TheHotSpring.com :: The Amazon Kindle DX is a beautiful device. Its design is user-friendly, intuitive and cohesive. It is clean-edged, minimal and thinner than many major magazines. Its format size is comfortable and makes tactile sense; it feels like something you hold in order to read, giving it a useful aesthetic kinship to books or magazines, a vast improvement on smaller e-reading devices. It is, in point of fact, far more comfortable than planting yourself in front of a computer monitor to read large amounts of text.

One of the first things to praise about it is its efficient wireless download process. At no charge to the user, Kindle DX allows for wireless connection to the Kindle Store and immediate wireless download, from any location, without requiring any connection-login or wifi network. In fact, Amazon registers the device for the end user before sending it out, so it can be opened and used, straight out of the box, literally within seconds.

Its black-and-white e-paper monitor allows for extremely efficient battery usage. It need not be put to sleep or turned off, as the device uses no energy to show what is on the screen, only to change what is shown, navigate or download. Battery life can be prolonged dramatically by turning off the wireless connection, which is only needed to browse the Kindle Store, and download updates or new purchases.

Kindle’s screen is in some ways a blend of the e-paper concept and a traditional monitor, which means that in low light, it appears darker and is harder to see than the average printed page. E-paper works on the principle that the surface of a page reflects light, so no backlighting is necessary. The black text on white background should imitate this effect, but with the e-paper surface inset behind a plastic cover, there is a reduction in the reflective ability of the surface of the device.

The Vizplex screen, by E Ink, a company founded by e-paper researchers from MIT, is a matrix array of bistable microspheres, which can show black or white, or combine to give shades of gray. The microspheres react to encrypted electronic pulses that cause their visible surface to produce black or “white coloring”, which is really more like a very dark charcoal gray against a very light greenish gray. The effect is similar to the contrast of standard newsprint, more than to the higher quality paper of a bound book.

This effect may actually be designed to reduce glare or to protect the e-paper surface, but one could imagine a less light-absorbing plastic barrier, which would allow for better contrast. But in most settings, the contrast is excellent for comfortable reading, and the Kindle DX does, in fact, seem to “get out of the way”, allowing for direct engagement between reader and text, one of the stated goals for the Kindle’s being an improvement over most on-screen reading experiences.

One of the most comfortable, and useful, things about the Kindle DX, from this reviewer’s point of view, is news reading. Every morning, the most recent editions of the newspapers and magazines one has subscribed to are waiting to be read. One can shuffle through the content of major publications, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, or Salon. Blogs are also available, and they are updated multiple times per hour, so that any new content will appear on the same day it was posted to the blog online.

There is also a peppering of international media sources, so one can read the news in French or Spanish. The Shanghai Daily is also available, but it’s China news in English. I find it rewarding to get a look at the French daily Le Monde, which due to time-zone considerations, tends to publish 12 hours before the list-date, so I have a window onto international political news the day before it would otherwise reach us here.

Plus, it’s helpful for language skills to cross-compare vocabulary used in US political reporting and French-language reporting on the same issues. Buying foreign newspapers in the US can be a costly adventure and often produces only a pared-down version of the full publication. The Kindle allows instant pre-newsstand access to the original content.

The benefit the Kindle DX offers is not about browsing the web or searching for the latest information on a given subject; it’s about ease of reading and portability for a digital library, possibly thousands of titles and millions of pages, which can range from newsprint to literary fiction, summer romance to your favorite magazine. It’s about finding a comfortable way to make huge amounts of information highly portable.

Text is displayed simply, in something like the traditional black ink on white paper format, with indented paragraphs and justified margins. Devotion to the idea of mimicking the printed page is evident, and the streamlined text-intensive format, with few graphical enhancements is a welcome “cleaning up” of periodicals and websites that are increasingly noisy and given to complicated graphic-intensive layouts, kinetic Flash advertisements and other bells and whistles.

Personally, I would like to see more formatting options: for instance, a two-column re-format option that might give the Kindle text palette something of a magazine or newspaper-like feel, if the reader prefers it. It would also address the ages-old typesetting problem of making sure the horizontal line is not so long the eye loses its place on the return to the left margin. This could be done with very light-weight code that simply fits two columns into the same template where we presently see one.

A slightly wider screen or the choice of smaller text sizes, by the user, might be instrumental to making this function workable. On rotation, in landscape view, a three-column option might be nice as well. This kind of layout flexibility should be workable, because the Kindle format is uniform and privileges text over other media.

I also think there is need for a more dynamic index-page layout. For instance, when I open the New York Times Kindle Edition, I enter a “front page” which is in fact the opening to one article only. To see what else is included on the front page, I have to click to the right to navigate to the next article and then the next. (Each article shows at the foot of the page what the title of the next article is, but for periodicals, a list of headlines is hard to find — blogs do have them).

To locate the list of headlines in any given section of a newspaper, you have to click the 5-way navigation button when the option “view sections list” is highlighted at the foot of the page. Then, to the right of each section, there is a number, which is underscored with a dotted line. Clicking that number will reveal a list of headlines, like an rss feed. Clicking the section title will take you to the chosen first article, after which you must navigate to the right or go back to the sections list.

There is no clear reason I can think of why a Kindle Edition of any publication would not benefit from an itemized table of contents or index page. Since articles are already separated out and navigable by one-click navigation, there should be no significant modification to the way a Kindle Edition works to simply add an index page that provides a broad-view map of the publication’s contents.

Some users may at first be frustrated by the lack of browser-like menus and options. But the Kindle is designed to be mechanical, like a book. To highlight the text-on-paper reader-content relationship, the Kindle emphasizes the virtues of e-paper over the versatility of a laptop-style graphic-user-interface (GUI).

Menus are simple, static page-view lists, which one navigates by scrolling up or down the list, using the 5-way navigation button nested between the “MENU” and “BACK” buttons. Since the e-paper surface is not touch-sensitive, more dynamic page-flipping and graphic-intensive navigation options are not available. Also, there’s the low-energy logic of e-paper: those graphic-intensive touchscreen features require computing power, which means electric power, which means lower-battery life and more energy consumption.

To say we must compare the Amazon Kindle DX, or Kindle 2, to work being done by Apple, involving touchscreen devices, wireless download, online sale of electronic media, and the like, is to some extent unfair. The comparison is not really between rival products, but between possibly rival parallel technologies.

The touchscreen magic of the iPhone and iPod Touch have revolutionized gadgetry and our expectations about the intensity of focus on end-user interactive priorities, but they are based on a very different set of assumptions than the Kindle’s e-paper technology. The iPhone and iPod Touch are fully intended to be intensely diversified multimedia platforms, on which literally tens of thousands of services (“apps”) can be implemented.

The Amazon Kindle DX and Kindle 2 are, on the other hand, intended to be single-medium delivery vehicles, which do something like bring the vastness of a bookstore beyond any bricks-and-mortar inventory, to within 60 seconds of you, wherever you are. Apple’s products can mimic this effect, and there is a Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but despite similarities, the two technologies remain distinct, and even parallel to one another, addressing different aesthetic and practical concerns.

I am tempted to frame the discussion as one rooted in a kind of ideal, looming up over the horizon: a large-format touch-sensitive full-color non-backlit edgeless e-paper device, which could take on any number of tempting, experimental or prevailing morphologies. Neither the Kindle nor the iPhone-type Apple devices meet this description, but both provide clues about what comes next.

The Kindle is a noble experiment, especially given the still highly experimental phase in which advanced e-paper finds itself, and due to its commitment to the text-on-paper experience, which more or less forces Amazon into a black-and-white world. The new Kindle devices enjoy 16 shades of gray, instead of just 4, but some users complain this has reduced contrast, which, by the way, cannot be adjusted.

It has to be said, the softer light radiating from the Kindle (entirely ambient light reflected on the static surface) is softer on the eyes than a backlit screen, which projects a constant stream of its own light directly onto the retina. If I look at the Kindle and my computer monitor side by side, my eyes want to get text from the Kindle, while my mind is curious about the color and definition afforded by a brilliant, gloss-front Mac laptop monitor.

What holds me back from really considering the Kindle a work companion, however, is the degree to which it limits my ability tocontribute. A laptop allows me to do all the typing and editing I may feel is appropriate. The Kindle is slower for typing and really only permits typing for search and for adding footnotes.

The footnote capacity is brilliant, it helps one feel like there is something like margin-scribbling going on —and each note goes into the My Clippings file, its own Kindle book on the main page— but I am compelled to rely on a paper notebook or a computer to do any real writing. I think it’s actually not a terrible inconvenience that the Kindle does not allow for more hands-on editing or file-creation. It keeps the focus on reading text, and compiling a substantial library, which can soar into the thousands of documents, if one pleases.

That’s no small feat in today’s world of acquired attention deficits and chronic compulsive surfing of options we never really explore. Oddly, the Kindle might do just what E Ink and Amazon’s developers say they want to do with e-paper: salvage the kind of prolonged attention and imaginative reading that we used to derive from books, the most important and enduring communicative medium in history.

When I get near the end of a page, I want to turn to the next and keep reading, if the content is good. Scrolling down the page on a web browser often does not induce —or permit— this effect. Scrolling is distracting: it requires hand-eye coordination and re-orients the brain’s motion-processing faculties. Turning a printed page or clicking the Kindle’s NEXT PAGE button don’t; they’re almost automatic reflexes, which allow the mind to keep “reading” —to stay in that mindset— while the page turns.

Apple has a great contribution to resolving this problem as well… on its devices, the Kindle reader actually flips pages out of the way, with a flick of the finger. This is essentially as convenient as a single click, executed by exerting just the slightest pressure with the thumb, but may involve more motor-skills and conscious brain involvement; it will also be necessary far more often, because the iPhone’s screen is less than 1/4 that of the Kindle DX.

So: in summary, the Kindle DX is a beautiful device; it accompanies the user admirably; it offers tempting interludes of enjoyable ergonomic reading; it stimulates the mind and responds to the user’s sudden urges to read this or that title not currently at hand. Its graphic quality achieves the stated goals, but is limited by the limitations of the current state of the art of commercially viable (cost-wise) e-paper technologies.

For reading text-books whose assets include full-color images, diagrams and detailed small-print tables and graphics, it will struggle. But the platform is ready to evolve with the e-paper technology, and it is not unreasonable to expect a full-color e-paper device within a year or two, if the right advances are made quickly enough.

If you need a touchscreen computer-like device, this is not your device. If you need something that acts like a book, but is electronic, lightweight, able to handle huge numbers of titles, and convenient to use, this is for you. Cost may be an issue, however: the Kindle DX currently retails for $489 and the Kindle 2 for $299. You have to pay for content, but you’ll get a better deal on that content than any paper version of the same publications.

As far as a work-tool: uploading PDF documents is simple, aided by a dedicated email address that automatically converts the PDF and sends it to the device wirelessly. But there is a cost of $0.15 for doing this, and the pages cannot be zoomed or resized, so small type or lightly colored type can be hard to make out.

The PDF documents cannot be so easily worked with as the Kindle Edition books and news publications. Underlining and footnoting does not work effectively, if at all, and so while reading and reviewing them, if properly sized, can be comfortable and convenient (you can store hundreds, or even thousands of them, on the Kindle), you need to take down your notes elsewhere.

I’m hoping for full-color non-backlit e-paper to arrive on the market before long —two years seems like a conservative bet—, and when that comes, look for e-paper and touchscreens to start converging. The technological problems inherent in achieving this are complicated, but the rewards could be immense for Amazon, for Apple, for readers, for publishers, for the news business, for all of us who use media or read printed pages or want more fluid access to global information.

My Kindle DX is a loaner, delivered by Amazon for me to review for this publication, and I add this final note, because it allows me to say that, whatever tweaks and improvements I would want to see made, as attendant technologies evolve, I will miss my Kindle DX the morning after I send it back. I will miss its convenience, its helpful way of delivering whole publications to me every day, keeping me informed, keeping me curious, keeping me reading whenever I can.

Related stories:

• Apple Projected to Release 10-inch Touchscreen Tablet, September 2009
• Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines
• Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs
• Edgeless Letter-sized ePaper Reader (concept)
• What Obstacles Are there to an e-Paper Touchscreen Interface?
• Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

TheHotSpring.com :: The Financial Times is the latest publication to weigh in on mounting expectations that Apple will release a touchscreen tablet computer this fall. There are rumors the computer maker is hoping to counter the rise of cheap netbooks with something lower-cost than their standard Macs and with a larger screen based on the model of the iPod Touch and the iPhone. The news could mean a breakthrough in personal computing standards and even portability of the workplace.

For now, the focus seems to be on content delivery and entertainment: namely music and reading. There are rumors of new deals with record labels, booksellers and possibly one or more wireless carriers. The Boy Genius Report says “Apple is allegedly going to team up with Verizon to release an Internet tablet that will be subsidized by the carrier”. The idea would be that the Apple tablet would work like a big iPhone, with wireless download via Verizon.

What is not clear is whether signing up for an account would be a requirement of purchasing the device, or just an option. Requiring that buyers sign up for a Verizon account could hurt product sales, as the device will be bulkier than an iPhone and might be seen by consumers more as a web-surfing device, a computer for other purposes, than as a giant iPod.

According to today’s Financial Times:

The device is expected to be launched alongside new content deals, including some aimed at stimulating sales of CD-length music, according to people briefed on the project. The touch-sensitive computer will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally.

It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to the web, and to Apple’s online stores for software and entertainment.

It looks like the device could be set up to compete in nearly all media: it will play music and is said to have a new focus on large-format album artwork, possibly a way to make the music listening experience more interactive and tempt consumers to buy whole albums again. The Financial Times reports that “Recording industry executives” relayed the information that Apple has such a strategy in place for an upcoming release.

A parallel FT story cites “four people familiar with the situation” as indicating that Apple is working on a special project designed to achieve this goal, carrying the development codename “Cocktail”. The project also aims to enhance the variable interactivity of the interface, allowing users to access songs from the album artwork booklets themselves, without having to mechanically access and search through iTunes.

The booklets would include not only images and text, but also the album itself, the music, and videoclips, possibly some accessible only this format. But the device would also cross over into web surfing, video playback, word-processing and e-books. With high resolution and intense contrast, the device could pose a serious threat to Amazon’s Kindle devices, which have grayish e-paper screens.

There is admittedly a different purpose to building a backlit high-resolution tablet computer and an e-paper device designed to show text on a blank background. Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos says he wants the Kindle to “disappear” when readers get immersed in text, as happens with a book, something backlit monitors are ill-equipped to do, because the light emitted strains the eyes.

But a touchscreen Apple tablet with a 10-inch visual interface would mark a potential revolutionary moment in e-reading, film and TV, music marketing and web surfing. If lightweight or easily propped up, and with a standard qwerty keyboard, it could also make email and business communications more portable, as the format would be far more suited to formal writing than a small phone or Blackberry device.

The device may also revolutionize the way the publishing industry and the software industry work. As Wired reports:

Apple is already prepared to blow Amazon and other e-book makers out of the water with one key weapon: iTunes. Having served more than 6 billion songs to date, the iTunes Store has flipped the music industry on its head. It also turned mobile software into a lucrative industry, as proven by the booming success of the iPhone’s App Store, which recently surpassed 1.5 billion downloads. Apple has yet to enter the e-book market, and making books as easy to download as music and iPhone apps is the logical next step.

A one-stop instant download multimedia library, with music, video, books, software, and other services, could pressure Amazon and other content retailers in unforeseen ways. The iTunes music store changed the way music, and music videos, were sold. It is breaking into film and TV, and the App Store is already into the billions. Making books available in the same easy way, competing directly with Amazon’s Kindle Store wireless download standard, could be a landmark moment in the evolution of content distribution.

Again, according to Wired:

For textbooks or anthologies, Apple can give iTunes users the ability to download individual chapters, priced between a few cents to a few bucks each. It would be similar to how you can currently download individual song tracks from an album. It might even have the same earthshaking potential to transform an entire industry by refocusing it on the content people actually want instead of the bundles that publishers want them to buy.

This may put publishers in the business of wireless distribution far more quickly and on a wider scale than Amazon has been able to do. Because iTunes operates across millions of devices already, potentially billions, and means the right royalty agreement could make Apple into a leading bookseller, altering the entire calculus of the marketplace.

News and discussions on edgeless e-paper devices:

• Amazon Kindle DX: Beautiful, Focused, Comfortable, Imperfect, Inspired & Worth ‘Reading’
• Amazon Kindle DX: Big Screen for Textbooks, Newspapers, Magazines
• Electronic Medical Records Could Help Find Cures, Speed Progress, Cut Costs
• Edgeless Letter-sized ePaper Reader (concept)
• What Obstacles Are there to an e-Paper Touchscreen Interface?
• Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

From other sources:

• Financial Times Confirms Apple Tablet for September
• Analyst Predicts Apple Will Unleash Touchscreen Tablet Next Year
• Large-Screen Kindle Won’t Mean Squat if Apple Tablet Arrives
• Apple COO Reveals Plans for Touch Tablet — Kinda
• Rumor: $800 Apple Tablet Coming in October
• Rumor: 10-Inch Apple Tablet Landing in Early 2010

In a tucked-away corner of the New Zealand coastline, a couple, both architects, Lance and Nicola Herbst, have designed a self-sustaining “off-the-grid” home that lends flavor and mood to everyday living. Their cedar-clad bungalow is designed to interact with the natural environment and optimize its use of resources, such as energy, water and nutrients.

Great Barrier Island is four and a half hours from Auckland, by boat, and its remote geography necessitates the kind of innovative green building choices visible in the home built by Lance and Nicola Herbst. When the South African-born couple first visited Great Barrier Island, they were taken with the unique beachside structures they encountered — “little timber shacks we had never experienced before—tiny buildings with 20 years’ accretion of stuff”.

They were smitten with the relaxed notion of the vacation bungalows (bachs — after “bachelors”, their traditional inhabitants) they found there, and also saw the scaled back standard requiring off-the-grid pragmatic innovation as a challenge to their design abilities. Achieving high-design innovation and stylistic and material “modesty” were part of the challenge.

The success of their experiment is encouraging, as it augurs a future in which individual homes are more self-sufficient and environmentally friendly. Having made the move there themselves, then established their home in a scaled down, off-the-grid bach, they were asked in 2003 to build a home nearby for a friend, Marc Lindale.

In the words of Dwell magazine’s Jeremy Hansen:

Lance says the lack of services on the island meant the home’s design became “a diagram of the basic provision of shelter,” not unlike early bachs. This straightforward approach was aided by their decision to dispense with the patterns of city life in favor ?of predominantly outdoor living in the island’s subtropical climate. There is no front door to the home, just a few steps up to the space that serves as its heart: a covered terrace with a large dining table, backed by a gabion wall made from local stone.

Stripping away standard fundamentals of home design, like the front door and landscaped run-up to a home designed in that way, allowed for building a home more optimized to its surroundings. The home features two bedrooms and one bathroom, with a small kitchen looking out on the dining and living area.

The underlying structure is a pine-wood frame, raised on a concrete foundation, and the outer cladding is cedar. The roofline is designed in such a way that it collects rainwater for storage in an underground tank, making it possible to provide a regular supply of fresh water for use in the home. Treated waste-water is used to irrigate the grounds.

Electricity in the Lindale house comes from four 150-watt solar panels arrayed on the roof. An electrical engineer was brought in to study electrical needs in the home and to optimize the planning to get the most out of those four solar-voltaic panels. Part of this is “targeted task lighting”, to use Lance Herbst’s words. The lighting was also planned to be low-intensity, with the home designed to favor ambient lighting.

Lit with natural light, the ambient light effect means the home need not be brashly lit as natural light diminishes. Candles and lanterns, traditional lighting techniques for the bach community, fit the atmosphere and the design, and help to manifest the low-intensity lighting scheme and reduce electricity consumption.

According to Dwell, “The Herbsts also disconnected the oven’s electric grill and Lindale banished the toaster after discovering ?that both would require energy surges the solar panels could not deliver.” The conservation thinking involved in living within one’s energetic resources might be taxing for some urbanites, but it fits the atmosphere, and enjoying the quality of life this sort of self-sufficient home affords requires awareness of energy sourcing and the dynamics of the lived environment.

The ‘City of Lights’ seeks to innovate, to touch the sky, and to protect the “right to light” of its citizens, in one bold design

A revolutionary skyscraper design by Herzog and de Meuron, commonly known as ‘the Triangle’, aims to break the long-standing Parisian height barrier of 37 meters, while respecting the right of neighbors to the same quantity of sunlight they would have without the new structure. The Guardian has called it a ‘shade-less ziggurat’, reference both to its irregular stepped-pyramid shape and to its playing a central role in the evolution of the spirit of the times, in design terms, in a city whose emblematic architecture is, somehow, also a sacred essence.

The question of the “right to light” is vital to zoning laws in many European cities. In London, for instance, something called the “Ancient Lights” law requires that any window which has enjoyed sunlight exposure for more than 20 years should go one receiving that light. It has been a source of heated polemics in the construction of new high-rise office towers in the historic city center, but for many, the innovation associated with new building designs has helped to offset the community-quality concerns that often militate against the installation of new megastructures.

For the city of Paris, the skyscraper question is a question of community quality, but also of cultural identity. The city has long had a skyscraper ban, a building limit of 37 meters, and an officially sanctioned aim of retaining an historic low-rise or “human-scale” built environment. This was, in part, to privilege historic structures, like the Left Bank’s Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame cathedral on Ile de la Cité, to ensure the resonance of these structures is not overshadowed in figurative terms by block-like modern behemoths.

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Paris is not a skyscraper city, but a city of infamously confusing concentric avenues, medieval layout superimposed with 18th century statesmanesque grandeur, romantic cobblestone tussled streets and sun-dappled sidewalk cafés. It is a city that prides itself on not having fallen for what an architectural convention in Barcelona in the mid-nineties termed “the temptation of America”, to build upward to the sky, disregarding the meaning of the pedestrian trolling around in the shadows below.

It is clear that there is a conscious distinction, in the minds of Parisians, between the nature of a city that lives for its inhabitants and a skyscraper-strewn metropolis, famed for its overwhelming brute mass and anonymity. It is thought that the low-rise atmosphere of Parisian haunts is more transcendent, that a neighborhood is more resilient, more character-driven, more time-tested, when it can be felt to be shaped by the people who walk among its structures.

Inhabitants of London or New York would probably balk at the suggestion, however theoretical, that their cities are somehow not like that, but they might also feel somehow haunted by the need to avoid falling into the “temptation of Dubai”, where it seems artifice and surface are overtaking character or the meaning of the human soul walking at street-level, as governing principles in the evolution of society. But these are perceptions, and in Paris, there are at least 6 new high-rise projects aiming to populate the outskirts of the historic metropolis with a post-modern outcropping of glass and steel, a hint that the city is also a place of renewal and innovation.

Herzog and de Meuron’s glass ziggurat is a test of post-modern and computer assisted design, intended to bridge the gap between need-for-use and the natural fear of human diminishment in the face of massive structures. Can the city reinvent itself as a cozy if weighty centuries’ old “museum city”, courted and elevated by the bold urgings of today’s grandiloquent noise-maker architects? Will the shadowless Triangle be like a dreamcatcher, holding up a subconscious portrait of the city’s will and destiny to the buzz and brimming of the historic center?

Aside from its central design feature, that of casting no shadow, or more precisely, of preserving the daylight-rights of the neighbors, the Paris Triangle will also be optimized for solar-voltaic and wind-power harvesting, making it a potential watershed moment in French green building design. If implemented with not merely current, but 2012-current —the date the building is slated to open for business— state of the art renewable energy technologies, the building could be self-powering and could help to generate clean energy for the Paris energy market, a further reinvention of the role of skyscrapers in a city wary of their social side-effects.

DeZeen design magazine cites the architects’ own report on the Projet Triangle:

On the scale of the Porte de Versailles site, the project will also play a significant role in the reorganisation of flows and perception of urban space. The Parc des Expositions site currently forms a break between the Haussmanian fabric of the15th district of Paris and the communities of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Vanves, emphasised by the visual impact of the peripheral boulevard.

The construction of an ambitious building on the Porte de Versailles site will mark its opening and restore the historical axis formed by the rue de Vaugirard and avenue Ernest Renan.

The square of the Porte de Versailles is a complex space in its current configuration. Its initial semi-circular organisation is difficult to interpret given the many visual impediments and lack of clearly identified public spaces between the Parc des Expositions and the buildings opposite.

The project is designed to open public space, to revitalize the surrounding area, and with its street-level shops, cafés and restaurants, to help invigorate the public use of private space, in Parisian style, with added life and activity: in short, the project is conceived as a model new space that considers human use the principle, and aesthetic ambition an aid to achieving that end.

While admitting the project is ambitious and large in scale, and while declaring it to be conceived on the entire metropolitan reach of Paris as a whole, the architects have designed the ‘sharkfin’ structure to be both bold and noticeable, and also to stay out of the way of people’s needs and tastes. It is intended to complement, not to overshadow, the style of the older structures, and its height is offset by its narrow frame (from two sides), allowing for only a negligible shadow to fall from it, a shadow which will move quickly with the sun.

If properly executed, the structure will open up the public spaces around it, affording locals the same freedom of movement and atmospheric enjoyment they now have, but with the added value of a monument to urban renewal and a vibrant center of commercial activity. In the more abstract sense, the architects also note that:

The Triangle is conceived as a piece of the city that could be pivoted and positioned vertically. It is carved by a network of vertical and horizontal traffic flows of variable capacities and speeds. Like the boulevards, streets and more intimate passages of a city, these traffic flows carve the construction into islets of varying shapes and sizes.

This evocation of the urban fabric of Paris, at once classic and coherent in its entirety and varied and intriguing in its details, is encountered in the façade of the Triangle. Like that of a classical building, this one features two levels of interpretation: an easily recognisable overall form and a fine, crystalline silhouette of its façade which allows it to be perceived variously.

The Triangle is meant to evoke the “role of the reader”: the public can make of it what they will, as it stands up above the landscape as an outgrowth of the pie-piece urban sections that fan out from the ancient city-center. It mimics and mirrors the landscape, with a geometry that merges with surface style to permit a broad range of interpretations, emotional and functional. In this sense, it is very much attuned to the cultural identity that underpins a time-tested Parisian way of interacting with local architecture.

‘PARA LLEGAR’ es una exposición que propone juntar un grupo de artistas, algunos establecidos y otros por darse a conocer todavía, del mercado coreano, en una muestra única en Barcelona. Habrá un espacio central con la exposición principal, y algunas muestras ‘satélite’ en otras galerías y espacios o culturales o de consumición. El propósito será lograr una presentación dinámica de las formas innovadoras de expresión artística para un público que tal vez no tenga un contacto con el arte contemporáneo de una de las grandes democracias del este de Asia…

‘GETTING THERE’ or ‘PER A ARRIBAR’ is an exhibit designed to bring the work of a number of new and established artists from South Korea to Barcelona. The show will feature a large main exhibit space, with satellite gallery showings and works for sale and artist commissions available for major works or installations.