2009年7月30日 星期四

Aenne Burda

Fashion | 28.07.2009

100th birthday anniversary of German "Queen of patterns"

Germany's grande dame of fashion would have celebrated her 100th birthday on Tuesday, July 28. In post-war Germany, Aenne Burda won the hearts of women with a simple idea: a magazine with sewing patterns.

The war was over, people were beginning to enjoy themselves again, and women were keen to wear pretty and fashionable clothes. But where to get them in the struggling bombed-out grey cities of post-war Germany? Ready-made and off the rack weren't yet available, Paris Haute Couture was too expensive and too extravagant.

Aenne Burda had the right idea at the right time: a magazine with sewing patterns for women who wanted to be fashionable. "I wanted to offer not sophisticated but wearable fashion," Burda said.

The daughter of a railroader, Aenne Burda was a rebellious child with a mind of her own. At the age of 17, she chopped off her braids, and wore her hair cut short; she didn't like her name Anna-Magdalene, so she changed that to Aenne. In 1931, she married publisher Franz Burda, and had three children.

But that was not enough for the energetic, beautiful and ambitious Aenne. Hubert Burda, Aenne's youngest son, remembers that his mother had a vision: "She was driven by the desire to give elegance to women who, like her, had survived the war."

"I will prove that miracles are possible" A fashion model at a Burda show in RussiaBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Burda-Moden: worldwide success

Aenne's chance to fulfill her dreams of wearable and affordable elegance came in 1949, when her publisher husband handed her a small, ailing publishing company. Franz was trying to appease his wife, who had only just found out that he had been having an affair.

The first edition of Burda-Moden hit the streets in 1950. The magazine started off with 100,000 copies. Then, in 1952, sewing patterns for clothes were added – an instant success. Copies printed skyrocketed to four million.

In no time at all, women in more than 120 countries were following Aenne's patterns. In 1961, Burda-Moden, which was printed in more than a dozen languages, was the world's most widely published fashion magazine.

Aenne Burda headed her publishing house for 45 years. At the age of 85, the business woman stepped down; she died in 2005 aged 96. Her patterns, though mainly on the internet, live on to this day.

Author: Benjamin Wüst (db)

Editor: Neil King

light writing

Art | 29.07.2009

For Cologne artists, light is their paint and the world their canvas

They use flashlights instead of spray cans: A new generation of graffiti artists is putting city landscapes in a whole new light. For a group of light writers from Cologne, the world is - literally - their canvas.

Cruising through the streets in the dark of night, a trio of young men is out to leave their mark on Europe's cities - at least temporarily, with neon lights. The new trend known as light graffiti, or light writing, has one-time spray painters exchanging their paint cans for flashlights.

The Cologne-based group "Lichtfaktor" (Light factor) made a name for itself in the novel art form after its videos got upwards of 2 million clicks on YouTube.

"You just stand in front of the camera and use your flashlight to draw pictures," said Marcel Panne, who makes up Lichtfaktor along with Davi Luepschen and Jens Heinen. "It's really important and exciting for us to capture the background when we are taking the pictures."

The photos they take are sequenced together to create movement, or "stop animation." A special setting on the camera is used to help control the moving pictures.

Music is added to the animation and, when the video is finished, the viewer experiences something that never actually took place - light moving through the city.

A work by LichtfaktorBildunterschrift: Lichtfaktor plays with existing perceptions of the city

Technical innovation

"I actually studied civil engineering, but I've always been interested in art," said Lichtfaktor member Heinen. "I think the combination between both technology and art is very interesting."

Heinen's technical expertise comes in handy, as the group is constantly working on developing the art of light writing. They have even designed a special printer which allows them to write letters and words in the sky with blinking lights.


Many of the artists currently involved in light writing used to be graffiti artists. Some say they switched media because light graffiti gives them more options. For them, spatial and dimensional limitations are removed and the world is truly their canvas - and developing technology only expands the possibilities.

"I'm not just a graffiti artist," said Luepschen, "I'm an illustrator. The difference between graffiti and light writing is that everything we do now is digital. We don't even use photo paper."

With projects in cities across Europe, including London and Istanbul, the budding artists are not going unnoticed. They've been featured on the front covers of sports magazines and were even pictured in an advertisement for a light bulb company.

Lichtfaktor may be at the forefront of developing their art form, but they're not alone in the pursuit. A group from Holland has invented a so-called lumasolator - a machine that allows for real-time light writing. And other light graffiti include Marko 93 in France and PIKAPIKA in Japan.

Click on the link below to see more pictures of Lichtfaktor's work.

A work by LichtfaktorBildunterschrift: Stills are sequenced to create animation

Author: Ulrike Hummel / Kristen McMillen

Editor: Kate Bowen

2009年7月28日 星期二

Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies

Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies
Published: July 27, 2009

Merce Cunningham, the revolutionary American choreographer, died Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

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Richard Rutledge

Merce Cunningham in "Antic Meet," with design by Robert Rauschenberg, in 1958. More Photos »

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Radford Bascome/Cunningham Dance Foundation

Carolyn Brown and Merce Cunningham performing "Suite for Five" in 1958. More Photos >

His death was announced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing “But” and “What if?” questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. He went on doing so almost to the last.

Until 1989, when he reached 70, he appeared in every single performance given by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center. In April he observed his 90th birthday with the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Even when it became known that he was fading, and friends began coming to bid farewell to him in recent days, he told one colleague that he was still creating dances in his head.

Mr. Cunningham ranks among the foremost figures of artistic modernism and among the few who have transformed the nature and status of dance theater, visionaries like Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine.

In his works, independence was central: dancers were often alone even in duets or ensembles, and music and design would act as environments, sometimes hostile ones. His movement — startling in its mixture of staccato and legato elements, and unusually intense in its use of torso, legs and feet — abounded in non sequiturs.

In his final years, while still known as avant-garde, he was almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest living choreographer. Mr. Cunningham had also been a nonpareil dancer. The British ballet teacher Richard Glasstone maintains that the three greatest dancers he ever saw were Fred Astaire, Margot Fonteyn and Mr. Cunningham. He was American modern dance’s equivalent of Nijinsky: the long neck, the animal intensity, the amazing leap. In old age, when he could no longer jump, and when his feet were gnarled with arthritis, he remained a rivetingly dramatic performer, capable of many moods.

International fame came to him before national fame. In due course he was acknowledged in America as one of its foremost artists, but for a time his work was known here only in specialist dance, art and music circles. Not so in London, Paris and other cities. There Mr. Cunningham was widely celebrated as the creator of a new classicism, as Diaghilev’s successor, as one of the most remarkable theater artists of his day. And it was in Europe that he was most acclaimed right through to this decade, with sold-out Cunningham seasons in Paris at the Théâtre de la Ville or the Opera.

Yet he was always a creature of New York. Close to the founding members of the New York Schools of Music, Painting and Poetry, Mr. Cunningham himself, along with Jerome Robbins and the younger Paul Taylor, led the way to founding what can retrospectively be called the New York School of Dance.

These choreographers both combined and rejected the rival influences of modern dance and ballet, notably the senior choreographers Graham and Balanchine. They absorbed aspects of ordinary pedestrian movement, the natural world and city life. They tested connections between private subject matter and theatrical expression. And they re-examined the relationship between dance and its sound accompaniment. With Graham and Balanchine, they made New York the world capital of choreography, and the New York School influenced the world in showing how pure dance could be major theater.

Many of the dancers who passed through Mr. Cunningham’s company, notably Mr. Taylor and Karole Armitage, went on to become prestigious choreographers themselves. Many other choreographers, notably Twyla Tharp and Mark Morris, have paid tribute to his influence.

Mr. Cunningham’s most celebrated and revolutionary achievement, shared with the composer John Cage, his collaborator and companion, was to have dance and music created independently of each other. His choreography showed that dance was principally about itself, not music, while often suggesting that it could also be about many other things.

“Ambiguity” and “poetry” were among Mr. Cunningham’s favorite words when talking about choreography. So was “theater.” Wit and humor abounded in his work; his conversation was full of laughter and wry anecdotes. Partly because dance was the main subject of his choreography, and partly because he often created dances requiring virtuoso skill, he did more than any other choreographer to demonstrate that dance can be classical while being in most ways far from ballet.

Mercier Philip Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Wash., the third of four children of Clifford Cunningham, a lawyer, and the former Mayme Joach. (One brother died before Mercier’s birth.) His two other brothers, Dorwin and Jack, followed their father into the legal profession.

Like many artists, he grew up feeling different, “from about age 2.” Later, with this in mind, he made a solo for himself called “Changeling” (1957).

But he also took his birthplace with him. Even the names of Cunningham works like “Borst Park” (1972), “Inlets” (1977) and “Inlets 2” (1983), all made in New York, referred to parts of Washington. It was there that his interest in wildlife began. Although he did not enjoy country life, his series of “nature studies” continued for decades, from “Springweather and People” (1955) to “Pond Way” (1998). In “Solo” (1975), which he alone ever danced, he seemed to metamorphose from one animal into another.

He took his first dance classes in Centralia. In 1936, he went to Washington, D.C., to study at George Washington University alongside his elder brother Dorwin. He quit after a few months, but it was there that he first saw choreography that electrified him, in a performance by the Kurt Jooss company.

In 1937 he began study at the Cornish School in Seattle. At first he concentrated on theater but also started his first formal study of modern dance with Bonnie Bird, a young woman who had trained and danced with Graham and who went on to become an internationally renowned teacher. A clash with the drama teacher Alexander Koriansky (who disliked modern dance) led to Mr. Cunningham’s switching his first area of study from theater to dance.

In his mind, however, he never left theater. Under Koriansky he had begun to play in Shakespeare and Chekhov and to practice Stanislavskian methods. In later years he was excited by many radical figures in drama, not least Antonin Artaud, and in the 1960s, as he and his company began to tour internationally, theater figures like Lindsay Anderson and Peter Brook hailed his work as drama.

At the Cornish School Bird’s classes introduced him to modern dance as a rigorous discipline. He also started to choreograph. And he became close to Joyce Wike, an anthropology student who had privileged access to the Swinomish Indian tribe; he once watched an extraordinary dance ceremony from which nontribesmen were barred. (One of his first major solos for himself, from 1942, was called “Totem Ancestor.” ) His interest in anthropology became a permanent source of inspiration, most obviously in “RainForest” (1968), where he took ideas from Colin M. Turnbull’s account of life among African pygmies.

In 1938 Bird hired the young composer John Cage as her chief accompanist and music director. Bird and Cage introduced Mr. Cunningham and other dance students to the photography of Edward Weston (whose son was a Cornish student) and to the paintings of Paul Klee and Mark Tobey. Tobey’s work, like Klee’s, anticipated many of the 1940s breakthroughs of Abstract Expressionism, particularly in its decentralized use of space; Cage and Mr. Cunningham became devotees.

In 1939 Bird took her students to the first West Coast session of the Bennington College modern dance summer School at Mills College. Mr. Cunningham was 20. His extraordinary dance talent — his jump was phenomenal and remained so for many years — was immediately recognized. He accepted an offer from Graham, and that September moved to New York. Stepping onto a New York sidewalk for the first time, he looked at the skyline and, as he often recalled, said, “This is home.”

That December he danced on Broadway in a Graham season at the St. James Theater. His long neck and sloping shoulders reminded people of a Picasso acrobat.

Graham, unsure that her teaching methods were sufficient for him, sent him to study at the School of American Ballet. When Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of New York City Ballet, asked him why a modern dancer should study ballet — the two genres existed in virtual warfare at the time — Mr. Cunningham replied, “I really like all kinds of dancing.” Though he was not the first modern dancer to study ballet, his way of splicing elements from both genres in his own work was a breakthrough. He was soon invited to teach modern dance at the school.

The second man to dance in Graham’s previously all-female company, Mr. Cunningham remained a member of it until 1945, appearing in the premieres of masterworks like “El Penitente” (1940), “Letter to the World” (1941) and “Appalachian Spring” (1944).

Spending time alone in a studio, he began to explore his own ideas about dance. In 1942 Mr. Cage and his wife, Xenia, an artist, arrived in New York; Mr. Cunningham and Xenia appeared in a 1943 Cage percussion orchestra performance at the Museum of Modern Art, as a photo spread in Life magazine records. Cage urged him to choreograph, and the two began to develop what would emerge in the early 1950s as the most radical of their ideas about dance theater: that dance and music should be performed at the same time but prepared separately, both autonomous and coexistent.

Cage and Mr. Cunningham also became lovers, and the ensuing breakup of the Cages’ marriage was painful. For many years only a few people realized that the Cage-Cunningham relationship was sexual. Although their offstage partnership became an open secret, the subject was not open until 1989, when Cage, answering an unexpected public question about it, surprised everyone by replying, “I do the cooking, and Merce does the dishes.”

Mr. Cunningham began to present his own choreography in 1942. In 1944, with music by Cage, he presented a performance of dance solos that he later regarded as the true beginning of his career as a choreographer.

But his own dancing came first; he was the main dancer of his choreography for decades. His animal-like qualities of grace and intensity were as remarkable as his jump. His dance vocabulary owed much to both Graham modern dance (especially its use of the back) and to ballet (especially its use of the legs and feet).

For many people Mr. Cunningham was also a superlative dance teacher, right up to this year. Although he often spoke of teaching as if it were a necessary evil, he was passionate about it. No other choreographer has asked dancers to move the torso with such rigor and intensity while also keeping the lower body busy. No modern-dance choreographer has ever made more brilliant use of legs and feet.

In 1947 Kirstein commissioned him to make a dance for Ballet Society (the 1946-48 precursor to New York City Ballet). When Mr. Cunningham asked what kind of piece he wanted, Kirstein, thinking he was being open-minded, said, “Well, I think it should have a beginning, a middle and an end.” Mr. Cunningham, however, steeped in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” thought of how nature doesn’t have finite forms with beginnings and ends. Instead, his mind turning to Joycean and cyclical form, he choreographed “The Seasons” (1947).

Like Cage and other composers, as well as several painters, Mr. Cunningham also began experimenting with chance as a compositional tool. He used the I Ching in particular, but also cards and dice to determine which parts of the body would be used, which directions, how many dancers. The point had nothing to do with improvisation; Cunningham choreography was very precisely made. Rather, he wanted to banish predictable compositional habits.

The I Ching is the “Book of Changes,” and Mr. Cunningham’s choreography became an expression of the nature of change itself. He presented successive images without narrative sequence or psychological causation, and the audience was allowed to watch dance as one might watch successive events in a landscape or on a street corner.

“Psychology doesn’t interest him; zoology and anthropology do,” Mr. Cunningham’s leading co-dancer, Carolyn Brown, once wrote. When another dancer asked what “Minutiae” (1954) was about, Mr. Cunningham took her to the window of the New York studio, showed her the street below and said, “That.”

Zen Buddhism was another influence. Although Mr. Cunningham’s choreography often featured qualities of attack and conflict, it also expressed a Zen kind of acceptance. Mr. Cunningham, always a superlative dance soloist, now created a dance theater in which the basic condition was soloism. Even in a duet or a trio, each dancer retained marked degrees of independence and detachment.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company gave its first performances in 1953, at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. And it was there that Mr. Cunningham and Cage met the young painter Robert Rauschenberg, who embraced their ideas.

With Rauschenberg, the company became a three-way demonstration of the autonomy of the theater arts. The dancers often did not know what their costumes, décor or music would be until the dress rehearsal or first night. Mr. Cunningham, Cage and Rauschenberg all found this liberating, and the work cemented them as colleagues. In tours across America, Cage would drive the company van while Rauschenberg took charge of the lighting.

From the mid-1940s, Mr. Cunningham began using other composers as well, including David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Takehisa Kosugi. Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars and Sonic Youth have been among more recent musical colleagues.

Mr. Cunningham was himself a remarkable dance partner. One female dancer said the strength and focus he applied made a duet with him the equivalent of a profound sexual experience. Male-female duets always stimulated his creative imagination: he showed how people can be intensely involved and isolated at the same time in a relationship, both cooperating and independent.

Modern dance had been notable for its earnestness; Mr. Cunningham’s work was often characterized by humor. “Antic Meet” (1958), for example, seemed to satirize the more foolish mannerisms of the Graham dance theater. Much of Mr. Cunningham’s wit arose out of his concentration on pure form. An unpredictable change of rhythm or direction, a brisk figure of nifty footwork could provoke the same smiles and laughter as the jokes in a Haydn symphony.

Mr. Cunningham finally achieved international fame with a world tour in 1964. As soon as the curtain rose on opening night in London, at Sadler’s Wells Theater, the company members felt that they were receiving a quality of attention they had never received before. The tour included several other European cities and crossed Asia.

Once, discovering that the company was booked to perform in a space without a proscenium arch, Mr. Cunningham decided to arrange a one-off anthology of separate sections of choreography, using costumes and music different from those of their original contexts. This became a new and important Cunningham genre, the Event. Events provoked questions about how choreography could look when decontextualized and recontextualized. How would a solo from a 2002 work look between a duet from a 1982 work and a 1997 quartet, all before a 1953 Rauschenberg décor and in newly designed costumes?

Events also stimulated Mr. Cunningham’s love of unconventional spaces for performance; over the years they included the Piazza San Marco in Venice, Grand Central Terminal in New York and a beach in Perth, Australia.

At the end of the 1964 tour, Rauschenberg and some dancers left the company. In the years afterward the group’s designers included Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.

Mr. Cunningham continued to experiment. In the 1970s he became fascinated by filming dance. But one of the most controversial elements in Cunningham dance theater in recent decades was Mr. Cunningham himself, now aging visibly. Often he gave himself roles in which his seniority was an element in the drama.

In 1989 he began to explore composing dances on a computer; his first dance made this way was “Trackers” (1991). This became, until late in his life, his main method of dance making. He also increasingly resorted to using a wheelchair and stayed at home while his company toured. He is survived by his younger brother, Jack, of Centralia.

John Cage died in 1992. Although he had advocated the autonomy of the arts, he was often a controlling figure. Mr. Cunningham once said of life without Cage: “On the one hand, I come home at the end of the day, and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home and John’s not there.”

Mr. Cunningham’s dance invention remained fecund after Cage’s death. “Biped” (1999), with computer-generated visual imagery suggesting many aspects of transcendence, proved the single most sensational dance choreographed by anyone in the 1990s.

Mr. Cunningham remained a man of secrets. Few people knew he had taught himself Russian or had written his own translation of “The Bear” by Chekhov. When he invited Baryshnikov to dance a duet with him in his New York 80th-birthday season (“Occasion Piece,” 1999), he surprised Mr. Baryshnikov by writing to him in perfect Cyrillic script. He took up drawing, frequently combining features of two or more different species to create a convincing but fictional animal.

Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence. “You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

2009年7月17日 星期五

Stadium Where Worlds Collide, Humanely

Architecture Review

Stadium Where Worlds Collide, Humanely


Published: July 15, 2009

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan — For some of us, entering a vast sports stadium is always an anxious pleasure. Behind the electrifying anticipation of the game there’s the nagging feeling that every stadium contains the seeds of mass hysteria — that it can, in extreme times, become a place of terrifying intensity.

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Marc Bibo

The World Games stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, designed by Toyo Ito of Japan. The opening ceremony of the facility is on Thursday.

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Architecture: Inside His Exteriors (July 12, 2009)

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Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The new stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, features a flow from its outsize plaza to its indoor field. The site will hold this month’s World Games.

Designed by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the World Games’ main stadium, which will be unveiled at an opening ceremony here on Thursday, is shaped by a sensitivity to those conflicting sensations. It is not only magnetic architecture, it is also a remarkably humane environment, something you rarely find in a structure of this size.

The World Games, which have international sports competitions not included in the Olympics, don’t attract as much attention as those more famous games, and there has been considerably less buzz about Mr. Ito’s stadium than there was about the Bird’s Nest, the lavish Olympic Stadium by Herzog & de Meuron that opened in Beijing last year. Nor does it have the same symbolic ambitions.

Yet for those who have been privileged enough to see Mr. Ito’s creation, the experience is just as intoxicating. Clad in a band of interwoven white pipes, the structure resembles a python just beginning to coil around its prey, its tail tapering off to frame one side of an entry plaza. Unlike the Bird’s Nest it unfolds slowly to the visitor and is as much about connecting — physically and metaphorically — with the public spaces around it as it is about the intensity of a self-contained event.

The stadium, with more than 40,000 seats, is surrounded by a vast new public park, its grounds sprinkled with palm trees and tropical plants. Most of the trees are young, but in a few years, when they are fully grown, they should create the impression that the structure is being swallowed by a dense tropical forest. In essence the coiled form becomes a tool for weaving together opposing energies: the concentrated intensity of the stadium on the one hand, the plaza’s chaotic social exchanges on the other, the unruly forest all around. What brings the design to life is that Mr. Ito is able to convey this experience physically, not just visually.

Visitors arriving from downtown via public transportation, for example, walk down a broad boulevard before turning into the plaza. From there the stadium’s tail, which houses ticket windows and restaurants, guides them toward the entry gates. The plaza itself gently swells up to meet that area. Once inside, the surface drops down suddenly, transforming into a sloping patch of lawn that looks over the field. Mr. Ito imagines that during many events the lawn will be open to the public, letting visitors drift in and out without buying a ticket.

As people move deeper into the stadium, the narrative becomes more focused. Concourses and upper-level seating are supported by a ring of concrete structures that vaguely resemble giant animal vertebrae — Mr. Ito calls them saddles — that seem to be straining under the weight above. The character of the canopy (formed by the same white pipes as on the exterior) changes depending on perspective. Seen at an angle, the diagonal pipes create a powerful horizontal pull, whipping your eye around the stadium; seen from straight on, the vertical supports are more dominant, giving the structure a thrilling stillness.

At this exact moment — the moment when you are most in tune with the event about to take place — the outside world momentarily creeps back in. The tops of a few mountains are visible just above the canopy. So is the plaza, and just beyond it a distant view of the downtown skyline. It is as if Mr. Ito wants to remind you, one last time, of other realities, to gently break down the sense that the world of the stadium is all there is.

He is not the first architect to experiment with degrees of openness and enclosure in a stadium. Herzog & de Meuron’s 2005 Munich soccer stadium, which looks like a gigantic padded inner tube, is almost suffocating in its sense of compression. Eduardo Souto de Moura’s 2004 stadium in Braga, Portugal, is a masterly expression of extremes: embedded in a quarry at one end, its rectangular form opens onto a bucolic view of rolling hills on the other.

Like many who came to prominence in the past decade or so, these architects have sought to create structures that explore the psychological extremes that late Modernism and postmodernism ignored. Their aim was to expand architecture’s emotional possibilities and, in doing so, to make room for a wider range of human experience.

Mr. Ito’s stadium is the next step on that evolutionary chain. It reflects his longstanding belief that architecture, to be human, must somehow embrace seemingly contradictory values. Instead of a self-contained utopia, he offers us multiple worlds, drifting in and out of focus like a dream.


紐時讚世運主場館 充滿人文魅力
名建築師伊東豐雄所設計的世運主場館,在夜幕低垂之際,仍展現恢宏氣勢。(美聯社)

〔編譯管淑平/紐約時報十五日報導〕高雄世運開幕,世運主場館建築風格也引起國際媒體注意。紐約時報十五日專文介紹這座由日本知名建築師伊東豐雄設計的體育場,稱讚它不僅極具魅力,更著重與周邊都市生活、人文環境的結合,擁有其他類似規模建築少有的豐富人文氣息。

紐約時報指出,伊東豐雄設計的這座體育場,雖不像北京奧運主場館「鳥巢」引起那麼多討論,但是它令人陶醉,魅力不下於鳥巢,強調的是在實體或象徵意涵上,將體育場內賽事與周邊公共空間和環境做連結。

伊東豐雄設計 魅力不輸鳥巢

這 座能容納四萬人的體育場,主體結構是由白色鋼管交織而成的螺旋體,蜿蜒如一條正準備環抱其獵物的巨蟒,尾端往外延伸,形成入口廣場的一部分,場館周圍是一 片廣大的綠帶公園,數年後,當這些熱帶植物長成,體育場就好似被一片茂盛的熱帶森林圍繞。主體尾端和開口式設計,在意象、實體上,傳達將場館外環境融入體 育場內的體驗,就在視線隨著充滿律動感的主體結構曲線投向體育場內之際,遠方山頭和市中心天際線納入眼簾,伊東豐雄似乎藉此再次凸顯體育場與這座城市連結 的意念。

伊東豐雄以此一開放又環抱的實驗設計體育場,試圖探尋現代主義晚期和後現代主義所忽略的心理層面,目的就是要擴展建築的情感面,創造一種豐富的人文體驗。

伊 東豐雄一九四一年生於日本殖民時期的韓國首爾,一九六五年自東京大學建築系畢業。一九九七年獲得日本年度藝術選獎文部大臣獎,二○○二年拿下威尼斯建築雙 年展終身成就金獅獎。除了高雄世運主場體育館,伊東豐雄未來還將在台灣完成台中大都會歌劇院、台灣大學社會科學院院館兩項作品,台灣北、中、南都可看見這 位大師的作品。

2009年7月16日 星期四

Nissan, Toyota Focus on Graying Drivers

http://images.businessweek.com/story/08/370/0506_toyota_factory.jpg

Last year, Toyota Motor approached Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at Tohoku University, who chairs a "Mobility and Smart Aging" study group at the university, to help develop a car of the future. JUNKO KIMURA/GETTY IMAGES

In Japan, about 20% of the population is over 65, compared to 12.5% in the U.S. So it's unsurprising that the government and companies are doing more to cater to the needs of older customers. Yet when it comes to driving, it's hard to avoid the mixed signals. Companies are keen to keep seniors behind the wheel. Although few admit to targeting older customers with specific models, many new technologies or design trends are being developed with older drivers in mind.

And it's not just because the Japanese elderly population is growing in numbers. Last year Japan's auto sales reached 25-year lows. A lack of interest in car buying among younger drivers (BusinessWeek, 7/23/07) is one of the reasons for the slump. Japan's graying population of baby boomers, with more time to drive and money to spend after receiving substantial retirement packages, is a much easier sell.

That means giving them cars that meet their needs. Nissan (NSANY) has its engineers donning special suits which mimic the physical effects of aging. The suits simulate poor balance through a raised front-toe design, use goggles that imitate failing eyesight and color blindness, and have special casts that mimic arthritic pain by making it more difficult to raise arms and legs. They also feature a 2-in.-thick waist-belt that duplicates middle-age spread. This, Nissan says, makes it harder to enter or exit a car and cramps an engineer's movement behind the steering wheel in poorly designed seating.

Avoiding Acceleration Issues

That might seem extreme, but Nissan points out that while older drivers occupy an increasing share of the auto market, its engineers, often in their 20s or 30s, need to know what it's feels like to be older. "It's not always practical to recruit older motorists for product research," says Nissan design engineer Etsuhiro Watanabe. "These special suits allow engineers and designers to come up with solutions that make car use a safer and more positive experience."

Toyota (TM) is taking steps that are even more ingenious. Last year it approached Ryuta Kawashima, a professor at Tohoku University, who chairs a "mobility and smart aging" study group at the university, to help develop a car of the future. One idea is for the car to recognize how the driver normally drives, such as the way he or she accelerates or holds the steering wheel. If the approach to driving changes significantly, for instance, accelerating for no obvious reason, the car could automatically slow.

Kawashima, best known internationally for being featured in Nintendo's (NTDOY) Brain Age video games (BusinessWeek, 3/8/07), says he would like to develop a system that monitors drivers' brain patterns and, if problems are detected, notifies the driver or slows the car. "We're not going to do what you can easily imagine," he says.

A Special Sticker for Seniors

While new technology like Kawashima's or other innovations (such as in-car cameras that monitor consciousness to ensure the driver is awake at the wheel) benefit all drivers, safety measures are especially important for older drivers. Even though the number of car accidents in Japan in total is in decline, the number involving people over the age of 70 is rising. "We don't think aging is bad, but there are ways to improve the ways in which people age," adds Kawashima. "We think we can come up with some very interesting results within 10 years."

Yet not everyone seems as keen on elderly drivers as the carmakers. Because of concern over rising accident numbers, since 2002 seniors over the age of 70 have been encouraged, but not compelled, to display a special symbol on the hood of their vehicles that informs other drivers of their senior status. Resembling an autumnal maple leaf, the orange and yellow symbols are known colloquially as "ochiba marks." Ochiba is Japanese for fallen leaves.

If that's not humiliating enough, on Apr. 1 the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force began persuading business to encourage the over-70s to quit the roads by offering them bribes to hand in their keys. Among the incentives: restaurant discounts, free home deliveries, and reduced interest rates at a Tokyo bank in return for quitting driving. The scheme is expected to go nationwide from June. At least insurers are on side of the elderly. Despite a rising accident rate, older drivers aren't yet penalized with higher premiums simply because of their age.

Rowley is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Tokyo bureau
With Hiroko Tashiro .


Nissan, Toyota Focus on Graying Drivers

Faced with slumping sales at home, Japan's carmakers are testing new technologies to help the elderly stay safely on the roads

2009年7月15日 星期三

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

  1. 針對 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 搜尋的圖片結果

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  4. SANAA 獲邀設計2009 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion @ GG Interior ...

    ap_F23_20090309044448544.jpg 日本建築師事務所SANAA(妹島和世+ 西澤立衛| Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa)受邀設計2009年的Serpentine Gallery Pavilion...

文化遊﹕倫敦「一攤水」下乘涼
2009-07-15

【明報專訊】天時暑熱,走在街上,陽光直射臉龐,連眼睛也睜不開,最想找個陰涼地方暫避。英國倫敦肯辛頓公園Serpentine Gallery內的涼亭Serpentine Gallery Pavilion就獨樹一格,在涼亭設計上搞搞新意思。

大師設計


Serpentine Gallery Pavilion既是涼亭,更是一件藝術品。每年夏天,Serpentine Gallery也會搭建臨時建築Serpentine Gallery Pavilion,作為派對、展覽或演講等活動的場地。歷屆作品均出自建築名師之手,包括曾奪得建築界榮譽普立茲克獎(Pritzker Architecture Prize)的Frank Gehry、Zaha Hadid、Oscar Niemeyer及Rem Koolhaas。

鋼柱撐起


今 年則由日本建築師妹島和世(Kazuyo Sejima)與西澤立衛(Ryue Nishizawa)設計,以鏡面拋光的鋁片製成天花。設計不設牆壁,只以條條細長不鏽鋼柱撐起整座涼亭,使環境顯得開揚。從高處看,涼亭像倒瀉的一攤 水,又或是灰銀色的雲層,穿插於周邊的樹林間。亭內天花如鏡,能反射地面景致,給予觀眾視覺新鮮感。Pavilion將於3個月後拆卸,要一睹大師作品, 就要在10月中前往倫敦了。

■Serpentine Gallery Pavilion


地址﹕Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

日期﹕即日至10月18日
時間﹕每日上午10:00至下午6:00
電話﹕+44(0)20 7402 6075
網址﹕http://serpentinegallery.org
收費﹕免費