Hasta La Ideas

Focus sur le recensement des tours les plus étranges et loufoques du monde, sorties de l’imaginaire des architectes. Entre le Klimwand Climbing Tower, les tours San Gimignano ou encore l’Hôtel Ryugyong en Corée du Nord, voici une sélection en images à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.

Klimwand Climbing Tower, Wunderland Kalkar, Allemagne.

Un château d’eau en maïs, Rochester, Minnesota.

L’Hôtel Ryugyong, Pyongyang, Corée du Nord.

Puffer Fish Tower, Chine.

La maison de Nikolai Sutyagin, Arkhangelsk, Russie.

Les tours Pigeon, Libye, Iran et Egypte.

La tour de Zizkov Télévision, Prague.

La tour Genex, Belgrade, Serbie.

La tour de Pise, Italie.

Les tours San Gimignano, Italie.

L’artiste iranienne Parastou Forouhar, aujourd’hui vivant en Allemagne, crée des installations in situ, investissant l’espace d’inscriptions en Farsi. En s’appropriant murs et sols qu’elle orne de sa langue natale, l’artiste construit un pont entre les deux cultures qui l’habitent. Un magnifique projet à découvrir.

News: a book of photographs showing domestic life in Tehran was temporarily blacklisted by online payments company PayPal for having the word “Iranian” in the title (+ slideshow).

Iranian Living Room, the first self-published title from Italian communications research centre Fabrica, features images taken by young photographers in Tehran in their own homes to create a personal view of everyday life in the Iranian capital.

Yet when it went on sale earlier this week, PayPal added it to its blacklist of forbidden goods and services, meaning customers could not buy it.

Fabrica CEO Dan Hill spent 48 hours trying to resolve the issue with PayPal, only to be told all payments had been blocked “because the book had the word ‘Iranian’ in the title,” he wrote on his blog.

To overcome the issue, an account manager at PayPal suggested removing the word “Iranian” from the book’s title. “Leaving aside the fact that of course we don’t want to change the name of our book in the shopping cart, I find this politically-motivated censorship, willingly if not actively carried out by a corporation, absolutely despicable,” Hill wrote.

After an outcry from followers of Hill’s City of Sound blog and Twitter account, PayPal removed the book from their blacklist on Wednesday night, allowing the book to go on sale.

Iranian Living Room is a project that captures the interior lives of Iranian people, at home in their domestic private spaces. “The book is really a very humble project in a way,” Hill told Dezeen.

Enrico Bossan, head of photography at Fabrica, asked 15 young Iranian photographers to take pictures of their “interior life” in Tehran. “In the West we just don’t see that. With a state like Iran we usually see it framed through the lenses of the BBC or CNN. It’s invariably protests on the street or elections on the street,” said Hill.

“And of course in Tehran, like many other cities, those conversations go on in people’s living rooms or domestic private spaces,” he added. “And in those living rooms people are not a million miles away from where we are. It was a very simple idea that we could show someone falling asleep in front of the telly. Or people together or cooking food. And in doing so it would highlight this other side of Iran than people don’t see.”

Fabrica is publishing the book itself and selling it via the internet, rather than collaborating with a mainstream publisher as it has in the past, in order to “move on from very 20th Century model of publishing that most people are still engaged with,” he added.

Hill said he was tempted to investigate PayPal’s secret blacklists as his next project. “I’d like to do another Fabrica project about these hidden blacklists,” he said. “That would be an amazing thing to do.”

The post Iranian Living Room – the book
PayPal tried to ban appeared first on Dezeen.

Pittsburgh’s take-out dining concept serves food from countries in conflict with the U.S.

by Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi

Who thought international disputes could leave a sweet, mouthwatering aftertaste? Well the minds behind Conflict Kitchen—Jon Rubin, Dawn Weleski and John Pena see the savory in skirmish, intending to whet palettes and satisfy appetites while educating the city of Pittsburgh on the tenets of conflict. A truly novel (and tasty) installation, the experiment is a take-out restaurant meets public art project, serving food from countries that the United States is at loggerheads with, although overt combat is not a prerequisite.

For Conflict Kitchen, food serves as the main cultural communicator—a “seduction for engagement [that] opens up a space of conviviality and comfort for people,” as Rubin puts it. However, the initiative goes beyond comestibles, intending to spur conversations about the social contexts of the conflicts within these nations. Rubin envisioned a space that “could not only add some culinary diversity to the city, but, more importantly, could create a public platform for a more empathic discussion about the places and cultures that many people are not familiar with outside of the relatively narrow and polarizing lens of the mainstream media.”

Currently called “Bolani Pazi,” today’s iteration of Conflict Kitchen looks to Afghanistan, but the country rotates every four months and I had the chance to check it out when it was representing Iran. Taking on the name Kubideh Kitchen in reference to the staple Persian dish, the restaurant served kubideh—ground beef duly spiced with turmeric and cinnamon, garnished with aromatic basil and mint, and served atop freshly baked barbari bread. “We like to work with simple street food; something that you could make and get easily regardless of your social position within a culture,” says Rubin. “The draw of our food has opened up a curiosity amongst our customers that leads to conversations about politics that might not happen otherwise.”

Conversations really did spill forth from each bite of the kubideh, as the meals at the concept come wrapped in paper printed with opinions and facts about each culture, in this case with bits about the importance of tea and the sui generis New Year custom of Nowuz. Just the other day I shared an extra kubideh wrapper with a close friend of mixed Persian heritage who was both enamored and touched by the words and efforts of Conflict Kitchen, exclaiming excitedly that she was going to share this with her mother. That, like the heady thinking behind it, goes far deeper than the meal itself.