🧵I used to work as an architect, before becoming a film producer. Here in this thread are a few of my most known architectural projects. Below is me over a decade ago photographed through a porthole window I designed.
This is WATERING HOLES, a drinking fountain we designed for the Royal Parks. It was meant to be rolled out over all of London's Royal Parks, becoming as ubiquitous as the red phone box. One was rolled out so far in Green Park, near Buckingham Palace.
By pushing buttons on the side of the granite slab of WATERING HOLES water sprouts from recesses in the chamfered circular openings, allowing adults, children or wheelchair users, and pets to drink from the respective watering holes. The granite was sourced in Cornwall.
Here is a child having a drink from WATERING HOLES. The objective of this project was to reduce the amount of plastic bottles bought and discarded throughout the Royal Parks.
This is YACHT HOUSE a combined boat storage and holiday flats on the Black Sea coast. It was inspired by the history of Soviet Constructivism which is linked to the site it is in, and is an unapologetically modern yet playful building at the same time.
This is YACHT HOUSE seen from the approach road, with the break waves jetty where boats are hoisted back to land.
The pedestrian entrance of YACHT HOUSE only reveals two floors next to a stair tower, and circular windows.
The top floor balcony of YACHT HOUSE with the porthole windows recalls the experience of living on a boat.
The main idea of YACHT HOUSE was to provide a wide horizon view of the sea with 9 metre wide fully opening folding sliding windows. The horizon of the sea is the focus of the design.
One of my favourite spaces of YACHT HOUSE is the panoramic roof terrace, sea horizon on one side, and 1,234 metre tall mountain at the back.
And this (on the right) is the TBILISI SPIRAL TOWER, a design for a business centre in Tbilisi, Georgia, designed to offset its Soviet neighbour (on the left). In this Left-Soviet Right-Capitalist dichotomy we designed the building as a stack of coins placed on top of each other in a spiral form. The roundness is meant to soften the sharp rectangular edges of its late Soviet neighbour.
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"NO EXTENSION OF NATO'S JURISDICTION FOR FORCES OF NATO ONE INCH TO THE EAST of a unified Germany" - US Secretary of State Baker to Gorbachev, 1990.
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
"U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east. The Soviets would need much more time to work with their domestic opinion (and financial aid from the West Germans) before formally signing the deal in September 1990.
As late as March 1991, according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, British Prime Minister John Major personally assured Gorbachev, “We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO.”
BAKER TO GORBACHEV:
"Would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a united Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?”
GORBACHEV: "Such an expansion would be “unacceptable”
GERMAN UNIFICATION CONDITIONAL TO NO NATO EXPANSION EAST OF WEST GERMANY
“We made it clear in the two-plus-four negotiations that we would not take NATO beyond the Elbe stretch [West German border]. We can therefore not offer Poland and the others NATO membership."
Jürgen Chrobog represented West Germany at the 2+4 negotiations with East Germany and the four victorious powers of World War II (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France) concerning the reunification of Germany and its future as a NATO member, and referred to those negotiations in a meeting of the directors of the US, UK, French, and German foreign ministries in Bonn. After the meeting of the political directors of the US, British, French and German foreign ministries in Bonn on 6 March 1991, Chrobog wrote:
Rothschild took over the British Monarchy centuries back, & Robert Maxwell took over the British State under Thatcher & then Ghislaine & Mandelson took over New Labour. Epstein was just the US spinoff of the same blackmail operation, or viceversa. Any questions?
Nobody died of Covid, people died of: 1. Covid protocols: medical malpractice 2. Withdrawal of antibiotics for pneumonia: medical malpractice 3. Drugs associated with unnecessary intubation: medical malpractice
Stop blaming Covid for medical malpractice
Early Covid was REAL and a nasty disease, though quite rare. Easily treated though with a round of Azythromycin. Not giving the antibiotics because of some hearsay that "viruses" can't be treated with antibiotics was criminal negligence. Covid was a symbiotic viral-bacterial disease.
I am a patient who had bilateral Covid pneumonia right there at the start. I was even put on a respirator as had very low oxygen, not intubated thankfully. I had a good doctor. Not one of his patients died of Covid, ever. Including the elderly ones.
"I can very confidently assert, there is no climate emergency.
As much as it may upset many people, my message is the planet is NOT in peril.
Atmospheric CO2 and methane have negligible effect on the climate.
The policies government have been implementing are totally unnecessary and should be eliminated.
So far, [we] have totally misidentified what is the dominant process in controlling the climate, and all of the various models are based on incomplete and incorrect physics.
The dominant process, is “the cloud-sunlight-reflexivity thermostat mechanism.
Clouds are all bright white, and they reflected 90% of the sunlight back into space making them the most crucial yet most overlooked aspect of the climate system.
Two-thirds of the Earth are ocean. The Pacific Ocean alone is half the Earth. The average cloud cover for the Earth is 67%; about 50% over land and 75% over oceans.
I claim that the above conspicuous properties of clouds are the missing part of the puzzle."