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2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003

Contemporary Jewish Museum
[ Posted NOVEMBER 7, 2008 ]

Contemporary Jewish Museum



H.M. de Young Museum
[ Posted NOVEMBER 7, 2008 ]

De Young Museum



Mikimoto Ginza 2
[ Posted OCTOBER 20, 2008 ]

Mikimoto Ginza 2



Christian Dior Omotesando
[ Posted OCTOBER 20, 2008 ]

Christian Dior Omotesando



Tokyo International Forum
[ Posted OCTOBER 20, 2008 ]

Tokyo International Forum



Feed Announcement and a Picture
[ Posted AUGUST 15, 2008 ]

Walt Disney Concert Hall

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
[ Posted AUGUST 6, 2008 ]

Standing guard at the National Stadium, Beijing

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
[ Posted JUNE 6, 2008 ]

Nakagin Capsule Tower

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
[ Posted MAY 8, 2008 ]

Toyota Municipal Museum of Art



Yokohama International Passenger Terminal
[ Posted MAY 03, 2008 ]

Yokohama International Passenger Terminal



Tadao Ando in Tokyo, 2005—2007
[ Posted APRIL 30, 2008 ]

Tadao Ando in Tokyo, recent works

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
[ Posted APRIL 26, 2008 ]

Harajuku Protestant Church, interior



Bangkok & Ko Phangan
[ Posted APRIL 15, 2008 ]

Bangkok and Ko Phangan



Tokyo
[ Posted MARCH 27, 2008 ]

Commuter walking briskly by the Shinjuku Eye

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



Facade detail, Imperial Hotel Imperial Hotel Entrance Hall
[ Posted MARCH 19, 2008 ]

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
[ Posted MARCH 16, 2008 ]

Borobudur Temple




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All images and text copyright © Liao Yusheng. He can be reached at liao@yusheng.ca.