ESTATES: REAL vs MOBIL

Nothing new, but it’s worth mentioning… And it looks cool. It looks Ipod. In a sense, it is Ipod – with the principal difference that regular ipods bring sensory experiences to you, while this one brings you to sensory experiences.

In the age of global mobility, the notion of presence – even temporary – goes out of fashion. Doesn’t it? It is to be replaced with the fashionable notion of transience. The main question is no longer Where do you live? (”oh my! I live in Harlem with rats and cockroaches..”), but Where did you go? and Where are you moving next? The GMC PAD is defined as an urban loft with mobility, a concept for dwelling in the ever-changing cultural landscape. Why commit yourself to the views of one locale, if you can have your location moving in any direction you want. Two, three, four, twenty four views a day…. There are no more locations (sometimes they get very expensive, considering escalating real-estate market), but the series of ever exciting dislocations.

” The GMC PAD features a Diesel-Electric hybrid system, which acts as a generator for the onboard power grid as well as propulsion for DriveMode. With the PAD’s resource management technology, onboard fuel & water supplies would last for weeks or even months on end. During daylight hours, the PAD’s SkyDeck features 6 M-Sq of photovoltaic cells that collect and store the sun’s natural energy. An electromagnetic suspension aids in leveling & stabilization when the PAD is being used in the LifeMode as well as remarkably easy handling while in DriveMode.

Direct TV , OnStar , XM Satellite Wi-Fi and are continually online to provide an endless variety of entertainment, information and security options and the PAD’s LCD interior architecture creates a media rich environment unlike any other. Electronically variable exterior glazing means privacy is always at your fingertips. The PAD’s rearmost area is devoted to a personal spa created in conjunction with Kohler. The food prep / kitchen area features a full suite of PAD-specific appliances developed by Thermador and, with a teraflop of on board memory, the digital life has never been so deep & abundant.”

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LUTE’S WORLD, AMSTERDAM

There is a great plenty of reasons to go to Amsterdam covering the whole motivational spectrum from highest virtues to lowest sins – nothing inhuman, please. The city leaves very few visitors unimpressed with its fabulous scenery; very few blind people of the infinite multitude stream through its red-light district…

I am in Amsterdam to meet Peter Lute. This name is enough of a suggestion that my journey is better than a good trip. It’s a luxury trip. Visiting Peter Lute means spending a night at what is suitably named the Lute Suites. All good things in the world come in small quantity: there are only seven suites bearing this name. All good things in the world are not immediately given: I am taking a taxi to Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, a picturesque village off the beaten path of massive international tourism some ten minutes away from the city.

My ride to Ouderkerk might have taken a bit more time and extra false turns without the back vocal of global positioning system that renders all rare and remote valuables with more pronunciation and accessibility: “In 50 meters turn right. Now you have reached your destination.” Of those visitors whom I encounter in Ouderkerk this afternoon, I seem to be the only one who needs the GPS computations to get here. This place is well-known in Amsterdam. It’s popular – though rather exclusively so. Amsteldijk Zuid 54-58 (this being the address) is famous for its restaurant – the Lute Restaurant. Sometimes your dinner is served on a boat. What is this boat called? It’s the Lute Boat. Whatever you may think of it, this naming strategy is a good sign: the host is explicit in taking his things personally. In the Lute Suite I am a Lute Guest.

This is not the first time I meet Peter Lute. Two months ago I heard him speaking at the Future Forum in Barcelona where deliberating on the new trends in hospitality industry he was advancing the concept of interactivity in dining practices. It is this very concept that gets our interaction going – in the Lute Lounge.

Experience of food is much more complex than eating – just like my overnight experience of Lute Suite #6 is so much more than a cozy accommodation. Peter Lute is far from being a crude utilitarian and it is safe to suppose that he wears his shirt not to merely cover his nakedness, but to invent himself stylistically. He expects his guests to share a similar attitude vis-à-vis their choices. And here are the choices: Hotels in Amsterdam are abundant, but there are few that have bold aesthetic claims. Lute Suites are seven art pieces – they are not furnished, they are designed. The distinction is not merely terminological. While the suites are provided with whatever is necessary for the purpose of comfortable residence, their main attraction is their unique aesthetic status.

They are designed by famed Dutch designer Marcel Wanders who, as I am gathering bits from his published self-revelations, likes to wake up, to listen to Bach; he doesn’t read newspapers or magazines, no TV or radio for him either, he gets the news from the air and suspects he might be crazy. Think of these luxury hospitality pieces alongside the Amstel river in terms of installation art that, by definition, uses environment and materials to modify the way one experiences a particular space. Think of the Lute restaurant in terms of Beckett’s experimental theatre where audience is expected to take an active part in the play…

Peter Lute’s concept of interactivity is about participating in a certain art form – the form which is not conceived in opposition to substance, but always above it. Peter Lute’s forms soar high.

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THE GREAT INDOORS

Interior architects do more than design rooms: they open up such rooms, connect them to surrounding spaces, and make interiors suitable for human use. Being currently the fastest-developing branch on the tree of design, interior design combines the disciplines of fashion, architecture and product design.

In addition to formal, technological and aesthetic issues, interior design also includes social aspects and even reserves a role for marketing. It’s this plethora of influences that makes interior design the consummate 21st-century multidisciplinary design practice. The interior seems to be the only place in which people still dream of a better future; it’s the ultimate sanctuary of utopian thinking. Catering to the desire for an intense experience, the interiors of hotels, shops and restaurants have evolved into the new epicentres of human imagination.

The Great Indoors is a new, biennial, international interior design award and was held for the first time from 16 to 18 November 2007 in Maastricht, the Netherlands. By signalling the best interior design world-wide, the award wishes to celebrate the best-realised projects, thus raising the quality of interior design. The Great Indoors Conference explored the growing influence of interior design on the private and public domain. It offered both designers and their clients a unique opportunity to share the visions and experience of some of the world’s more talented designers and attracted over 150 visitors.

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EVE HURFORD: MEDIUM WITH A MESSAGE

Vadimus, an apocalyptic erudite – someone you would most likely not know – has issued his typically unfavorable verdict for contemporary art. Contemporary art resembles an act of petty telephone hooliganism: its various agencies persistently call your number… and hang up on you as soon as you answer the phone. There is no message other than that of hollow-sounding pathos of self-reassurance: here I am, I exist. It does exist – by means of unsolicited phatic communication. It checks if there is anybody on the other end of the line. There is always someone… Dyslexic narcissist, it shakes hands with you for no other reason or purpose than to confirm its own facticity, to experience its own and otherwise impossible phenomenality. This is the “therefore I am” of contemporary art.

Granted this is generally the case, there must be exceptions.

Eve Hurford is a half British, half American artist. For the last 14 years or so she is a resident of Berlin. Closer to the point, Berlin is Eve’s generative context, a cultural ecosystem that has naturally nurtured a prolific video artist – out of an architect. This context is not static. It has never been so – as far as Eve can travel in her recollections. Since the fall of the wall, the city has been going through radical and dramatic changes. Its perpetual transformation is, perhaps, the only form of permanence one can find here. Berlin is unique precisely in this way – compared to other European cities.

I am visiting Eve at her apartment on Rosa-Luxemburg Street in the heart of the Mitte district. I am here to turn to Eve a number of questions about her being an artist and immediate witness to the immense demographic and structural changes in her neighborhood. Formerly a part of stoic East Berlin, the street is now a lavish host to often unreserved fashion boutiques, restaurants, art galleries, cafes, bakeries, and bars. What used to be an unremarkable (if not repulsive) Stasi office building across the street is now Lux 11, a chic design hotel.

On of Eve Hurford’s recent works deals with the issue of gentrification. I want to know the site-specific meaning of the term, it’s local connotations. The artist does not hang up on me – her contemporary art is not phatic. Eve Hurford has a message…

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ARBORESCENT RHIZOME?

Designed by two Swiss artists L and B, hotel Everland has no foundation, no permanent address. Everland is arguably an example of nomadic architecture – it moves from one roof to another, from the woods to the center of Paris (from October 2007 until the end of 2008). One may think this construction is so atypical of the western architecture grounded in the state bureaucratic regimes – and in a sense subversive – that it is acceptable only as a piece of art. In the definition of art, Everland hotel, which is basically one tiny bedroom (and a bathroom - but let’s not talk about that), is doing fine on the accounting ledger. One may even think that art is its alibi. You cannot book the cubicle for more than a night. There is a two months waiting list. Expect to pay about 400 Euros, if you are lucky to win the bid at the bottom – not quite a horizontal transfer. This climbing piece of art with a close-circuited sewerage system is very, very busy.

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DESIGN SOLUTIONS IN BETWEEN DESIGNS

The main issue of design habitat - design hotels, design cafes, design you name it all analytically combined to provide for holistic design lifestyle - is geopolitical. Design habitat is disjointed and has obvious territorial limits. The main issue of design conglobation is its exterior. One’s design existence - no matter how satisfactory - is always fragmentary. One cannot draw a fine direct line between design points A and B. There is no design connectivity between various design sites. In between design sites, there is always this abyss of unrefined and insecure experiences that disturb the order of things, to which designers and consumers of uninterrupted comfort aspire. In the world as it is, you’ve got to be lucky to make it emotionally and physically intact, say, from BLEIBTREU in Berlin to SCREEN KYOTO in Japan. It quite may be that THE MANDALA is “The OTHER World of THIS World”, but it is emphatically not the other way round. THIS World is where they take without consent or shoot without warning… sometimes.

This is not to make you paranoid going from A to B. I am just scratching my head for ways to introduce Aya Tsukioka, an experimental fashion designer from Japan, and her line of urban attire. Tsukioka walks in the footsteps of Kenji Kawakami, who is famous in Japan for his great many “unuseless queer tools” including a roll of toilet paper attached to the head for easy reach in hay fever season. It is in this spirit that Tsukioka solves the issue of lacking connectivity between points A and B and Z of the discontinuous design domain. That is to say, sort of: Feel threatened by THIS World on the way to the OTHER world? Wear an automated coke dispenser. Hide and this is how:

New York Times: Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place. October 20, 2007
images: (c) New York Times

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The Other world of this world and its Holy spirit

I am running 15 minutes ahead of time. I jump out of the taxi on the corner of Friedrich and Leipziger Strasse and walk to Potsdamer Platz 3 where I am to meet Lutz Hesse, the holder of that entire address. Since World War II and until some twenty years ago, this area was no man’s land, the desert of Berlin… Now it is its glittering center attracting nearly 100,000 visitors in a single day. In certain parts, it is a pleasure resort.

The address is that of a private design hotel directly across the street from the monumental glass and steel structure of Sony headquarters, an amazing and hard-to-miss piece of modern architecture. In my notebook there are dozens of questions that I am about to employ to unveil the heart and mind of Potsdamer Platz 3. Its compact lobby invites me with some spatial eagerness further inside – to the bar one flight of stairs above; or to Facil on the fifth floor, one of the finest restaurants in the city. I know that of all those questions in my notebook, there is time for no more than 5 or 6… Below the surface of tranquility, it is really busy here.

There we meet. Lutz takes me to one of his 166 suites. He is a type of person who seems to be present in all of them at the same time. Lutz is all over the place – because it is his place. The place is called The Mandala and Lutz Hesse is its Holy Spirit.

At some point, as we walk down the corridor, he rushes forward ahead of me alerted by presence of a foreign object on the floor – by something that is explicitly not his. The size of that object is a square millimeter next to nothing. It is something that is not mine, either – sensorially: I cannot see it. This is what’s called attention to details. Should Lutz pay to details a bit more attention (whatever the minimal unit of attention measurement, a half of that!), he would perhaps be hospitalized. But that’s precisely the meaning of professionalism operative on his territory: The notion is pushed as far as it can positively go. Anything beyond that would constitute a clinical case of obsession.

Half through the interview and speaking about his approach to design, Lutz demonstrates how he wants to see three vases arranged on the table: this way and not a centimeter left or right! Lutz Hesse, I trust you on this…

Considering how quickly our discussion shifts from a topic of self-description to that of the issues related to management of the hotel, I realize what really preoccupies Lutz Hesse’s mind on Thursday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon – what is the Managing Partner’s first priority…

If this very moment were the last chapter in the story of The Mandala - the last chapter in the sense that we want to postpone speaking of its future until a bit later, - what would be its first chapter? How far back in time would you like go to tell this story? And since we cannot talk about the hotel without considering your person, why not start with you?

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VOICES OF ARCHITECTS - REALAUDIO

Walter Adolph Gropius - German architect and educator
Founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius also designed buildings typically characterised by simplicity of shape, elimination of surface decoration, and the extensive use of glass.

on the origins and democratic vision of Bauhaus | on artists brought into the Bauhaus: character over talent | on the human being as the starting point for design | on beauty as a basic requirement of life

Charles Édouard Jeanneret Le Corbusier - Swiss-French architect and painter
Perhaps the most influential figure in the development of modern architecture, Le Corbusier (born Charles Jeanneret) was the leader of the so-called International School of Architecture.

what makes true architecture: on the poetry of life and the richness of nature | on architecture and urbanism: creating green cities and the major problems of working and living in modern society

Mies van der Rohe - German architect, furniture designer and teacher
A leading figure in the development of modern architecture, Mies van der Rohe’s reputation rests not only on his buildings and projects but also on his rationally based method of architectural education.

on definition of real order and how this influences his work | on the benefits of open planning and the sort of house he would build for himself | on how cities are going to change and the role of the architect | on the idea that a building ought to express it’s structure

Richard Rogers - British architect
Architect behind the Lloyds Building and Millenium Dome, Richard Rogers is one of the founders of the so-called “high-tech” style of architecture, receiving acclaim for his bold and eye-catching designs.

on the role of the architect | pushing forward with new ideas: on the need for constant questioning | on architecture in the environment | on the key responsibilities of the architect

more on the topic on the BBC-4 website.

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