My my, who are these happy people? It's Urban Crash's own Maja and Borut on their "mini Czech tour" in which they also visited VUTBR - Faculty of architecture Brno where this lovely picture was taken.

We've also heard that our Czech colleagues from this faculty are planning on visiting Ljubljana. Prima, brzy se uvidíme! :)

NOTE: I apologize to our Czech readers if I've just written something like "stoic dog on bicycle" instead of "great, see you soon". I have much faith in online translators. Even though some cases point out I shouldn't...

If someone walks in on you browsing through the October issue of slovenian Playboy, you can finally use that age-old excuse »But I'm just reading the articles, really!«.

There is an interesting, an almost poetic interview with Boris Podrecca (sorry guys, just in Slovenian language), a well-known, Vienna-based architect »with an austrian passport who is a Slovene, a Croat and an Italian at the same time«.

In the interview he discusses his work (»I never designed a football stadium and that is my life's tragedy«), his life experience (»… I was cleaning boats, then I had an exhibition in Trieste with Èernigoj when I was seventeen, I was a gardner in Sweden for six months, some time later an older waiter, an Italian, persuaded me to pass the exam for a cook. I started as an assistant chef in the largest elite restaurant in Stockholm, a former theatre.«) and his many views on architecture (»What's new in architecture is that it became a label, a brand.«).

Check it out. But be sure not to get carried away, exclaiming »Wow, look at those balconies!« because, well, there are no photos of his work in the article so you might have some awkward explaining to do.

As I already wrote, there were 6 groups working on different approaches to the “London ever after” theme: Worst Case Scenario, Memorial to Future Past, Architastrophe, London Y-Z, A Catastrophic Silence and Factory for Passe London.

Each of these 6 themes sounded really interesting (you can read about them on the AA website but I liked Cher's and Bettina's presentation the most so I joined their unit – Architastrophe. Cher graduated in philosophy and fine arts in South Africa and Bettina graduated in fashion design in Berlin. They both work in a London-based company that predicts future trends in fashion.

In their presentation they talked about exploring architecture’s and fashion design’s common ground, pattern cutting and sewing… A thought crossed my mind: we’ll be making some sort of super multi-functional transformable clothes that we can fold to a minimum size and carry around in our bags so they come handy if a disaster strikes. These clothes will then act as an umbrella and keep our bodies safe in extreme conditions at the same time… in a way, designing clothes that are kind of similar to astronauts’ space suits. In the end, we didn’t really do anything of that sort. Throughout the course we examined the parallels between fashion design and architecture as a sign of a catastrophe.

    My group

My unit colleagues were Sundos, Badia and Kholoud, three girls from Saudi Arabia, Rita from India, Desislava from Bulgaria (all these girls have already finished their third study year of architecture), Ha li Wong who studies biology in Canada, Beatriz from Madrid, Yoo Jin Lee and Hae an Kim from South Korea, John and Sherwood from Hong Kong (who just finished high school) and Kerry from Australia who works in a financial field but wants to change her career. Each of us had a totally different background, yet we had to work together to make the final project. I thought it would be really hard and complicated, but somehow we worked well together from day one, so our team work soon became an interesting mix of ideas.

… continued next week.

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Jelena Grujiæ is the winner of the 2007 Trimo Urban Crash competition.

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