Bjarke Ingels of BIG spoke at UCLA on Monday, in one of the more engaging and refreshing lectures I’ve seen in a while. He looks and sounds like a kind of Danish bro, but it was actually kind of endearing, especially since he seems so smart and enthusiastic. He has a remarkable skill in reducing the narrative of a project to its most simple and evocative terms. I doubt it’s COMPLETELY honest, but it makes for a great show, which I of course appreciate. Projects are presented very minimally in terms of theoretical content or depth of information, and rely more on telling stories of the design process though cartoon-y diagrams, colorful renderings, and construction documentation. It was nice to see multiple iterations for many of the projects, and to see how discarded iterations can show up in later projects, which we’ve of course seen in work by OMA. The best quote of the night came when he was discussing a project in Copenhagen called the Lego Towers which use a typical Danish prefab unit size, stacked to mimic curving forms. His friend from Ikon apparently said it was “Greg Lynn at 72dpi”, which is especially appropriate here, where Lynn teaches.


"Greg Lynn at 72dpi" - in a screengrab from the BIG site... at 72dpi!



In other news, I’m slowly but surely moving into my sweet new loft in Westlake very near Downtown. It's got 18' ceilings and is 1560 sqft (despite being advertised as 2000...). I’m excited with what we’re gonna do to the space (not “with” it, ha ha) – right now our plan is to build two little mini suburban houses with standard framed walls, and reclaimed windows and doors (does anyone know if there’s a salvage place like Berkeley’s Urban Ore down here?), and probably a translucent corrugated plastic roof. I’ll post more when we get underway (if it looks okay that is).


Gotta love those concrete floors in the morning...