visitors

I still think this was really cool.  Bedroom door – visitors trace

In one year and 3 months these were the people that visited me. (some missing)

how much do your books weigh?

mines (and ain’t so many) more than 200 kg. tough to believe.

 

I am proud to be lazy.

I am lazy and it takes me forever to do things I don’t like if I don’t have pressure on. It took me forever till I decided to organize all my papers and do a general cleaning at home. I did it today and I am really proud of how nice my place looks. (no worries I won’t put pictures, you have to come over and take a look)

If I get pressure on me I over perform and make things happen really quick, I can handle 5 things at a time, I can be like speedy gonzalez (do people from UK and US know about this mouse), I went once to a radio school contest and the presenter nicknamed me “snake” because i was laying back on the chair like bored listening to the other team or to the questions but when I knew one I just bent over the mic really quick to answer. My teachers used to say that I was lazy even for sitting on a chair and that I normally lay down on them, not sit on them. So I have a really long story with this. I’ve tried really hard to change this, but I got to the point when I decided that it was better not to change it, but to assume it. So I am lazy, I work like a mule for a thousand hours but sorry I am just lazy. but if don’t i just let it go once and again till I do it.

I am lazy to meet people, I am lazy to go out, I am lazy to have stupid chit chats that lead to nothing, one tip, just be funny dudes, people have seen me getting asleep in a bar when having dinner with a group of friends. Actually people have seen me getting asleep in class, sorry but 8.30 am classes should be illegal, asleep on trains, planes, cars, at work, almost everyday after lunch in front of my computer, at the cinema and in dinners. I guess that there is no better place to be bored that at home, so why bother when you know is not worth.

Today I feel lazy and I am proud of it. I have to recharge my batteries for another 3200 hours at the office in a year. yeah, yeah, 3200. (2700 job + 500 research) go figure.

So today, and after putting upside down my place I am gonna use my couch for a few hours.

happy trip to Rio Sara, we’ll miss u in London.

NY living – my apartment’s floor is inclined

So, that’sit. We have rented an apartment here in NYC for 6 days. As we are 3, a 1 bedroom apartment was economically quite cheap for a short termrent. The location is perfect, East Village, just a couple of minutes from houston st and bowery.  The only thing that is a bit weird is that the floor os inclined, but not just a bit, quite a lot, I think the slope would not comply with the 5% maximun slope for people with disabilities (no, just kidding).

On the other hand one good thing is that has little/no furniture, so I am using the floor again and I really like that, I like to recover the use of the floor level, like sitting on cushions and so on, kinda mix between japanese and arab.

Aboutthe city, it is just awesome, one of those place you are meant to be in. Temporary Waterfall installation is so, so. The one under the Brooklyn bridge is perfect, really cool, the others are Ok, but nothing spectaculatr, overall, worth seeing.

Yesterday I did one thing I never thought possible, I walked the whole day, no metro, no bus, just walking, from 14th street to battery park. Who said NYC was too much? I find its scale perfect, not overwhelming, it is just dense, but density in the good way.

nothingness (part II)

…we don’t have much sun there, where we come from…………

clocks

I got like 2 clocks on my walls, aclock from the owen on the kitchen,  a clock in each of my 2 cells, my normal watch on my wrist and my computer clock. That means than in an easy look when I am at home  I have 7 possibilities to check what time is it when I am at home.

 It is not that I am obsessed with that, it just happened that way, I have 7 different clocks available.  Normally I don’t realise about that, but this morning walking around my place I notice about all those clocks. The funny point is that none of them shows the same time. No matter that I tried to match them some time ago after a while each of them shows something different. But it is not that each of them has a different speed, they just start with the same time, then move different for a while to make the differences and then stay with those same differences for ever.

Then when I walk from the bathroom to the kitchen it is like a 5 minutes walk in the future, but if I walk on the other way it is like having 5 extra minutes in my life, same happens when I open the 2 cells phones, I can call two places at the same time, pretty amazing.

The only bad thing about this it is that every morning when I go out to take the tube I never know if I am late or early, depends on the clock.

 

I got a drip waterfall in my living room

Well, I guess my lucky break here in London has come to an end. I’ve had 4 days completely wrong, some of those days you get up on the wrong side of the bed, but it’s been like that for 4 days in a row.

Before today it was wrong but kinda ok, but this morning I found out when I woke up that I have a very nice dropping waterfall in my living room, just coming from the edge of my balcony. I knew it was raining outside, but now it also rains inside. What else can I ask for? Well I can ask for having two drips and a few more wet areas, which is what I found at my flat when I came from work. Oh yeah, didn´t I tell you, today was bank holiday here in London, but not for me, I had to go to the office from 9 to 18 because Dubai money people don’t know the meaning of time and wait and they still think that their money can make people do whatever they want to, and looks they are right. So I woke up, discovered a drip, went to work, got completely wet under the rain, came back from work found a second drip. Perfect day!!!!!

OK, do you want more things, my friends are coming in 10 days to visit me and stay at my place, now I have to ask them to bring the swimming suit, and more precisely their polar coat because it looks that they may have to remove the whole balcony window to repair the drip, so they will be sleeping in a beautiful outdoor living room in such a warm London.

And all this and I haven’t talk about my 12 hours outdoor walking experience yesterday in London, which I will do in tomorrow’s post.

Whatever, wrong side, wrong day.

mix.

Just a touch of a few different things.

The kettle and the cooker.(sometimes Sunday afternoons are funny enough)

I went to my friends’ place yesterday and I learned a valuable lesson, never put your electric kettle on top of your electric cooker, well, unless you wanna create that smoky atmosphere of late clubs and discos, in that case follow the instructions.

Part I. creating the situation. 

First. You should wanna cook pasta.

Second. You wanna save time, it’s XXI st century and any time you could save it’s precious, so, why should you be waiting to the water to boil when you can be drinking more wine and chatting.

Third. You have to be a smoker (that’s a basic, first lesson, first day, if you wanna rock, you must smoke. Even though you do it only to go against London Council campaign).

Ok, so now you are ready, here it comes the most difficult part.

Part II. Creating the smoke FX

Fourth. You pour water into the kettle, so you are thinking in boiling the water in the kettle before pouring it into the sauce pan where you’re gonna cook the pasta.

Fifth. In perfect timing your friend tells you to go for a cigarette outside before dinner, and you put the kettle on top of the electric cooker and turn it on instead of putting it on its own base, meanwhile you take the keys and the lighter.

Now you wait. Go outside, chat for a while, smoke your cigarette. When you go back to your apartment you have a nice London club fog a and a kettle less, along some melted plastic perfect to serve with your salad. Innovative eh?

P.S. Pasta was really nice after all. Thanks Pip.

Ways of using a stadium for the first time.

Queen Elisabeth II loves to be the first one in using any public building in the UK. Actually that’s her job. You may think that’s pretty exciting, and it may be the first few times you do it. But after a while it must be annoying to inaugurate buildings that you’re never gonna use again. So it’s kind of yuhu, another thing I’ll never use and some other will have fun with. Imaging now doing that for 50 years, pretty tiring eh.

So after so many years she has developed special skills to do that, quite amazing ones, eve though she is more than 80 years old. Now her method is something like that.

You get the whole population of a small town into the new stadium. You make them take a sit 2h 30 min before you arrive. You make them to pen a special gate to the pitch for you. You make your car drive through the pitch just to the middle. You get out of the car, go down a few steps, take a scissor, cut the ribbon, take a few steps back, get into the car back, everybody applauds, you leave, no words. That’s it.

Come on, it makes you feel special, you cannot say no.

Sheffield way.

Wanna burn down a place, do it like in Sheffield. So many years serving vodka in a pub made the carpet the most alcoholic client. So much alcohol in the carpet that someone dropped a match or cigarette and the whole place burned out. That’s Sheffield way, come on, yes you can.

My life in boxes.

Today I got my stuff from Madrid from the moving. Finally after like 3 weeks I have everything back, my clothes ( I just brought with me a small suitcase for the first week), my books, my projects, my vinyl discs, my drawings, my teddy bear, my towels (fucking towels), my kitchen stuff so I can cook back again and I don’t have to steal any more forks

You never know how much stuff you have till you do a moving, (and this is my 3^rd in 5 years). I mean things start appearing from nowhere in the void space into your boxes and you keep filling boxes, one after another and it looks like that you’re never gonna end as you look at your sides and you still have the same things out of the boxes than when you begun. 

And then I started to think back as I did when I packed everything in Madrid. Wow, my whole life in boxes, compressed up to 2 m3. A lot of things go through your head when you see this image of your belongings inside boxes. It is a very strange emotional mix about effort, melancholy, past memories, needs, emotions, hopes, and everything packed together in 2 m3. My laughts, my nights without sleeping, my friends, university, my work, my readings, all the things than link me to my past, my present, my friends are inside some boxes that actually mean nothing to anybody but you. 

On one side you have this feeling like, all that I have, all that I’ve done, all that I wear is inside those boxes. In somehow is like getting your entire world and putting it in stand by for some time. It’s like stopping the world at least the physical one. 

On the other side I also have the feeling that physical things and belongings are less and less important as time goes by, and more in this era, I don’t need as much my physical belongings as I need my laptop and an internet connection

So a lot of emotions and thoughts were today on my head

Through this situation on putting your things into boxes and having these many emotions I started to think in concepts like what defines a person, what is the meaning of material belongings, about housing and architecture, movable stuff, moveable furniture, pack&go things, my world moves with me, this sort of ideas for an always changing world in which we live. 

Standard space modules so you can fit your same storage in any place of the world you go. Like using a standard wardrobe or something like that that you do not have to empty and put things in boxes, you actually move the wardrobe as it is from one house to other and it fits the module, or kitchen, and houses start to be “just fit in” places and structures, and people sort of colonize them with modules, living module, storage module, kitchen modules…. I don’t know. 

Maybe it is not at that big scale, but some kind of box that it works as furniture but also works for the moving. We still are very far away of achieving any technological innovation in the world of moving from one place to the other, and more even in getting architecture to the present world in which people moves, travels and changes more than never before. 21^st century nomads that need a world that travels with them. 

Too many things to have them clear, but the images of my life in boxes actually impressed me a lot.

Life in boxes Madrid image. December 2007

Life in boxes London image 01. January 2008

Life in boxes London image 02. January 2008

Lesson to London architects Nº 423

Alright, I know there is not much sunlight in England, fine if you don´t care about privacy, fine too that Mediterranean blinders are kind of ugly to a new minimal apartment block, fine that you do everything very early in the morning, but fuck, waking up a Sunday at 8 am because there is sunlight coming in your bedroom is unacceptable.

You know I got some kind of venetian loovers in my windows, this kind of office type ones, white, pretty smart ones. I really do like them. But the problem comes when even if you have make them opaque they allow sunlight to come in. So as soon as the sunrises I got sun light filtering through the loovers and going directly to my bed because my bedroom has a east-orientated window. I know is my problem if I like to stay in bed long during the week-ends but that is why we invented exterior blinders. Maybe not the best invention ever but quite effective. I am also one of those minimal-cool project architects that doens´t like to have anything like a blinder going on in my façade, but when it comes to something personal, fuck, i wanna be able to make my bedroom as dark as possible. It is not a matter of someone watching me naked, I don´t care, it´s a problem about being able to sleep till noon.

So please, maybe not ugly blinders, but something in between, maybe not have east faced bedrooms, whatever, but something.

Worst thing is that we are in January, I don’t want to think about summer mornings. I hope I find my way before that.

Sunday morning light in my bedroom, even when loovers closed

Typical spanish outside blindres

Cannot we get we a kind of in between mixed solution?