Following the urban of the move post, here are some picks of my walks through London in my last week there.
This was My London. sort of
hackney. 100 football fields. wanna play?
Old garages. I would love to renovate them and put my office here with a vibrant courtyard.
Directions.
Old magnetic Lloyd’s Building.
Mutivideo-two screen cocktail layout.
The curve @ The Barbican. 3D modifications
Smithfields market. Brightful meat.
Suitcases. My life in boxes once again
Last 10 days have been pretty intense and there is no point to try to summarize it. So instead, I post a series of videos that try to capture East London life on the move…. there are some bits missing, the farewll party, my life in suitcases again… but I’ll put more pics later.
This is my farewell to living in East London, enjoy the ride.
Under London’s white sky…. like every day.
It was 1o.oo am.
this is the closest to blue….
Sometimes I feel like I live in the future and I am gonna miss it so much during the time I am gonna spend in Spain. mm, fuck it.
I live in a place where I got a Tax Refund Cheque for a tax refund that I was entitled for but that I didn’t ask because at that time I didn’t know how to do it. I live in a place where I go to the bank and I can pay in a cheque without going to the teller, I can do it through the ATM and it is in my account the same day!!! I live in a place where I have a rechargeable transport card that I can manage online and that it auto tops-up when I have no credit on and it charges directly my bank account. I live in a place where I can plan my public transpor journeys by the minute online. Not to talk about the postal service, they collect every hour from the post office, every hour!!!! and you get letters and parcels within 2 days, Amazon delivers next day, maximum 2 days most of the items.
I live in a place with 5 airports, FIVE, and a renewed train station that links me to Paris in less than 3 hours,
It’s not one of those futures of bright, shiny clean white environments, it is more that of the typical pseudo catastrophic, bit crappy environment, but I love it, because it has a lot of warehouses and lofts reconverted as offices, lounges, restaurants museums. I live in a place where you can find artits’ studios directly under the rail tracks in old fashion brick arcades spaces, I live in a place with one of the most amazing river banks I’ve ever seen and with the huge turbine gallery, I live in a place where Lily Allen plays @ Koko before anywhere else, or the roundhouse, or the Notting Hill Arts Club, I live in a place that has one of the best punk-whatever-tourist-retro-vintage markets ever, and it’s all in one, Camden.
I mean the place has also its bad stuff, but that’s the stuff anchored in the past, like “British food” whatever that is, early closing for bars, no 24 hours living (NYC, you are so awesome for that, miss it), crappy weather, (they didn’t know that the place where they were founding the city it was crap) and a horrible English accent, it’s not their fault, we embrace them anyway. They have a weird sense of humour (almost none), and some other stuff.
But sometimes THE FUTURE, and more often than you think, appears in your life. Sometimes I live in the Future.
- Where are you coming from?
- The Future
- And how does it look?
- It’s a better place,
P.S. Though it could be sunnier and had some stuff like Jamon to eat and so on… just asking.
I used to go through this station everyday, abit earlier though…. thy not?
This is PEC watching rush hour some months ago.
After one year, I have finished working for SOM London, and I think it’s time to upload some of the pics I took on my cell during that period. It’s been an intense year, I worked at the office more than 2700 hours which means i worked like 1.5 years time in one year. It’s been crazy, instructive and I have to say fun. It was not fun to work like crazy, but it was a great team and we had fun together. We went through a lot of different situations, we had sleepless nights, some parties, some triumphs and quite a bunch of defeats. I think we spent more time together than with any other else this year. So, this is just a small taste of what we have gone through, some pics that I /we took with my cellphone.
I am not sure where this blog is heading right now, and probably it will change the direction and the topics of the post a little bit but on the meantime, this is what we did at the office.
… and the leader said, there might be light to illuminate our world
and light was created…
also a big dildo was created in the middle of the world, but that’s another story)
of course we had a list of famous visitors… (we kept the cards as souvenirs)
as a good navarricos that I am, we celebrated San Fermin (7th of July) with Kalimotxo (red wine and coke)
…. and some people were really enjoying it. (Bernard- Brian)
We had guest DJs, like San Miguel bottle…(rocking the studio sessions on wednesday nights)
We cried the death of our beloved model…
Towards the end of the year, SpiderPig came to visit, but it was more like GodzillaPig.
dedicated to the team
It takes me so long to finish the posts normally, I start and then I stop`, then I take it the next day and it doesn’t make sense anymore, sometimes I have an idea but I don’t know how to express it, sometimes I have a story but I don’t know which way would be the best one to write it. It’s been a week since my firends got lost in Wanstead on the way back home. Funny enough this is my first 2 days weekend in a month and I am sick, but at least I am home, and I am warm and confortable, which brings to my mind my poor friends lost in wanstead.
You feel home because you know the place, you know how thing work, you have memories and feelings attached to it.
You are lost when you are somewhere you don’t know. Knowledge gives you confidence, confidence gives you security, security makes you feel at home.
Some friends came to visit last weekend, on sunday they went out and came back by the Night Bus. At 1.20 am they called they were lost. They were in wanstead. So, technically they were not lost, they knew where they were, but the context was completely unknow for them, therefore they felt lost. They didn’t have the knowledge, not the language, nor the resources to get away from that situation. Then you feel weak, then you feel lost.
It is not only about knowing the place, but also about knowing you, about having experience in similar situations, having resources and abilities, having external useful knowledge is what makes you confortable, about not panicking. Normally when you feel lost, your brain just blocks, is not able to react and bring to the spolight the objective situation and the resources needed to move on, normally you just paralize and drama begins.
This fact of not being able to stop for a moment to think, to forget the rush, the anxiousness, toput feelings aside and think about the actual facts is what leads to a series of bad decisions that make the panic feeling grow. Just call a cab, write down the address, you loose 25 pounds and you are home. Or as they did, take the same bus back, tell the driver the address and get back home at 2.oo am. They left back to Spain at 5.oo am. Tough night.
Today I am off to get an aspirine. Damm it.
normally it takes me 35 min to go from my flat’s door to my desk at the office.
normally I get to the office between 9.3o and 9.45 am
official time to start working 9.oo am
route to the office. Bow road station. district line one stop to Mile end. Change to central line. 2 stops to liverpool street. Walk from liverpool street to old street.
On Monday I tried to get to the office on time. Various reasons for that.
Monday December 1st.
8.25 am. Go out of my building
8.35 am. I took the district line
8.38 am. I jumped onto the central line at MIle End.
As i entered the coach a lady sitting there just fainted. They had to call for medical assistance. Train stop
8.42 am.Decided to take Hammersmith line, so change plattfor and changed to Hammersmith line.
8.50 am. We are stopped at Whitechapel.There is a personill at Monument station, a few stations in front of us, all the trains on that track are stopped
8.54 am Decided to go out to the surface and take the bus
9.oo am I catch the 205 bus that goes directly to my office place. There is a huge traffic jum due to roadworks and Ring Road congestion
9.30 amI reach the office
normal time 35 min. Monday time 1 hour 35 min. And all because for ine day I tried to arrive on time.
Infrastructures and public transports are the element around which the city should be built, and we should find a way to be able to avoid interrumptions due to normal and frequent activity falilures. no?
Blogging.
I realised that a lot of times I got a really good idea for a post,or a really good funny thing that just happened to me, but at that moment and even that day I don’t have the time to stop what I am doing and put myself to write the post. so many times I have “unborn” posts, which piss me off, so I have thought that probably talking about architecture and society, or more about ideas than about occurrences would be a better and more interesting idea for the blog. Also I am gonna try to write the quick stuff in twitter, I like the 140 character rule. Let’s see how it goes.
Fraud.
On my way to work on Sunday I came accross this guy who showed me his arm bleeding and asked for money for a cab. I offer to call an ambulance bu he refused and went away asking more people for money. I felt something was weird with that guy. Well, tuesday I saw the same guy doing the same trick to other people. I though thatn values and respect are in the lowest levels ever.
3 weeks without writing, the longest period this year. I always think that I want to write everyday and I never do it. First weeek I was in Spain near the coast, plenty of time, plenty of movies, no excuse, second one just back in London, social week, too much social, third week I am fucking working my ass woth no aparent reason but that is the real thing. Client and cosultant workshops taking place, coming from nowhere, unexpected, unwanted and me just sitting there in a borrowed place to do whatever the partners want me to do. I love working under pressure, but this week it has been really fun, I truly have worked live, with 3 partners overseeing my screen or model live over my shoulder, oooohhh yeahhhhh, that was nice. And the best thing of all, when you do things right nobody would know you have done anyhing at all.
Amazingly they are not able to put a thugh deeper than the one a 10 year old kid would do, so obvious, so straight, so volatile, so empty, so difficult to follow because there is nothing to follow.
Also we got a team diner which I didn’t attend to as I don’t like those stupid thigs, so I got pist with my buddies.
In Alicante I didn’t do a lot of things but I watched quite a lot of movies.
Paris, Texas / Blood Diamond / Caro Diar0 / Flags from our fathers/ Letters from Iwo Jima / 24 hours to the limit / The good sheperd / and my memory starts to fail but there were a few more.
whatever
parcel boundary. definition.
1. I am sorry to say this but why British cannot speak proper English. Parcel boundary = Plot limit, or plot line, or plot boundary. Parcel is what you sent through the post to other people.
Well, back to business.
Parcel Boundary. Definition
You spent a couple of months doing the layout of an area around 3km by 2 km, boulevards, parks, roads, and plots. You freeze this layout, you focus on the volumetric conditions and deliver your masterplan.
After that you Chicago office take 6 blocks within that masterplan to go further and they just decided, well you know, can you change your parcel boundaries because it doesn’t fit my buildings. Fuck, wow, I thought it was the opposite, I define the limits and you stuck to them.
So we started fighting, we change the lines, we don’t, and so on so forth for 2 months. But not only that, they want to change the parcel boundary because it affects its contention wall for the basements, hello!!!!!! you want to extend the plot limits because you want to keep you perfect structure grid and build the contention wall outside, but yu cannot do it on the public domain, so you have to extend the plot limits, you change the road layout, you change the park design, you change all of the other architects buildings because you wanna build the contention wall without affecting your grid and as you are Chicago and the mother ship, London do whatever you fancy.
whatever. these romans are crazy.
One of the problems of our age is time. If you try to do something in half time that is require you are not going to be able to do it properly, and if you do it for sure you would not have put enough thoughts on it. But who cares, it looks that not thinking is how we are suppose to behave, and then suddenly problems appear. Then when you want to solve the problems you put 5, 6, 7, fancy mediocre people together to do video-conference and that are not able to take decisions and what it is even worse they have no right to take them.
whatever. these romans are crazy.
I’ll put some pictures of the so “called” “process”.
They look like kids with new shoes, smiling thinking on how big and important they are doing projects like this.
