When entering the US, ( I am in Kona, Hawaii at the moment) , visitors have to fill in an embarkation form which asks questions such as whether I have ever been part of a criminal organization or if I am planning to join one in the near future. War on terror or whatever, the questions are so silly, they could have been written by Kramer from the Seinfeld series.

For those who have not seen it yet, the office is a British pseudo documentary about life in a paper company. It is quite clever really, when I watched the first episode I was not quite sure if it was a documentary or not. There is a US version which is funny as well, but I prefer the British episodes as the line between real and fiction is much thinner here.
On the BBC site Ricky Gervais explained how they created the series.

An excellent document on PBS on visionary art made by people who do not call themselves artists, called off the map

Some of these “backyard paradises” are well known such as the Palais Ideal by le Facteur Cheval or the Watts Towers in LA. Others such as the Bottle Village are new to me.

One of my favourite books is called Architecture without architects by Bernard Rudolfsky on vernacular architecture. A book that looks at buildings embedded in their context. Another excellent book on building on indigeneous buildings is Shelter by Bob Easton and Lloyd Kahn.
I used to work for the Japanese architect Hiroshi Hara on the Kyoto Station and the Umeda Sky Building. Hara is a professor at Tokyo University and during the late 70’s early 80’s he and his team travelled around to world catalogue-ing the vernacular architecture and urban design of houses and villages in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and South America. Hara identified 100 elements which he would use as the design elements in his buildings. Often he would  use all the 100 elements in some way or another, which explains for the complexity of most of his buildings. Eventhough the approach itself is very interesting, I could never get the feeling that he really succeeded in implementing these elements in the way Hara had seen them in their context around the world. It all looks too artificial to  me. The difference being that vernacular architecture or the art created by the artists above is being implemented on an (I lack vocabulary here) “unconscious” level.
As trained professionals, will we ever be able to reach this level? This might sound very pessimistic, but I am sceptical about the “unlearning” element that an architect would need to go through to reach the level that vernacular architecture demands.
To be continued.

Offices are literally transitional spaces. If we calculate the actual offices occupancy for example: we find out that companies pay rent for their office space for:

8760 hours a year (365 days x 24 hours).

BUT

The occupancy is only 2080 hours (260 days x 8 hours).

This means a 76% non-occupancy level.

Isn’t it time to start thinking about alternative solutions for using the office after hours and weekends such as:

Allowing people to work anytime of the day. I often have to make calls to Europe and the US and most of the time I have to do this from home in the evening or early in the morning. Instead global teams could work locally in the office in different time zones. A truly global office.
Being able to go to the office anytime of the day would solve the “morning person - evening person” syndrom. No more grumpy people at the coffee machine in the morning anymore. An office adjusted to your own bio rhytyhm.

On July 7th I will give a talk to a group of 20 International MBA students on a unique three continent program. Students start classes in either Mumbai or Paris, they then go to the Temple University main campus in Philadelphia for more studies and a consulting project. The final leg of the year-long program is four weeks in Tokyo. Most of the students are US citizens, others are from Europe and India.

I will talk about WorkVitamins and the value of design in the work environment.

Twenty four thousand one hundred and forty seven skyscrapers drawn to scale. WOW!

“Legalise Chaos, Style is for the Insecure”

Is printed on the inside of a Marcel Wanders T-shirt that I am wearing today.

In Japan we are having one construction scandal after the other.
The revolving door that killed a 6 year old boy in Mori’s Roppongi Hills in 2004. Last year the Aneha scandal, the architect who faked structural data on more than a hundred buildings. An interesting Blog about the scandal here. I wrote an article in the ACCJ Journal about this. My argument was that the system was as much to blame as the architect in question. You can download it here.

On June 3rd Schindler Elevators, was in the news as a 16 year old boy got stuck and was killed. It makes you want to check before entering a lift:
“Schindler Elevator KK, the Japanese subsidiary of the Swiss-based global elevator and escalator maker, said Tuesday there were a total of 320 cases in which passengers were trapped inside its elevators across Japan in 2004. Schindler Elevator said it is in charge of maintenance work for about 6,000 elevators nationwide. This means one out of every 19 Schindler elevators experienced a problem involving trapped passengers that year.” Source: Criss cross Japan
More here and here and a very detailed report in Wikipedia here (scroll down).
Schindler’s home page his this press release.

Music is a WorkVitamin, at least for me it is. We have music playing in our office every day (sometimes different music from different corners). Once I know how to do it, I want to add a playlist in this blog as well. For the moment take a look at Pitchfork, an excellent music review site. Very good to read that The Rapure are going to release a new album.

Listen to the them here. Watch their video of “House of jealous lovers” here. Great graphics in this video.

For the moment here my first WorkVitamins playlist:

The Rapture: House of jealous lovers
The white stripes: 7 Nation Army
LCD Soundsystem: Deceptacon
The Hong Kong: Mazerati
The dandy warhols: We used to be friends
The arcade fire: Rebellion(Lies)
Happy Mondays: Bob’s yer uncle
Todd Rundgren: Bang on a drum all day
Devo: Girl U want
Vitalic: La rock
Fisherspooner: Sweetness
The presets: Kitty in the middle

Johan Cruyff made the comment that in Spain all the 22 football players make a cross when entering the football pitch. He commented that if praying or making a cross would really help, as both teams made a cross all the football games should end in a draw.

In a recent article in the Scientific American it seems that praying to actually can have the opposite effect. In a $ 2.4 million research study it was discovered that there was no significant change whether there was a group of about 70 praying for the recovery of patients undergoing heart surgery or not.
However, when the patient knew about the prayer group this would create stress and his or her chances of recovery actually became worse.

“The patient might think, ‘Am I so sick that they have to call in the prayer team?’”

Scott Adams wrote this on the article in his Dilbert Blog:

“I have to say that I wasn’t surprised to learn that praying for sick people didn’t help. If praying worked, convenience stores would have lines of monks down the block every time the lottery reached $100 million.”