*ou Porque é que só há uma Receita no Livro Fabrico Próprio O nosso artigo “Pirâmide, the cakes of cakes. No, really.” foi publicado na revista italiana Sugo em Dezembro de 2005. Foi a partir deste texto – e das duas vistas de uma Pirâmide (frontal e corte longitudinal) que ...
Ramses the Great, the Republic of Venice, Napoleon III, John D. Rockefeller Jr, the University of Harvard. The history of architecture can also be read as the history of its commissioners – from small renovations of private buildings to the capitals of nations, visionary patrons have for millennia relied on ...
I won’t make it to Weil-am-Rhein for the Fernando and Humberto Campana 20-year retrospective, but its rich catalogue is already on its way to Lisbon. Looking forward to reading the essays from curator Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, Maria Helena Estrada, Massimo Morozzi, and Adélia Borges. Dezeen has a pretty comprehensive coverage of ...
O Ricardo Hartmann mandou-me ontem a letra deste dueto entre a Rita Lee e o João Gilberto, para inspiração. Entretanto encontrei a música. Beleza. Valeu Ricardo! Quando Cabral descobriu no Brasil o caminho das índias Falou ao Pero Vaz para a caminha escrever para o rei “Que terra linda assim ...
Kawaee!! That’s what Japanese schoolgirls shriek when they see something irresistibly cute. They make “funny face”, squirm their eyes and hide their giggles behind their hands. Their mothers and fathers find a lot of things kawaii, too. They may not giggle, but they will probably buy the same stuff. ...
While delving through the turbulent history of Brooklyn Bridge Park, I found inspiration in the words of Frederick Law Olmsted, the godfather of park building in America: “There is one large American town, in which it may happen that a man of any class shall say to his wife, when ...
After a reading of Armin Vit’s “Speak Up: Now What?” blogpost (and all its comments), Rick Poynor’s “Easy Writer” text, M. Kingsley’s “Rick Poynor: Ipse Dixit” response to that (plus an even louder cacophony of complaints and pats on the back) and again Poynor’s follow-up/reply, I can’t help but feel ...
I’ve been living in New York since the end of August of 2008, and ever since I got here, people have heard me complaining (we Portuguese like to complain) about paying for incoming calls and text messages on my mobile phone despite the bad reception, getting charged on ATM withdrawals ...
The Orange-and-straw Tropicana juice carton left us in the last days of 2008. Another memorable American consumer product icon is gone, another brand metonym is dead. Writing an obituary about a particular iteration of a brand is like mourning the death of a butterfly. Both are short-lived, fleeting glimpses into ...
A friend reminded me today about the brilliant BBC series Look Around You. Neither of us saw it on TV, but on Youtube, where most of the episodes from its two seasons seasons can be found. Every episode seems like a science lesson from 1981 (even if some are dedicated ...
If looking at friends of friends’ Facebook photo albums or reading TMI Twitter updates is not enough of a time waster for you, try netdisasters.com. It’s as moronic and pointless as throwing water balloons at passersby, but if you liked that you’ll love this. Netdisasters.com lets you destroy – or ...
A magazine art director friend of mine recently posted on his Facebook profile a great article by Gabriel Sherman. Sherman is a contributing editor at New York magazine and a special correspondent to the New Republic, and in Slate‘s The Big Money he writes how this may be a tough ...
One of my favorite presentations at the Design and Film symposium last Saturday was Stuart Kendall‘s talk on the film Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. The documentary, directed by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer, focuses on Goldsworthy’s site-specific sculptural work. I was particularly interested in Kendall’s reading ...
Hugo Chávez, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is one of the most charismatic leaders of our time. He lead a failed coup in 1992, got elected in a 1998 landslide, was forced out of office for 48 hours in 2002, endured huge opposition pressure, street protests and ...
Abubakar Akintola couldn’t believe his eyes as he opened the COSCO shipping container that had just arrived to the Apapa container terminal. Akintola had seen the strangest imports arrive at Nigeria’s main commercial port during his 30 years as a customs official. But he couldn’t figure out what these small, ...
When we met a few weeks ago, Susan Yelavich suggested I read Cornel West’s essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” (October, Vol. 53, Summer 1990, pp. 93-109), as part of the research for my Master Thesis on contemporary Brazilian product design. I found it truly inspiring, especially this paragraph: ...
The Trump World Tower possesses all the virtues and vices of the buildings that made New York the greatest metropolis of the twentieth century. Like many of the city’s great skyscrapers—such as the Woolworth or the Chrysler building—it’s more than a feat of the architect; it’s a flamboyant statement of ...
True change is coming to New York’s streetscape. Not rhetorical speech change, but the kind of change that inspires real political citizenship, participation and a new belief in the street as the ultimate stage for public life. Over the course of three weeks last Spring, planters, bollards and stone ...
I can’t really remember when I got my first desktop map of the world. I know that Germany was already unified, but I’m not sure if Yugoslavia still existed – both on my desk and on Earth. Knowing that I only started doing my homework at home from 5th grade, ...
The central gallery of the Palace of Versailles is no ordinary room. It was designed, furnished and decorated to become a luxurious, excessive statement of Louis XIV’s unmatched political supremacy, the salle des visites of the world’s most powerful leader. It boasted lavish silver furniture and dramatic, heroic stuccoed ceilings ...
In 1928, Joseph Urban created an architectural vision for William Randolph Hearst’s headquarters in New York. A building that would house, in his words, “the industries whose purpose is to exert influence on the thought and education of the reading public.” Today, one can read Norman Foster’s forty-story addition to ...
I overslept again this morning. I showered, dressed, had breakfast, put on scarf, hat, gloves, left home. I walked to the bus stop, where the 26 stopped only a few minutes later. I got off at Fulton and Flushing Avenues, went down Dekalb Avenue subway station, boarded the B. I ...
Coincidindo com a mudança do MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda de Lisboa para o seu local definitivo – a antiga sede do banco BNU na Rua Augusta, em Lisboa – e com a exposição “Ante-Estreia”, foi lançado um catálogo-revista com uma selecção de peças do Museu. Alguns ...
Um dia destes mudo-me para Copenhaga. Razões não me faltam: depois de ter sabido que, há poucos meses, a revista Monocle colocou a capital dinamarquesa no topo da sua lista das 25 melhores cidades do mundo para se viver (Lisboa ficou com um promissor 24.° lugar), pude visitar a ...
Creativity, innovation, regions, clusters, mobility, funding, education, risk, opportunity, competitiveness, sustainability, networks, integration, culture, fertile grounds, Europe, America. This simultaneously-translated, multilingual bureaucratic litany, this Powerpoint-generated “tag cloud” of policy buzzwords shaped my two-day visit to Brussels last month. But I did manage to find creative, innovative life beyond the “eurospeak” ...