Hasta La Ideas The Adventures of Star Wars Figurines in Nature Archives

May 03

Osama bin Laden’s Compound

Surveying the design details of the world’s newest notorious hideout

Like any media-obsessed normal person, we’ve been riveted to the coverage surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and especially interested in the descriptions of whereabouts that overnight went from “cave” to “McMansion.” Curious about what exactly goes into sheltering an international terrorist for six years, we focused on what architectural details have surfaced so far. In other words, what kind of a fortified compound does a million bucks get you in the “affluent suburb” of Abbottabad, Pakistan?

nyt-compound-jpg

SIZE

Built in 2005 and described by local residents as the “Waziristan Mansion,” the three-story house looms eight times larger than neighboring buildings and was one the first shocking clues indicating that the place was significant to the mission.

SECURITY

Concrete retaining walls topped with barbed wire surround the building, reach 18 feet on the southeastern side of the compound, and range 10-12 feet high on remaining sides. Anyone trying to get past the towering walls would also face reported armed guards and numerous security cameras.

EXCLUSIVITY

Located at the end of a narrow pathway, opaque windows obstruct the view inside from onlookers and a seven-foot-tall privacy wall hides anyone up to, oh about 6’4″.

TECH

The courier that led the U.S. to the location was the sole way Osama communicated with the outside world; the compound had no telephone or Internet connections.

STYLE

Describing it as “surprisingly permanent and surpassingly Urban,” LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne ranks Osama’s crib up there with Saddam’s as one of the “most notorious examples of hideout architecture in recent memory.”

via the New York Times and DailyMail

Images from top to bottom: European Pressphoto Agency (EPA), Diagram by NYT, EPA, EPA, AFP/Getty Images, T.Mughal/EPA

Edited by Graham Hiemstra, Ami Kealoha and Tim Yu

Mar 29

Rashid Rana

Posted in: pakistan

Things are not as they appear in this Pakistani artist’s pixelated works

Working across mediums—sculpture, video installation and large-scale photography among them—Pakistani artist Rashid Rana explores the singular issue of South Asia’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Typically he uses a pixelated aesthetic to express how globalization and the media impact the region’s identity.

This approach separates out and reassigns associations between the part and whole as a way of challenging stereotypes. His work—on view at London’s Lisson Gallery—teeters between 2D and 3D perspectives, creating tension and forcing his audience to question reality while underlining his position that “we live in a state of duality.”

Rana’s series of sculptures, aptly called “Books,” are really aluminum cubes printed with pixelated photographs, putting the perceptions of three-dimensional space and form into play by toying with our sense of concrete information.

Described by Rana as “unpacked abstraction,” his large-scale photographic work looks like a chaotic field of geometric shapes from afar. As you focus closer, the pixels reveal themselves as smaller, context-specific images disrupting the serenity of the work as a whole with their sheer volume.

Rashid Rana’s show will be at Lisson Gallery from 30 March 2011 through 30 April 2011, and is accompanied by a new monograph on the artist.

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