Danish Architecture

Two venues, one subject: Danish sustainable architecture - one of the 28 Embassies Project exhibitions of London Festival of Architecture 2008. While "sustDANEable" showcased models, videos and drawings of various Danish sustainable projects in the embassy's parking garage; Co-evolution, the winner of Venice Biennale 2006, exhibited interesting Sino-Danish collaboration on sustainable urban development in four Chinese cities: Xian, Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing, in an old college building by the Thames.

"SustDANEable" exhibition at the Danish Embassy

Co-evolution: Sino-Danish sustainable urban development in China

Model of the Magic Mountains project in Chongqing

Detour

Just want to share with you. As part of London's architecture festival, Detour, a multimedia exhibition performed through a traditional peepshow in an old mansion, introduces 18 architectural structures along some of the most picturesque national tourist routes in Norway. Not the best design show, but a great promotion for the Norwegian natural beauty.


Detour from K F C on Vimeo.

White Cliffs

Last Sunday, we went hiking along some famous chalk cliffs in Southern England. Fair weather, if not a little too windy. Infinite sky, white cliffs, seagulls, sheep, wild flowers, the Channel. We started at Seven Sisters Country Park at 13:00 and reached our final destination at the resort town of Eastbourne at around 19:30.

Seven Sisters Cliffs

"Danger, cliff erosion"

Lighthouse below Beachy Head, the highest chalk cliff in England


Birling Gap, intermediate resting place for the 16km hike

Eastbourne Seafront, our final destination

Viva Espana!!

Road to Madrid, 2003

Segovia, 2003

It's their year! Both for Nadal and the Spanish national football team! What a great display of attacking football last week at Vienna's Euro 2008 final, and what an epic win for Nadal to beat Federer today at Wimbledon. Today's game was unbelievably long. I don't know how Nadal and Federer can cope with the pressure throughout. The game has lasted for almost five hours! We thought of going to Wimbledon to watch it live (on big tv screens outside the stadium), but were discouraged by the fact that we had to queue for a ticket and a spot super early in the morning. Thus, we decided to watch it at home instead... Viva Espana! Let's hope Nadal can continue his great form later in the US Open, while Casillas, Torres, Fabregas and the likes can play some great football in South Africa in two years of time.

Battersea Power Station

A well-known (but abandoned) building designed by Giles Gibert Scott, who was also the architect for Bankside Power Station (now the Tate Modern). The Battersea Power Station is probably one of the most iconic buildings along the Thames, and for many, including me, it's one of the most beloved structures in the city. It has become a favorite spot for amateur photographers, a cultural icon as it has appeared in works of many artists, film makers (Hitchcock and many others) and in MTV and on record covers of rock bands (such as Beatles, Pink Floyd, etc.), and a controversial site for real estate redevelopment. Architect Rafael Vinoly was hired a year or two ago, and recently he has presented his masterplan (N attempts to revitalize this site of collective memory since the early 80s), which involves renovation of the brick building and a new skyscraper and mix use complex alongside. New apartments, shops, hotel, bars, and offices would certainly transform the badly deteriorated architectural icon into a feast for real estate developers. Whether his proposal can balance the taste of politicians, the greed of the developers and the heart of the public, we will soon find out.

Street Art, London 2008

Tate Modern, June to now

Waterloo Taxi Tunnel, May

Street Art has been a big hit in London in the past two months. First street artists from all around the world came to transform a taxi-parking tunnel at the Waterloo Train Station into a huge public gallery. Then the Tate Modern came along to hold a special exhibition on street art and provide its massive brick facade for gigantic pieces made by internationally renounced street artists. If there hasn't been Banksy in the past few years to stir up the controversy, how differently will the public and the mass media evaluate these great and often meaningful works that they once call graffiti?

An Unfinished Video

Unfinished video, December 2007, London.

Cafe du Hong Kong from K F C on Vimeo.

One Thousand Year of Solitude

Longprayer, a sound installation in the Lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, east of London. If everything goes as planned, the piece will last for exactly 1000 years.

With a computer program continuously editing the original, an audio recording of a 20-minute Tibetan prayer has been playing without stoppage and repetition since 1st January, 2000, and will continue to do so until the last day of 2999.

We visit the lighthouse as part of the London Festival of Architecture last Sunday. Trinity Buoy Wharf, including the lighthouse and container cities, was used as an exhibition ground to house several installations and architectural exhibitions.

* * *

Infinite blue sky. Endless moving clouds. Curvy silhouette of the window panes. A dreamy and laid back afternoon. Trembling reverberations of the Tibetan singing bowl in a surreal interior of the lighthouse did something funny to my sense of time, as if the very moment could last forever, as if within a second a thousand years had gone by. Subconsciously my imagination jumped through 992 years to the end of 2999, searching for whoever may be present at the same spot, in the lantern room of the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse, across the Thames from North Greenwich, east of London, listening to the grand finale of Longprayer, probably at a rainy night. In a thousand years of time, will the Thames still run in front of the Trinity Buoy Wharf? Will the only lighthouse of London still standing? Unlikely.


Eternity from K F C on Vimeo.

Dummies

A Sunday afternoon in spring. An empty arcade in the city. A few dummies in the absolute silence.

Bruges 2007

A grey chilly day. A melancholy little old town. Here everything makes you to believe that the eternal beauty of Bruges is a legacy of its glorious past, when medieval merchants has transformed the once sleepy town into a prosperous port city famous for its wool and cloth trading. Full of pleasure and joy, you stroll along centuries-old colonnades, cross ancient stone bridges and wind through tiny intricate alleyways, fulfilling your long desire to go back in time. Here nothing reveals the 500-year decline of the town after the commercial port has been abandoned. Fortune receded but proved to be a cycle. A slight Potemkinist touch and a long-lived effort of preservation, Bruges has found a new story of success since late 19th century, being one of the earliest tourist destinations in Europe.

Here the real master is you and me, my fellow tourist.