Posts tagged architecture
Tourist Stranger - self-portraits in Mexico

French photographer Benoit Pallé enjoys exploring the theme of the Stranger. This project, spotted on the excellent It's Nice That (a glorious soubriquet for a cultural web colander if ever I saw one), sees him wandering the beaches of Mexico allowing tourists to capture themselves, photo-booth style. They are fab. ‘Tourist Stranger Self Portraits’

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Inspired by artists – Oscar Niemeyer

If Brazil were a building...with Niemeyer it's all about the flexibility of concrete, the man-made organic shapes. I'm not going to upload tonnes of pictures and images or talk about his life. Instead, here is a list of his works, and here are some things he said:

My work is not about "form follows function," but "form follows beauty" or, even better, "form follows feminine."

Architecture was my way of expressing my ideals: to be simple, to create a world equal to everyone, to look at people with optimism, that everyone has a gift. I don’t want anything but general happiness. Why is that bad?

I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete.… This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.

Life is very fleeting. It’s important to be gentle and optimistic. We look behind and think what we’ve done in this life has been good. It was simple; it was modest. Everyone creates their own story and moves on. That’s it. I don’t feel particularly important. What we create is not important. We’re very insignificant.

We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.