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b-bear

Last seen: 5 months ago

b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia

    Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy. ~William Blake
♫
    Mon auberge était à la Grande Ourse. My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud

  • Fun Forever - Luxury fun is affordable for everyone! &...

    Rated May 22 2009 • 2 reviews • architecture, bizarre • funforever.net

    1,422 views
    Fun Forever - Luxury fun is affordable for everyone! & Anti-sit

  • http://mek.oszk.hu/03100/03117/pdf/part_1.pdf

    Rated Nov 30 2008 • 0 reviews • architecture, theory • oszk.hu

    1 view
    http://mek.oszk.hu/03100/03117/pdf/part_1.pdf

  • KrzyżtopÏŒr Castle - a set on Flickr

    Rated Oct 14 2008 • 1 review • architecture, bizarre • flickr.com



















    From the page: "the castle designed in the form of a calendar, with four towers (one for each season), 12 large halls (one for each month), 52 chambers (you see where this is going), and 365 windows (plus one extra which remained boarded up on all years save for the leap year). The castle was destroyed not long after it was completed during the Swedish deluge, but remains a haunting ruin."





    10 views
    Krzyżtopόr Castle - a set on Flickr

  • St. Gall Monastary Plan - Home

    Rated Oct 02 2008 • 0 reviews • architecture, history • stgallplan.org

    57 views
    St. Gall Monastary Plan - Home

  • Folly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Rated Sep 21 2008 • 3 reviews • architecture, follies • wikipedia.org







    According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (surely a folly of an etymology dictionary when compared to the word wonder of the Oxford version) the word 'folly' refers to fool. In French, however, the word folie can be traced to both delight and madness. For the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word folly is first used in the sense of a 'costly structure considered to have shown the folly in the builder' in 1654, but we could take the notion of an architectural folly all the way back to Genesis and to the Tower of Babel, that monumental and mythical folly which defied God's sense.

    Nonetheless, a folly might be defined, according to this wikipedia entry, as a building that delights us because it appears to be without purpose or a building that is not what it appears to be, thus an enigmatic structure. Such buildings are rarely used for shelter and other necessities, and therefore display a kind of carefree abandon to luxury and uselessness.

    A darker version of 'folly', however, from Babel to foolishness to madness, still lingers at the site of these ruins and adventures in architecture.

    Since the nineteenth century, and more so since the century just passed, we have also become familiar with the notion of an intellectual structure - of a kind of architecture of thought, reason and madness. There are certain necessities and certain structures of a useful and useless nature in thought, and Nietzsche would not be the only thinker to have pointed out the way in which a structure of thinking might be riddled with uses and abuses and with grand follies of an archaic nature that could send us all mad.

    So what if, according to the ongoing archaeology of intellectual historians, structures of thought might also be considered follies?

    I am thinking here of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, and of a historian of ideas who has followed, in the steps of Kant and Nietzsche, the great folly of the strange concept of 'Man' which, at once necessary and useless, was the precarious structure of so many European and national follies.

    What if, pace Erasmus, folly and follies really were the universal structures of thinking?

    Exemplary intellectual follies might then be encountered alongside the history of architectural follies. And one of the most obvious is what happened in Ireland in the nineteenth-century Potato Famine, the great intellectual folly being in this case laissez faire or free-market capitalism. Sticking to the doctrine of laissez faire, the English Lords of Ireland avoided all payment for welfare reasons, refused to intervene in the catastrophe that was taking place before their very eyes and gave cheap money only for particular works. Since serious and useful state-funded work might supposedly jeopardize existing jobs, the Lords persisted in building follies: 'roads in the middle of nowhere, between two seemingly random points; screen and estate walls; piers in the middle of bogs; etc.'

    In our time we too have our own follies: work for welfare, the banks, the IMF, and so on. And perhaps there are also ways of thinking (such as about animals, the environment, work or communities) that are merely the useless aggregation of architectures or institutions that were once seen as the height of usefulness but that are now no more appropriate for the future than piers in the middle of bogs.
    156 views
    Folly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Perrotts Folly Website

    Rated Sep 21 2008 • 1 review • architecture, tolkein, follies • perrottsfolly.co.uk










    Perrott's Folly in Birmingham was gazed upon by a young Tolkein, fully impressed by the phallic construction on his flaccid daily rounds. If you read the tourist brochures, it was one of the inspirations for The Two Towers and Lord of the Rings.
    646 views
    Perrotts Folly Website

  • Great Buildings Online - Master Architects List 2009.0825

    Rated Sep 21 2008 • 0 reviews • architecture • greatbuildings.com

    2 views
    Great Buildings Online - Master Architects List 2009.0825

  • The Folly Fancier

    Rated Sep 21 2008 • 1 review • architecture, bizarre, follies • wordpress.com














    A goat tower in Illinois, an architectural folly built by goat fancier and farmer David Johnson of Findlay for his eleven Swiss mountain goats.

    (From the outlandish blog, The Folly Fancier)
    48 views
    The Folly Fancier

  • Folly Fellowship Homepage

    Rated Sep 21 2008 • 0 reviews • architecture, bizarre • follies.org.uk

    447 views
    Folly Fellowship Homepage

  • http://www.materialicio.us/2008/04/24/chatou-a-private-sp...

    Rated Sep 10 2008 • 11 reviews • architecture • materialicio.us

    15K views
    http://www.materialicio.us/2008/04/24/chatou-a-private-space-for-a-teenager-h%c2%b2o-architectes/