19/04 - Traboules, Lyon

Without Michelle, we could have easily missed the traboules when strolling in the Saint Paul area of Vieux Lyon. These hidden passageways inside old apartment blocks were used as trading shortcuts in the Middle Ages.

19/04 - Inflatable Mouse

A giant inflatable mouse designed by architect Jacques Rival floated on the Rhone River to remind the city about flooding.

18/04 - Lyon Architecture

Architecture wasn't the prime reason for us to stay in Lyon. We did, however, make a brief tour to see a few buildings in the city: Jean Nouvel's Opera House, Renzo Piano's Cite Internationale, and the area of La Confluence, the further site of a cluster of buildings which includes Coop Himmelblau's Musée des Confluences.

Thanksgiving 2009

We drove by the Springridge Farm in Milton today and had some fun at the Harvest Festival.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

Toronto Nuit Blanche 2009

We took the TTC and got home just before 7am. What a night!

Frog's Dream

My project, titled Frog's Dream, has been chosen as one of the finalists in ReBurbia Design Competition, a contest to generate ideas that transform the declining North American suburbia. Online voting and viewing starts on August 10 and closes the following Monday. Please vote for me and take a look at the projects of all 20 finalists. There are really some great ideas: http://www.re-burbia.com/finalists/

Here's the statement of my project:

What to do about all those abandoned McMansions? Turn them into wetlands and natural water filtration systems for urban centers.

According to many scientists and climatologists, we are fighting a losing battle against climate change, loss of rain forests and wetlands and extinction of species. Historians who study Maya and Angkor have warned of an inevitable collapse to civilization when natural resources are overused in non-sustainable ways. Many real estate analysts have also predicted that a change of lifestyle, shrink of household size and a rise of energy prices will seal the final downfall of suburbia.

What would be the future of suburbia when McMansions are abandoned?

In response to the anticipated future, the Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.

The Frog Dream presents the idea of a highly concentrated city and its ring of suburban wetlands will hold the key to a green future.

17/04 - Cote d'Or, Burgundy

In a thundery afternoon, we were the only hikers on this particular Grand Cru route of the Cote d'Or. We started from the village of Vougeot, strolled through Vosne Romanee in the rain, and hopped onto a train at Nuits Saint-Georges. The rain came and went and we dried ourselves under the afternoon sun on a train platform at Beaune, while waiting for the north-bound service back to Dijon.

16/04 - L'art Brut, Lausanne

French painter Jean Dubuffet stated that when an art which is created by a person distanced from the society, produced and conceived outside the fine art industry and has no specific recipient, then the work can be considered as l'art Brut, the Outsider Art. The Art Brut Museum in Lausanne is a great place to explore these wonderful pieces of marginal art, that we both agreed.















Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne

15/04 - Golden Pass, Montreux

After Chillon, we rested our feet by taking the Golden Pass rail line to tour the Swiss Alps. Not as magical as our day hike to Oberhoresee back in August 2008, but it served a perfect finale to our day.

15/04 - Montreux to Château de Chillon

From Lausanne, we hopped on a east-bound train for Montreux, passing along picturesque hillside vineyards, Lake Geneva and the French Alps beyond. From Montreux, we strolled along the lakefront towards Château de Chillon, a iconic waterside castle. April turned out to be the perfect time to hike the area, with tulip blossoms and mild weather.

Chillon was small in scale, but its dramatic setting on a rock island is all it requires to become famous.

14/04 - Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern

On the outskirt of Bern lies Piano's Paul Klee Zentrum. Completed in 2005, the museum/ cultural centre houses a great collection of Klee's works. Pleasant building, great exhibtion, only the admission is a bit pricey. We were delighted to see the exhibition In Search of the Orient - From Bellini to Klee, which presented a number of paintings and sculptures from Renaissance to Klee's era. Gentile Bellini's Sultan Mehmet II was presented as a pioneer to reflect the interest of Western artists towards the Orient.

A visit to the zentrum corresponded to our earlier visit to Baubaus in Dessau, where Klee was once a prominent professor.

Paul Klee Zentrum

TUNA - for people who loves Japanese food, including me

13/04 - An Architectural Pilgrimage, Ronchamp

Four hours after we departed from Basel we were still on a regional train speeding into the mountains of the French Jura. A tiny stop at the tiny mountain village Ronchamp. Le Corb's masterpiece stands above them all on a hill. Passing by an old mining structure, a 20-minute walk uphill brought us to the entrance.

The rain stopped. Lush-green lawns. Concrete of every finishes. Modernist details. A stroll around the chapel reveals a continuously changing facade. We stayed for a couple of hours, from early afternoon to sunset, and entered the chapel several times in between. This is a building to stroll around, a facade to ponder upon. Be patient, and one will get rewarded. No photographic documentation can justly translate the spiritual interiors into images. Light is the key: light through stain-glass, slits of light between walls and the ceiling, voids of light above prayer areas, the alter light box of Virgin Mary, red, blue, yellow, green. Le Corb's personal touch can be found everywhere, including the painted entrance door. From the first minute and on, we had undoubtedly fallen in love with the building. A sensational experience. A day of revelation: being an architect can be fun, now I finally understand.

12/04 - Vitra Design Museum_3, Weil am Rhein

Our first ever visit to see an Ando's building and his iconic 6-holed-concrete wall! A great harmony between architecture and nature, as the Japanese architect insisted to build his conference centre around the existing cherry trees on site. Perfect time to visit with the cherry blossoms allover.

12/04 - Vitra Design Museum_2, Weil am Rhein

Built in 1993, Vitra Fire Station is Zaha Hadid's first ever built project.

12/04 - Vitra Design Museum_1, Weil am Rhein

From Basel, Switzerland, we took a but to Weil am Rhein at the southwest corner of Germany to visit the world-famous Vitra Design Museum. Throughout the past three decades, to signify their support to the design world and innovative vision of Vitra, the design furniture manufacturer has commissioned a number of great architects to create a wonderful collection of architecture in their premises.



































top to bottom:
The Museum Building, Frank Gehry's first building in Europe
Petro Station by Jean Prouve
Production Hall by Alvaro Siza

11/04 - Hoenheim Tram Station, Strasbourg

Zaha Hadid has made a strong presence at the tram terminal in Hoenheim. An urban delight that involves a 700-space-parking lot and a concrete tram shelter. For us, it was a pure reward after a pleasant tram ride on the highly acclaimed public transit system that links the old town with its suburbs and modern development such as the European Parliament.

11/04 - As If Real, Strasbourg

Original Medieval busts from the Strasbourg Cathedral, now exhibited in the nearby cathedral museum.

11/04 - Cathedral, Timber houses, Cafe terraces, Strasbourg

Our first stop in France: lovely cathedral, elegant timber houses, lively cafe terraces - the capital of Alsace.

10/04 - Porsche Museum, Stuttgart

We were a bit overwhelmed by the Benz Museum as we took the S-Bahn rushing to Porsche's. We get off almost right in front of Delugan Meissl's new museum. With a building cost of 100 million euros and 35,000 tons of steel, we came to the museum with high expectations. At first glance, I was quite impressed by the boldness of the floating structure and the purity of the white powdered coated aluminium panels. Yet the most impressive of all are the highly-polished stainless steel panels on the underside of the structure, forming a super-reflective surface above us as we entered the building.

However, it was a different story inside. Visitors crowded at the foyer to pay for admission and obtain their audio-guides, not entirely organized when we were there, with large amount of people queuing from various directions. Long escalators brought us up to the exhibition level and found the trendy white interiors forming a uniform backdrop for the sport-cars. With open layout, we had difficulty to find the ideal sequence to see the exhibition. As our primary interest lies in architecture and not automobile, we soon shifted our focus from the 911's to the interior detailing and spatial designs. With no windows to allow natural light to get in, the entire exhibition space feels like an isolated showroom underground, instead of floating in mid-air. In similar fashion of isolating from its context, the exhibition itself does not in any sense provide much information on the context of Porsche. With the large amount of visitors we had experienced that day and the lack of contextual information, the museum failed to provide a clear story of Porsche to someone like us, who have little knowledge about sport-cars and Porsche. Our tour ended in an anti-climax: we walked into a long corridor, found our way through a door that was monitored by a security guard (seems like a design flaw, either the door is not too well sign-posted or it's a bit dangerous for people to use it at the same time from both sides), and then reached two narrow and confusing doors side by side at the end of another corridor - the male and female toilets.

Unlike the experience of many, our visit to the Porsche Museum is a little disappointment.