Currently reading Watership Down, and it got me to reminiscing about the survival fiction I read as a kid. There were a lot more, but here are some that I remember best.
Jean Craighead George will always be one of my favorite people.
A lover loves.
Hayao Miyazaki and Hideaki Anno…..being bros….in the dunes…..
ain’t nothin’ more special
than
dune bros
When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.
Minjeong An, Self-Portrait, 2008
“This is me painting. I tried to express my thoughts on painting, my perspective on the world, and the energy of an artist.”
flickr (links to VERY large version of the above and well worth the detour)
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To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
Built over the only thermal springs in the Graubunden Canton in Switzerland, The Therme Vals is a hotel and spa in one which combines a complete sensory experience designed by Peter Zumthor.
Peter Zumthor designed the spa/baths which opened in 1996 to pre date the existing hotel complex. The idea was to create a form of cave or quarry like structure. Working with the natural surroundings the bath rooms lay below a grass roof structure half buried into the hillside. The Therme Vals is built from layer upon layer of locally quarried Valser Quarzite slabs. This stone became the driving inspiration for the design, and is used with great dignity and respect.
“Mountain, stone, water – building in the stone, building with the stone, into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain – how can the implications and the sensuality of the association of these words be interpreted, architecturally?” Peter Zumthor
This space was designed for visitors to luxuriate and rediscover the ancient benefits of bathing. The combinations of light and shade, open and enclosed spaces and linear elements make for a highly sensuous and restorative experience. The underlying informal layout of the internal space is a carefully modelled path of circulation which leads bathers to certain predetermined points but lets them explore other areas for themselves. The perspective is always controlled. It either ensures or denies a view.
“The meander, as we call it, is a designed negative space between the blocks, a space that connects everything as it flows throughout the entire building, creating a peacefully pulsating rhythm. Moving around this space means making discoveries. You are walking as if in the woods. Everyone there is looking for a path of their own.” Peter Zumthor
The fascination for the mystic qualities of a world of stone within the mountain, for darkness and light, for light reflections on the water or in the steam saturated air, pleasure in the unique acoustics of the bubbling water in a world of stone, a feeling of warm stones and naked skin, the ritual of bathing – these notions guided the architect. Their intention to work with these elements, to implement them consciously and to lend them to a special form was there from the outset. The stone rooms were designed not to compete with the body, but to flatter the human form (young or old) and give it space…room in which to be.
Architects: Peter Zumthor, with Marc Loeliger, Thomas Durisch and Rainer Weitschies
Location: Graubunden Canton, Switzerland
Project completed: 1996
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Junji Ito and his cat Tenmaru
my hero
its the cat with the cursed face…………..
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I’ve been sitting here laughing at the captions on the Ztams photo site for the last half hour.
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James Hamilton - The Last Days of Pompeii
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