Haunting, terrible images of St. Petersburg’s past, mixed with images of the city in present day taken from the same spots. More here.

Via Vinny.

I recently took part in a study for McGill University, where among other things they had to do an MRI of my brain. Seeing as this doesn’t happen too often for me, I politely asked me if they could email me a copy of some of the images when they were done. I thought they had forgotten, but a week or so later some amazing images popped into my email inbox – portraits of my brain.

A slice of my brain as taken horizontally straight through my eyeballs.

One of my heroes, the late, great animator Norman McLaren, once decided to turn an x-ray of his head into an art project by drawing on it. McLaren was an animator, and much of his work was stream of consciousness doodles, so this made a lot of sense. I put my images through photoshop, my tool of choice as a designer, in an effort to make the various structures pop out a bit more and add a little colour.

Here is McLaren’s head compared with mine:

Burtynsky is generally known for his large-format prints of man-made landscapes like quarries, factories or dams. He has also recently released his film, Manufactured Landscapes, and founded the environmental site WorldChanging.Org.

Being a general fan of the man, I couldn’t help but jump at the opportunity to see him speak when my recent trip to San Francisco happened to coincide with his presentation as part of the Long Now Foundation’s lecture series on long-term thinking. (( If you aren’t familiar with the Long Now, they’re a non-profit dedicated to promoting the concept of long-term thinking over the short-sighted instant-gratification which seems all too prevalent in our society these days. It’s a wonderfully nebulous goal for an organization, and I’m proud to be a card-carrying member. ))

As well as showing many of his fantastic photographs, Burtynsky was charged with looking into techniques for preserving images for 10,000 years. His recommendation was to use an obscure and little-used technique called Carbon Printing, which is done commercially by less than a dozen small shops worldwide. It’s particularly expensive, labour intensive, and difficult, but the final product is incredibly stable and resistant to degradation. The ink is literally crushed stone of different colours suspended by gelatin. The Magenta stone is only obtainable from a small mine in Germany, and the gelatin used by the process is so pure that the small shops employing the process need to band together to commission special small batches from gelatin manufacturers, because nobody makes anything with the purity needed on a regular basis.

Being a world-class city, Berlin has it’s own fair share of buildings designed by prominent architects. Seeing photos of buildings is never the same as seeing it in person, and on this trip we’ve had the chance to see buildings by three of the most famous architects in the world – Daniel Liebeskind, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry. I’ve taken lots of photos and written down my reactions to the buildings, with comments on what I thought worked and what I didn’t.

Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum

When Libeskind entered the competition to design the new wing of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, he showed up a day or two before it was due, walked around the museum for a few minutes, went across the street to a cafe and drew his submission on a napkin, at least according to a version of the story I saw him tell a few years ago. His design was chosen, despite other architects putting in far more work preparing more formal bids with mock-ups and scale models. Such is the star power of Daniel Libeskind. His designs are wild and crazy, and virtually flaunt the fact that they take no regard for context or history.

I’m not generally a fan of him for the very reason that he disregards context, but I was expecting to like this building more than I did. I can appreciate his random “draw your own interpretation” angle on paper, but when seeing it in place in the actual buildings it’s just too random for me to appreciate, and they often came across as gibberish. I felt the architecture distracted from the content of the museum in far too many places.

The most successful spaces were generally the ones with less of this “gibberish”. These were the spaces where the design found the most order. For example, the garden below was the only geometrically rectangular space in the museum. It’s experienced from below – walking among the concrete towers gives you some space to stop and think.

The other successful spaces were what Libeskind called “voids” – empty concrete spaces peppered throughout the museum, visible through windows. In the bottom of one was this art piece consisting of hundreds, if not thousands, of steel faces, upon which you were encouraged to walk. The effect was predictably chilling.

Frank Gehry’s DZ Bank

The DZ bank, located in Pariser Platz – around the corner from the Reichstag, in face of the Brandenburg Gate, and two doors down from the hotel where Michael Jackson famously dangled his baby from the window of his hotel, the DZ bank is easily some of the most pricey real-estate in Berlin. I was a little surprised to see that Gehry’s design was surprisingly conservative, at least from the front. It’s nice, simple, and fits in well with the surrounding buildings.

Once you go around to the rear, it becomes clear that this really is a Gehry design. The curvature of the rear of the building, materials, and window style are all classic Gehry, and yet it still seems a little conservative, or at least that’s what it first seemed.

Once you walk through the front door, however, you realize that this is not so much a building so much as a wrapper for a giant glass, metal, and wood sculpture. It gives the impression that the offices are an afterthought. The building is fun to experience, but it also comes across as the ultimate show-off – this is a building designed to impress the pants off people, but not particularly practical.

Norman Foster’s Reichstag Dome

I’ve always admired Foster’s work, but this was my first chance to see it in person. The key here for me is that Foster built his structure in a way that evoked what had been there before. The dome Foster has built is roughly where the dome was in the original design.

It was only after a bit of reflection that I realized how incredibly light the structure appears. It appears as if there’s nothing really holding it up, like a soap bubble.

The dome is not only a good viewing platform, it also focuses sunlight into the chamber below, providing natural light and reducing energy use. The result is something extremely experimental, but still toying with practical ideas.

I’m thinking of changing Five Whys into a blog of funny cat photos. Here’s the first one.

I’ve always found it interesting how the human brain is wired to pick out certain shapes, like faces. I took this photo a couple of years ago, because I couldn’t help but view this jewelry set as a big screamy face.

Here’s a gallery of unintentional faces that do the same thing.

Found in the back-alleys.

Here’s a set of locally made dishware I stumbled across on the weekend. They wear their non-commodity status on their sleeve by proudly declaring “not made in china”.

While I don’t generally think it’s a good idea to sell or buy something for what it isn’t, rather than what it was, I couldn’t help but be struck by the design.

Here is a composite photograph of the number of plastic bottles used in the U.S. in one hour – 2.5 million. (click to enlarge).

Via GoodExperience

Summer is coming, and that means I hope to get up to doing some graffiti photos. Here’s one I took this afternoon.