Interruptions Blog | Creative dumpster of Interruptions virtual network. http://interruptions.ning.com
Greetings Interruptionists,
My team and I in the Design Strategy program in CCA are doing an online survey on music experience. Its simple and won’t take much of your time. The information you provide is valuable to our research. Information is only for our use and is not to be made public. Click on the link to start
Our friend, Thorbjørn Christiansen of Rum46, reprinted and installed spreads of Interruptions Banana and Noise Editions at Rum46 space in Denmark.
Rum46 started as a non-profit exhibition space for contemporary art in 1995 – initiated by students from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in Aarhus, Denmark. Today it is run by 6 members with backgrounds from [...]
Rum46 also previously featured Samandal, a comics magazine based in Beirut.
For more information, visit Rum46 Blog
from Nour Bishouty
to Khaled Sedki
date Mon, May 3, 2010 at 7:07 PM
subject Beirut on the Hour
mailed-bygmail.com
signed-bygmail.com
Sedki, I wrote this for Interruptions blog, would be cool to have some photos of the trip with it too. Feel free to modify the timings if you know better. let me know what you think.
How was the workshop by the way?
Call me lata alligata
N.
Thursday:
2:00pm: B-Team meets at the Sedki residence
2:30pm: Driver arrives
2:30pm: 6 suitcases and 200 copies loaded
3:00pm: B-Team depart
——-
3:00pm > 11:00pm:
B-Team eats yummy turkey and cheese sandwiches prepared by C.
B-Team sings Fairouz, Tony Hanna, Fiona Apple, Norah Jones, Michael Jackson, and Hit Me Baby One More Time
B-Team prays for a safe pass of 200 copies loaded in the trunk
B-Team gets lots of beautiful stamps all over their passports
B-Team is saved by N (in this case myself), on Jordanian-Syrian Borders, whose prettiness captivated 2 soldiers.
B-Team owns a Lebanese number
——-
11:30am: B-Team lands in Hamra, Beirut
12:00pm > 1:00pm: B-Team has it’s first Beiruty meal
1:00am > 2:00am:
B-Team looks for a place to stay, not a single room available.
B-Team gets a Presidential Suit (apparently the only thing available) at an expensive hotel. While B-Team members N and O crash at Rania’s.
Friday:
10:30am – 1:30pm: B-Team runs another search for a less expensive place to stay.
2:00pm: B-Team checks in at The White House.
2:30pm: B-Team heads to Karantina; visits The Running Horse, B018 and Bernard Khoury’s*
B-Team eats at Nando’s somewhere along the hours.
8:00pm – 11:30pm:
B-Team meats with Raafat, Yasmine and Haig at Dynamo, goes into some serious discussions over Almaza and Araq.
N, supported by Haig and Raafat, sings with Ali.
12:00pm – 1:30pm: B-Team eats at Yabani* REALLY good sushi.
1:30pm: B-Team heads to Gymaizi. and what happens in Gymaizi stays in Gymaizi.
4:00pm: B-Team goes to bed.
Saturday:
10:00am – 12:30pm: B-Team heads to Karantina again; visits Beirut Art Centre: Homeworks and broke into a guy’s home in search for Bidoun Library but finds it closed and leaves 3 copies by the door. (more like on the door)
1:00pm – 3:00pm: B-Team eats lots of yummy fish and lebanese maza and Aaraq.
3:00pm – 11:00pm: B-Team is BLOATED.
6:30pm – 9:00pm: B-Team arrives at Art Lounge Karantina, met some awesome people and enjoyed a small launch and left LOTS of NOISE copies.
9:30pm – 10:30: B-Team Visits Central*
10:30pm – 1:30: B-Team enjoys an awesome performance by Zeid and the Wings.
Sunday:
10:00am: B-Team eats last breakfast in Beirut.
11:00am: B-Team departures to Damascus.
2:30pm: B-Team meets the Sedki’s and enjoy a great meal of mloukhiye, lasagna and chicken with mushroom and a delicious home-made blueberry cheesecake.
3:00pm – 9:00pm: B-Team is bloated again.
4:00pm – 6:30pm: B-Team enjoys a walk through old Damascus with sedki and does last-minute souvenir shopping.
6:30pm: B-Team heads back to Amman.
*Bernard Khoury was a fundamental ingredient upon which decisions were made.
*Yabani is a Japanese restaurant designed by Bernard Khoury.
*Central another restaurant / bar designed by Bernard Khoury.
Extras:
D finds 51 Porsches.
B-Team learns about Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
B-Team gets accopmanied by a stray cat for over 5 minutes in Beirut, and negotiate asylum to Catatonia.
K,Y,C,D and N spend a lot more than planned budget.
Dajeej vol.1
Pecha Kucha Night Amman
March 10th at Books@Cafe,7.00pm
Dajeej is organized by Interruptions and sponsored by Books@Cafe
Supported by Pro4 – Onstage
Media Partner, Aramram
Join Amman’s celebration of creative NOISE.
Amman's third circle- Sometime in the 50s
Speak of rapid-change!
Photo found by Alaa’ Zureikat.
By Rusaila Bazlamit
Originally published on Reflect Upon
Yesterday I read an article by Orhan Pamuk titled “Why I didn’t become an Architect” from his book “Other Colors“.
In this article Pamuk starts with a journey he took to one of the underprivileged sites of Istanbul where he walks into buildings that had very different past than their current present. He talks about how people came to live in buildings that were built by outsiders of Istanbul… and he had some interesting insights about who at the end the architecture aims to serve!
From this he take us to a decision he made as a third year student of architecture to drop architecture and change his career to become a writer and a novelist… He describes the difference for him between empty sheets that were waiting for “modernist” architectural designs and between empty sheets that were waiting for “his” words…
He ends his article with more reflections about architecture and the-serving-who dilemma as he walks in the ruins of the aftermath of the earthquake that hit Istanbul in recent years.
Through his personal recollections of his decision… he gave me a better understanding of my own choice to stop practicing architecture…
Later on last night I had an interesting phone call from one of my good friends who happen to be an architect though now she is more of an urban designer.
And I was sharing with her my reading… and I found myself expressing my own reasons of leaving architecture…
Probably the first detachment between me and architecture happened when I was taught history of architecture… through these courses I was somehow taught to appreciate architecture and master pieces through their images. So what was designed to be an experiential space was projected through lenses and prints into a see-and-admire experience. I truly understood the depth of this problem when I had the chance to visit famous buildings while I was at the USA. When I went to see the Guggenheim in NY… I was brought into tears… standing there in the massive lobby gave me an experience which I can’t put into words let alone images… I felt something…
My second detachment happened when I couldn’t relate the big talks and deep concepts that some of my fellow classmates would come up with… and I forcing my self to see the reflections of these concepts in their designs.. but all in vain… I would be standing bewildered and left to think I’m less than the rest of them… because my concepts were not projected as I wanted into my spaces…
This feeling got even worse when I started meeting up with the big names of Architecture at our Amman… and even worse when I did my internship at the company of one of them….
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Being myself the daughter of an architect… my father… is the type of architects that you should make a film about… my father embodies the real architect struggle to be an architect in a society dominated by empty concepts or trendy designs… [coming to think of it... I should make a film about my father... just like Nathaniel Kahn did "My Architect"]
My father supported my decision of leaving architecture behind… though I know that he is much in love with architecture… for him… architecture is creating a place where a person can feel… that is the only concept my father ever followed in any of his designs… His style of architecture has changed according to time, place and his own maturity… maybe one of these days I should blog about his work…
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But now back to me and my reasons of leaving architecture…
I stopped at the big talk of the big names… as I said… after working for one of them… I realized that architecture as it is being used is not in harmony with who we were and who we aim to serve…
After that… I graduated and joined the working force… I began to read for Rem Koolhaas… the more I worked… the more I read… the more a nagging voice inside of me got louder…
Until the day I decided to liberate myself… from “… the obligation to construct…”
I turned all my creative abilities… all the crazy concepts and ideas that were rattling inside of my head into different media which for me made sense…. and felt more natural…
Now, I don’t feel any need to be pretentious… to add any glamor to my products… I express myself… and I don’t do that to serve anyone… yet somehow I’m serving more now than I ever did… or thought I would…
The way I see it… The problem with architecture is that it is used to glorify the architect’s mind and visual abilities… or maybe as Pamuk said to serve his/her imagination…
Architecture as I was taught and seen practiced is creating empty spaces… and for that reason I left architecture….
So you bring together two competing campuses, minimum exposure, zero level of interaction, contrasting teaching methodologies; select 50+ projects from all types, subjects, context or scale, with a 3:1 ratio for the project, stack them in 8 themes, keep them away throughout the whole process and then bring them all together to submit their ‘products’ hours after midnight at prestigious Kempinski!
Result: a damn interesting experiment worthy of a doctorate dissertation!
Perhaps Abdali’s competition did not provide student/student exposure but it certainly exposed many important issues. Perhaps the highlight of last year’s CSBE | Omrania award is the jurors’ summary released which questions architectural education, externalizing the matter of education out of the institutions—
The Abdali Award designed as a competition for ‘innovation in design’ is less important for the projects it collects but rather for the opportunity it given us to observe current architectural education logics—
The non-existing interaction platforms, the radically internalized teaching environments, the emphasis on ‘product’ rather than methodology, isolation of ideas, lack of criticism, adaptability or connection dynamics.
it appears that our “mutation” is counter to that of contemporary architecture models—
Here I can mention two examples for comparison,
1 The MIT architecture campus joins an arch department at a university in Japan for a collaborative student project through virtual online connection using the 12 hour difference to work in shifts where students at MIT use the 12 day hours and then pass the work online to Japan’s campus to work their 12 hour shift- the result is unspeakable!
2 The AA did not only connect virtually but moved all the way to Beijing and established an AA center where they can bring together student from the AA with those in Beijing as well as international students to produce collaborative material, and currently studying doing a similar experiment in Dubai
We managed to meet Ms Luna H. Madi (Abdali Investment & Development PSC) and Jo Chemali (Regional Communication Director, MS&L) and agreed to work something out between AIA and Interruptions— we are hoping this could use the AIA as a gateway to turn this experiment into a student manifesto and a review/analysis/or critical observation (the minimum) to follow this basic blog draft in our upcoming edition.
