Category Making

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Saltatory heuristics

World Builder

Sep 20, ’13 6:00 AM

Prologue, Henry V:

But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

The Bard, with humility, his theater, the wooden “O” deemed “unworthy”, asks pardon for the effrontery of staging a bit of historical fiction there.

Oh, and what finds itself crammed within the spaces we architects to presume to make?

Life

Pardon us please for daring to set a stage and bring forth so great an object as living-in-the-world.

Are we sufficiently humble? Are we honoring the material? Is the scaffolding we have envisioned up to the task?

So, a film: on the one hand shot in a day, but on the other needing two years in post-production. For architects and film makers both, after the vision, comes the long work of documentation, and iterative refinement with digital tools.

Architects have always been world-builders. The work is best when motivated by affection.

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Ten Steps to Becoming the Designer You Want to Be

Apr 11, ’12 6:00 AM

Good advice from a self-described mentor and design veteran.

  1. Get the book
  2. Get the obscure book you’ve never heard of
  3. Choose a topic that fascinates you and learn it inside out
  4. Write, blog, and speak on that topic
  5. Learn Something New Every Day
  6. Create a New Idea Every Day
  7. Experiment
  8. Learn as many frameworks as you can
  9. Choose variety over anything else
  10. Model or draw (all the f*@#ing time)

She begins:

An open letter to the next generation of designers, part 1.

Everyone has moments in their career when they look back and think, “If I had only known then what I know now….” After 15-plus years as a designer and design researcher at places like IBM, Trilogy, M3 Design, and now frog design, I know I certainly have. Which is why, now that I’m a veteran, I’d like to give share some advice with young designers just starting out. If I could be your mentor, this is what I would tell you:

Jump to link.

Footnote:

The obscure book referenced above is The Universal Traveler: A Guide to Creativity, Problem Solving & the Process of Reaching Goals. I discovered this book as an undergraduate in architecture school and I am sure my teachers hated seeing such a hippy book in their studio. Maybe they were on to something: I found the book’s language unfathomable. I barely understood what it was about. Yet it spoke to me, and apparently some seeds were planted. So we have bd-MAP: not a Universal Traveler – as we’re trying to get a rather specific type of work done. bd-MAP would be your Specific Traveler According to Universal Themes.

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Wind Infographic

Mar 29, ’12 12:57 PM

Near real-time wind map, updated hourly.

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Manifesto

Mar 22, ’12 7:10 PM

A set of core principles as relevant today as they were in 1860. My how times don’t change:

  • Find joy in work
  • Create objects that are not only well-designed, but affordable to everyone
  • Live simply
  • Stay connected to nature
  • Maintain integrity of “place”

Link.

 

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Cognitive Biases

Feb 28, ’12 6:00 AM

A few hundred reasons why it is so hard to make a good decision.

Given my own textbook Optimism Bias, I just know you will read the link through to the end, then employ a process of rigorous self-assessment, so that you will avoid all such decision biases in the future.

 

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Jogging Past Environmentally Responsible Retail

Feb 4, ’12 6:00 AM


Listening to their iPods in apartments that don’t exist yet, walking their dogs down prospective city streets, playing chess together in a forthcoming park near Potrero Hill.

Who are these little humans and what are they doing in our images? The New York Times and BLGBLOG looked into the question of human figures in architect’s renderings. We’re asking ourselves the same question

George Hershey’s The Lost Meaning Of Classical Architecture paints classical architectural motifs a color grounded in unpleasant realities: Sacrifice. Blood. Enslavement. After reading that book I never thought of the Caryatids the same way again, neither the little Dwarfs holding up the front of Michael Eisner’s office; both appear reasonably content holding the building up, but if you accept George Hershey’s line of argument, they are slaves pressed into service. Michael Graves should have known better.

Technology has changed, but it seems we may have come full circle.

The ancients with incredible skill chiseled the image and likeness of humans from a block of stone and deployed the resulting figure into the service of their building.

And today it is a bit the same except we capture them from the digital ocean. It’s nice when Anderson Cooper or Angelia Jolie or underprivileged families will hang around well… forever and legitimize and tart up ones sales pitch for a project, and hopefully the pitch places it above critique, as the project is apparently already an essential part of the city.

I think there was a post-classical, pre-digital phase when human figures transcended a particular time and place and stood for all humans in all places, since they didn’t sport recognizable backpacks or fashion accessories or haircuts. All are descendants of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and I’m thinking of Le Corbusier’s modulor figure, or WG Clark’s beautiful ink drawings for Robert Venturi, and other mid-to-late century examples of where, in Corb’s case anyway, the figure was anonymous and functioned as a humanistic ruler to make a point about the building’s proportion or scale. These days we release our scalies into virtual architectural terrariums and hope they will be happy there.

I can’t really add much to the coverage cited above, and I encourage you to have a look at the NYT piece.

In a lighter vein (or maybe not) there’s this:

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The Poet on Glass Architecture

Nov 20, ’11 6:00 AM

Billy Collins, US Poet Laureate, speaking about the beautiful Poetry Foundation in Chicago, takes a moment to make a general point:

A lot has been said about poetry and architecture, but usually that’s just a metaphor; it means architecture is like poetry in the same way as you’d say something is poetry in motion. [The Architect of the Poetry Foundation] did say that he wanted to construct this building as a kind of a parallel to a poetic experience. One thing about the building is that it’s basically glass, and you might say there are two kinds of poetry: One is stained glass, and one is clear glass. Stained glass poetry wants to be very decorative and colorful and have a brilliant surface, and the poetry I prefer is the poetry of glass, which is clear and makes you want to see through it to something vital. It’s true that as you walk through the building you get many angles from which to look at the interior of the building. So if you walk 25 or 30 feet in some direction and turn around, you are seeing an entire reconfiguration, and that is actually a quite accurate physical representation of what a poem does.

John Ronan, the architect, has delivered quite a nice job: the perforated screen changes color in the sun, special aggregates warm up the sandblasted concrete, the layers of onion-skin architecture work together well, you feel the presence of a well-thought-through syntax. This is an interesting project for a historically struggling starving-artist nonprofit as it grapples with what to do with a huge philanthropic gift, one of the results of which is this building.

This work is as much about the veil, as it is the glass, which makes me think the Audubon Society would approve.

More on John Ronan and the building, and the Poetry Foundation. This page has a link to renderings by the designers and photographs of the opening reception.

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Ruins of Detroit

Nov 17, ’11 6:00 AM

We’re surrounded by an embarrassment of rich photography.

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Buildings Adapt or They Go Away

Sep 8, ’11 1:14 PM

To quote a commissioner in Chicago’s Department of the Environment.

Cities adapt or they go away. Climate change is happening in both real and dramatic ways, but also in slow, pervasive ways. We can handle it, but we do need to acknowledge it. We are on a 50-year cycle, but we need to get going.

So the Chicago of the future will be a city of Sweet Gum and Live Oak.

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Kuroshio Sea

Jun 23, ’11 6:00 AM

A single 22.5 m x 8.2 m x 60 cm acrylic glass panel at the aquarium in Okinawa. OK – sure – a Dubai aquarium has a slightly larger panel measuring 32.8 m x 8.3 m x 75 cm. One hundred and seven feet long. Thirty inches thick. Thirty feet high. 270 tons.

How?

The video will calm us down (please: full screen, HD) while we ponder the impossible logistics of moving around such an object and installing it in a building. Without leaks.

We appreciate the twenty or thirty thousand creatures living here all the more, after pondering this, raising more important questions, I think, than how did they get the glass in.

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