online widget mash-ups, and mobile downloads among others.
These two explorations – one architectural, the other online – seek to re-define ‘under-construction sites’ as expressive spaces in a city of ongoing transformation."
Fulton Fence . net
Would have loved to be there for the briefing meeting for the engineer who made this happen... Maybe Gehry should use the "But, your honor, its art!!" defense for the Stata Center case.Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.
In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.
‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others. Our own time, Salcedo is keen to remind us, remains defined by the existence of a huge socially excluded underclass, in Western as well as post-colonial societies.
In breaking open the floor of the museum, Salcedo is exposing a fracture in modernity itself. Her work encourages us to confront uncomfortable truths about our history and about ourselves with absolute candidness, and without self-deception.
A granite paving sample fell on my friend and co-worker Jooyeon's foot yesterday and bruised her. I don't think it she was using it for the purposes that the sample was issued, in fact I think she was using it to stabilize a book that she was photographing because she couldn't be bothered scanning, so maybe its the sample's way protesting its abuse. (I have been reading the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). But the incident got me wondering if there was a better way to manage the millions of paving samples that we receive constantly - I request new ones for every project because its simply too hard to find the ones I want in the existing sample collection. And voila ~ the interior designers have already come up with a way of doing this... At this year’s NeoCon World’s Trade Fair, Tricycle launched a significant expansion of the program, called Tryk. Previously the company could only create samples of tufted carpet, but Tryk works with woven carpet as well as wall-coverings and fabrics. It also allows for different scales and larger sizes—and the image quality is improved. “We continue to move toward a more photorealistic image,” says Michael Hendrix, Tricycle’s creative director and chief brand officer. “If you could see an image from three years ago, the tufts looked flatter. We’ve been able to improve the perception of volume in the overall look.”
Without Standards and Codes.
"Vote for the Drivers of Change that you think will influence your area of work. Vote as many times as you like and add your own if you feel that a driver is missing." ...vote here 
In the artist, Jason Freeny's words -
Not that normal street lights AREN'T useful, but this one is even more so as its a solar-powered street light and WiFi in one. This kit is intended to be mounted on "one" pylon. Typically 11 "Lights" network with one central control.
The kit contains :
Things not included:
An old housemate of mine had the theory that people who really knew what they were talking about could explain anything very simply in a very short amount of time. A postgrad I know once summed this up as "the cocktail line" i.e. what you told people that you met at cocktail parties when they asked you what your phd was about and you only had 30seconds of their interest. 
