The summer is almost over. I fly home in two days, and now I want to stay longer. If I tried to tell you how incredible this summer has been, I would fail miserably. So I will let my photos tell the story.

Segue. I have a new site dedicated to photography. My photoblog can be viewed here. I am pretty hooked on photography, and excited that my camera isn’t just a heavy, expensive necklace anymore. I actually can kinda use it. But I have a feeling this is going to break me. I need to buy new lenses, and a couple more cameras… less expensive ones off eBay, but lenses are pretty damn expensive.

Today was a photography day. I only had about 30 minutes of sunlight. Berlin isn’t a sunny city, meteorologically or metaphorically, so maybe the grey sky photos are actually more representative.

I am sifting through 3400 photographs to figure out which ones to edit and put onto my new site. But I have a few days off soon…

I will also write a thing or two about all of the cities I have been to, which include:

• Nanjing
• Shanghai
• Tongli
• Beijing
• London
• Salisbury
• Barcelona
• San Sebastian
• Gernika
• Bilbao
• Berlin
• Leipzig
• Dessau

I feel like there are more….. maybe not.

Go to my new site, leave a comment. I will populate it shortly.

Say word.

Alexanderplatz U-Bahn, Multi-Exposure.  Former DDR, Berlin, Germany.  No gas faces for plugs one two and three.

Berlin Olympic Stadium. One of a few remaining Nazi buildings.

Inside the stadium.

Me with Le Corbusier’s modulor man at his Unite Berlin.

Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, Berlin.

…this should explain it.  (Photograph from June 26)

Living at white heat has taken its toll on me.  I have about two more weeks in Berlin and I am struggling to make it.  I am having fun, of course, but I am a bit tired of living out of a suitcase, traveling in a herd, and thinking about architecture / urbanism.  I need some downtime soon.

But, Berlin is a great city.  We have rented bikes for the month and I have ridden more this month than in my entire life.  We rode the entire length of the Berlin Wall a few days ago (well, the part in the city center) and have seen so much here.  Berliners party like no one else in the world; club policy is they shut down “when the last patron has left” which usually happens around noon the next day.  I know this because our studio is on the 10th floor of an office building in East Berlin (off Alexanderplatz) and there is a club called “Weekend” on the 12th-15th floors.  We hear the bass from the club going through the night and into the next afternoon.  Then, Monday morning it returns to being a respectable office building; truly a strange transformation.

I am up to my eyeballs in numbers.  Our project consists of FARS’s, Lot Coverage, Migration trends, trash–>ethanol, Biomass, shrinking populations, growing single population, growing sectors of business, reuse of Plattenbauten, trash, trash and more trash….  all of that must control the design.  It’s very MVRDV, and it’s fun, but it’s a very dogmatic way to make decisions.  My project is, in a nutshell, based on trash generation and renewable energy, and I have titled it Eurotrash: Berlin.  I will upload the cover page soon, it’s pretty funny / good.

So, on August 1st, I fly to Texas for 10 days and then back to LA.  Alles Gut.  I just need a break and a lot more money, I don’t even want to tell you how much I have spent; financially, physically and emotionally.

Say word.

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I am in Berlin having fun and being really busy.  My project is over in a week and I will update after that.  I have 4 days free post-project to ride around the city on my bike and sit at home and post photos etc.

But, the point of this post is to tell you not to email me at jfk@jfk.la anymore.  The domain registration expired and I was paying kind of a lot for the “dot LA” domain, and I never did much with the site.  I figured it wasn’t worth it to renew.  So from now on, email me at jasonfordhamkingATgmailDOTcom, changing the ‘at” and “dot” obviously.

All is well, hope to see you soon.