The Extraordinary Ordinary - Sunset in Oman...

A few photos from Nizwa, Oman, taken a few years back... 

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Wave Patterns at Qurum Beach...

A short video taken of the subtly undulating swells at Muscat's Qurum beach... For related posts please click here and here...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Oman Sunsets...

If not necessarily off to sunnier shores (as there's plenty of those along the local coastlands) this will, nevertheless, be my 'sunset'/ closing blog-post from Oman... Tonight I'm off to Europe for a stint of R&R, after which my family and I will be heading to Qatar in early August where I'll be taking up my new post at VCU-Qatar...

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The aim is, though (for better or worse) to keep on bloggin' over the summer...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Nursing Lab (Humanoid) Props...

A heart, skeleton and a head (with a cold)...

The included photos were taken of various displays in some of the nursing classrooms at my university here in Oman... I find these humanoid, quasi-genderless, anatomical props quite fascinating...

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They're a bit Damien Hirsty but...

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Anorexica...

Burt...



A s/he...

Prop insomnia...

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 - 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...

Small Bizarres No. 5 - Car in Corridor...

An example of lateral thinking by some of my students. Not being able to open the external access doors to the new workshop they instead decided to drive their truck (with its heaving load of hand-made mud bricks) through the building's corridor to the workshop's hallway entrance, thus saving us plenty of manual labour... That's mi boys...

Small Bizarres No. 4 - Suspicious TV Remote...

A TV remote from a hotel in Oman. Never dared to press the indicated button though..?!

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Doors, Floors, and a Bit about Ceilings...

Metal Doors in Oman...

Whilst 'flaneur-ing' (urban strolling) around diverse locales in the region, I've noticed that I've managed to take an almost inordinate amount of photos of various local doors and doorways. This might seem a somewhat pastiche thing to do, as one can find postcards and posters depicting doors from most cosmopolitan cities or a bit more picturesque towns almost everywhere, but it is perhaps exactly this ubiquity that also is what makes observing doors so intriguing – they fulfill the same function and purpose everywhere, yet still retain a distinctness and clearly differ from one place, function, and culture to another. Their pervasiveness is exactly what allows us to note the deviations between what we're used to from that which diverges from our norm.

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The door must be amongst the more intimate constituents of a building. It's among the sole elements of a building we touch and handle daily. It's also the first thing we touch when entering a building. It's a door's handle which provides, as the Finnish architect and theoretician Juhani Pallasmaa has said, the 'handshake of a building'. A building's door defines the realm where greeting and goodbyes are expressed, it's the transitional 'in-between' threshold venue which belongs neither (or both) to the 'inside' nor 'outside' of a building. It's also a building's doors and floors which, unlike the walls (let alone the ceiling), we engage with directly on a physical and somatic level. However, while the floor might be the surface with which we have a more constant engagement with, it still remains a passive partly during such interactions (i.e. we move across the floor rather than the floor moving, one should hope, across us) and while a floor is usually perceived through an intermediary – a shoe or sock – a door includes an inherently sensory, tactile and directly kinesthetic attributes, as we literally have to 'handle' (push, pull or slide) a door to provide access or an exit from one space to another.

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A door includes an intrinsic multi-sensory quality, it has a radius and range of motion, a weight, degree of friction and its surface has a texture and latent temperature. Its proportion and scale are a reflection of its intended users and utility. A glass door for a busy shopping mall is a very different contraption from a wooden door of a private residence. The heavy and gigantic metal doors of a city gate not only perform as a protective, both symbolic and actual, deterrent, but also express the power and might of the city, as well as act, through their ornamentation, as twin billboards of its wealth and artistry. The laminate doors of a kitchen cupboard, on the other hand, attest to a quite different set of aims, where the doors' vertical surfaces are often intentionally plain and modest in their appearance. Here, unlike in the city gates, a shopping mall or a residence, the intention is not to emphasize or celebrate what's behind them, but more about hiding, camouflaging and neutralizing the detergent bottles, surface-wipes, buckets and sweeps that are usually concealed behind such below-the-sink doors. This connotative ability of a door can be expanded to apply to the features on a door, where the type and size of door-handle, if it has a window or not, a mail slot, spy-ocular, or the size of its threshold can inform you about its purpose. Even a door's position in comparison to its door-frame and be used to indicate the degree of access to a space. Here a closed door suggests 'do not enter', an open door 'come on in', and a door slightly open hinting one should 'proceed with caution' (how welcome depending on how ajar the door is). Doors hide and reveal - they open, close, revolve, slide, protect, uncover, represent, suggest, and inform.

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So I'll probably continue photographing doors, as they're simply too catalytic and irresistible a motive to ignore...

Wood doors in Oman...

Small Bizarres No.3 - Anthropomorphic Light Switches...

Wether the correct term is anthropomorphic, humanoid or something else, these light switches found in my apartment remind me of faces, whose 'noses' I interact with daily. They each have also a surprising amount of personality... I haven't named or started talking to them as of yet, but one never knows...

Small Bizarres No. 1 - The Tree in the Middle...

This is the first submission of the Small Bizarres posts. Their aim is to document various, usually small but strange, features found in and about various local as well as more distant settings. These posts are in part related to the Extraordinary Ordinary posts. But whereas they usually focus on easily hidden or overlooked beauty in ordinary things or events, these posts main purpose is to point out various subtly surreal or bizarre - 'second glance' - affairs.

In this post we find a tree in the middle of a road, which hence makes vehicular access quite impossible. The adjacent traffic signs somewhat wishful message suggesting such access, and the carefully laid and newly painted bee-striped curb surrounding the tree, only manage to amplify the benign absurdity of the situation...

The picture was taken looking towards the gap between the newly erected buildings 5A and 5B at the University of Nizwa in Oman...

Mud Brickin' it in Oman...

A short note to bring to your attention an ongoing project outlined on this blog's sister-blog smArchitecture discussing how to both make as well as (eventually) develop traditional (Omani) mud-bricks... The two related posts can be accessed by clicking here & here...

A Different Side of Me...

I took the portrait above yesterday at a small local photo-studio. The interesting thing was that I walked in wearing my tattered old 'Camden Market' t-shirt and a pair of worn weekend jeans, and walked out with a picture of me in my Omani best. No change of clothing was involved, as the outfit change was all achieved through the 'magic of Photoshop'... Obviously, technology wise, there's really not much novel about this picture or process. All it requires is a few stored outfits as layers in the aforementioned software and, voila, Bob's your uncle..! However, personally I haven't come across this particular rendition of use of photo manipulation, where the outfit is adjusted to befit a particular cultural norm (these photos are usually used in passports by the locals). This technique works particularly well with the Omani muzzar and dishdasha, as these can be placed in front of the subject. How this would work with a keffiyeh, which also occupies space behind the subject, would require a slightly more laborious process. There's something charming in the applications simplicity and benign deception. It would would be easy (and it's probably already done) to apply the same process to this season couture catwalk collection or Saville Row sartorial contraptions. It probably would, however, to retain the conceptually ascetic spirit of the above photo, require the image to retain the modest frame and context of a passport photo or, at most, a torso shot, as otherwise the deception becomes too apparent. It should be an image that involves a glance rather than proper scrutiny - a picture that captures a quality, a somatic ambiance, rather than performing as an accurate depiction... But, as it stands, for me as a non-Omani the image retains an aspect of novelty and has by contextual default become something closer to a souvenir rather than something practical or useful. Something that's a perfectly acceptable outcome in its own right, as it performs as a mnemonic node that will henceforth represent and remind me of a hot Spring weekend in Nizwa, March 2010...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Lines and Patterns in Sand...

Included is a quite substantial chunk (but only a fraction of the total number taken) of photos exploring various, man, critter, wind & water made sand patterns, taken at Qurum Beach in Muscat a short while back. I was surpised about the variety of different conditions and constellations of sand I came across whilst walking too and fro the extended stretch of beach. The quantity of and diversity of sand patterns created by the four aforementioned 'affectors' is truly amazing...

Above and below - Weawed water...

Above and below - Critter & Man made calligraphy...