I have already procrastinated no fewer than 6 days to write about this. (and I don’t even dare mention the 6 months it took me to get my ass moving on starting the website redesign)

In these 6 days, 3000 people have statistically perished from the conflict that is going in Darfur.

Hence the name “Stop Genocide Now.”

With every top-down bureaucratic problem solving approach, there is a bottom-up small guy reaching from the grassroot level trying to make change. In the past 2 years, my good friends Yuen-Lin and Carol have teamed up with team leader Gabriel Stauring and a host of other caring individuals who have devoted many countless unpaid hours towards a greater good of stopping genocide, now.

SGN’s unique approach is this: Gabriel has been flying down to Sudan in person and to record videos of the real situation on the ground, interviewing key personnel in the area as well as visiting camps. The entire initiative is called i-ACT (Interactive Activism). At this very moment, Gabriel and Yuen-lin and Connie (Gabriel’s sister) are in Chad, reporting on the Darfur crisis, and from now Jul 10-20 will be sending back 1 video and lots of blog posts updating us on the situation over there. We are currently already in Day 6 of this instalment of i-ACT.

Here’s what you do:

Visit the website and take a look at the videos by clicking on the link below. Read some of the stories and experiences and write a comment. The idea is to be in the know and be mobilized and spread the word to people around you.

Stop Genocide Now.

Procrastination suddenly sounds a lot more serious when it translates to: StopGenocideLater.

Inspired by an old football magazine I used to read, Match, as well as Wired Magazine’s wired/tired/expired, I bring you Flash/Trash #1! Charting collate.org’s value trends.

Mia Lee, age 5

4:27:45 PM spiltmilk: this is really bizarre but pple have been standing me up the entire week at work
4:27:52 PM niacin: ?
4:28:04 PM spiltmilk: yesterday a flooring rep didn’t show
4:28:09 PM spiltmilk: today a client didn’t show
4:28:15 PM spiltmilk: and now my lighting consultant is mia
4:28:23 PM niacin: Mia is your consultant? :)
4:28:27 PM spiltmilk: harhar
4:29:11 PM spiltmilk: i’m serious, it’s really weird
4:29:32 PM niacin: dunno
4:29:40 PM niacin: maybe you need a more comfortable chair
4:30:02 PM spiltmilk: so that they’ll be more willing to come to meetings??
4:30:21 PM niacin: no so that they won’t keep standing you up!! HAHAHAHAHAHAH

A long overdue half-written post back from october last year, some thoughts on Las Vegas that came up while I was designing something there for work:

Designing a building in Las Vegas is an extremely difficult, and paradoxically challenging task.

As architects and designers, we often approach a design problem by asking ourselves: how do we make this a different and more enriching experience than everything that has come before it?

What does this mean though, in Las Vegas, where the status quo is the spectacular. Do you go one up on the spectacular, in which case you are only valid until the next spectacular thing. Or do you go the reverse, depart from the kitsch and theme park artificiality and actually apply solid grounded design principles.

There is no environmental, social, demographical or anthropological reason that a city should ever exist in the first place. In that sense, the city is artificial. It is appropriate then, that the defining building type of Las Vegas, the Casino, revels in its artificiality. There are miniature replicas of New York, Paris, Egypt, Italy. Fake cities within a fake city. Ironically enough, that is contextual.

That’s why when Lee Hsien Loong compared us to Las Vegas and encouraged us to use it as a role model for Singapore, I could not believe what i was hearing. We really don’t need anymore artificiality.

In the everyday urban environment, there is an element of repetition, routine that defines everyday existence. To challenge that architecturally means to introduce elements of exhilaration and spectacular. This can be done with design strategies such as introducing unexpected materials, introducing non-traditional programmatic adjacencies or spatial relationships. To delight, amuse, or to shock.

A NYT article on Las Vegas said this:-

“[In Las Vegas] everything new quickly seems old, while the old struggle to keep up.”

In the case of Las Vegas, to innovate and exhilarate means to up one another on the bigness and grandness. It’s interesting to know that the greenest grass and largest pools of water this side of the world, can be found in the middle of the Nevada Dessert, all continually watered to keep alive.

Or how about this, for a while we toyed with introducing the natural, the material, the honest. Desert landscaping, no exorbitant pools of water, site specific desert materials like clay, rammed earth (boss didn’t like it).

Architecture and buildings, human intervention on the natural landscape designed and built to be timeless, to weather gracefully and last generations, perhaps are objects and values that do not belong here in Las Vegas.

(photo credit: lasvegasgolfadventures.com)

My grandma skypes! :)