9.5.12

Salty corner

Way back i remodeled me kitten chin, fuzzing it with cuteness, also known as bead board, and installing a dish bubbler all modern and silent, except that it called for salt to be poured into its innards.  Looking online, i found some obscure product called "Somat", that was highly recommended.  The stuff has been sitting in a closet for a couple of years until i finally got tired of seeing these boxes i ordered taking up valuable rag and snorkel space, so i broke out the boxes and poured in the salt, needed or not.

But first, beauty struck!  A handful of nose hairs fell onto my lap not really.  On the corner of the box was the instruction to "press here".  The corner of the box?  i've opened a few boxes in my time, and never have i been instructed to "press here" on the corner of a box.  i was thinking shit, i'm going to have to struggle with this stupid gimmick cause its just not going to do what it's pretending is going to happen.  But i was wrong.  It opened effortlessly.  What an ingenious use of the tension that naturally exists between adjacent sides of a box about its corner.  Whats more, the corner of the box forms a natural spout for the ingredients to pour out when you tip the box.



Press here


Pour!


This is such an unexpected articulation of the corner / diagonal in packaging; something i might have expected the Japanese to have produced given their natural inclination toward articulation of the diagonal within an orthogonal system.  But not the Germans.

1.5.12

Come and vanish

What should a train station be?  A gate to welcome?  Or leave?  An expression of shear as the comings and goings of a city?  A gathering place?  An expression of motion?  i'm sure it could be all of these, and has been.  Last year i visited Avignon, France, and was impressed with their train station for the TGV designed by the transit authority SNCF and Jean-Marie Duthilleul with Jean-François Blassel.  It made me think of travel less as the "going someplace" than the simple "going".  It contained an expression of the planet as a round thing that one could go round and round; it seemed to say "why stay in this spot, when you could so easily disappear by simply moving?"

The device used to generate this effect is a gentle curve, which by itself wouldn't do enough work, so in addition the building tapers to each end of the plan curve, the effect being that as and one enters (in the middle of the curve) and looks to each direction the building creates a strong forced perspective, and does so with one just standing there, no movement, or trains, necessary.




The use of ramps to reach the platform further reinforces the building's inclination (not a pun) towards movement.

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