An article on the City of Angkor in Cambodia, the largest pre-industrial metropolis in the world: http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6618259.
Interesting in its own right, but this caught my eye especially: "The hydraulic system became "not manageable, no matter how many resources were thrown at it,"".
That got me to thinking. Reliance on technology to brute-force the environment with rapid growth to fit to some vision of human dominance and success? That breaks down eventualy? Hmm, is that much dissimilar to where we may be today? Following the same path, trusting in yet more technology to make our current way somehow work out?
If so, it is pause for thought.
"I think as designers we realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence. So as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we in a way need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system, and the frame conditions of a planet. I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, because the news is the news of abundance and not the news of limits. And I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits, and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share..." -- William McDonough
If you have not yet read Cradle to Cradle, please, do so now. It is an amazing and beautiful introduction to a shift in context, one that is logical and powerful. McDonough is quite a visionary, and out there, in the world, doing it. He gave a talk at TED, an ideas conference in Santa Cruz in 2005 and the other day I was sent a link to his remarkable talk... which I now share with you. See it here.
I hadn't realized this would be so when I posted my pictures the other day, but it actually lined up with a gallery viewing I went to yesterday. Tiff, Evan and Evan's parents and I (and Jet, of course) went up to the city to the main branch of the SF Public Library to view the exhibit Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change.
I really enjoyed it. For starters, it was mostly black and white photography of moderate size, punctuated by these huge (3'x4') colour prints. Each of the photographer's (there were about 6 who's work was on display) had a different tact and a different take on what they were shooting and on how, and taken together it was quite evocative, some scenes amazing, some wrenching. Juxtaposition was the word of the day (which is really not surprising), not only in between each photograph, and also not only even in between the elements in the photographs, but sometimes between the emotions and the humanity within. As a purely visual exhibit with no set narrative what each person would take away from it, I would assert, would be different -- which works beautifully.
For myself, the exhibit had a double ring because many of the pictures were taken in Henan province, which is where the bulk of my travels in China have been. Looking at some of the pictures brought nods of knowing from me, simply by recognition of what was depicted (as in "I saw that"), but also as I recognized what I saw and took it in the larger context of the exhibit and viewing the familiar through (pardon the pun) a different lens made possible by the 'big picture' (again, pardon the pun). Let me put that another way: in the context being created by the show, the familiar images gained new layers, new levels of meaning.
Great exhibit that runs until June 24th in San Francisco -- I recommend it.
In the 'you really can find anything on the internet' category, the other week I had the inkling to do a search for some lyrics. While we were in China in 2005, on our daily travel to and from the Wushuguan, our bus' DVD player would start anew. That first video/song shown on the DVD became, over the days, adopted as our group's sort of unofficial anthem. Enough so that several people bought CDs and DVDs with the song on it... but I never knew what exactly the song was about. It was a pretty nifty video, that was for sure. So, I sought it out. And found it (link also contains the video and the song)!.
This is very cool. Some years ago an architect had this flash of insight and developed a new theory for the constructions of the great pyramids at Giza. To test his theories, he turns to a realtime 3D model and AI systems... which is precisely what I began to investigate in my own Thesis for my architecture degree (at about the same time he came up with his theory, actually, interestingly enough). Rock on -- I may not have been able to persue the fruits of my thesis, but it is very cool to see the very concepts and hopes I had being put into practice.
Here's the paper you can download: http://khufu.3ds.com/introduction/datas/intro/downloads/Kheops_Story.pdf
Sadly, my own thesis (Maya Visions) is not on the web right now. Hmm. And I'm leaving it that way... because? I might well just rectify that!
(Ok, that's odd -- if you misspell my last name (the missing n) and put my name into google, the first article that comes up is the article about me in the Mountain View Voice... how about that.)
Current Possibility: Being Infectious
I blogged once before that I fell in love with the Pulse many moons ago... and while that dream of owning one may have receded, here's something new that could be equally fun: the VentureOne Hybrid. The Pulse back in its day could already get 100mpg at 55mph, this as an EV and Hybrid vehicle would be doubly awesome. Think I still prefer the body of the Pulse better, but hey, this one is available! (Or will be...)
On a more silly note, here's an idea who's time may have come.
Want to talk about light? In the field of prefab homes here is a particularly cool website that opens with several time-lapse movies of the quality of light within throughout the full cycle of the day. Nice quality of light indeed, and very cool to watch the play of shadows and light as it moves along. And the homes are, of course, sweet as well.
As for things, well, things are going very well. On the boo-side, I didn't get the gun drop yet again in my second run through the instance in WoW last friday (I wonder how raiders manage to stay sane after several hundred runs). Played Eberron this past weekend, got character concepts roughed out for a new campaign, worked on various projects, kung fu was great, and just generally having a blast in all areas and at all times. Now that is remarkable.
Current Possibility: Levity, Grace and Inspiration
In my mailbox today was an envelope from the California Architect's Registration Board. With nervous fingers I opened it. Inside were my results for Building Planning: Pass! Woo!
I'm starting to study for Mechanical/Electrical now, about two months later than the timeline I had created at the start of the year. So I've written a new timeline that will still have me completing everything for licensure in mid-2008.
Le w00t!
It's been a while since my last post as I recently returned from a vacation home, where I had forgotten to bring the URL to update the blog. Oops.
Deep breath time... big post ahead!
But a great trip it was! I got to catch up with many a friend (hi ICE, Su, Murrgon, Averyl, Ruth!), did some work on my campaign, worked on Sifu's book, did some Tai Chi with my mom, practiced the Tiger Crane set, watched a few documentaries and movies, and slept a whole heck of a lot more than I planned -- apparently I needed it. It was odd to be back home without Shadow -- I never noticed how much of a routine or used to what she would do there was, the number of times I would do something and expect to hear/see/have her appear/etc... and then not have that happen was saddening and enough to knock me off stride of the action for a moment. The weather was nice if a bit wet, and being my first trip back home in the fall since I moved here I really appreciated the riotous colours that I so rarely get to see anymore.
I was also fortunate to be able to do some architecture seeking. I had a day in Toronto at the tail end of my trip, and managed to find the OCAD Sharp centre, designed by Will Aslop, walked by the Art Gallery of Ontario (construction not yet begun on Gehry's new entrance), found a new biotech lab at University of Toronto that I had seen in Architectural Record, and then walked up to the Royal Ontario Museum where the construction on the new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal is underway. On my way up there I was thinking to myself "Self, who was the architect again for this addition?" Upon seeing the construction it was obvious: Libeskind.
I also walked down near the SkyDome and the CN Tower (still a fave of mine) and was stunned to see the amount of development along the waterfront, especially just west of the CN Tower. Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of condo towers, which is, in a way, exciting. Downtowns with lots of residential...
Even greater was earlier in my trip, when I made it to Ottawa, I spent a day visiting the new Canadian War Museum, designed by Raymond Moriyama (also known for designing the Ontario Science Centre and the Canadian Embassy in Japan). It's quite the interesting building from the exterior, angular and with a prow. You can also walk up to the roof (part of which is walkable, part of which isn't but is a green roof, planted with grass). For all its sculpture, I was most interested how it was spatially inside.
To which I say: Great, when it's given the opportunity to do so. Within the main galleries there is nothing to give a sense of the building -- it is really a black box. Before I go on, I'll talk about those galleries, for that is the bulk of the museum. I'm not entirely sure how I would describe them, save to say that they are 'modern'. Think big, continuous, colourful, integral combination of text, images, models, artefacts, equipment, interactive displays, video, projectors, dioramas, life-size recreations, and more. The path within the museum takes you from tribal warfare through the arrival of the Europeans and up to the today's peacekeeping missions. When I started out a part of me thought it was too much -- too glitzy, too theme park, too something, not befitting the topic at hand. But as I went on I realized that whatever it was, it was done well. The history was told and traced, and I was especially pleased with the balance within the exhibit, never shying away from speaking from multiple angles and even (literally) from asking questions from you, the viewer/reader.
Outside of the gallery is where you get to see the building, and it shines well. The entrance hall (bisecting the building) is a rich landscape of materials, angles and cuts that comes together nicely. Within the museum (I didn't see any of the research halls) there is LeBreton hall, a glass-walled large space where the large artefacts/vehicles are kept (including some vehicles damaged in peacekeeping operations, which was sobering to see), and there are two passageways to reach it. And here is where the building's magic really comes through, especially in the narrow Regeneration Hall. Here copper angled walls soar up some 25m, light is supplied by small clerestory windows as well as the glazed end of the hall that aligns itself with the peace tower on parliament hill. The atmosphere is definitively serene and cathedral like, enhanced with plaster work models for the memorial at Vimy Ridge. Coming from the sensory feast of the gallery it was a magical counterpoint.
Though the circulation could have been better to reach Regeneration Hall, the building shines when allowed to do so. Moriyama (who gave a fantastic speech at the dedication of the building) has skilfully woven light (specifically the introduction of light), materials (glass, steel, stone, copper), angled planes and space to create a fantastic place.
In a horrible segue, I'll turn to the main impetus of the trip: a performance by the Frantics. Murgon invited me up to see the show together way back at the start of the year, and there I was, to see the show. And let me tell you, the Frantics haven't lost their touch at all. The show was fantastic, with some classic sketches (I can die happy now, having seen them live) amongst the new material. Equally broad was the style of humour, from topical to juxtaposition to situational to straight up absurdism and surprise. Lots of familiar characters made appearances, including one of which only Murrgon and I seem to know -- least we were the only ones to w00t -- and another who got enough cheers that he proclaimed in his unique accent "Wow, makes me wonder what would occur if I should make a third appearance!" (I'm sure I'll be corrected on the exact quote, as well as the quote used for the title of this post) While I seriously want the episodes of 4 on the Floor to be released to DVD I say... forget that, get these guys back on TV regularly with new shows/stuff!
After the show we got chance to get autographs, and Murgon and I had a good short talk with Rick Green on a somewhat personal level, which was a) awesome and b) was for very cool reasons, linkages and intersections of fate that occurred earlier in the year (and that I won't recount here).
A great trip!
Back I now am in the SF Bay area, and had a fantastic Tiger and Crane class 5h after landing that was an awesome workout and had my legs yelling "Ow, but YES!"
Last weekend I spent with a little visit to that city of excess: Las Vegas. 'Twould be my first visit there, with the plan to meet up with my parents and catch some of the shows. I figured I would be alternately architecturally amazed and horrified.
To sum it up in a word, BIG. The famous Las Vegas strip is all about big. The hotels are big (2000-7000 rooms). The casinos are big. The street is big. The billboards and video screens are big. The buffets are big. The statues are big. The budgets are big. The planned developments are huge. There really is nothing low-key or small on the strip (the costumes in the reviews and cabarets are likely small, but probably not considered low-key). It really was quite more than I expected in that way.
My parents and I, in the end, saw three shows over two days: Cirque Du Soleil's Ka, Blue Man Group, and Cirque Du Soleil's O. The Cirque shows really deserve their own entry, so they'll get that. Blue Man Group was a bit different than I was expecting, but was a very raucous, exciting and fun show with humour and much audience participation. The fact I like percussive music so much (hello Taiko!) of course helps.
I had plenty of walking time to explore, arriving Friday just before my parents went to see a show, and leaving Monday evening post-departure of my parents. I walked up and down (and back up and back down) the strip several times, exploring all the major spots, from the gondola-filled canal of the Shops of Venice to the amazing wine tower of Aureole, and everything in between. To try to cobble some semblance of order to commenting would be almost counter to the whole experience, nay, raison-d'etre of the strip. So I'll take the slot-machine approach and scatter:
(after the cut)
Friday night I walked down (south?) the strip to basically the end of the hotels. As I left New York New York and headed towards the Luxor one thing suddenly struck me: how desolate it suddenly became. Entering the Luxor was like entering a ghost town compared to everywhere else, there were few people to be seen. I remembered hearing much about the Luxor when it opened, it was the hot property, one of the new themed supertels, big hooplah. Now it's as quiet as can be, both outside and in (I swear it felt like there were only 5 of us on the inside of that pyramid). Spatially it's kind of interesting, a very large space inside, with the hallways to the rooms open to this slanting space -- too bad the materials and colours used for these balcony hallways was as uninspired as the Holiday Inn, which really killed the effect (very cheap, bland, beige, with just simple recesses where the doors to the room were). Blah.
Saw the lions at MGM grand a few times, who were always sleeping, and almost always on the same spot. Which was a good spot for us humans, for it was atop the glass hallway that bisected their cage, giving a unique view of lion face pressed onto glass and a good view of their paws. The white tiger at the Mirage was also often sleeping in the pitiful little enclosure they had for him, but once was lying up doing some human watching.
The fountains outside the Bellagio are insane. The smaller ones rotate and spin about, and the large ones have REACH. As in I swear 50'+ of shooting power. Impressive at night when lit from below, but equally impressive during the day even from afar as this mountain of water explodes upwards to reach several stories high and block part of your view of the hotel. All done to music. Niftycrazy.
I was surprised on the emphasis on and at the amount of shopping there was to be had along the strip. Nearly every hotel I entered had some shopping concourse. In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have been too surprised, given what I saw at the first themed resort I'd been to (Atlantis in the Bahamas), but there's thousands of square feet of high-end shopping on the Strip. From Caesars' to Paris to Aladdin and of course Venice most all followed the same basic idea: barrel vaulted, wide hallways with 'buildings' along the side for each shop. Ie, a series of stores with a theatre-front. Some were more effective than others, and some were quite well done, but after a while it became a bit old.
The shopping concourse at the Wynn, and the overall interior design of the Wynn, was quite different and cool. Rather than being hyper-real it went for a whimsical 'let's see where we can take it' approach. I've always been a fan of 'run with it'-type creative endeavours (if they don't run off a cliff and go boom). This was well done, with some impressive glasswork and planting, nice use of light, and with a shopping concourse that was curving, tall, wide, and looking all the like an Ironforge (from Wow) made by elves.
I managed to reach Aureole at the Mandalay Bay hotel, the restaurant I'd seen in an Architectural Record Magazine some years back, with the centrepiece being a glass wine tower -- some 14foot square and four stories tall, with a set of white, luminous bins within for storing wines. And the wine stewards going up and down on climbing harnesses to fetch the bottle of wine. Slick, modern, sharp, fun, and many pictures taken. The rest of the restaurants at the Mandalay were also nicely appointed, really. Didn't eat at any of them, but design-wise they were cool.
For the most part, the coolest interior design was at and for the restaurants and the nightclubs, interestingly enough. Some pretty wicked stuff there.
There's a new development going in called City Center. It's 68 acres of development (remember: BIG is the word) between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo, with five towers of hotels and residential by some pretty big name designers, including Lord Norman Foster, Caesar Pelli, Rafael Vinoly, and more, with Gensler in overall charge of coordination. The residential towers looked quite nifty, including a skewed/twisting pair done in green, and Foster's done in blue glass and with curvy ends. A project so big (especially adding in the casino, shopping (of course) and the convention centre (also of course) that it'll have its own people mover/monorail system to tie the two ends together. Want to buy a unit? 800k-1.2M to start for 1 bedrooms...
The roller coaster at NY NY looked kinda fun and had a nice reversal loop on it, but at 12.50 per ride I passed on it this time.
There were a few galleries amongst the shops, including one by Mangelsen and one by Peter Lik, of whom I'd never heard before but absolutely stunning and colourful images of landscapes. I was very impressed and would seriously consider some of them for my loft.
I didn't gamble, but I did walk through quite a few casinos. Hard to say which one was the 'best' of the bunch design-wise. I did like the height in Caesar's, and Paris IIRC also had good height and good design. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about Caesar's that really worked, though.
Ah, the Vegas sin city. Which mostly meant every 5' one would run into someone (and a very eclectic and odd mix of people types they were) handing out laminated cards for some strip club or another, clicking them and moving the cards back and forth. And then a few table/bar dancers to be seen in some of the bars, and something a bit unusual, a night club named Shadows where behind the bar were two large shadow screens, behind which were the dancers (so all you saw was, of course, the shadow).
And I think I've seen enough public drunkenness and stumbling about for a little while.
Amusing to be back in a place with smoking (and drinking on the street, but that's another amusement) allowed indoors. With all the dry air (it is a desert, after all), dust and smoke both my eyes and nose were in full revolt, the former by being angry and scratchy by the end of the day, the latter always in threat of exploding in a fountain of blood every time I blew my nose (instead I only got shotgun blood).
The food we had was all good. Woo!
I think I'll stop there. Flight home was uneventful, and spent Tuesday/Wednesday catching up at work!
Cirque reviews next...
Seems the SF Chronicle can't get enough of architects recently. A half decent article, nothing too out of the ordinary or under-the-covers, and does talk well about the hurdles along the way. They could be more careful on the wording; at least one person I've spoken to has taken the line "has one of the highest concentrations of architects - at some of the best salaries - in the country." to mean that the architects have some of the highest salaries in the country, rather than what is intended which is to say architects in the bay area are on average more highly paid than architects elsewhere in the country (which means we're still hurtin' in the housing market here).
Oh, heh, just noticed the article doesn't involve the editorial staff. That's interesting...
Are architects hot? Seen steps above the rest? Passionate? Are presented as having something others do not in their daily lives? The SF Chronicle takes a look at that today in this article, which is fun especially for the cover photo. The number of hollywood stars (and the number of lead roles) would seem to indicate it... though the idea that "Unlike a painter or poet -- to which the adjective "starving" is, for good reason, attached -- architects are assumed to have an earning capacity that would allow them to live large on the screen" is sadly perpetuated though the films (especially in north america where real estate agents often make more for selling the thing than the architect makes for designing, managing, overseeing, and combatting to get it built). Still, it's fun to be part of a 'glamorous' profession.
In another section of the paper today is a rather poignant quote and observation: "Somehow, in an age where technology has made everything instantaneously audible (and visible), we've turned ourselves into insulated eavesdroppers and avid voyeurs who've lost the form and content of genuine discourse. Instead of conversing, listening and considering the context, we're poised to pounce, pass judgment and pile on."
Things to consider.
Healthful architecture are good for business and learning and healing and well being... et al. "We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us" said Winston Churchill, and there's scientific evidence to prove it. Well designed, well (naturally) lit, open buildings equal health, longevity, performance, alertness, etc. And make you $ in the process. A box may cost less to build up-front, but since when was life a single-factor equation?
Jose pulled it off again. Not only did he get us tickets for Trilogy Tuesday back in 2003, he pounced on tickets to Howard Shore's LotR symphony as it came to San Francisco. Friday night, we went.
We planned our arrival into SF to miss afternoon traffic, which gave us a few hours to kill. Unsure exactly what we would do, we were provided with an answer the moment we stepped out of the parking garage under civic square. Directly in front of us, slashing across the skyline and catching our gaze immediately, was an angular screened form perched atop the roof of a tall building. "Is that the new Federal building, by Morphosis?" As if it could be any other -- it was indeed and we went to check it out, walking fully around the site. (Renderings 1 2 3)
And damn, quite the impressive building. One of the few fully poured-in-situ concrete high-rises I've seen in a long time, with lots of nifty details, the least of which is not the screen that commences sculpturally on the rooftop (what we saw from afar) and travels down the side of the building to ground level, to become a canopy of sorts. The screen material is of fine enough a mesh it reads as a translucent skin from afar, and the rhythm of the panels gives a subtle reading of masonry coursing. A diagonal slash cuts along the skin, leading to a large three- or four-story balcony/opening (complete with bridge) that will be eventually planted to become a garden in the midst of the building's form. The underside of any exposed concrete slab (such as at this garden) was cast in a wavy pattern, which was remarkable to see. The backside of the building is no less impressive, with vertical fins of frosted glass covering the whole, set apart from the glazing system about 24 inches by a sunshade/catwalk shelf. At the time we walked by the site, the sun was setting just right as to catch these blades, making them glow in an ethereal light, a stunning effect especially given the expanse of them and their rigorous repetitiveness. A few of these fins wrap around to the frontside as well. The garden/terrace also reads on the rear façade -- the fins continue uninterrupted but the face behind is pulled back to create a subtle reading. Jose wondered if they would/could illuminate the blades at night, something I think would rock, it could be done subtly to give quite the effect, albeit you'd blow your Title 24 energy regs to hell.
We took probably about 45 mins to walk around the building, architecturally geeking the whole way.
Next up we visited the Main Library, designed by James Freed (of Freed Cobb Pei architects). I had heard of some of the controversies about the building and wanted to go check it out (I had never been in). Freed spoke of using light extensively in the building, and to that end it certainly succeeded. Light wells and atria galore provided not only light but also some amazing cross-floor vistas and vignettes. Some of the highlights included a pair of barrel vault courses, made of unhidden corrugated metal with a ridge skylight, the upper-floor triangularly-shaped terrace (that oddly had almost no seating save a few benches -- the library wishes not people to use it?), an amazing periodical room that pierces into the central atrium, and the atrium itself that while round has the centre of the skylight oculus offset.
One of the more amazing details was the treatment of the walls that enclosed the reference sections, carried through on three floors. Cards from the card catalogues no longer in use were given to artists and 200 volunteer scribes, who, following the artists' guidelines, selected a cataloguing card and annotated it with either a quote from the book indicated or with a text or image from a different work on the same subject. Fifty thousand of these cards were ultimately used, creating a huge grid (a fresco in reverse as one website has put it) that were set into the wall and covered with a thin wash of plaster (just ever so slightly white-ed out). Rich, unique, and fascinating all at the same time.
We traced several paths through the building (quite possible given its intricate nature), pointing out details, materials, vistas. As for those controversies, I looked them up: lack of book/shelving space (despite being double the size of the old library), caused mainly due to books coming out of storage (placed so after earthquake) and the building being cut in size and various administrative directives, and lack of ease of finding things. The latter I can understand, I wasn't sure how to navigate around and what order they would use to distribute the books, but then I wasn't trying to find anything so I wasn't making any effort to learn the layout. The other thing Jose and I noticed was the many expanses of exposed flat surfaces that were unreachable and fully viewable. And not cleaned regularly enough for that latter fact.
The concert itself in the next post...
I'm getting to stretch my 3D fingers at work these days...
Over the last year or two, I found, modified and developed a 'fakeosity' solution that I've coupled with some simple textures to create some pretty sexy images. I call it the 'grey cardboard' method, for that is what it looks like. A single direct light fills the role of the sun, casting sharp anti-aliased ray-traced shadows. What makes it sing is the ring of spotlights at the ground level and the dome (of about 50ish) of spotlights that surround the model, each at .03 intensity and each casting ray-traced shadows. Put it together and you get some very nice and subtle light effects that, coupled with the simple materiality, really looks sharp and sometimes photograph-like. I've even managed to use it for indoor shots, cutting away extraneous walls to let the shading in.
It's a great method for the early design process to show volumetrics and form (much like a traditional cardboard model). Without textures it's easy to make it sing - once you try to make it look 'photoreal' (vs model-like) the amount necessary to make it really work (your mind is good at going 'that doesn't quite look right') really shoots up the roof. Plus, clients tend to think of things as more 'done' when looking at a realistic image.
With our current massive project we upgraded to 3DS Viz 2007, bringing along with it the MentalRay renderer. Eager, I popped it open and watched in amusement at the bucket rendering, watching the strange patterns it traced each square it rendered in turn, and thinking of how it would speed things up with a render farm (now that it isn't done on a frame-by-frame basis, but rather can distribute buckets). Then I turned on the Global Illumination and tried a few tests. And was rewarded with flat, boring models. Nothing looked smooth. I could continue to use my fakeosity, but what fun was that?
A conversation with madcoyote had him point me to some articles and a new material shader type for Ambient/Occlusion mapping that would 'fake' edge darkening. Thing was, it was nowhere to be found within Viz, and when I tried to bring in a Max drawing with the shader, Viz would crash. Nothing I could find on the web seemed to indicate that Viz's MentalRay was somehow crippled.
In the end, I found it by counter-intuitively checking the 'invalid' box in the shader selection dialogue. Don't ask me why - the shader even ended up being greyed out but I was still able to select it and include it. Woo! A bit of playing showed that even without a any light you could get a good fakeosity solution without the rendering time of 80 lights...
Thing was, we needed to animate this model, so a two-pass compositing solution via Photoshop wouldn't work. And the A/O material didn't handle transparency at all. Thus began a 3h hacking session, trying all sorts of different material and shader combinations that resulted in victory! The ability to have a material definition with transparency if desired, but still have the edge darkening of the A/O shader.
Since then I've been deep into the modeling so I haven't had a chance to do any production prints with the new shader, but every machine in our office is ready to be set up as a render node (Render Farm, woo!) and I'll get a chance to give it all a shot soon. Really soon - deadline is in two weeks. (this is why I've been so busy of late!)
Wild wild days. Much text after the cut!
What has really opened up for me over the past couple of weeks is being calm in the midst of all the plates I'm juggling. Neverminding Lofty, my course and all the other things I've got going on, but just at work I've got three deadline-intense things on my plate. Yet there is no upset, no panic, no franticness, no deer in headlights of what to do next. It's really quite an amazing and new space to be in... and I get to enjoy a rendering project at work, continue to work on the new labs and implement, create and train the ADT deployment. This works for me, I think I'll keep it.
Bagua continues to be a total learning experience. Saturday's workout was a good one, with a not-to-deadly run and stairs, and then a focus on all the short, explosive Shaolin sets (#4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Tong Bei and Emperor Tai) along with the last third of #1. Evan and I have now learned the first four lessons to Six Harmonies Spear (no injury this week!) getting in practice every night. We also did a second workout on Saturday, to practice some two-person Bagua exercises -- quite the full day of exercise.
Then, I indulged in a couple of hours of WoW in the evening and got Khyborr up to 29. Just another 14 levels to go 'till he's back where he was at the end of closed beta!
FoodFu: Picnic! was held on Sunday with the usual gang. It was a good smattering of fare, lots of varied things (fruit, cheeses, breads, meats, hummus, guacamole, southwestern meatless wraps), and I made a Raspberry/Blackberry Gratin (which is an odd name considering it had no cheese, but it was broiled lightly) that met with much praise and appreciation and tastiness. Then, tennis was played by some in the courts nearby. I jumped in, having a good time and not sucking too horribly (I have more fingers on my hand than the number of times I've played), though I had forgotten my sunscreen upon leaving the house and now have quite the red tinge to show for it.
Sunday evening's D&D game was a great conclusion to the sub-story arc as we awoke in the midst of a carnage. Aathome said I wouldn't like the 'hero' who was chosen to wield the sword, and he was right. We faced off against some lizard folk whom we had not seen in two years (their lands being way to the south), we paused, sized up the situation, learned of a language barrier, troops began walking towards two of our party members, actions were taken, combat was joined. We were seriously outclassed (especially given the quite powerful sword). One member fell, but was healed up to 0 (by the mount of the hero, no less), another of our members was attacked repeatedly and fell well beyond our help. A short engagement between myself and the hero led to me backing off, looking/glaring at him as if to reach an understanding. He understood, for he went after Tito, testing him with his smite (and the blunt of his blade) to discover that Tito's aura of evil was just the taint of his fiendish transformation, not of his character.
With that the battle ended. A spell of comprehend languages allowed the hero to speak to us, and with that we learned the carnage around us was caused by an oath/law of their land that for every fallen of their number they extract a price of two upon the offender's race. (I really don't like him!) Further, the mage in our party, who had been slain, radiated enough evil to likely be seen from the high heavens. Quickly I realized it was the wraps he was carrying that he had taken from the fallen Archon. I said this to the hero, who cared not much a whit. What he did care for was that we had killed one of his troops, and a debt had now been incurred. The judgment was to take Tito's life as he was the 'transgressor', unless another would take his place. To which I immediately stepped forward.
And was struck down on the spot. The lizard folk turned and left.
Alexia turned to heal me and was rewarded with an electric shock. Tito was grief-stricken -- he and I were the last of the original band to leave the caulderra (where the campaign began). As Gravax went to check the other bodies, both I and our other dead party member rose into the air on crackles of energy, to be struck by lightning from above. With that, I awoke from the dead for the second time that day. I had taken oath to protect Tito so many moons ago -- the oath fulfilled Aathome brought me back, and once again I was able to commune with the divine (read: my paladin powers are functioning once more).
The rest of the evening was taken by our task to aid the island sisters recover and to destroy the evil magic item (over the protests of the once-again alive mage). The GM had little to do as for an hour+ we self-generated content. All in all, a great evening with some good roleplaying by all.
Great stuff ahead this week, with Wednesday being the current highlight with a special evening led by the most loving, direct and generous person I have ever met. I invite everyone in my life to come Wednesday night to think, to be moved, to see what's possible.
Forgot to mention! In other combat news, I passed my fourth Architectural Registration Exam. w00t! So that's LF, GS, SD and CDs out of the way. Next up: Building Planning (BP), one of the graphic divisions.
QotW:
Kannik: how the mighty have fallen
Murrgon: They're not mighty, just "super sized" :P
Wow, crazy. Been quite the while! The Lynx update in brief: odd spaces.
It's all after the cut...
Sifu Lam is away this month at the kwoon, so it has been a month of review and practice. I've been leading classes on the tues/thurs class nights, insofar as calling out the basic eight palm routine, then creating with the class what we'll work on for the rest of the night and guiding from there. We've done nights of going slow (and by slow I mean molasses in January slow, it's WAY harder than one would think), doing some two-person drills, some bagwork, and random/quick palm changes. Last class we paused to watch some DVD/VCD/AVIs of other Bagua masters. Sifu had suggested we do so to observe differences in styles, to see what they were doing, and compare to the basic Bagua fundamentals. Just another week before we start onto the next class (application) which will be interesting -- even after five months I feel like I'm only scratching my understanding of Bagua, which is probably an accurate assessment. Easy to learn, difficult to master.
Otherwise, Kung Fu has been somewhat binary (one of those odd spaces) for me, with great nights/weekends followed by nights of low energy and poor performance. I started to run the stairs again, with the first week being not too deadly if not particularly fast, the second weekend being pretty brutal. I also (finally!) got to start up Iron Palm for the year, and in three weeks I'm starting back on the steel without too much problem, which has me happy. Very late start this year, given all the rain.
Amazingly we haven't gamed since the Bloodstone at the start of the month -- various vacations have put a crimp on those plans. I've also only played another smattering of WoW during the time. Did play a game of Settlers of Catan; it was a fine game though I do prefer Carcassonne. The Heavy Gear expansion I did the graphic work for was duly posted to the DP9 website.
I scheduled my latest Architectural Registration Exam (on Contract Documents) and wrote it this past Monday. It was very refreshing, being who I am now, to be calm and composed over it and over my uncertainty about how I fared. A lot to know in that exam about drawings, about law and about contracts and my sense is I could have spent more time reviewing all the material. There were a few questions I hadn't heard material about, a few questions that were in non-related areas but I could've known the answers, and some that were tricky. And some I knew dead-on, of course. I should know in about four weeks if I have a P or X.
There's also been much friend visiting and some visiting friends. Lofty continues albeit somewhat slowly. Did some property scouting both near and afar (well, Vallejo far), had one meeting with a planning official and one coming up with a council member, starting to get some harder numbers on construction, looking into funding.
Really, the last few weeks have been pretty non-stop with my fingers in many pies. I'm amazed how many pies sometimes, and how well they're turning out. Also been a time of some self-discovery and exploration and a lot of observation/noticing, which accounts for much of the odd spaces. I'm definitively getting what I signed up for!
Apparently they're building a new museum at Tulum (Maya site on the eastern edge of the Yucatan peninsula), and equally apparently they held a competition for the design. 5NOVE/Alessandro Console won, and it's a pretty nifty underground design with sculptural forms above that engage the landscape and bring light below. Could be nifty indeed... see it here.
An interesting little (bad pun) read about the tiny island of Tikopia, that has been inhabited for 3000 years. Gorgeous in its own right, but its history and its 'choice' is the more facinating part. Read about Tikopia here.
A San Jose developer is proposing to redevelop land currently taken by a GE plant.
55 acres. 646,000 sq feet. That's IT.
A whopping 25% land coverage, single-story retail, no residential, and the remainder, yes 75% of this site, will be parking. PARKING.
Say what you will of the design or authenticity of Santana Row, it has residential, parking garages, and a delicious plethora of inhabitable streetscape vs the typical wasteland. Nevermind that the GE plant could very well be a fantastic adaptive re-use opportunity, but to create such a low density for yet-another-mall (YAM) is a waste and borders on the shameful in my book.
(*Adaptive reuse and residential being brownfield dependent, of course, though cleanup options could exist)
As in snow. Drove over to Santa Cruz on Sunday morning, and therefore got a taste of snow here in the bay area as we crested the hill, complete with police escort. The trees were delightfully dusted with it, and the novelty of snow this close by made it very fun. For serious snow, I'm heading up to Tahoe this coming weekend where I'll be treated to no less than 60" of fresh powder. MmmmMMmMMMmmmmm....
The purpose of the trip to Santa Cruz was a meeting to further the LoftyOne project; things are moving along. Saturday night saw our most recent FoodFu. The event looked a bit in jeopardy, due to schedules, illnesses, and etc; in a flash of brilliance I re-christened the event as FoodFu Prepackaged/Premade (FoodFu Pre!), and the event was saved, and much tasty food from TJs shared, along with some local small-restaurant tastiness. A joyful lazy extended dinner, with meandering conversation and tied together with several teas. As a bonus, a former Wing Lam KFite was visiting and joined us, so it was an extended KF/FF family eve. Later, a few of us watched the film Ping Pong, amusingly kung fuish and an interesting journey into several themes of competition, satisfaction, happiness, friendship, et al. Also some rather great and understated graphics and effects to tie it all together.
Sunday night gaming was cool, as we were greeted with a pirate ship laid out on the map for the start of our adventure (we had purchased a ship the previous session). Our journey is an important one for my character, who's ties to his deity was severed (disappeared? Blocked? Something else?) and who is following the words of a fortune teller: "They will not be able to help you, but you must go see the Sisters of the Green Isles." We ended having left our bodies and entered the land of the dead -- we're not dead, but we could end up that way if we're not careful. This, by the way, is a surprise to us, we had no idea we'd end up there when we undertook this path, though warned by the Sisters it would be a dangerous one. A couple of weeks of Eberron are next, followed by two of my game before we return to continue this journey.
On the whole I've definitively taken on many things right now, so I'm quite the busy cat. Updates may be a bit more sporadic in the coming weeks, but I'm not abandoning the space of greater conversation. I'll still be here to post and to spur it on.
An interesting new article from the L.A. Times (with a link to a video also in the article, albeit not the greatest video) that speaks about new 'loft' trends: "They started out as bohemian art spaces in low-rent places. Now they're crafty conversions and bold new construction -- and they aren't cheap anymore."
The article explores the realm of Loft, demi-lofts, new-construction lofts and loft homes, wrapped up in a dialogue of the recent popularity of lofts and the way many a developer or agent will plaster the loft label to just about any space. The first part of the article I really got into -- what they're calling lofts these days is almost 'criminal'.
Let me take a step out of the main conversation for a minute. For me, a Loft must have an adaptive-reuse component. If it's a ground-up, then I don't consider it a loft. But I also get that many may consider the essence of a loft space -- open, wall-less, exposed structure, light, etc -- to be the defining factor of a lofty space, whether it's new or old construction. Informal poll time: which of these two (or a third option) do you find the most important factor?
In many ways, I reccognize it's semantics; words do carry strength and meaning, though, so I find it trancends a simple dictionary game. Witness the press-on-architecture/loft earlier discussed. At what point does the name become but something to clothe yourself in? Would it behoove us to draw up some terms to draw the distinctions? At one end would be the ultimate in strict tradition invoked, wherein if the loft comes with anything more than a plubming lead and an electrical lead, it is no longer a loft. In the middle, where I lay, Loft would invoke an image of open living in a converted building. The tail end would be anything that had big windows, be it new or old, one or many rooms. Is the public being confused through the loose definitions?
A good read.
WOW: http://www.legoland.bubm.de/allianz.htm. Amazingly detailed, with a wicked cutaway section, and it GLOWS AT NIGHT. That's right on.
Also, we got snow on the hills here again! One of our principals took a picture outside of his house, looks like a good 2 cm of the stuff, woo! And I have to drive over the hills this sunday, maybe I'll get a chance to see some of it...
Two links for you today.
The first is from a new hotel in Madrid, Spain. The shell/building is designed by Jean Nouvell, while each of the 12 floors within is designed by a different architect, including Nouvell along with Isozaki, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, and more. For photographs of the lobby, you can see them here ; check back in a couple of days for images of the rooms or go directly to here.
The next link is from Koolhouse's OEM studio, a video showing their new building. Consider it an Architecture Music Video. Interestingly, this is for a building in Kentucky. See it here. (Humour: a friend writes "I especially like the black bars over the OMA employees' eyes - to protect the overworked and underpaid.")
Aw heck, THREE architecture links! Constructed topography meets inhabitation -- in a fashion -- here.
A 'real post' coming soon, but until then, this is very very very very very cool:
http://archidose.blogspot.com/2006/01/half-dose-21-schaustall.html
I'll take it!
See it to believe it: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/gmc_pad_the_mob.php. GMC PAD- The Mobile Loft.
Went to a design session for a project we're doing at Stanford, in conjunction with the building architects, there were between three to five of us in the room, and it was a hell of a lot of fun as we traded ideas, figured things out, drew on the plans... totally rocks when that happens.
Awesome, a first-ever analysis of green roofs for cold weather. Short answer: they work!
WOW. That's something... http://www.amyhughes.org/lego/church/photosfirst.html. 18 months, 75000+ bricks, 7x5.5 feet in size, 1300+ capacity... and a pipe organ!
As I posted before, I started a community project titled LoftyHeights.org
I am now taking that to the next level. In October, I began a project that follows the LoftyHeights ideals. I have started a blog for it, as I wish to chronicle the journey as a means of communication, education, interest and for my own remembrance. You can find it here: LoftyOne.
As the project progresses, I will keep it full of what I'm discovering, pictures of the job, resources needed, and the like. Welcome aboard.
... one is in a beautiful space with beautiful light and enveloped in pipe organ music has got to be a good day.
A 747 is recycled into cool, ecological architecture:
Now THIS is interesting. Two of these would power my whole project!
Wow, basically November already. TWO years of my blog have now elapsed. Ca-razy!
A fairly low-key weekend was had. After a great visit, I drove my parents to the airport early Saturday morning, returned home to nap and head to practice. I didn't do the stairs, but did the main run almost double (the way the route worked out), then did the Shaolin stairmaster of the sets in order (of the ones I know), plus the two sets from shaolin, punctuated by straight sword, cane and DHS. We're but a few moves into the set, and it's already a very good challenge in some coordinated spinning/hooking/curling maneuvers that look anything but coordinated or smooth right now. A good workout, good lunch then... I took a different tact that day and kicked back, set up an athmosphere in the appartment and relaxed for the rest of the day. Woo!
Sunday I caught up with some studying, maintenance et al, and also headed over to Wendy2's place where I querried her about some things to expect for the upcoming Firefly LARP I'll be joining. We also worked our magic and developed a good chunk of my character's background, and I finished choosing stats/skills/etc. Besides the char sheet, I have a bunch of querries for the GMs and have to pin down some solid info on the 'verse...
Of course, there was all the info that came out of BlizzCon this weekend, about WoW and the Burning Crusade expansion pack. I'm still waiting for patch 1.9 (paladin revamp, baby! Khyborr will be back!) but even without the expansion there's nice stuff a-coming -- linked auction houses, weather effects, that sort of thing. My interest in the expansion is there, but I'll wait to see what the new alliance race is before I go ape or just woo about it.
But what would a post be without some architecture. For one, I link to you Foster's new Faculty of Pharmacy at UoT, a building I wouldn't immediatly associate with Foster's name or feel. Also, some very attractive looking prefab by Marmol Radziner, available now, made in their own factories, with renewable and enviro-friendly materials. Wowza!
Not sure if this is a real study or not...
Those who play BattleTech will read the title and think, reflexively, Double Heat Sinks!
However, I refer to Double Hook Swords, which is the set Sifu started to teach us last week, another of my "hey, I bought this weapon in China... can we learn that next?" coups. This will be my second double set -- though in all honesty the double dagger is not a very difficult double set, meaning that this one will really kick my butt. Generally DHS are taught after double broadswords, so I'll have a lot of spinning and groundwork stuff to catch up on when we reach it, neverminding general coordination of the left and right hands.
I chose to forgo falling/throwing practice on saturday at KF in the hopes of giving my back/shoulders time to get used to being re-set after, well, having been re-set by Dr Fuji friday morning. The strategy seems to have worked, and it gave me some time to do some extra sets, meaning I did the run, later cane and #3 three times each, some DHS, #6, #7, #5, Tong Bei Quan and Emperor's Boxing -- a good gaggle of sets and a good workout. I'll catch up with the throwing this week with Evan. And speaking of he, we went to his place after class and spent most of the afternoon with wood, tape and tennis handgrips to wrap up and create good handgrips for the often-mentioned DHSs. (The only boo on this whole thing is that the DHS I bought are, for lack of a better term, crap too-thin-at-end things)
Saturday night saw the arrival of my parents down to visit, and sunday we trucked down to Monterey to the Aquarium and some sight seeing. I'd never been to the Aquarium, and it is quite an interesting building, with some on-site building and materials reused, the rest is poured-in-situ concrete, steel and glass. A display near the entrance chronicles the site's former use as a sardine canning factory (of which contributed to the depletion of the sardine stocks in the bay). Overall, the exhibits are well done, with a moderate focus on local/nearby marine biology. Certainly for me the highlight were the sea otters; I was more partial to river otters but after seeing them swim about amazingly gracefully and all their playfulness, I think I'm a bit more equitable in my like for otters.
For dinner we ended up in Carmel-by-the-sea, where I had the most fantastic braised rabbit dish. The rabbit was crazily tender and tasty, the red cabbage and mango salsa accompaniment was a great counterpoint, and to top it off it a triangle of excellent polenta really rounded it out nicely. Given that the rustic Italian bread was some of the best bread I've eaten in a long time, a very fine dinner.
For Immediate Release
Mountain View, CA -- LoftyHeights.org has gotten it's first notice in the press. I invite you to head over to the Mountain View Voice to read the article on LoftyHeights' mission and its founder, Oliver Bollmann. [LINK]
And this makes it one post a day this week. Wow.
Solar power for your dorm/residence room? Sure! http://www.uvm.edu/~rnizlek/
Six years ago, when I moved to the Bay area, I gave up ever being able to own a home. It just wasn't going to happen on an architect's salary. Earlier this year, I said "hey wait a minute. Oliver, you're an architect. You have an interest in adaptive reuse. Let's see what's possible."
So, I have begun LoftyHeights.org. What we're about is creating the environment for adaptive reuse and green building practices to be alive and present in the SF Bay area. I invite everyone to come visit the site, share it, and contribute to it! With the content management system in place, it's all set for collaboration. I've even had my first comment posted today by a city official(!).
This project is huge for me. Come see what it's all about.
http://www.renewnyc.com/plan_des_dev/wtc_site/new_design_plans/freedom_tower/freedom_tower_elements.asp
Just found some numbers about fire: "burning wood for 9 hours in a conventional fireplace pollutes as much (mostly particulate matter) as driving an average car for over 20,000 kilometers." While wood is a renewable resource (if managed/grown properly), and the CO2 may end up being a wash (ditto), the particulate matter is what is at issue here WRT pollution. But there are options for the woodburning crowd: the Topolino, with nearly complete combustion and almost no ashes. Vermont Castings also makes some high-efficiency stoves that look, shall we say, more traditional.
Those who have hung around me long enough to learn my architectural fetishes know that I really do not like gas fireplaces. That 'real' fireplaces are inefficient I know, and that they are generators of particulate matter I also know, but despite the 'better emissions' of a gas fireplace there's something wrong to me about flicking a switch to light a fire, pretending it's a real fireplace with faux logs. And natural gas exploitation isn't exactly enviro-friendly either by a long shot.
Some friends of mine have a nice pellet fireplace that produces warmth and little emissions. The flame is, however, smallish and the sound of the fan somewhat distracting.
So it is with great excitement that I discovered these that look cool, nifty and awesome, and don't require any fakery (only the aust/new zeland site works, and they have a huge gallery there). The fuel is grown, could be made by waste products, and burns cleanly, with a nice flame, little enough emissions to not even need a flue, is created with a small unit and leaves open many design options.
I think I just found myself a new whack of ideas.
Over the past couple of weekends, a new house has been on display in the SF Bay Area, in collaboration with the infamous Sunset Magazine. Titled the "Breezehouse", its lines are modern, its interior flooded with light, and its configuration truly Californian with a central 'breezeway' that can be fully opened to the outdoors.
Have a quick look here.
But the outsdanding feature on this house is the fact it was built in BC. Or, rather, that it is a prefab home. The owner buys the land, sets the foundation and stubs the utilities. The rest is dropped in by crane and in less than a week you're moving into an architect-designed slick modern home at per sq/ft cost that'll make some heads turn. Prefabbing also has the advantage of making better use of materials, higher possibility for quality (ie factory conditions) and less energy usage (even after trucking it in). Grabbing their multi-page pdf gives more info, but also shows the future potential for a varied number of configs.
Something interesting is indeed blowing in.
Very cool to hear about/see -- would've gone had I been nearby and known.
Lunch on Tuesday was an interesting affair as we all crammed into our conference room to munch Amici's pizza and watch a film, a film that managed to evoke strings from a trip I had taken in second year university.
The film was My Architect: A Son's Journey (see here and here). Nathaniel Kahn searches to reconnect with a father he never really knew (he was 11 when Louis Kahn died, and was one of the two children born outside of Kahn's marriage). Kahn's seminal works only appeared in his 50s, leaving the world with only a few examples of his genius, though as I.M. Pei put it "It's quality, not quantity, that matters."
The film was interesting because it had basically three themes wrapped up into one: an exploration of Kahn's buildings, an investigation of Kahn's life, and Nathaniel's searching for his father through his father's works, his father's life, his memory and those who knew his father. It is not an enviable task to weave together, and at first I thought the film was a bit haphazard despite the loose organization around a geographic journey to seek the man and the buildings. But I later came to appreciate it, understanding that this WAS a journey for Nathaniel, this was how it unfolded for him. As he had to piece it together, so too do we as we watch the film.
And what a film it is. Nathaniel may not be an architect, but he is an artist with his filming of his father's buildings. He hovers, at times with time lapse, delivering some of the best capturing of space and light I have seen of an architectural documentary. The buildings are annotated by interviews with people involved I their construction, their occupants, old radio clips, old footage of Kahn himself. Yet they manage to stand as a character on their own as well, with a presence and brilliance all their own, a testament to the architecture.
As the architecture unfolds, so too does the veil of Kahn. I had not known he had three 'families', but he did. The interviews with contractors, planners, his contemporaries, co-workers, clients and, ultimately, with Nathaniel's half-siblings, half-relatives and with his mother herself range from the comical, to the harsh to the loving. Throughout, you really get that Nathaniel is wanting to discover who his father really was, and whether the stories he had told himself those past 25 years were myth or an honest portrait. He is doubting, he is unsure, he is hungry to discover. As are we; Louis Kahn produced some very significant buildings, yet we are affronted from the very premise of the film that he possessed what may be considered moral and social foibles.
Cumulatively, these three levels of exploration intertwine and produce a portrait of Kahn unlike any anywhere else, an honest portrait that leaves us on our own. Nathaniel, at the end of the documentary, has come to his own resolution, but for the viewers, we must come to our own resolutions.
For me, the film brushed up against the closest experience I had to meeting Louis Kahn. In second year, a bunch of us from studio undertook a trip that brought us into Pennsylvania for an architecture pilgrimage. There we saw two Kahn buildings. While the first, the Richards Medical Centre, was the larger it was the second, a house, that had the most impact on me, for we were lucky not only to see it but at the invitation of the original owners of the house.
From the outside, you may never have guessed it was a Kahn design, compared to his later works. Where the Richards Centre is big and bold, this house was intimate and understated. Yet with exploration one could see the touches that pointed to the Kahn sensitivities that remained at his core. Indeed all his great works were bold yet with intimacy within, playing with light and with the compression and expansion of space.
Later, when I have retrieved my photos from home I will post them here, but for now, I shall give a quick sense of the building. From the entrance, to the left were the private areas of the house, delicate in scale and with intimate detail. To the right was the main public area, a space soaring to double height. Black slate floors (with radiant heating) and natural wood was the dominant palette. Light was brought in through strategic windows, and from upon high in large main room. One wall of the room was angled, and two-thirds of its lower half could be raised to directly connect the room to the outdoors.
Besides the fantastic kindness of allowing 30-odd architecture students to tromp through their house, the owners spoke warmly about Kahn and their experience working with him. There were the (now) laughing retellings of how they had butt heads on certain placement or details, but what I remember was on the whole they remembered his hard work, his excitement and his desire to create something special for them.
To see and watch these same reactions and recollections in the film brought this all home for me. Many spoke lovingly about his buildings, and lovingly about his passion for creating spaces that enriched the clients and the users.
Not all his buildings were totally successful, and the number of cancelled and unbuilt projects far outrank those that were built. But his passion remained (in more ways than one) and there is real poetry that lives in his great buildings. I have a great urge to visit more of them.
Holy grails of construction:
Also, scuba diving and eco-friendly hotels, in Ontario? It's true!
DWR (Design Within Reach) is a local store, who send glossy catalogues to me every quarter, chock full of modern design (mostly) goodness.
Thing is, they have a VERY different idea of the interpretation of "Within Reach" than I do.
So it is with great pleasure that I found this site today: DWOR.
And I don't mean the death flu, which seems to have hit a few more people at work. What I mean is the plague now known as McLofts -- I spoke about them here and here, now there's an article on Slate about it. All I can do is shake my head, not sure what's making it hurt more, the flu, or this "trend".
I am a big proponent of 'adaptive reuse'. Slash/Burn and build is not something to aspire to. That being said, grafting onto existing buildings can be the most amazing exercise in frustration, pain, and many trips to field verify. It wouldn't be so hard if builders (and the clients) actually had REAL drawings, shall I say ACCURATE drawings of the buildings, or if the buildings hadn't been added to over many years, sometimes without permits, in a hodgepodge way. Or if columns actually lined up over each other. Or other similar things. And I'll continue to advocate for reuse. But right now, this building, which IS going away in 3 years anyway, could use a good wiping out and let's go for ground up!
(It's not like the building is much material at any rate -- a butler-style prefab mostly. That steel could probably easily be recycled)
Last night I ran class, and in honour of the New Year of the Rooster, I ran a single-leg and bouncy (?) intensive class. Felt a bit rusty, but felt good. Didn't feel so good afterwards, I don't think I'm over my cold yet. And my ankle/leg, ah, pain, I know you too well.
I have received... my new phone. And wow, is this thing small. If I hold it next to my current phone folded up, it's maybe actually bit longer, a bit thinner, and a bit narrower (though egg shaped), but it just feels really really tiny. Its charging right now, so I haven't tried it out yet, but woo, at least I have it. While this one also has a retractable antenna, it fully, completely and entirely sits inside the phone with no protruding bits, so hopefully the days of broken antennas are over. Of course, silly thing doesn't come with a belt clip or nothing, so I will probably have to spend to get one of those.
Don't you just hate it when you know you had stuff to say and share but now can't remember what the smeg it was?
So, some things.
You can compare apples to oranges.
Libeskind to design again in Toronto.
Weekend passed relatively well, though both games suffered a bit of a late start. Saturday practice was fine (new pants, I still hear thee), and I even got the first (two, actually) 'that looked/was good' I think I've gotten in ages. Also torqued the hell out of my ankle some more, so looks like that'll be on the DL for another X months. Studied a bunch, and found myself borking some questions I was doing for a second or third time, overcomplicating them -- need to step back a bit and realize to take them for what they are.
But of most import is that after some fantastico work by Mike, comments have been turned on anew. I await your pent-up flood!
With the Smithsonian's NMAI now open, I wonder how long it will be before american tourists/etc see the Canadian Museum of Civilization and say "Bah, they copied us!"?
Of big Architectural publications in North America, there are two: Architectural Record, and Architecture (formerly Progressive Architecture, IIRC, or at least continues the P/A awards). I manage to aquire both (see my previous post about magazines) through work and am thus filled with a plethora of architectural reading. Quite often both magazines will cover the same project within an issue or two of each other -- how each one treats the projects can be revealing and interesting.
Especially when the building receives very different responses. One such project is the new addition to the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto (click to see image of the project). Toronto, finally, is starting to have some cool projects done once again. For those who have been to downtown Toronto, one can recognize that nestled within the generic.skyscrapers there are actually some pretty cool and avant-guarde buildings... that had all been completed many years ago. The symphony turned down a Ghery design due to cost and ended up with a bland building that cost just as much (fools!) but lately he's been hired along with several other prominant architects for some well-seen projects. Which brings me to the OCAD addition, or, more specifically, the difference in coverage of this project.
To be fair, Arch Record's article was much shorter in length than the one in Archit, but I don't think that can excuse the 100% lack of critical-ness. To say an article must include faults is not what I aim for, but this is a project where the faults are somewhat obvious, failures of design, and thus curiously absent from Arch Record's article.
Quoting Architecture (penned by Beth Kapusta):
The novelty of OCAD's overarching sculptural idea fades quickly as the building strugles--and ultimatly fails--to resolve itself on the interior. Inside the addition, there is virtually no sense of being in a floating volume high above the city; it feels like being in any old office tower, albeit with some colourfully framed, randomly placed windows. Any sense of procession is denied, because acces ... is through a spiritless bank of elevators (The red tube connecting old to new is solely for emergency egress).
I'd say my thoughts probably mimic to an extent the overview of the Archit article: essentially, acceptable concept, poor execution. As someone who designs from the inside-out, I find it just that much harder to take. The number of missed opportunities here is astounding -- natch, I understand budgetary concerns, I understand code issues, and I don't know all that went on during the whole process. But to look at the interior spaces just makes me go ?? and wonder how it ended up as it did.
Whether one likes the project as a whole, in its context (Centre Pompidou anyone?) is one thing; having the addition end up being banal within is a shame.
While much of what the author does on their site is irreverent, Monkey Sphere is an interesting essay. Fear not, for it is still quite written in a humourous style, and still contains satire, irony and reverse psychology, but the basic premise and the points argued I think hold some weight. Mike pointed us to it on the weekend, now I point it to you (and probably back to him, if he reads this page).
Tiff pointed out two other good sites: The Fool's World Map, and the Terra Nova Blog. The former is an excellent harnessing of the collective internet 'intelligence', the latter contains links to various essays and thoughts on MMORPGs in all directions, including their development, style, impact, etc.
More on the environment, our place in the universe, Art Renewal Centre, The Dwell Home, and a very tasty recepie for a type of pesto:
1 cup dry roasted cashews
1 cup fresh basil
2-4 cloves of garlic
Olive oil
Two heaping spoons of fresh grated parmisan
Food processor, chop nuts. Add garlic. Add basil -- as the material starts to bind, add olive oil as necessary. Add salt/pepper if desired, add cheese as last step, adding more olive oil if necessary.
Now this is quite amusing... Burning Man, the Basics of City, and You (title mine).
I cannot hide it. I am a bit of a magazine junkie. It comes part and parcel with being such a knowledge hound; magazines often simply provide an easy fix. That being said, I do remain a somewhat discriminating magazine reader -- there needs to be quality information or exploration. I don't read everything that comes my way (that's what the 'net is for - well, ok, not really).
Right now I'm collecting or receiving magazines on computer game development, digital art and graphics, digital video, some National Geographic, infotechgeek and, of course, architecture and society. Architectural Record, CA and Architecture are the usual core suspects, but supplemented with Dwell. This latter is often very keen, though I do really need to write them a letter to discuss one or two issues (like their aversion to floor plans).
But today I want to talk about Metropolis.
I have glanced through Metropolis a few times, but only recently have I come to discover that there seems to be some really good calibre articles hiding within. I referenced one earlier already, but this month's provides a couple more, including the typical 'here's a design'-type article about a house up near Marin County (the crux of this one is its difficult site including a slope and extreme proximity to a freeway). But what really caught my attention (and my praise) is this article, on a sort-of award for innovative design ideas. Launched by the magazine and actually backed with $$ to pursue the building and/or further exploration of the award winners, this is a pretty keen concept and much kudos for the dollar award to take it beyond competition.
First winner up (they are having multiple) is also a concept that is totally enshrined in a key value of mine: Adaptive Reuse. More than just a archi-speak, this idea of re-inhabitation and urban re-use (rather than sprawl) is a big thing on its own, but to use the detritus from another project and to transform it into something radical and new is even more noteworthy (and worthy of praise).
Taking the now-redundant elevated roadway (and its structure) from Boston's Big Dig, the architects for the project saw in the castoffs a perfect long-span, wide bay structure with the capacity for great loads. Combine and erect together in new ways and you have a curvaceous housing development with high floor-to-ceiling space, cantilevers, total internal bay freedom and enough load capacity for all the pianos, libraries and weight rooms in the world, not to mention a full earth-depth park, pools and the like on the roadway-come-roof. A curtain wall encloses the whole thing, and unless one knew, one would be hard pressed on first glance to think 'Gardner Expressway'.
Obviously, the foundations and the curtain walls are not already there, so the project isn't uber-cheap, but with the structure already taken care of it's a long-way there already (not to mention perfect for loft-type spaces w/o the kitch!). Less landfill, more interesting spaces to live in. Mmmmmm.
Check it out. Myself I'm going to keep checking out Metropolis for articles like these. They may not be on how to solve all the world's problems, but little steps that add to bigger leaps.
"Architecture is art produced on the grandest possible canvas." -- Governor General Adrienne Clarkson
Actually, the title is a bit misleading, for the main topic of this post is to speak about a lecture I went to last night; this lecture was, however, punctuated by several technical glitches including the afore-mentioned powerpoint which decided to not only be its usual slow bloaty self, but also to force a machine with nothing else running to puke and bemoan its lack of virtual memory, right in the middle of the presentation.
Remember kids, powerpoint is a fat and lazy application that is also ugly, and can reduce your presentations to brain-dead status. At least the show last night was all pictures and not bullet points (ie, replacing the very traditional and nearly ubiquitous slide projector), but in that case... why not just show the images with something small and quick like Irfanview?
At any rate...
Last night I went to see a lecture given by James Polshek, of Polshek Partnership Architects. He's done a lot of interesting work and some pretty nifty designs over the years. This was the first architecture lecture I've attended since last year, when I went to see a presentation by Patkau architects. While there is always a theme to the yearly lecture series at Stanford (who has no scholastic architecture faculty, this is run by the 'building services' architecture department), this was the first one that was in effect a transcription of the theme. Taking Stanford's 'A Decade of Change: Campus Planning and Design' topic, Polshek showed us projects on which he had worked at various campuses around the USA, taking time to give a bit of history, some background to his project, problems on the campus, and sometimes some rather biting criticism. It wasn't really a 'show and tell' of his work, as archi lectures tend to be, but nor was a lecture in the more usual sense of the word. It was more of a survey of conditions and potential solutions that exist at various campuses.
He was great. With humour and decorum (despite the technical difficulties) he led us through the different schools, including Columbia University where he had been Dean of Architecture (and advisor to the president on building, a condition he imposed before taking the deanship as he felt Columbia had many problems) and where I had done work during the Studio '95 project with Carleton (the Harlem project, for those who remember). His final slides were on his work at Stanford, an addition to an art gallery. Most of his work was additions or modifications to existing buildings, and his "big thing" seemed to be circulation through the building for the public/students (ie, using the building as a connecting link between different parts of the campus) as well as their external visage vis-à-vis the public face of the university as well as their relation to existing structures (both in a formal sense and in a contextual sense).
Overall, it was lighthearted and fun, and different. It wasn't a thorough discourse or intellectually overbearing, nor an expose of the architect's work. While those two can both be desirable, this held its own and left one to glean what they may from the campus exposé.
On another amusing note, while walking to the theatre I did a small double-take. Many buildings at Stanford are done in a 'rough face stone block'. Lo and behold, there's someone doing a traverse across the face of the building. Heh. Judging by the amount of chalk along the rock edges, I'm guessing he was not the only one to use that facade for practice. Either that, or he practices quite often.
As this excerpt from Metropolis Magazine states, this is not surprising. But for me, this is sick, wrong, silly, and I find even more insulting than most subdivisions. It's no secret to most that I am enamoured with lofts and with the idea of adaptive re-use, so obviously I have some bias when it comes to something like this. But, geez....
(For images, either before reading the extended entry or during, you can see this link)
[begin quoted material -- written by Karrie Jacobs]
In reality, I am the uncool hunter. My talent is discovering the places where hipness goes to die. I drive around the country and stumble on phenomena that make me realize that something I once valued is about to be eaten alive by mindless commerce.
...
Several months ago, I found myself in Frederick, Colorado, one of those featureless expanses of dust that fills with tract houses simply because -- traffic permitting -- it's a 30-minute drive to Denver. There I came face to face with the demise of the loft as a meaningful cultural icon. Not that I was surprised. The commercialization of the loft, the abandoned warehouses and factories that afforded artists dirt-cheap square footage, perfect for the painting of epic canvases -- that happened a long time ago. Old industrial buildings became prime real estate. Then developers in cities without a large enough inventory of mills and plants ripe for conversion -- Houston for example -- began building "loft" complexes from scratch, complete with exposed ducts and heroic girders. But at least these industrially inspired buildings were true to the urban nature of more authentic lofts.
Three years ago I started seeing lofts as the contemporary answer to the ranch house. It seemed that the popularity of the ranch house in the 1950s and '60s suggested a nostalgia for a lost lifestyle, a longing for the atavistic cowboy. The loft is also about nostalgia: it is a monument to the disappearance of industry.
...
I got my answer last summer, when I wound up in Frederick, drawn there by an ad I saw in a glossy real estate advertising magazine called Homes and Land of Boulder County. The developer, Cornerstone Homes, had several pages promoting Ironworks Lofts, a community of "stand-alone" loft hoes, single family subdivision houses tricked out in industrial brick and steel with names like the Firehouse and the Cannery.
...
I told myself that these buildings are exactly as industrial as a more typical subdivision's "Tuscan Villas" are Italian.
[end quoted material]
There is nothing wrong with incorporating some of the 'features' of a loft: open plan and open space, high ceilings, big windows, even exposed structure vs the generic drywall box room. But to copy the aesthetic as an applique is, IMHO, quite on the side of wrong. Could these buildings have been built in the same materials and with the same interior spatial qualities and layout w/o being kitch? Yes. In fact, some of their exterior appearances needn't change too drastically, simply remove the press-on-architecture, and design with honesty and self-integrity rather than disneyland-interpretations of the real thing.
This isn't a very good example, but there's a house near where I live, on near Lawrence expressway, that one could call... industrial or farmish due to its materiality. It isn't a brick warehouse, but it isn't quite an Eichler either. Have a look here and here. It doesn't break any new ground on the house archetype, really, and certainly not 'loft-like living' inside. But it isn't trying to pretend it's some other kind of building either, nor that it had a (false) past.
Lofts as converted spaces are something cool, because of the adaptive reuse, of their (often) deep-urban locale, their re-vitalization properties, and the fact that true lofts origninally come as a blank slate for the inhabitants to inhabit by crafting an insertion. The 'new' loft developments turned lofts into a high-priced luxury place by simply adopting a few of the elements of lofts, but filling the space with pre-built and pre-arranged things. These not only are in a suburb (not urban = more sprawl), they seem to have rooms like any other tract house, and they're consuming new resources. Call a true conversion a loft, call 'new lofts' something else, maybe grand studio appartments, and call the last for what it is: subdivision home w/ hollywood smear.
Wow, I think I am about done with 95% of the design work I was doing for Dream Pod 9's next book -- a whopping 88 planes, 22-odd ships and 8 ground vehicles. They add up fast. Some rules design/commenting in there too, though not as much as I thought there would be (at least, not yet, though there is still a wee bit of time). Certainly I'll never under-value the work of those doing all the stats for games (especially from scratch, and doing design while the rules are changing), and I think I enjoy the whole thing way to much. If that's possible... (nahhhh)
In a reply to a comment to an earlier post I stated that LEED may have a brighter future as public awareness about Architecture (and architecture, as well) is growing due in part to starchitect projects, but just from a general greater treatment in the media and magazines. But thinking about it some more, that is definitively one area the LEED project may well have failed; it may not be specifically in their mandate (perhaps purposfully, so that they aren't attacked or shut down), but they could have done a much better at PR/awareness/advertising or even promotion and a camapaign. Get the word out! "Does the company you do business with believe in LEED?" "Do you know where your consumer dollars are going? Into the trash!" "Oh no mom... we can't buy that! They aren't LEED certified!" and the like. A particular shoe company had to change its wage practices due to their slavedrivingness -- something similar with LEED? At least something to get the word out -- it is the consumer who changes things if the companies don't want to. Of course, then they'd argue it'd cost more, and the deal may very well be off; its how the auto industry operates after all.
At any rate, something to publicize the issue, PSA done by a good advert firm. That's where LEED could do more, to try to advance its cause.
Lastly... only in...
As quickly as the 'colder' weather started last fall, the warmer weather has returned with temps in the low 20s for the past few days and even nights (despite clear skies), which has made both the Push Hands class and the Shaolin class rather perspiration-inducing. Speaking of the latter, good practice on saturday and a good class last night, albeit one that was co-opted by Jason about half-way through for his own brand of kicking drills.
Quote of the day: "Since a paper recount is impossible with the majority of these machines, one has to wonder if touch-screen voting might eventually inspire nostalgia for the hanging chads, political wrangling and mass confusion (...) The old system may have been a nasty business, but at least we know what went wrong with it."
People with sensitve info on 'netserver'puters, beware! (quite interesting read)
Had a LEED seminar today at lunch, which was very interesting. Its not something that is done enough, but it may be something that is gaining some momentum... at least I hope so.
Out for now...
Just in case you thought we didn't really enter the competition.
It is quite interesting, and quite amazing that they have put all entries online. Given the nature of the boards, they must have used a rather remarkable digital camera setup to capture them all, and in such good lighting (no hot spots) and good resolution. My inner geek says hats off to them for that.
It is also, of course, doubly interesting to peruse the various entries and look them over from various angles including their architectonics, their response, their 'woah out there' and equally important the board itself. Regarding the above-capture process, some are so dark they didn't make it well into this format (and must have been hard to read IRL). There are professional entries, there are entries from people who felt they should enter. There are completed super slick and there are ones with just text and a little post-it-note. There are common themes, and there are the, er, unique.
There are also 5000+ of them. This could take a while to go through. :P
(I already commented on my thoughts on the winner(s) earlier, but let me add the difficulty of making a large, underground cavernous space remain a visitable place, especially in the presence of so much water...)
Workout saturday wasn't the best, but I was expecting it since I was sick (actually, given Gan Mao didn't stomp it, I think it was my california allergies). But this brings up the question: was the workout not the best because I was expecting it not to be? Or was the cause/effect the other way (sick = bad)? Hard to know. At any rate, still managed to do the run-and-stairs routine, so that was good.
This seems Stranger Than Fiction (tm).
My professor for my second thesis has done this paper. Dr Loten is very cool, having worked at Tikal during the early days of its discovery, looked at some of the codex in detail, excavated and drawn other sites (including Altun Ha, the subject of my thesis), etc. But -- this paper seems to share a lot of base elements of my thesis. Is he allowed to do that?
WTC memorial competition. Seems I was remiss in that duty, and now they've chosen the 'winner'. Reflecting Absence is the chosen design; or, as I like to call it, Two Holes and a Box.
Now, to be fair, the box thing doesn't seem to be on the site proper, so I'm not sure what it is. But as you can guess, and as I mentioned before, I'm not entirely thrilled by the chosen entry.
Before I start on that, though, something interesting to note: it seems the program around the site has been seriously scaled back. A great number of the elements in Liebeskind's original design are just simply gone, reduced to two buildings on the one corner of the site (compare this with this); gone is the building that vaulted one of the tower footprints, the larger cultural centres, the honkin' waterfall, etc. Hmm.
Removing those elements makes the new site look even more sparse. If there is one comment I would have about all the finalists was the amazing lack of stuff on the site. Maybe the judges liked that simplicity, but let's be frank here, this is a BIG site. The winning design basically consists of the two voids, the rest of the site seems to be a staircase with a gaggle of trees. Now, a huge-ass stair can be very cool (see one of Ando's works in particular), but I don't think it'll be quite as so here -- there's no great program underneath.
As for the voids themselves... I'm not so sure. I liked the image presented by Foster's original entry, but these voids don't strike me quite as evocative, with the water running down the sides like that (not to mention the water on the edge is a bit strange -- tribute to the firefighters if they could've aimed their nozzles that high?). The space underneath the voids is also hard to discern. The great black cube with a window to the sky encircled by water seems like it might offer potential... but the other is rather undeveloped and may not evoke either tomb, mausoleum or sacred space and instead seem like underground concrete box. Especially with the 'now entering the subway' entry ramps. Post-construction will tell.
Of course I speak with a slightly biased viewpoint, having entered the competition and all. Especially considering we packed our site with various elements which broke it down into smaller pieces. Simple and powerful is good -- look at the Vietnam memorial -- whether this falls into that category or whether it becomes dead space, well... from where I sit right now I fear the latter.
Given the history of the whole post-nine-eleven on this site with the process, designs, redesigns, and the interests, interests, interests, and the BushCo, I can't say I'm overly surprised at the result.
So Jason posted a comment about our time in studio, especially the late-nights. Studio is one of those times I think most architects look back upon with a mixture of amazement, fondness and horror. There was a reason the entrance to our 2nd year studio bay was spray painted with the phrase "Abandon all hope ye who enter here". On the other hand, it was also a time where one (at our school) could be most free to explore.
Getting back to Jason's comment, though, if there's one thing architects chuckle about when getting together to reminisce about studio it is most likely the long hours and late nights. If someone had told me, before I entered architecture, that I would be pulling the number of all-nighters that I did in first year (and these are real all nighters, not the B.Arts-I-stayed-up-until-02:00 kind), I would've told them they were insane. Once there, I realized I was insane, because I was pulling these quite voluntarily; or, at least, I enjoyed it enough to do so.
Getting that little sleep will lead to some interesting... side effects, of course. Over my studio years I had several interesting hallucinations, similar but different from those of Jason. Let's explore...
I think the picture has been painted. The hallucinations actually mostly stopped later on. Starting in 3rd year I cut back sleep almost every night, with only a few all-nighters (3A I spent 4 months at less than 4h sleep a night, 3B and there-on I had burned out and had to do a 6h sleep schedule).
Then you get to thesis. 4 months of general confusion punctuated by amazing moments of pure brilliant clear terror. }:)
As promised, here it is. I certainly don't think it was one of the better board layout jobs I've done (by far) but it is workable. I also think our entry would have been stronger with solid walls rather than the glass/transparent ones. But perhaps, looking back on it and looking at the finalist entries, perhaps what killed us the most was that we simply had too much going on. The central idea of the memory niches and ramps may have been strong enough, but looking at the chosen entries it is somewhat hard to know.
I'll try to find time over the next few days to comment on the various entries. In our scheme, I like the memento/memory niche walls and the contemplation tower, but those are parts I developed so I'm a bit biased in that fact. I also like the idea of the walls, though the original idea was to inhabit the walls, and that is where the shape of the contemplation tower first found form (it was the intersection at the middle of the site of the various walls). The ponds inhabiting the footprint of the towers, with the island formed by the building cores I also think works well (and holds some symbolism). It is also an interesting series of spaces, vs the blank slate of some of the other entries.
Given the short amount of time we had to work on it, I am quite satisfied with what our team developed, we all pulled in ideas and created something quite nice for the site.
Perhaps its no surprise. But there was always hope. Ok, in reality, I figured if we had been one of the finalists we would've been contacted by now, and indeed that does seem to be true, for the finalists on the above page all have animations, something that is quite impossible to submit on a poster board. Add to that the 'original submission' link, and you know they were asked to provide extra material. But, given that nothing had publically been announced and the fact there was some 5k+ entries, there was always a chance. Et bien.
Some of the statements are really funny to read, though -- waxing poetic to the Nth degree. Though I respect that...
I'll try to post our entry somewhere so you can see it sometime.