Round look, round world

While listening to round music, searching for round people with round eyes and round glasses.

Yung Ho Chang (Architect), Ieoh Ming Pei (Architect), Harry Potter (Magician),
Le Corbusier (Architect), Aldous Huxley (Writer), Ken Smith (Architect),
Nicholas Grimshaw (Architect), Peter Cook (Architect), Philip Johnson (Architect)

Not only wearing black clothes is obligatory for an Architect, round glasses have always been a distinctive. But of course, they may think you are a Magician or a mad Musician in case you use dozens of them...

John Lennon (Musician)

Have a nice gOOd rOund day.
 

Greece (or Macedonia) in India | Μέγας Ἀλέξανδρος (Alexander the Great)

Un monument donne son plein sens à Taxila; c'est l'autel dit "de l'aigle à deux têtes", sur le socle duquel on voit trois portiques sculptés en bas-reliefs: l'un à fronton, de style gréco-romain, l'autre en cloche à la manière bengali; le troisième fidèle au style bouddhique archaïque des portails de Bhârhut. Mais ce serait encore sousestimer Taxila que la réduire au lieu où, pendant quelques siècles, trois des plus grandes traditions spirituelles de l'Ancien Monde ont vécu côte à côte: hellénisme, hindouisme, bouddhisme; car la Perse de Zoroastre était aussi présente, et, avec les Parthés et les Scythes, cette civilisation des steppes [...]. À l'exception de la chrétienne, toutes les influences, dont est pénétrée la civilisation de l'Ancien Monde, sont ici rassemblée.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, 1995.

Empire of Alexander the Great

Rests of this type of art remain in the north of India and Pakistan. Greek Budas and Indian Alexanders...

Torso of a Buddhist Bodhisattva, Maitreya or Avalokiteshvara, ca. 5th century

, Pakistan

Head of a Bodhisattva (Siddartha?), c.2nd-3rd Century ce, Afghan, Gandhara region, terracotta with garnet inset eyes

Standing bodhisattva 3rd-4th century, Gandharan region, Afghanistan or Pakistan, grey schist stone

Marble Bust of Prince Siddhartha (?) Marble, 2nd century C.E., Allegedly from the region of Peshwar

The conception, future Buddha descends into his mother in the form of a baby elephant with a nimbus. 2-3rd century, Lahore - Pakistan

Mondetrompel'oeil

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see


 Freddie Mercury, Bohemian rhapsody (1975)

Plato's Cave, Jan Saenredam after Cornelisz  (1604)

Flammarion woodcut (?)

Incredulità di San Tommaso, Caravaggio (1602)

Real Life is Rubbish, Tim Noble & Sue Webster (2002)

HE/SHE , Tim Noble & Sue Webster (2004)

Dirty white trash (with gulls), Tim Noble & Sue Webster (1998)

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him? 


Plato, The Republic

To read

Where do we read?
On an object.

Bookwheel, Cockfight Chair, Reading and writing table

On oneself's hands or lap.

And, in the end, on oneself's tomb.

Aliénor d'Aquitanie, Martín Vázquez, Valentina Balbiani

Micro

Sometimes, only the very micro things survive. 

Vassily Semyonovich Grossman (Василий Семёнович Гроссман), born in Ukraine in 1902, turned out to be a writer when he was 28, after working as an engineer. When the II World War started, he became a war correspondent and related what happened in Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. 

Vassily as a war correspondent

Irène Némirovsky, born in Ukraine in 1903, escaped with her family from the Russian Revolution, and established themselves in France. After studying Literature in Sorbone, Irène began writing her first novels.

Irène in France

Vassily lived in the USSR all his life. He died in 1964 of a stomach cancer. Irène lived in France until he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Both of them had approximately the same age, and both were Ukranian.

Both of them were acused of the same: being Jews. Vassily openly denounced the Holocaust, but his writings and opinions were censored by the Stalinist regime. Irène hated his family, and he projected this hate into Jews somehow. She became catholic and accepted France as her new country. 

Although Vassily lived in the USSR, the enemy of Germany, he suffered antisemitism too. Although Irène didn't want to be Jewish, she was killed too.

Vassily wrote around eight books. Irène wrote around eleven.

Life and fate, wroten by Vassily, was submitted in 1960 for its publication, but the KGB seized all the documents. Semyon Lipkin, in 1974 (10 years after Vassily died), microfilmed one of the surviving copies and with the help of Vladimir Voinivich and Andrei Sakharov took it out of the Soviet Union. It was first published in 1980.

Vassily during the II World War

Suite Française, begun by Irène before her detention (1942) was not completely finished. It just had two parts of five. The novel depicts what was happening at that time, so it is one of the first novels about the II World War. Irène wrote it in microscopic handwriting in a single notebook. She was killed before finishing it. Her husband was also deported. Her daughters, escaping periodically from the SS, finally survived, and some of Irène papers too. Denise, the older daughter, kept this notebook unread for 50 years. It was first published in 1990.

Irène's writing

Irène's notebook

Moul / Mol / Mill

Three of the same kind.

First. It was founded in 1889 by Josep Oller Roca, born in Terrassa. He also founded the Olympia.

Second. Opened ten years later with the name La Pajarera Catalana, copied the first one's name in 1910 (though adding Pétit). Afterwards, it was Spanished.

Third. It opened in 1909 with the name Palais de Luxe. Later, in 1930, when Laura Henderson refurbished it, the new name was linked with the street name, where a windmill existed in the 18th century, but also with the first and the second.

The triplets in three cities: Paris, Barcelona, London. In their tummy, varieties, with showgirls dancing and singing. The Moulin Rouge, el Molino, the Windmill Theatre.

Moul 

Moulin Rouge, Montmartre, Paris

Mol

El Molino, Paral·lel street, Barcelona

Mill

The Windmill Theatre, Windmill Street, London

The papier couché is the evanescent trace of their history. And red colour, a distinctive.

C'ést très excitant!..

Revudeville

Lujo, Arte, Gracia y Picardía

Moul / Mol / Mill, three oldies of the same kind.

Columns delight!

Imitating, mummificating... Turning round the past, copying it. Super retro design for a corporative image. This is my every-morning bus stop. Every morning people make a pilgrimage to this mini metallic doric temple: just to wait for the bus.

Lately (and always), columns have been a very popular resource of national identity, with a classical reputation. Building columns is what architects are useful for nowadays. This other four columns have been built in Montjuïc mountain in Barcelona.

Their age is one year. Its construction is a way of recovering the four columns (one for every red stripe in the Catalan flag) that were built in 1919 for the International Exhibition in Barcelona and were destroyed in the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in 1928, just before the Exhibition opening in 1929.

Nevertheless, columns have always been a curious element to analyse. Adolf Loos proposal for the Chicago Tribune in 1922 is one of the most strange examples of what a column is wanted to be.

Happy column day.