Back from the field, Amsterdam where I stayed at the Lloyd hotel designed by MVRDV, the renowned Dutch architecture firm. I really did like the concept of the Lloyd: it is a 1 to 5 stars hotel, meaning that budget and business travelers mingle. Art brings everyone together:

The hotel’s Cultural Embassy offers various services in communal spaces. Situated above restaurant the Cultural Embassy informs guests and interested parties on topics such as art, culture and cultural projects. In conjunction with the Lloyd Hotel the Cultural Embassy and its members organize projects and cultural activities: performances, small exhibitions and presentations. Admission is always free for everybody.

Some rooms have kinetic architectural elements: cupboards open up to disclose and create a proper space for a bathroom. One advice, make sure you don’t get a room located in the basement!

Cupboard door opening up to give proper space to a bathroom (surface area saving…).

While in Amsterdam I have met with the food designer Debra Solomon, curator of The Edible City exhibit:

The exhibition presents a cross section of pragmatic proposals and utopian schemes that enable cities and city-dwellers to meet their own food requirements. They range from MVRDV’s Pig City and Agroparks to the urban agriculture Cuba found it necessary to develop after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As befits the subject, much of the exhibition is itself edible.

Check Debra’s culiblog!

Studies we conduct are like dyed cloths, those which pigments tint the skin of whom wears it (not unlike the indigo cloth of the Tuareg, the blue man of the desert…). They change us.