Figure/Ground

Contemporary Jewish Museum

2008-11-07T18:56:55+08:00

H.M. de Young Museum

2008-11-07T18:56:01+08:00

Mikimoto Ginza 2

2008-10-20T17:35:20+08:00

Christian Dior Omotesando

2008-10-20T17:35:15+08:00

Tokyo International Forum

2008-10-20T17:35:10+08:00

Feed Announcement and a Picture

2008-08-15T16:39:12+08:00

I've finally gotten around to setting up a long-overdue feed for Figure-Ground.com. You can subscribe to it at: http://figure-ground.com/index.xml

And the picture above is one I never put up before of Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Beijing

2008-08-06T17:49:51+08:00

The media this week (and all month, really) has been wall-to-wall news, articles and essays about Beijing. Here's my contribution to the avalanche of Beijing coverage:

Incidentally, for the first time that I can remember, I'm actually excited about the Olympics. It has not much to do with the Games themselves, but everything to do with the host city and country. All the controversies surrounding this Olympics (the pollution, the media censorship, the crackdown in Tibet, the support of the Sudanese goverment) and the herculean effort the Chinese have made in successfully building a new Beijing that just screams money and power everywhere you look, have made the Olympics interesting again.

Nakagin Capsule Tower, Plus Nagoya and Fukuoka

2008-06-06T17:59:31+08:00

Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) - Kisho Kurokawa

I've also expanded the Tokyo (2005 - 2007) section to include photos from Fukuoka and Nagoya. Therefore, the section has been renamed "Japan" to reflect the expanded scope. Definitely take a look at the Fukuoka sub-section if you are interested in architecture. There are quite a few interesting buildings in that set.

Toyota Municipal Museum of Art

2008-05-08T20:52:43+08:00

Yokohama International Passenger Terminal

2008-05-03T19:39:31+08:00

Tadao Ando in Tokyo, 2005 to 2007

2008-04-30T00:45:46+08:00

Three recent works of Tadao Ando in Tokyo (hhstyle.com/Casa, Omotesando Hills, 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT). You see a definite departure from earlier works with the incoporation of lots of sharp angles and diagonals. I'm not sure I like this "new" Ando. These are pretty underwhelming projects compared to his earlier work like the Church of the Light and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Harajuku Protestant Church

2008-04-26T15:56:37+08:00

Bangkok and Ko Phangan

2008-04-15T15:16:41+08:00

Tokyo

2008-03-27T13:10:28+08:00

A selection of photos from four trips to Tokyo taken between April 2005 and December 2007.

Imperial Hotel Entrance Hall

2008-03-19T01:41:44+08:00

Surprise, surprise, another update to Figure/Ground! Hot on the heels of the Indonesia travelogue, here's a small update featuring a few shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel entrance (yes, just the entrance), moved from Tokyo and planted in an architectural history theme park near Nagoya.

I thought it looked extremely sad, having been torn not just from its location, but from the rest of the building as well. It's architecture without context.

The photos of the truncated building set against a lush mountain backdrop and overlooking a lake look just so ridiculously incongruous and wrong, so you won't see those here. Some of you are probably curious to see them, but I simply cannot do that to FLW.

Indonesia

2008-03-16T20:14:49+08:00