The Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is is a natural musical instrument, seventy meters long with thirty-five organ pipes built under the concrete. The musical pipes are located so that the sea water and wind movements produce musical sounds that are heard by passers by so that it achieves a communication with nature and promotes a unity of architecture and environment. As sea forces and energies are unpredictable in terms of tides and winds, this organ offers never-ending concert of numerous musical variations in which the performer is nature itself.

The New French Hacker-Artist Underground

By Jon Lackman

“Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. They met up at a small café near the Eiffel Tower to review their plans—again—before heading out into the dark. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.

But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Ségur and walked home as the sun rose. The mission had been so easy that one of the youths, Natacha, seriously asked herself if she had dreamed it. No, she concluded: “In a dream, it would have been more complicated.” …”

The Proper Way to Eat a Pig – New York Times

By Marine Hanel

Published: April 4, 2013

“On a recent morning in Portland, Ore., Camas Davis was teaching nine high-school kids how to butcher a pig. A 17-year-old named Mady called dibs on the front trotter, slicing through the skin near the pig’s ankle, then using a hand saw to cut through the bone. Nathan, 15, moved up the leg and worked through the hock, while Karina, 16, eyed the shoulder. Pushing up the sleeves of her red cardigan, she placed her blade between the fifth and sixth ribs, scored the flesh, then gave the knife a long pull, separating the shoulder from the carcass, but leaving intact the coppa — a muscle around the pig’s neck — in case anyone wanted to roast it. …”

Hooked. On architecture. That’s what you’ll be feeling after the Fogo Island Arts colony is done with you. A series of pavilions cut like shards of volcanic stone are being constructed off the coast of Newfoundland at the edge of the raging Atlantic.

Architect Todd Saunders, a Newfoundlander who moved 14 years ago to Norway, is the talent behind the dark blades of intelligent design. His client, Zita Cobb, a native of Fogo Island and president of the Shorefast Foundation, is investing some of her dot-com millions to reposition her remote community into a cultural, architecturally enlightened destination.

Pinch me. This might be a rare utopia but it is not a dream.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/home-and-garden/architecture/architectures-new-rock-star-newfoundlands-and-norways-todd-saunders/article623101/

In an age of rapidly-changing cities, is it time for city museums to embrace a new outward-looking, activist mission? As keynote speaker at the recent International Council of Museums CAMOC conference at the Museum of Vancouver, renowned urban planner Larry Beasley raised the challenge. This is an edited transcript of his address,“The City as Museum and the Museum as City” on October 24, 2012.

http://www.museumofvancouver.ca/programs/blog/2012/11/2/city-museum-and-museum-city