Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House (廣州歌劇院) Video

Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian explores the Zaha Hadid's latest creation - The Guangzhou Opera House (廣州歌劇院) in this video.  So amazed and inspired! 

YUCCA - Shanghai. Let's go!

Yucca is a tiny cocktail lounge that just recently opened on the third floor of Mansion 26F in Sinan Mansions, Shanghai. Created by Australian-Greek chef and restauranteur David Laris and designed by Shanghai based Lime 388, the space is a crazy mix of modern Mexican motifs, bold, shocking colors, iron gates, catholic crosses, and religious undertones. Seemingly....one can get lost in here... One can only hope.

Can't wait to go here on my next trip to Shanghai.

Source: The Coolhunter

Georges Rousse - "Geometrism" and Trompe L'oeil Art

NO PHOTOSHOP HERE PEOPLE!!! I am so inspired by the work of Parisian Artist Georges Rousse. His understanding of space manipulation is truly amazing. My mind is blown.

From his bio:

"Georges Rousse is unmistakably a photographer: his photographs are intrinsic to revealing his images, and deciding the composition, cropping and lighting and clicking the shutter are all essential to his process. But he is simultaneously a painter, sculptor, and architect, carrying out the same relationship to his worksites as a painter to his canvas, or a sculptor to his clay or marble.


His raw material is Space: the space of deserted buildings. Taking his inspiration from a site's architectonic quality and the light he finds there, he quickly chooses a "fragment" and creates a mise-en-scène, keeping in mind his ultimate goal, creating a photographic image. In these empty spaces, Georges Rousse constructs a kind of utopia that projects his vision of the world--his imaginary "universe." His creation both expresses his artistic intentions and resonates with his impressions of the site, its history and its culture. Finally, this results in a photograph, a flat plane, so the shapes he paints and draws, and the volumes and architectural constructions he creates in those massive spaces seem fractured or split on different levels. His photo masterfully brings together painting, architecture, and drawing. It carves out a new space in which the artist's fictive world becomes visible.

At the heart of this questioning the definition of art, his work deals with our relationship to Space and Time.

In his photographs, Georges Rousse compels us to read architecture as static, images as immobile, then gradually transforms our perception of Space and Reality. The final photographic image perturbs our visual habits and convictions by presenting three kinds of space: the real space, where he makes his installations; an imaginary utopian space, which the artist invents and then carefully builds at his chosen site; and a new space that is visible from only one spot when he clicks the camera shutter, and exists only in the photo.

The convergence of these spaces goes beyond a visual game: Like a hall of mirrors, enigmatic and dizzying, it questions the role of photography as a faithful reproduction of reality; it probes the distances between perception and reality, between imaginary and concrete.


While they evoke the memory of a place and its poetic metamorphosis, his photographs also deal with mankind's problematic relationship to time in industrialized society, and the traces he leaves behind on the environment. Forgotten, neglected, in ruins or slated for destruction, the sites selected for his installations act as a metaphor for Time as it hurtles toward death. By transforming these sites into works of art, Georges Rousse offers them a new life, however fleeting. When he photographs them, he stops time, fixing an image in which traces of the past intermingle with his recent artistic actions, an image full of hope and energy, an image devoid of nostalgia. The history of these deserted places need not be illustrated explicitly by the artist; its presence exists in the image. As if traveling across time, it joins, in our gaze, that of its transformation.


A kind of new experience therefore occurs in the image, a spiritual dimension--a dimension more powerful than reality--that comes from appropriating, using and transforming a place before its destruction. This is the experience that comes from Georges Rousse's work. "

Source: Trendland

Collector's Loft by UNStudio

Source: SwipeLife

Cube 5 Villa - Shanghai

East meets West, Old meets new.

Cube 5 Villa started off as an traditional 1920's Villa in Shanghai and now it's an ultra modern and ultra chic modern contemporary private living space. Keeping a lot of the original architectural details of the old, Naco Architectures' reconversion of the space is based of the idea of the cube - each function of the house is represented by a cube concept.

I would love to live here. I've always been into living in an space that has some history...SOMEONE, make that happen. My birthday is in two days!

Source: Trendland

BUILDING FASHION - Fashion X Architecture

Opening September 9th, 2010, Building Fashion will celebrate cutting edge designs under the High Line @ HL23. A series of temporary installations will examine the intersection of architecture and fashion through store design and exhibition concepts. Amongst the designers that will be showcased here is Simon Spurr, who was named as GQ's Best New Menswear Designer 2008 and a CFDA Menswear Swarovski Award nominee in 2010.

Hosted by Boffo and Spilios Gianakopoulos, the exhibit will pair fashion designers with architectects to design one of a kind indoor and outdoor spaces that will act to accent and enhance their designs, thus examining the relationship of 3D store environment and its impact on creating strong and impactful brand and vision statements. Although temporary, these exhibits will far transcend the idea of a "pop-up".

In my own designs, in examining fit, form, and function.... one can't help but look towards architecture as a major source of inspiration. Also, this is an exhibit for those who don't have their own freestanding stores ....sigh. Maybe in a couple of years....I'll be here.

Building Fashion