CARROTS AND RABBITS

Another piece of street art, depicting a carrot, I suppose. I found it drawn on a pretty sandstone wall in Oxford in February 2009. I don't believe charcoal on sandstone is a very common mix of materials, but it works. Please note the beautiful craft of the surface and masonry of the stone wall. Why the carrot is (or was) there, I have no idea, but I like it.

By the way, I can recommend Oxford to all Romanticists out there. It's a place with a very strange mood, where you expect unusual things to happen at any moment. I never saw a White Rabbit with a watch and a waistcoat there, but I had the feeling that it was just around the corner most of the time.

THE MAGIC OF POINTY ROOFS

Irresistible.

BEAUTIFUL SHADOW

One of many good reasons to plant trees everywhere (including trees between the pavement and the road, trees in parks, in gardens, along the façades of houses, in backyards, on roofs, in parks and out of windows): The beautiful shadows they sometimes cast in the sunshine. This picture of a young oak tree was taken in the Palace Park in Oslo in July.

COOL STUFF YOU CAN DO WITH IVY

Cover a lamp post with it! (Took this picture less than an hour ago, literally just around the corner from where I live.)

A BUILDING I LIKE

I like this building, but I'm not quite sure why. It's really supposed much too boring and square for my taste, and not at all coherent with the principle of open form. 

Could be the Filippa K shop on the ground floor, but I don't think so. There's something about the façade, perhaps the verticality of it, which is established by the french balconies that replace the windows. The height is also quite good, very well-adapted to the building's neighbours. And of course the mixed use, with both space for retail and apartments. Still... Hm.

The girl in the picture is my dear friend Hildegunn, who is moving to Bergen with her lovely boyfriend, Ole Christian, in only a few weeks. Joy!

GUERILLA GARDENING AGAIN

Another form of guerilla gardening, I suppose. The artist is Dolk. Speaking of guerilla gardening, I think we'll be planting bulbs around the city quite soon. Let me know if you'd like to join.

CARDBOARD BOXES + ARCHITECTURE STUDENT =

 

Yeah, this is what happens when you hire an architecture student to unpack a load of cardboard boxes filled with books. Apologies to my boss, who had to pick them down.

LIFE IN THE CITY

This is what life in the city can be like. The girl in the picture is my sister, Ane Regine, and it was taken in Copenhagen in July by a friend of hers, Marita Moen.

MEANWHILE, IN NEW YORK

So you think there's no urban trend going on? So you want to build pretty, grey houses out in the country, where you can escape the noise and life of the city? So you think the city centre is a place to live only when you're young and studying? Think again.

As some of you (I'm quite intrigued by the fact that there actually are people reading my blog) may I have noticed, I have passion for townhouses. This urban version of the single-family house, existing in different incarnations all over the world have, in my opinion, the potential of replacing the detached house. While the suburban detached house is known for causing overuse of resources and energy, destroying natural and agricultural landscapes by the way of suburban sprawl, not to mention very high emissions of greenhouse gases and local pollutants because of people driving their cars everywhere (gasp!), the townhouse takes up less space and can fit into almost any kind of urban situation, while still giving people the feeling of living in their own house.

I'm not the only one who likes them though. While reading the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten online yesterday, I discovered that the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim, had just bought the townhouse in the picture (Although they called it a villa. Amateurs.). According to the Forbes magazine article they link to in (where I didn't steal the pictures, I found them on Wikimedia Commons, thankyouverymuch), the house is only 9 meters (27 feet) wide, but around 33 meters (100 feet) long. Located at 1009 Fifth Avenue, it's just across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the middle of New York City. Although a house of this kind is far to big to be a sustainable alternative for everyone, I find it very interesting that a person like this chooses to live in the city, and buys a townhouse to live in, instead of just driving to work from some gigantic suburban villa every days. More of this! (Only a bit smaller.)

DON'T TEAR IT DOWN

 

I know. This picture I took while walking home from work today, is ugly. Really ugly. Buttfuckingly (and not in a good way) ugly. In fact, I think it's one of the ugliest photos I've published on this blog (so far). 

However, there is a reason why I'm bothering your pretty blog-reading eyes with this. These houses have been remodelled, added to and re-used. In a not very charming way, but still. They're still standing there, proving that even a stupid food shop can be fitted into old buildings. 

You don't have to tear down old buildings that been built in an environmentally friendly and solid manner. You don't even have to tear down newer buildings that don't seem to work any more. Tearing down and rebuilding requires enormous amounts of energy, and produces extreme amounts of waste, and thus, you can almost always gain from redesigning an existing building on a site, pushing it around and squeezing something inappropriate into it. It's still better that it survives, perhaps secretly hoping of being restored one day.

MURDEROUS LIBRARY

 

I took this picture while I was on a boat trip in Copenhagen today. Why do I feel that the Black Diamond, the addition to the Danish National Library, designed by the Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, is sneaking out from behind a corner and wants to murder me? It looks so scary.

TREE HOUSE

Last week, I visited my friend Øyvind at his parents' house in Hurum. (They're moving to the village of Montségur in France this summer, but that's another story.) While we were walking along to the road to Holmsbu to buy some ice cream, we stumbled upon this wonderful tree house. I don't know who built it, but I bet my teachers would have loved it. I'd actually like to live in a house like this, perhaps just with taller ceilings and some insulation and windows. And a bathroom. And a kitchen, and maybe some space for a sofa. You get my point!