011_ghost building

[BE] Dissimilarly to American cities, many European cities were built by subtraction rather than addition. Public spaces were generated by carving away continuous fabric of edifice to liberate masses out of intricate webs of void. Open spaces became figure in the figure/ground relationship of the cities’ abstract composition. Such quality is obviously manifested in Nolli’s map of Rome, for instance. Demolishing a part of such entity of ground inevitably leaves a trace of its missing tissue.

010_yellow man

[IT] One of my favourite hobbies is collecting pictures of pedestrian crossing light from all over the world. Do you know that they all look different? For example, the red and green men in Tokyo wear a hat (the Japanese are in the detail as usual) while the green man in Kuala Lumpur is animated. This one in the picture was taken from Rome. Note that they have a yellow man!

009_public privacy

[NL] Have you ever thought of how public a toilet can be? Check out this male public toilet I found in front of the Amsterdam Central station. It seems a very normal thing for the local people there. A guy can use it even when cute girls are around and all the girls can just walk past the guy without being shy. Well, I decided to give it a try for a new experience. Only one complaint though, the urinal was a bit too high…

008_street light

[BE] There is something particular about streetlamps in Brussels; they are mounted on the buildings. As an architect, it would be quite a heart-broken feeling to see your building, with façade that you spent many late nights detailing it, ruined with that extra element. Look closer at the picture, if you can, they run the wires across the building, too!

007_over the water

[NL] The Dutch are not only good under water level, they are also great over the water. In order to perform a construction of a row house by a canal where there is no solid and dry ground available, scaffolding is set up as a temporary platform for standing of equipments and storage for building materials.

006_shitscape

[FR] When you are traveling in Paris, don’t enjoy too much with the nice weather and charming architectures. Once in a while, you should pay attention to where you are walking. A lot of pedestrian walkways in Paris are full of doggie droppings. In movies, they only show sexy Parisian women with their poodles flaunting on streets but never reveal the ugly side of the story. Those cute little dogs all need to poo.

005_mapping the invisible

[NL] I love snow. It reveals some invisible urban flows such as this one in the picture, almost like a mapping diagram of space in time. We can see which car came to park first by looking at the amount of snow covering the car. The fresher tire tracks leave deeper impression on the road and the shapes of the car (the uncovered area) on the parking lot dissolve through time after the car has left.