The Extraordinary Ordinary - Concrete Bricks...

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Some pictures of a 'sea' (or neighborhood, landscape, forest, mountain range - pick your analogy) of concrete bricks stored on a back-lot of the university campus...

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The Extraordinary Ordinary - Eight Easy Steps for Applying Sun cream...

A sequence of images of Andia applying sun cream to her face. Images taken in Muscat, May 2010...

Moving to Qatar...

This coming August, me and my family will be moving to Doha, Qatar, where I've accepted a position teaching at the new MFA programme at Virginia Commonwealth University - Qatar (VCU-Q). It's all very exciting, both to be a part of this top-notch institution as well as, on a world stage, an up and coming cultural entity such as Qatar...

Small Bizarres No. 8 - Screen Within Screen Within Screen Within...

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Ghadah Al-Kandari and I have been conducting a small exchange of, call them, sequential computer screen shots sent between Oman and Kuwait. It all started with Ghadah sending me a photo of her Mac's screen with the Chirps image (from a posts last week) as a backdrop. This promted me to use her image as a backdrop on my computer, which I photographed and sent to her, which in turn she used as a backdrop on her computer, and on it continued... Eventually, as can be seen in the image above, there's not much left to be seen of the original screen backdrop... We probably could have continued ad infinitum, but, as we both claim to be individuals who occasionally have more constructive things to do beyond such quasi-surrealist parlor games, I thought it wise to conclude it here (for now)...

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The original image sent by Ghadah...

Small Bizarres No. 7 - Child with Heads...

This photo was taken of a mural outside a kindergarten in Kuwait. It depicts, in my mind, a slightly macabre scene of a child playing with two (decapitated?!) heads - that of Santa Claus and the head of an elephant. One could also read the Santa head as actually being the arm of the child (a Santa-arm)...

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Bizarre indeed...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - My Little Friend Chirps...

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Meet my little friend 'Chirps'... He (or she) visits me most mornings and sing me a little tune... He (or she) usually sits on the ledge or inside the hollow U-profile of my right hand side bedroom window, bird-mumbling about the happenings outside... Sometimes we chat a bit, but he (or she) is a busy sparrow with what seems to be a quite demanding daily schedule, so mostly we just talk about general things like the weather or food... He (or she) is good company though, and often tweets, chirps and hums along to my morning tooth-brushing and gurgling - a quasi-melodious duet of beak and lips celebrating the commencement of a new day...

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If anyone would be interested in getting the above image as a (roughly 50 by 50 centimeter) poster, in either colour or black & white, just send me an e-mail at: thomas@small-architecture.com with the subject heading 'Chirps Poster'... I'll send it for free, but you'll need to print it out yourself (it should fit on an A1 sheet). They're both 300 dpi - the colour one (seen above) is roughly 14 Mb, whilst the black & white version is about 9 Mb. Please specify which one (colour or black & white) you wish to have...

SAM Street in Men's Passion Magazine...

An image charting the various typologies of commerical enterprises on a stretch of SAM Street (this image is not included in the Men's Passion piece)...

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The May issue of the Kuwait based Men's Passion magazine has an article on Salmiya's (in Kuwait) SAM Street, summarizing some of the polemic debated on this as well as the smArchitecture blog...

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Please click here to access the piece on the smArchitecture blog.

Dramatic Weather...

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Simon Balsom, the editor, amongst other publications, of Men's Passion magazine (a regional version of GQ or Esquire) sent me this dramatic photo, taken by photographer Lucie Debelkova, of a recent storm in Kuwait.

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Click here for more photos of a Kuwaiti storm (posted last year on the smArchitecture blog)...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Stained Statues...

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Even though not formally from the Gulf region, I decided to post the above and below images on this blog nevetheless. The pictures were taken a few years back of the various statues outside Imperial College's Royal School of Mines entrance in London's Kensington (a neighborhood very much frequented by individuals from the Gulf). There's is something subtly abstracting about these stains that suggests camouflage (or even Arab wedding make-up).?! The stains both mask and reveal, that which, whilst hiding various facial or corporeal features, also simultaneously catalyses ones curiosity and encourages one to study and observe those same features even further... Thus these stains become a form of 'anti-camouflage' which, instead of blending the figures into their background (which a stone sculpture in front of a stone facade might do) the asymmetrical blotches across their figures make them stand out from their backdrops to announce and emphasize their humanoid presence...

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Not long after these pictures were taken the statues were cleaned up, returning them to their original stony, and slightly melancholy, vapidity...

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Small Bizarres No. 6 - Fence Eating Tree...

A tree in downtown Manhattan (munch, nibble, gnaw)...