autoautism

movin' on

2010-02-20T20:50:00.002-08:00

If you're looking at this page you're at the wrong place! My lovely wife has started the process of self-hosting all of our various family blogs. You can find my newest stuff at work.permanentriot.com. Hopefully the new site will inspire me to be more diligent about posting. And if not, at least it can be pretty in lieu of informative or interesting.

notes on digital reading

2009-12-31T13:52:00.003-08:00

my lovely wife got me a kindle 2 for the holidays, and I thought that I might do what nearly every person who has purchased the thing has done and write about it on my blog (writing on the internet seems to be the primary hobby of kindle owners).
After a few days of using the thing, what really surprises me the most is how different it is from any other digital device. It's really impossible to do any kind of real comparison between an e-reader and an iphone or laptop or netbook or OLPC. For one, the Kindle is (as of yet) pretty much useless as a web device, due to the constraints of the software, connection, processor, and screen (in that order). it's not impossible that it might be usable to email or search with some OS improvements, but the lag in typing and the difficulty in browsing means that, at best, it is useful for reading a few mobile news sites and wikipedia (it actually works quite well as a wikibrowser.)
What is does do extremely well is show text on a screen. I'm going to go ahead and say right now that I prefer reading on the kindle to reading a paperback. I've never been a fan of portable books - I always struggle with hand cramps and sore necks. This object is the right size, weight, and look for reading. I actually went back to a book last night and was kind of annoyed. It's also fun to operate, has a good feel and good "cover" images (although the ability to customize would be nice).
The end result of all of this is that this might be the first digital device I've met that will actually end up slowing and concentrating my life rather than speeding and scattering. It's fun to use so I'll probably spend more time as a result reading novels, long-form magazine articles. Multi-tabbed browsing, skipping to minute 3 of a youtube video, quickfire rss feeding - this all now seems a little less important, and a little less fun.
It's interesting that by changing the priorities and limitations of a device, one's life can be subtly changed.

Publications

2009-12-01T22:34:00.001-08:00

scattermoonshot

2009-07-25T10:49:00.003-07:00

I'm a bit late at this, but there's been a lot of bemoaning lately (or is it just moaning?) about the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. From Wired to Tom Wolfe, there has been a lot of furious agreement with astronauts and rocket scientists, that we really dropped the ball these last...four... decades. We should all be living on Mars by now, like Ben Bova wants us to! Like any proper nerd, I occasionally consider what it might be like to bring someone from the past - say, Benjamin Franklin - and introduce them to modern society. It gives one the ability to be amazing without actually doing anything, by piggybacking on two hundred and fifty years of technical and social progress. One gets to be the salesman that reveals your... new... future!

However, if instead of a founding father it's, oh, Arthur C. Clarke, circa 1968, things get a little bit iffy. Then one has to explain how a colossal, colossal increase in computing and communications ability has made only subtle changes to our social fabric. How is it that telegrams and rockets can be so destabilizing to the status quo, produce a few World Wars and a subsequent world order on the other side, while similar technologies that are unbelievable improvements on connecting and computing lead to people working harder and a few stock market bubbles? Oh, and twitter.

Hulu is a great example. Why is Hulu so amazing? It roughly replicates cable TV, with slightly more interactivity, on a device that could land the population of Canada on the moon in LEMs, simultaneously. This is not an amazing use of your computer. It's like getting Pavarotti to sing the Oscar Meyer Weiner song. What is amazing about Hulu is the business side - getting networks to agree to put their content online, the social side - selling it to the public, and the design side - the interface and video algorithms. And none of that is colossal.

honored

2009-07-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

Wow, MRP made things magazine. Way more exciting than the fast company blog.

Speaking of honored, I found out from Tyler that my final project at Rice made it into Everything Must Move. I should get me a copy.

two links and a sigh, then some promise

2009-06-13T10:14:00.003-07:00

It's been a rough month for modern prefab. MKD is down, and shockingly Empyrean closed their doors as well. Both of these companies made a great product and it's kind of a shock (especially Empyrean, they were one of the first and biggest prefabricators, and broke a lot of new ground over the years).

Christopher Hawthorne over at the LA Times wrote this great article that should be required reading for anyone asking questions about the future of this industry. Sober, incisive, and maybe just a little pessimistic.

I also came across this modular marketing blog this morning. I expected it to be all bluster and invective, but instead I found a very down-to-earth, helpful, and frequently insightful boots-on-the-ground report. For anyone who thinks that prefabrication is dead, look at this site-- it might not be in Dwell for a while, but there are plenty of people doing good work.

This site also turned me onto the fact that Clayton Homes is entering the sustainable modern market. How on earth did I miss that? It's a solidly MOR approach, as should be expected for any company that actually wants to make money with their product, but I found a lot to like about the i-house (despite a terrible, terrible name). I was actually brought up short by what these guys came up with. It now seems to me that perhaps the real lasting effect of the last 10 years of modern prefab experimentation was to alert the giants of the industry that this niche market was important and growing. Clayton expects this line to bring in 10% of their revenue!

Granted, it's no Muji home (dear god I am jealous of those Japanese), and Clayton doesn't have quite the populist modern cache of Ikea, but I think the i-house might be a bellweather for the future of this industry.

I've been a bad blog daddy

2009-05-07T21:37:00.004-07:00

So my last post was September 16. Coincidentally, Katy went into labor that week and somehow I never got around to regular blogging again. Well, it's time to come back. The first five months or so I had a pretty good excuse. But since then Amalgamated Baby & Baby has been going to bed at seven and sleeping through the night, and I have no infants left to take the blame. I'm going to fight back against the evils of RSS feeds and online Netflix, and attempt to reintroduce myself in some way back into adult society, even if through a digital proxy.

Here's the first chestnut I have to lob into space (warning, bore alert):

How much longer until systems engineering becomes a necessary part of multinational architecture? If the last decade of architecture has made much headway (and I have my doubts) it's in attempting to rationalize and codify the value of design. What is baffling to me is that this has been done more successfully by people designing cars and cellphones. Architects seem to have been stuck re-hashing the same arguments, with slightly varying terminology, for roughly the last eighty years. Or at least the last twenty five.

It strikes me as plausible that, when discussing the success of Apple versus the relative obscurity of Norman Foster, the real difference is not in commodity value but rather in systems engineering. The entire idea of coordinating complex material and labor flows, attempting to rationalize a design with a material reality, from the very beginning, is something that architecture hasn't necessarily caught on to. Architects inevitably get stuck on meta-discussions about cultural relevance, and relegate the space-time stuff someone else's lap, in the last half of the schedule.

Obviously the problem here is dollars, or yuan, and how and when they're getting given around to people. "We don't have time," we always say, "and our margins are too thin as it is." Our margins are too thin because most clients consider our work to be at least 50% window dressing. And these considerations are the result of architecture having a poorly explained value, beyond a roof that doesn't leak and marginal improvements in worker productivity. BMW doesn't have to explain the value of design to anyone. And, despite what you're thinking right now, it's not because people love cars. It's because BMW has people who love to think, talk, and live automobile design, who talk to other people at bars about things that are not related to automobiles, and then come back and breathe this life into their cars, AND that these designers have an unseverable direct link to a system of engineering and production that is simultaneous and nearly instantaneous. Oh, and Everyone. Is. On. The. Same. Team.

Boy, that would be nice.

youth groups.

2008-09-16T22:01:00.003-07:00

One of the more surreal experiences I had in high school was a ski trip with a friend's youth group in Colorado. After a day on the slopes I was treated to a whiplash of, say, a lecture on the evils of macroevolution followed by getting drunk in a hot tub with my fellow brainwashees. There were also harrowing "study groups" that consisted of groups of a half dozen boys (or girls, although they were on another floor altogether), with a single, stone-faced parent, who would quietly and forcefully induce a strange combination of conversation and indoctrination, a process that strangely could be easily be derailed by asking a few questions or changing the subject. It was clear by the second day that the crew-cut head of our group didn't enjoy his role any more than we were enjoying ours. The whole escapade climaxed on the third day, when he broke down crying, saying "I've made some mistakes in my life that I don't want you boys to have to experience." This was the only part of the long weekend that I couldn't roll my eyes at, although I did have a little bit of fun trying to figure out exactly what this transgression might have been. I came away from the whole thing horrified at my taste of evangelism but convinced that it wasn't nearly as dangerous, insane, or effective as alarmists might make it out to be.

I say this not to establish my fundy cred, but rather as a long introduction to this solitary point: what that poor dad was trying to do in Breckenridge is the diametric opposite of the aim of an average pop musician. His frantic sheltering was being actively countered by the frantic exposure in every song we listened to, endlessly flaying us with heartbreak and regret. What is interesting is that this man clearly experienced something analogous to what you get from your Wonder or your Cobain; these musicians are not only pantomiming heartbreak for the adolescent; they are also fixing and remembering it for the old.

Steampunk and Tiny Motorbikes

2008-07-24T20:50:00.003-07:00

Randy Nakamura had a brief freakout yesterday. Topic? Steampunk.

We are being taken for rubes. At worst, the Steampunkers seem to be mediocre hobbyists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of DIY hobbyists want to create an imaginary Victorian present, no matter how insular or simpleminded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded sci-fi movie prop. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Steampunk as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Steampunk must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Steampunkers have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theater, hoax and hype, would be proud.

This ending is a bit hyberbolic compared to the rest of the essay, which, as the sole intelligent commenter pointed out, wasn't really a condemnation of the movement as a whole but rather a purely aesthetic dismissal of steampunk as a generator of new or beautiful form. Thus most of the offended people missed Randy with their comments as much as he missed them in his post; steampunk is perhaps a wonderful community / craft movement / source of innovation / party theme, but it has few chances at being incorporated into the larger world of design largely because the vast majority of design objects are rehash of a previous style (Victorian) that is itself an eclectic recombination of even older design.

What Randy ignores are the potentials latent in the current culture of design that are what is making steampunk such a popular (and yes, hypeable) movement. The complaints about contemporary industrial design bandied about by people coming out of this movement -- the predominance of the lightweight and short-life materials, the lack of handicraft, minimalism as an end not a means-- are all quite valid. Designers from every corner are currently attempting to add heft and decorative power to their work, from graphics to products to architecture. This is a nerdy, charmingly DIY attempt to reach a homemade analogue. And while I could personally do without the retrograde (even reactionary) Hot-Topic Victorian throwbacks, I can appreciate steampunk's healthy humor and reappropriative behavior.

In fact, what this really reminds me of is the work of Adrian van Anz, the progenitor of one-off platinum iPods and desktops. Here you have handicraft, longevity, and cultural reference, and it doesn't remind me of Myst at all. Here's a one to one comparison:

Steampunk motorcycle:

Cheap but Ugly.

van Anz equvalent:

Derringer Cycles: Pretty but overpriced.

So while I probably agree with Randy that steampunk won't have any lasting effect upon the world of general design beyond movies and a few video games, it is an important signifier of the yearnings and obsessions in the design-conscious public. People are waking up from their blind love for all things shiny-- we want our stuff to last, we want it to wear, and we want it to hurt when it falls on our foot.

Beautifully Ofuscated Architectural Photography

2008-07-01T22:41:00.002-07:00

http://www.fernandoguerra.com/

For Your Consideration: Sanikiluaq, Nunavut

2008-06-24T21:55:00.002-07:00

Yes, that's right. Sanikiluaq. Nunavut. Wikipedia claims this fantastic title belongs to "a small Inuit hamlet located in Hudson Bay, on the Belcher Islands, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada."

That's right. Inuit. Hamlet. The words just keep piling on. Qikiqtaaluk.

It even looks like another planet:

View Larger Map

For those of you that think that we Americans own the frontier, think again. There is no location in the continental U.S. that looks as desolate and remote as this place in the center of Canada:

The entire Wiki entry for the Belcher Islands themselves concerns a)Geology and b)Multiple religious Eskimo murder in the 1940's.

Sanikiluaq. Nunavut.

palms=set!

2008-06-04T21:21:00.002-07:00

For those of you that wonder what I do, here's a great chance for me to make it seem like things are much more exciting than they really are. We've had a frenzied week at the office, as a house was delivered and set on Tuesday and today. What is so special about this time is that it happened less than a mile from my house! Oh so exciting. The Palms residence is 14 mods, 2800 interior sf with 700 sf of deck space, on a typical Venice lot, around 40'x120' with a back alley. It's a two story house with some nice use of negative space (entry courtyard, stair atrium with skylight). It's also a reasonably green home(we weren't able to get it certified due to paperwork/inspection issues but we're pretty sure it would have rated silver). It was set over the last two days but in reality the craning only took about 5 hours total! The neighbors all came out to watch and it made a merry little scene. Tons of dogs and kids, and a guy in his bathrobe that looked pretty damn confused. It made me want to move to Venice-- I've never seen people this non-NIMBYish about modern houses. It's gotten some (friendly) coverage on Curbed, and the KTLA morning news came out and gave it the better part of an hour. That's right, MRP was on the CW. Holla. There was also a film crew and even some helicopters getting aerial shots(!?!) No, it's not usually this way.

Katy was also hired by the office to get some action shots-I posted a few of them below. Some of the factory guys seemed a little nervous to see a pregnant lady in a hard hat running around a construction site. Go fig. But at least she got awesome pictures-- there are more than 500 total but she's got a smaller selection on her Picasa site.

350 tons of craney goodness.
The guys at the factory made some stencils on the CNC mill and went to town on the shrinkwrap.
Oh yeah.
That's the kitchen, 25 feet in the air.
Every mod had to be lifted over the house next door. The owner was joking that he was praying for some free demo.
Work it, Mike.
10 am this morning: complete!
Still a lot of work to do... notice how nicely that siding lines up.
Entry court.
And then there was house.

Next up: the Dwell conference this weekend! I'll keep you posted. Things are crazy around here.

why not architecture, fashion, taste?

2008-06-01T07:59:00.002-07:00

Just spent a half hour exploring Fantastic Journal, which I hadn't realized was written by one of the minds behind FAT until the very end. For a great post check out this bit dissecting the "Ladybird Story of Houses," a 1960's era children's book that does a wonderfully subtle job of reshaping children into secret modernists. Not to offend you, Mr. Holland, but might not the first wave of postmodernism in the 80's be nothing more than rebellion against childhood indoctrination? In any case, this blog is another brick in the wall of argument that, despite one's taste in architectural production, it is undeniably true that the more references you find on or in a building, the better the architect must be able to write. As you can tell from this blog, I must work at an architecture firm that used to make everyone type "neutra" daily to log on to their computers.

on tactile memory

2008-05-23T21:13:00.002-07:00

Bending over to open a cabinet and retrieve dinner for my dog, I noticed the handle to the cabinet door. It's a nasty bit of overdetailed poorly cast pot metal that is so blurry and undefined that at times I wonder if they're really there, or just memories of real hardware in some other, more commodious kitchen. They are also just a little bit sticky, but this might just be from Herbie trying to lick his way through the cabinet door.

I grab onto these handles at least twice a day. I remember the feel of them in my hand (lumpy and uncomfortable) and could probably sketch a fair reproduction of one right now if pressed to do it. And yet I cannot for the life of me remember their counterpoints from any other place I have lived. I can't remember the kitchen hardware in my previous homes in Houston, New York, or San Francisco. I can't remember the pulls in the place I shared with Katy in Paris, the apartment where I proposed three years ago. I can't even remember the handles I would grab at my childhood home, at which time they must have been eye-height. All I can do in my memory is graft the current hardware onto the kitchens of years past, a typologically correct but thematically aberrant detail that throws everything else in the remembered scene into question.

architecrotchety

2008-05-14T21:41:00.002-07:00

Peter Eisenmann gave a lecture a few days ago at RIAS where he outlined what bdonline is calling his "six point plan." As far as I can tell those six points are:

1.Architecture in a media culture.
2.Students have become passive.
3.Computers make design standards poorer.
4.Today's buildings lack meaning or confidence.
5.We are in a period of late style.
6.To be an architect is a social act.

Well, if there really is a global decline in the quality of architectural discussion and practice, Pete certainly isn't helping. Not only does his firm produce some of the most vapid digital work this side of Himmelb(l)au, but the above-linked article does little more than vagely outline some percieved problem and then gripe about how it used to be better.

I think the truest point might be "we are in a period of late style." There is a sea change on the horizon, one where digital practice transitions from being a method of complex formal production to one of complex and interrelated real assemblage: from image to instruction, if you will. Despite his proclamations of doom, Eisenmann is and always has sat on the near side of that divide-- look at all of the work he has produced since the advent of CAD and you'll see occasionally elegant formal complexity with a lot of back-bending to get it to link conceptually back to his earlier decon work. I don't think that there are too many people out there that look to his firm as a source for the future of built architecture-- if anything, he gets looped in by the layperson with Gehry as a distant, obtuse producer of expensive but leaky university roofs.

There are a few details to keep in his tirade against pesky children and their computers-- there is still a very important role in the hand-drawn line, architects must be socially aware, things they are a-changin'-- but most of that information is weakened by a total lack of supporting evidence, and moreover is difficult to find, awash in a sea of petty gripes and wild generalizations.

As someone on archinect said in response: "Does he think rock music is just a bunch of noise, too? These kids today, I tell ya."

So hard I cried.

2008-05-09T19:45:00.002-07:00

Not since sonically naked David Lee Roth have I laughed this hard at work. The Superest is a perfect collusion between my past and my present-- I spent the whole day working little 10 minute bursts and then reading the next entry up. I highly recommend starting at the beginning and working forward. WARNING: this will waste a few hours of your time. Especially you, Paul.

linkage

2008-04-30T20:31:00.003-07:00

Bracelets that Katy should own (but that I should be smart enough to make myself).

Ponoko, like Blurb, but with furniture and jewelry instead of books. I wonder how they price compared to the scary guy living in a garage with his laser cutter?

A big camera obscura. Someday I will realize one of these. Maybe in my house. Clever name, too.

You can rent Frank Sinatra's Kauffman House lookalike in Palm Springs.

Nice map. Simple idea.

Pecha Kucha returns to LA.

aaaaaah punditry

2008-04-23T20:33:00.002-07:00

Yet another fabulous installment of the Guilfoile-Warner Papers. To wit:

"My second favorite takeaway (and by “favorite,” I mean the moment that made me swallow back my own vomit) was George S.’s question to Obama: “Do you think Rev. Wright loves America as much as you do?” I can’t blame Obama for acting weary and annoyed by this stuff, given that the question is harder to understand than Ryan Seacrest’s success. Is he asking if Obama loves America? Is he asking if Wright loves America? Is it a logic puzzle to test Obama’s lawyering chops? The question demands some sort of Venn Diagram, or maybe algebra.

If Wright loves America X amount and Obama loves America Y amount and if George Stephanopoulos says Y is greater than X by an unknown amount (Z), solve for Z without your head exploding."

This is what I would write about my political feelings, right at this moment, if I had the ability, the inclination, and the time. Unfortunately, the latter has been spent of late designing plumbing systems and contemplating my soon to be "multiples." Which sounds far too clinical and foreboding to be referring to babies.

an explanation, and plea for leniency. and a link

2008-04-20T13:28:00.002-07:00

By now it should be rather obvious what is occupying the time I could have spent blogging. Double the joy unfortunately also means double the fatigue and nausea in the first trimester, so I've been (poorly) playing the part of cook and housemaid the last few weeks. (Note: I am NOT COMPLAINING. I'd rather be doing dishes than barfing any day of the week.)

But, at the collusion of babies and elegant data presentation, I would like to show you this web application that tracks the popularity of baby names over the last century and a half. It seems that in the last fifty years the explosion of new names (and alternate/misspellings) has outpaced population growth-- there were more Emmas per million in 1880 than 2003, despite it's "Friends"-related #2 status.

new blog!

2008-04-09T21:48:00.001-07:00

I have another blog. Name should be self-explanatory.

UCLA: Two Houses and An Observation

2008-04-08T20:53:00.007-07:00

The UCLA Open House was this weekend, and among other things we got to visit two houses designed by professors: Neil Denari's Alan-Voo house in Palms and Roger Sherman's own domicile in Santa Monica.

And yes, these pictures are very snapshotty, but I was trying not to be the guy with the enormous camera hoovering up every available image, so I brought a little guy and used him discreetly.

The Alan-Voo house was both smaller than I expected and much more expertly detailed. The house was really a little jewel box-- a tiny addition for a regular couple with the detailing of a much larger and more expensive project. Impressive, although it did seem a lot more like a museum piece than Denari made it out to be in his explanation.

I was trying to explain to someone what I liked about this house and all I could come up with was "Denari's subjective angles are more attractive than other people's."

A perfect counterpoint to the Alan-Voo house was the Sherman residence, a house where seemingly every angle was derived from the program and code. This house could not have been different from Denari's project-- rough, lived-in, tactical rather than strategic. It was also very comfortable, and at times even beautiful. I have to say, I would probably rather live in this house (despite the lack of a door on the master bedroom. I won't try to explain the complicated programmatic layering of the office/house/rental unit/parking, but rather please enjoy the crazy way it stacks in perspective (and the wonderful wallpaper.)

Both of these houses were great examples of local architecture that highlighted the ability of this faculty (and the architects of this city) to not only produce novel theory and form but also to project that in actual built work-- work that was more interesting in experience than in writing. I wish this could be said of all architects and architecture. In the 5-minute presentations by the faculty of their work I was consistently impressed by the depth and completeness of work by people less than a decade older than myself. They set the bar for practice impossibly high, and I can only hope a little bit of their ethic rubs off in my short months at UCLA.

shiny new things

2008-03-24T20:35:00.002-07:00

On the happy future front-- while this technology seems almost too good to be true, this paint seems (to my nonscientific mind) to be quite feasible, and beats that chalkboard stuff any day of the week. In the performative brushed surfaces category, these two are pretty awesome as well.

perfect-bound ghosts of my past

2008-03-20T19:58:00.003-07:00

I am speaking, of course of the full scans of the Useborne Book of the Future that surfaced recently on the internet. This, along with sister volumes featuring only transportation, or cities, or robots, were an odd imported staple of my youth. Basically, they stole every imaginable future prediction in the 60's and 70's, digested it for young minds, and illustrated it in completely awesome cutaway illustrations that I still remember in perfect detail. The arcologies, hydrofoils, wrist radios, and elevators-to-space still pop up occasionally in my dreams. I hope dearly that someday this, as well as other especially formative books from my childhood (The Children's Iliad, the Illustrated works of Edgar Allen Poe, Farmer's Almanacs, the Undabridged Grimm's Fairy Tales) will someday be reconstituted in perfect condition in my bookshelves. Here me, Mom and Dad? I've left room...

[Found via Coudal Partners' Blended Feed. Awesome.]

science fiction double feature

2008-03-17T21:46:00.002-07:00

While Katy's out of town, I've been using my newfound extreme boredom to catch up on some recently old sci fi.

For one, I watched Primer. Before I move on, I want to note that this is a very good movie. This may be some of the best cinematography and acting I've seen in a $7,000 film, regardless of genre. That being said, I have two criticisms. For one, the film struck me as being kind of reactionary in it's intent: to create a science fiction movie that did not dumb down to it's viewers, that contained zero special effects, and that made no attempt to explain either plot machinations or the (tenuous) mathematics and physics it exploited. Which gave the whole thing a kind of angry, "let them have it" cast. I'd much rather the director use a few recognizable film tropes to meet the viewer halfway, than feel like I was being corrected in some way.

The other, more important thing I was bothered by has to do with the praise heaped on the film due to it's complexity. And it is a complex movie-- at least 7 different simultaneous timelines, with an equal number of "versions" of the main characters, made it nearly impossible to untangle. It is a movie that will only get better with subsequent viewings, although I admit I chickened out and read up on the plot after the fact.

However, the people who made this film made the conscious decision to prioritize complexity of plot over complexity of character, at nearly every point. Most of the depth was in the machinations of where and when, not in showing the (considerable) change in each character, as flaws are revealed and conflict blooms. Which made it a lot closer to a few episodes of 24 than to Memento, which manages an equal concentration on both. Which, to me, seems like a waste. This sort of concentration on surface complexity is an annoyance that seems endemic to the genre, handed down from almost every forebear from Philip Dick to H.G. Wells. It's usually easy to overlook because there is little character development to really show in a lot of SF, but here there was clearly plenty going on, a fact that was highlighted by the sparse sets and near-constant facial close-ups. The total lack of any continuity between scenes made the slow dawning of each character's growth difficult to parse. Still, if you haven't seen it, do.

I also ran to the library and grabbed the latest William Gibson reference, Spook Country, which ended up pretty solid, if nowhere near as great as Idoru, or even Pattern Recognition. Gibson's done a pretty great job of transitioning from cyberpunk prophet to contemporary commentator, while still keeping things entertaining. A lot of this is due to the fact that he writes very similar sentences to Raymond Chandler, able to make a bit of interior decoration or landscape have as much backstory as the people inhabiting it. I do wish he'd remember that Chandler wrote some pretty goofy shit into his books as well, though-- too often in this book the characters were going about their actions so soberly that it seemed like everyone was on Paxil. Maybe less stepping back, less awareness would do some good.

But credit where it's due: Gibson is still the best male SF writer at writing women naturally, the best SF writer at weaving in cultural references (and inventing new ones) without seeming awkward, and the best SF writer at doing what I thought lacked above-- not only giving the internal some presence in the book, but tying it into the surface of the plot in an important way. He is still writing the books that, from his nonfiction statements, one wishes Bruce Sterling would write. That being sad, Billy, I did cringe when you tried to justify your earlier technological missteps by bringing back VR helmets for some tacked-on scenes. Weak. Don't let it happen again.

i'm in!

2008-03-16T10:42:00.002-07:00

I received a nice packet in the mail today from UCLA-- apparently I will be a student in their M.Arch II program over the next year! The head of the studio is Neil Denari and the first phase of the program (and maybe the entirity?) is titled MEGAVOIDS. In all caps. I think that MEGAVOID is a rejected Transformers character, but I'm not sure. In any case, my natural inclination for the fantastic might need to be checked, otherwise I might end up writing a science fiction graphic novel instead of a thesis.

an upper with your downer

2008-03-14T21:20:00.001-07:00

...and now that I'm done being angry:

"Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s."

Score.

Oh, Steve. Oh, Hillary.

2008-03-14T20:38:00.003-07:00

Like many sub-30 folk, I have spent a disproportionate amount of time this election season parsing hype and slogans, attempting to get a hold on my opinions and how they might translate into something as definite as a vote. And while I did get sent this t-shirt by the fantastic Coudal Partners in a sweepstakes, my mind is nowhere near as made up as my clothing might suggest. I got a hell of a lot closer yesterday morning, however, when H. Clinton was interviewed on Morning Edition during my commute. I don't think that it is shallow to want a President that I can listen to in the car. A good road trip President, if you will. I can't hear two words out of GWB's mouth without switching to the oldies. With Clinton, I gave up after about two paragraphs.

I'm already somewhat weary of the "I AM NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE INFLECTION AND IT IS MAKING ME HOARSE" tone she takes during speeches, but this is far worse. Maybe one of her advisors told her that she has to sound confident and inevitable. Things started off fine--she said some (debatable) things about redoing the primaries, and deferred on the "Obama Veep" question. But the minute Inskeep got the tiniest bit confrontational (about experience, what else) she got all brash and swaggering and, well, kinda douche-y. And I had to turn the radio off.

I follow the issues the best I can. I keep up with national politics on a daily basis. But when it's all said and done, I'm just going to pull the lever for the person that makes me feel the least embarassed. Sad but true.

bird's nest of iniquity

2008-03-12T20:01:00.003-07:00

“Literally everybody in the Western world trades with China. This is a fact. So why should an architect not?”

So Jacques Herzog said at the Tate Modern yesterday, reported by Tom Dyckhoff for the Times Online. The Times has has always been reliably pro-behemoth and pro-superstar (see the sidebars: "world's ten most ambitious new buildings, from CCTV to the Freedom Tower," "View a stunning slideshow of buildings designed by architect Frank Gehry,") even if they are also reliably critical of the blandness of common development. Thus H&dM justifying their choice to build for the Olympics was given a quick gloss rather than a more in-depth editorial. "Whew!" Dyckhoff seems to say, "glad we got that out of the way!"

I really wish I was there to hear the rest of the lecture. Here is a longer snippet from the same article:

“It's very cheap and easy for architects and artists and film-makers to pull out or to make this kind of criticism,” Herzog says. “Everybody knows what happens in China. All work conditions in China are not what you'd desire. But you wear a pullover made in China. It's easy to criticise, being far away. I'm tempted almost to say the opposite...How great it was to work in China and how much I believe that doing the stadium [and] the process of opening will change radically, transform, the society. Engagement is the best way of moving in the right direction.”
“It would be arrogant not to engage,” de Meuron adds. “Otherwise no politicians could go there, no athletes. You would just close the borders.”

I appreciate the forthrightness above, even if I'd like to see more concrete examples of how the "bird's nest" is transforming political and social realities in China. The closest the article gets to quantifying anything is to mention the broken-down scale and lack of hierarchy in the structural system, followed by Herzog claiming “The Chinese love to hang out in public spaces. The main idea was to offer them a playground.”

So this means that this project won't be under the kind of permanent security lockdown that characterizes ever other major area I can think of? Using attached public space as a justification for buildng sports arenas is rarely taken seriously in the U.S., so why should it in a country with less personal freedom?

I am in total agreement with H&dM in their insistence that creative and artistic engagement with countries like China is an important way to keep a dialog open and (perhaps) enact some sort of latent transformation. But it takes deliberate action to tie the built environment to a progressive social agenda. If they had some awesome plan for this arena to be converted into, say, some awesome Chinese philosophical agora, a "special information zone," if you will, now that would be something. You could mount TV cameras to the roof with direct satellite linkage to CSPAN2. Anyone could run to the middle and declaim or support or propose anything they wished, as long as they checked their opinions going back out of the gate. If it makes sense to the Chinese to run their economy that way, why not their society? Why not open dissent recorded for posterity, visible to the entire world, instead of quiet rumors of oppression and human rights abuse?

Hell, I might want one of those in LA.

back on the blogowagon

2008-03-11T21:38:00.003-07:00

Okay, I'm going to attempt another run where I do a post-a-day until I get lazy... I'm shooting for a month of this but we'll see how fast the sloth returns. Even if the posts are lame linkages (I might even embed a YouTube video... I know.)

For today, I present the impeccably curated Paimio Sanitorium tour on Alvar Aalto's official website. This slideshow does a better job of presenting Aalto's ability to create a harmonious "total design" - in this case including the iconic Paimio chair, as well as light fixtures, handrails, and a pretty awesome door handle, and a whole host of other furniture and hardware. Paimio is one of the few early modern projects that has maintained almost all of its immediacy. Someday I will visit this building, and it will be fabulous.

haircuts = architecture

2008-03-01T22:20:00.003-08:00

I was getting shorn today and realized that what I go through to get my hair cut is a miniature analog of what most people endure redesigning their homes. No, follow me for just a second:

The stress starts before I even go in, because the risks and expectations are so high. This is something on the surface that strangers will use as a starting point for judgment from the first second. It says loads about my character, my income, my sexual preference... all to people that I might never get to speak to. It's like having a second face-- one that needs to periodically be remade.

I walk in and start the consultation, and immediately hit a snag. I have no idea how to communicate the desired outcome. Hell, I'm not even sure what the desired outcome might be. I begin gesturing vaguely and punctuating my sentences with "you know" and "kinda." In a panic, I begin using words I have heard other people using, words that don't really understand but hope will convey that this person is talking to an expert, someone who knows exactly what they want and will be furious if their high expectations are not met.

This is not going well. My song and dance routine seems to have simply confused matters more. Exasperated, I point to a picture featuring some fantastic result, usually belonging to some model or celebrity: "there. I want that." This seems to work, but the anxiety has not lessened at all. After all, my circumstances are completely different from the person in that photograph. And I'm almost certain that I am not hiring the same person as Mr. Fantastic in the picture. How can this person possibly replicate what I have asked for? I didn't do any real research before I walked into this place. A friend said that they did an okay job, and they didn't seem too expensive at the time. How can I have gotten this far without asking for references? Or a diploma? Or maybe even a quick chat-- this person is going to be awfully close to my life for a short while, and I barely know their name! But I'm too far in-- the cutting has already begun and all I can do is shut my eyes and pray.

The actual operation is messy and unpleasant, during which everything looks terrible and I can barely move. They can clearly tell I'm in incredible mental pain, but seem totally oblivious and focused on their job. Focused, that is, except when they're on the phone with someone else-- how can they be talking to someone? My job is only half done! They've clearly moved on mentally to the next customer-- how well can this possibly turn out?

At last there is the final reveal, and... it looks great! Or terrible! I really have no idea. I make up my mind very quickly and rush out the door... I over tip, rudely rush out the door, and talk to Katy, who in fifteen minutes has told me whether I paid for a masterpiece or a fiasco. Regardless of the outcome, it's too late to go back. It's done, and I have to live with it.

Luckily for me, haircuts cost less than $20 and grow back in a month. For people wanting a new home, the stakes are a little higher. I'll try to remember this the next time I have a meeting.

what the hell is orkut?

2008-02-24T21:31:00.003-08:00

Admiring this great infographic on Le Monde depicting the various national social networking website hegemonies, my first reaction was "What the hell is Orkut?" According to the graphic, this is a website with as many users as Facebook! More bizarrely, the first link I visited after a quick search led to a Google sign in page that asked me if I wanted to start an account. OMG! WTF?!?!

Orkut is, as might be presumed from above, a Myspace competitor started by Google, not some secret Soviet space weapon. It was named after the programmer that created it, named (I am not kidding) Orkut Büyükkökten. Orkut never took off in the US, but has done fantastically well in both Brazil and India. The Wikipedia site reads like an abridged thriller, with renegade hackers, government censorship, and secret Nazi webcircles.

I'm amazed that even the internet has such great social and economic hedges raised that I could avoid hearing about something this huge and interesting. This is a website owned by one of the largest companies in the world that has been totally outlawed by Iran. It's a huge social force in two of the largest countries in the Southern Hemisphere. And it was created by a guy with THREE FREAKING UMLOUTS IN HIS NAME. And I get nothing. Apparently Google doesn't think it's a big deal, either, because it's now putting it's efforts into standardizing the architecture of social networking sites, making the host of one's social network less important.

Orkut just makes me think about all of the globally important internet news and technology that must be pouring out of China right now, but that I don't know about, because our country is too proud and the language is too hard.

LCAC: Kindle vs. Pulp Army

2008-02-21T22:37:00.005-08:00

Designers, environment-wonks, anyone remotely interested in global economies or material reality, take note: IDC has left you a wonderful, free Life Cycle Analysis Calculator on the internets. This little beauty will take into account material extraction, manufacture, transport, use and disposal, and give you the damage in MJs and kg of trusty CO2.

I took this baby out for a little spin, and attempted to figure out exactly how many paperback books it might take to equal the embodied energy in an Amazon Kindle. Amazon has yet to really push the green angle, but I feel it's just a matter of time, so I got some rough numbers and had at it.

As don't own a Kindle I had to make do with some internet data and assumptions. Amazon kindly provided the dimensions and weight, and I made some rough assumptions on packaging and material makeup. Insider business posts let me in on the location of manufacture (China, natch), and transport was pretty damn easy (delivery to the door). Power consumption was a little more tricky-- I ended up giving a generous estimate to the amount of charging time and necessary wattage (30 minutes, 3 days a week @40W). I gave it a lifetime of 8 years (about the same as a well-cared for iPod), and assumed none of it would be recycled. Here's what we ended up with:
**note: I don't know why these huge spaces are occurring, so just bear with me and scroll down...***

KINDLE	MJ	kg CO2
Extraction/Manufacture	500	290
Transport	6	3.4
Use	100	35
Disposal	.74	.3
Totals	~600	~315

I have more books than Kindles in my house so that calculation was a little easier. I assumed a .5 kg average paperback with 50% recycled content. Most of my books were (surprisingly) printed in the US so I went with domestic shipping. Given the results (see below) I calculated both the cost of picking up the book at a bookstore and having it shipped to my house. Books don't have plugs, so use energy was pretty simple. I assumed, that half of my books would end up in the recycling bin. Here are my numbers:

BOOK	MJ	kg CO2
Extraction/Manufacture	9.3	3.7
Transport (Pick Up/Delivery)	51/6	20/3.4
Use	0	0
Disposal	5.7	2.3
Totals	~65/20	~25/10

Before I compare results, a little disclaimer: yes, I know I made a lot of assumptions. This LCA doesn't take into account lots of other factors like toxicity, warehousing, material origins, and the joy of turning a page. Likewise it doesn't consider the juice powering the server towers comprising the internet and my reading lamp, or the fact that the majority of books produced are not sold but end up in musty warehouses or authors' basements. But wasn't this fun anyway?

Biggest surprise: picking up a paperback all by my lonesome TRIPLES the environmental impact. Internet shopping now takes on a whole new dimension. But with the most efficient books I can muster, 30 paperbacks = 1 Kindle. Does this make it worth it? I think it would depend on the user. If you're using this thing to read magazines or newspapers that you usually get delivered weekly or daily, than it probably will save some carbon. If you read two books a year, it's probably not helping the environment any more than your 8000sf green vacation home.

I'm hoping to make this a series of posts just to show you how awesome this kind of calculation can be. But don't just take my word for it-- what in your house are you curious about? Get a screwdriver and a scale and figure out exactly what it took to get that product through your door!

digital controller hotness

2008-02-13T20:12:00.002-08:00

Yes, yes, the Tenori-on is very fancy. But it's made by Yamaha, the GloboChemCorp of music companies, and it looks a bit too much like a medical device. In the world of abstract digital grid controllers, Monome is what has my heart all a-flutter. Grids of 32, 64, 128 or 256 (!) light up buttons, and an accelerometer, all wrapped in sexy walnut and water jet cut metal.

Pack that up with some awesome open-source software action and you have something much more than a gridded keyboard-- you have a controller, game, feedback device, and light show built into one.

If one of these happened to show up at my door someday I wouldn't mid it at all. That is, if you can order one in the two minutes before it sells out...

(Via Coudal Partners. Thanks guys!)

Such A Rare Bird

2008-02-12T21:12:00.002-08:00

I was not a punk in high school. However, since in my era and locale (late 90's, Midwest) my only other mainstream adolescent choices of association were emo, rap-rock, or fourth-wave ska, and my favorite bands were They Might Be Giants and the Violent Femmes, I kind of got lumped in. I went to my share of hardcore shows in my teens, sometimes opening as keyboard player in a decidedly goofy hodgepodge of a band, but somehow it never really rubbed off. I didn't even own a Clash record until I went to college (and even now my favorite song of theirs is The Magnificent Seven). I switch to Morning Edition when the Ramones come on 103.1 during my commute. And don't tell anyone, but I don't really like the Stooges.

This all being said, when asked recently who my favorite punk band was, I could answer without thinking. I even have the album. Wire. Pink Flag. And, listening to the album this morning while doing the dishes, I know why.

First off, I started loving this album as one of the great road trip records of all time. It starts off slowly and ends quickly, few songs are over two minutes long, it works equally well as the background to conversation and as maximum volume screaming accompaniment. I burned the CD off of a friend at a point where I was listening lots of Olivia Tremor Control and Flaming Lips. I was judging songs based on obsessive layering of sound and drawn-out, slowly changing structure. So, naturally, by the time I had gotten through "Field Day For the Sundays," clocking in at 0:28 with about one chord change, my ass was thoroughly kicked.

But the real reason I'm putting Pink Flag up on a pedestal is because it taught me how to understand what those fifteen-year-old punks couldn't teach. My generation is so far removed from the seventies (like kids now are from the eighties), that at the time I couldn't really wrap my head around the difference between, say, the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones. After all, they were both rock bands with old british guys that played loud music. The difference between them and between what my friends were listening to-- gangster rap, rave music, Oasis,the Mr. T Experience -- seemed miniscule. The problem was that all of the punk kids defined their status non-musically, as some strange combination of attitude, politics and style. The music seemed to be as much of an accoutrement as their patches.

And that's pretty much where I left it. Every time I heard the punk movement discussed it was as a cultural event, with the music as only part of the range of expression. This suited my high school friends perfectly, as teenagers exist pretty much only to socialize -- day-to-day identity switching is not only easy but kind of expected. Everything started to fall apart, however, as discussed this kind of stuff with older people. At my tiny college radio station I started talking to people about the music alone, front and center, without context. And I suddenly had a way into the music.

The problem was that I'd never really bought into the idea that punk was about anything but music in the first place. All genres make artist membership based somewhat on credibility, but few besides gangster rap make such a big deal about it as punk. The kids I'd grown up with believed that the music had somehow been generated spontaneously out of sheer attitude, but the hours I spent trying to coax a melody out of my sequencer and drum machine at home told me something else. No matter how stripped down or lobotomized the music was, these bands had to be listening to something, and working hard to replicate it.

Or to destroy it. What struck me as I stood by the sink was how sheerly unfunky Pink Flag is. Once I got past that fact, I could clearly see what punks were reacting against in the 70's. Nothing political or social. What they were out to destroy was the entire fabricated rock and roll lineage of Delta blues->Memphis rockabilly->drug addled Brit that had been handed up to them as children. These guys had grown up along with the initial peaking of rock and roll, in the late Sixties and early Seventies. And what do you do at the self-declared peak of a genre? Burn it to the ground. Wire's music recalls a lot of things - Can, Kraftwerk, Broadway Musicals, radio jingles - but only rarely does it make me think of The Stones, or Elvis, or Leadbelly. When it does quote from that sound - the hyperactive vocals on "Start to Move" and "Feeling Called Love," or the zombie "doo doos" on "Strange," it's in a mocking apelike way, sneering at heritage.

All of this is probably old hat to anyone at all familiar with pop history. But I don't really read those kinds of books or hold those kinds of conversations. I own maybe three hundred CDs, no vinyl. I love Pink Flag because it taught me all of this in the amount of time it took me to clean a dozen plates. And I got to dance a little during the lesson.

welcome eric harvey

2008-02-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to say that Pitchfork is and has been pretty much the only source of music journalism and opinion I give any time to. I started reading it daily about a decade ago and as teenage fanaticism slowly transitioned into adult scatteredness, I just never bothered to develop a backup source (beyond several friends with fantastic taste.) As the writers have slowly grown up with me (maintaining a constantly superior knowledge of esoterica and theory), it's always felt like the perfect match for nerdy and uppity musical flaneurs such as myself.

They have a new feature writer this week. Erik Harvey's post on fandom and sampling is alternately touching, edifying, and revealing. Good for him.

prefab nostalgia tour

2008-02-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

A couple of blog posts in the last month have reminded me that prefabrication has not only been around for a long time, but that we haven't even regained any of the midcentury awesomeness that used to exist. Tropolism just posed a small eulogy on Bertrand Goldberg, including this house in Long Island Sound made with a combination of modular and panelized elements with a huge pier-to-nowhere, that most certainly wouldn't be allowed in this day and age.

Treehugger also has a nice bit on this Swedish prefab vacation home by Matti Suuronen, a pretty ingenious (and lightweight) fiberglass scheme that hasn't been revisited in the last few decades.

And then, of course, there's the blockbuster Maison Tropicale by Prouve, which I find to be charmingly graceless and techy.

Anybody doing serious research on prefabrication eventually comes to the conclusion that it's heyday has past, mostly due to projects like these. There's a daring and experimental quality in them that you don't get looking at Res4 or Living Homes products (or even those of my employer.) I feel like that's kind of melodramatic and immature. The kind of code advances that require better energy performance and safety do make this kind of work harder, and people/goverments do seem a bit more wary of handing over their home and pocketbook to experimentation. But if this kind of work is going to gain a toehold in the general consciousness, solutions have to work, first and foremost, as homes. So, in the absence of exuberance, I say it's high time we shoot for a mature, sustainable set of solutions that not only look good in a magazine but can be used and misused, day in and day out, without exception.

And I do mean misused. I'd like to see testing that unleashes a few dozen eight year olds into a house for a week and distills values like "fun quotient" and "irreparable parti damage."

flowers and coffee

2008-01-27T13:10:00.001-08:00

This morning, while visiting her family in Encinitas, Katy and I went on a strange dual errand, for a small flower arrangement (portrait session-Katy) and a coffee (internet fuel-me). After an unsuccessful attempt at one-stop-shopping at a nearby grocery store, which had only bad coffee and bad flowers, Katy realized that there was the perfect combination across the street:

Encinitas often feels to me like some sort of alternate suburban utopia, as if it is somehow immune to the blandness and impartiality that I'm used to seeing in the outer reaches. This is a prime example. These local businesses aren't protected by neo-marxist community law, tourist flow, high property prices, or even a walkable neighborhood. The coffee shop is drive-by only (although I walked up to the window, which may have precipitated a free size upgrade). There are plenty of Ralphs, Starbucks, and Targets down the street. And yet the area is almost choked with small businesses and restaurants co-existing peacefully beside their corporate counterparts. Every time we drive down I try to figure out why it works.

It might be as simple as the ocean, a mile away and a constant presence in this linear city. The Pacific is a social aggregator for these towns, providing lots of recreation and chance contact, and keeping house prices elevated (although, at least this far north, not ridiculous). This, combined with the topography and preexisting older neighborhoods, keeps developments, and their constituent lots, small and packed together. Most of the side effects are seen between the 5 freeway and the beach, in a string of cute, well-preserved main streets and boardwalks. But a secondary (and for me, more powerful) benefit is in the thriving tiny businesses in the second floors and back lot pads of strip centers over the hills. There is an addictive combination of jerry-rigged, frugal atmosphere with surprisingly high quality that is endemic in the burrito stands, haircut stores, sewing emporia, and, yes, flower shops you find scattered along this stretch of North County.

So I got my coffee and Katy got her flowers:

And we both went home happy.

shaken to sleep

2008-01-22T20:14:00.000-08:00

We saw Cloverfield this weekend and I had such a negative reaction to the movie I thought I should share. Like most people in the theater, I left jumpy, disturbed, and vaguely nauseous (someone actually left an acidic gift for everyone in the hallway before the film was over). This was mostly explained away as a consequence of 80 minutes of deep booming noises, shaky camera work, and a few exploding people. Feeling shocked after a movie is not a new experience. What was new was the black mood that set in almost immediately thereafter, which I could not shake for a full day. That, I believe is the consequence of what was missing, not what was actually there.

Cloverfield is a unique film in that it is almost completely absent of exposition, character development, and basic plot. What is left is a bunch of loud noises, grisly visuals, and the slow and steady revelation of what "Cloverfield" looks like, which reaches a somewhat disappointing climax in the final 10 minutes. To me, the lack of any explanation, greater story, or emotional attachment makes this something less than a film. As an experience it lies somewhere between a circus slideshow and being taped into a cardboard box and pushed down a flight of stairs.

Without the context provided by basic story elements, the 80 minutes of loud noises and visual shocks couldn't be processed as anything external to my own experience. So instead of spending my time after the film thinking about it as a piece of dramatic art, I instead just coped with a mild case of post-traumatic stress. Not my idea of a good time.

PS- There is something seriously wrong with our national culture that this movie is PG-13, but if I'd seen a nipple it would have been rated R.

GM-C and cityofsound, too

2008-01-15T20:59:00.000-08:00

#1: Gordon Matta-Clark at Ubuweb.

#2: Great (and I mean great) city of sound presentation on possible parametric/sustainable futures.

#1: Watch these videos and marvel at how much they look like Snohetta projects.

#2: Shoot in a comment to let Mr. Sound know what the future will really be like (besides shiny and warm).

Open Letter : Dinos Chapman

2008-01-10T19:50:00.000-08:00

The other day I decided to spend my morning drinking half a pot of coffee and letting my eyes vibrate across the 159 fantastic pages of the new Bibliodyssey book. In front of all of the crazy imagery was a foreword by artist Dinos Chapman. The forward was actually declared a 'forewarning' about the internet in general, which Chapman describes as a "treacherous minefield to be trodden with trepidation if it is to be used for anything other than a purient delve into the seamier side of human frailty." Mr. Chapman's was certainly being deliberately crass and provocative, but I feel the need to comment on it anyway (there's a wonderful symmetry in giving sober reflection on the internet to a crass and provocative printed page, for one.)

The essay seems intent on disproving what the book itself seems to suggest, that the internet contains unearthed hidden treasures and knowledge free and waiting for discovery. Chapman writes that digital life has "been dragged down to its lowest common denominator, a labour-saving device of the most crass order: a less than useless tool for ordering cold inedible pizza from around the corner, a plain cover wrapper for pornography, the discrete purchase of Viagra, the sending of virtual birthday cards..." To me, the entire two pages seems more like a personal expose or confessional than a true piece of analysis, a man attempting to hijack this deeply considered and well curated book with a strange kind of literary exhibitionism. The foreword to this book could have taken any number of tacks-- the issues with digital archiving, copyright and originality, visual culture, a nice short story-- instead all I got was a person I care little about telling me that he spends a lot of time at rotten.com, and lecturing me about how by spending time on my computer every morning I am a lonely, distracted hermit in search of ever more esoteric forms of titillation. Thanks, Chap.

What is the best future scenario for this kind of outlook? A return to salon culture? Post-apocalyptic hunting and gathering? One of the more obnoxious things about the foreword is that it tries to cast in internet as both banal marginalia and all-encompassing dystopia. In other words, a shrill prophesy of the inevitable decline of (post)modern culture.

Please, Mr. Chapman. The kids are alright.

obsolete but still funny

2008-01-08T21:40:00.000-08:00

Now that Hilary's had her day maybe it's time to look back, back to five days ago when everyone was surprised. The Huckaboom and the Obamawagon is a hi-styrical romp by Kevin Gilfoile and John Warner in the Morning News (maybe the most attractive internet news source available). These letters back and forth are sprinkled with nuggets of joy such as "Fred Thompson is running for president with the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old shopping for Sunday pants," and "The Giuliani campaign is the result of the same delusional miscalculation that’s causing Amy Fisher to market a sex tape. Amy Fisher isn’t famous for being sexy. She’s famous for being a bad shot."

But my favorite bit is at the end, when Kevin dissects a latent national (or maybe just personal) desire to pick one's president by "identifying the person I want representing this country to the world." For me, I didn't realize this desire until I had eight years of bumbling speechies coupled with headstrong assholeocity. So, unfortunately, right now what drives me most election-wise is the prospect of being envied by Europeans, and maybe some Russians. Or, if that's unattainable, only being embarrassed for my nation once a month, tops.

no-fi

2008-01-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

Ok, I promise I have a post of real substance coming down the pipe, but as it is I'm tired and the bed is warm, so what you get is this:

Maybe it's just nascent music snobbery, but Rolling Stone is the last place I expected to find a comprehensive, well explained primer to the problems plaguing contemporary pop music production. It's called "The Death of High Fidelity" and it explains in exacting detail why your new music is so much less exciting than the old (sorry, blanket statement, I know). The quick answer: digital compression is the devil incarnate. Somewhere around 10 years ago they found a way to completely eliminate dynamic variation, creating a literal "wall of sound" that catches attention immediately but can't sustain it. Add in a host of local compression devices in everything from itunes to your car stereo and you get some serious one-dimensional shit. And that's all before you even get to the generally low quality of most downloaded MP3s. It's pretty ironic that while the fidelity of the average home stereo system is rising (excepting those shitty ipod earbuds), recording quality is tanking like there's no tomorrow.

My favorite moment in the article are these captioned waveforms:

Nirvana
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Arctic Monkeys
"I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor"

Good job, Rolling Stone. Let's get some space in those there songs.

***Addendum: looking around I found via me-fi another great article with a more in-depth history. Also, this YouTube video.

merry xmas from the marshall islands

2008-01-04T07:55:00.000-08:00

I was reading PK's fantastic new post at Bibliodyssey this morning and caught a reference to atomic blast Christmas cards existing somewhere in the Scripps Oceanic Research Digital Archives. A quick search and here it is:

Makes me wish I knew more physicists come holiday time.

Back (barely)

2007-12-28T22:39:00.001-08:00

Okay, so holidays are over and it's back to irregular blog posting. Well, maybe a few after this weekend. I promise.

Until then: check out totally awesome Hugh Ferriss renderings at this museum and on this flickr set. This stuff vascillates between space-age modernism, neogothic mountains, American Futurism, and just generally kick-ass stuff with a paper and pencil. Honestly, this is the basis of the middle fifty years of architecture in the last century, not efficiency, not theory, not some hidden socialist agenda. At least not in this country; here, the acceptance of bombastic high modernism was more about the Jetsons, popular mechanics, and the mind-blowing rendering skills of guys like this.

I really don't think that much has changed.

kindling for the fire

2007-12-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Maybe starting off with a terrible pun was a bad idea.

OK, I'm going to make a stand here. I'm going to risk apostasy and say it: I kind of want a Kindle.

The online jeering at Mr. K has become somewhat silly. I have never seen so many reviews of a physical object (especially a piece of personal electronics) that were done without even touching or using the object. The internet is being used as a ten-foot pole, people are just poking at it and then wringing their hands, saying "it looks like an obese albino blackberry!

Even from a purely compositional standpoint I'm not that offended. Since when is random asymmetrical chamfering a terrible design concept? And don't tell me it's about the interface. You have to touch it first if you're going to talk about that. In fact, the public reaction is far from terrible. The first run has sold out. Nerds like it. Old people like it. And these people actually have one. They're not shrieking "see! see!" when Philippe Starck says something critical, jumping on an anti-hype bandwagon that is becoming increasingly divorced from reality.

Actually, the Blackberry is a great example. This is a device whose original looked like a half-chewed version of its namesake, had the color choices of a facial bruise, and had buttons so small you had to carry an infant around with you as an operator. And the last time I checked, these little monsters weren't going away.

This isn't to say that I think that this device is anything fantastic. One typface? No USB port? Unholy DRM? And yes, I'd much rather this thing had been designed by Dieter Rams. But it's not. And I'm still curious, because this thing is responding, if not perfectly, to a deep-seated desire for an as-yet unaddressed solution. So get off your iPhone high horse and touch the damn thing before condemning it.

Sim Kong

2007-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

I spent about a half hour today being mesmerized by the sterile isonometric beauty of the Edushi Hong Kong site. Whoever made this map has gone full-circle, reimagining a city - in great detail - in Sim City vocabulary. Parking lots? Check. Construction sites? Check. Monstrous housing blocks? Double-check. They even have little trucks with shipping containers next to the docks. Check it out:

I am having some trouble figuring out exactly whom would find this mapping system useful (although I am tempted to tile together screenshots and wallpaper my room with them.) Perhaps it was made by an evil superbeing bent on dominating Hong Kong and slowly guiding the city growth and policy, as in some sick, humongous game. Followed by, of course, destroying it with giant monsters.

radical cartography

2007-12-02T16:43:00.001-08:00

I was drawn into the radical cartography website through the following image in ffffound:

I'm a sucker for scale comparisons. Poking around, I found a lot of other wonderful map-mashups:

Including this awesome series called "The Errant Isle Of Manhattan" in which the aforementioned island goes on a sightseeing tour (inspired by Rem's epilogue in Delirious NY, natch):

I'd like to see this continued. Maybe New York should go on a European Tour? Visit the Dead Sea? Or maybe enact an epic naval battle against Key West and the Fleet of Venice? Or float North, eventually embedding itself within the seasonal ice in the North Sea, only being freed after decades of global warming?

Kind of reminds me of this Lie-Ins and Tigers drawing:

Bloch redux

2007-11-27T22:00:00.000-08:00

(all images courtesy of my lovely wife)

While in KC over Thanksgiving I got a chance to revisit the Bloch building at the Nelson-Atkins fine art museum, this time at night and filled with art. That same night they were hosting a scupture park tour, which is the source of the little bags lighting our way.

The bags highlight something that I hadn't noticed before-- the total absence of streetlighting around the building. The diffuse (but bright) glow that the building itself emits is more than enough to see your way around, and has a wonderful effect upon the contained spaces of the sculpture park-- it becomes a series of comfortable and familiar outdoor rooms instead of threatening surplus space.

The entire effect of the museum, in fact, is very unimposing. One can (and I did) walk up the grass right to the channel glass, and rap your knuckles or slap your palm across the giant lantern. Kids were rolling down hills next to softly lit Moore bronzes. And then there's the fact that admission is free and one can enter the museum at any exterior door, promoting a kind of indoor-outdoor meandering that seems totally foreign to any previous museum experience. Rounding this all out is the fact that, despite the expected occasional slipshod detail or muffed corner, all of the points of human contact in this building-- the handrails, the doors, the floors and paving-- has been deeply considered and is a delight to regard and to touch.

I can't express how ecstatic I am that my hometown made the choice to build this building. This is easily the one of the most boundary-pushing new art museums I've seen, and it does it without grandiose scale, formal histrionics or an exceptional collection. This is, despite all appearences, not a magazine or coffee table museum. It is first and foremost a community asset.

I'll take mine in "churlish," please

2007-11-18T21:21:00.001-08:00

Katy recently heard another photographer cite a web-business adage that I'd never heard before. Apparently, ugly websites sell more. This is not all websites, mind you, but rather websites attempting to aggressively sell something. This photographer had switched print sales sites from one with an elegant interface to one that was markedly uglier, and he saw an immediate uptick in sales. There seem to be a lot of theories about this-- ugly websites are inherently simpler, ugly websites seem more trustworthy, ugly websites usually sell cheaper goods, etc. I have another theory to posit-- that these sites are more approachable, and because they're so bare bones, you feel like you're getting a great deal even if you aren't.

This is the same idea behind bargain retail-- yes, there is usually less overhead in bargain stores, but don't you think that DSW or Filene's Basement makes enough money to, say, put in partitions? Or maybe use lighting that's not ripped directly out of a high school gym? These spaces are not entirely about saving money. They're about creating the atmosphere of savings, replicating as exactly as possible the feeling of a swap meet or flea market, pulling pages out of a book that goes as far back as the Agora.

What is the equivalent domestic atmosphere? Is there some sort of stage set you can produce that will make you seem instantly trustworty? Wise? Fearsome? If so, I'm sure you can buy it at Pottery Barn. It seems like our national industry has become the perfection of atmospherics, or "lifestyles," if you prefer the vernacular. It's not too different from the future Neal Stephenson posits where the only three things the USA is still #1 in are movies, code, and pizza delivery. Not that I'm going to start wailing for a return to honesty and simplicity. But I'd much rather have things reach out and smack you every once in a while, instead of sitting in the corner and glaring. I prefer my design to be active rather than passive. This is not an aesthetic judgement, nor a social one. Maybe just more products that answer the what, how, and why rather than the where, who, and when.

back!

2007-11-14T20:07:00.001-08:00

So we have returned from our 2-week Normandy/Paris/NYC sojourn (with a brief stop in Cleveland to eat bad airport food). My first post is about the new public bike system we got to see in action in Paris.

They're calling it Velib', a bad french mashup pun, kind of like calling it "bikereedom." Or maybe "cycliberty" In true public transportation style, the logo is hideous:

... and the bikes themselves not too stunning either:

The bikes are, in my opinion, both ugly and slow, but this is probably a plus, as it keeps them from being stolen, and as nobody in Paris wears a helmet, a low maximum speed is pretty necessary. And they work! Each bike has an integral stand, lock, light, and basket. To check one out, you must either have a year Metro pass, or get a special card from the transportation service. Either option requires both a bank account and a physical address in Paris, which makes it difficult for anyone but commuters to get a hold of one. This is irritating if you're a tourist, but with the popularity of these things it's a necessary evil. You get your first half hour for free, with incremental charges afterwards (ramping up such that you probably wouldn't want to have one for longer than an hour and a half). You can return the bike to any stand in the city, which are easily found due to an entirely new street sign system that points the way to the nearest one. The Paris bike lane system has also been massively upgraded and expanded, many of the lanes dedicated with their own curbs.

Did I mention that these things are popular? I would estimate that more than half of the bikes I saw in Paris (and there are many) were Velib bikes. I never saw one visibly broken, never saw one being obviously misused, and 99% of the time there was at least one available bike and one available extra parking spot. While a longer term is certainly needed to give a final verdict on the success of this system, it seems to be working fantastically right now. It's making the Metro less crowded, while adding visual interest to the city and reducing carbon emissions (maybe). Oh, and bikes cannot strike. Why don't these exist anywhere else?

from one dead space to another

2007-10-26T19:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't really posted in the last few weeks thanks to an incredible busy weeklong stretch of work to prepare for.... more online absence! Katy and I are taking off two weeks to visit Normandy, Paris, and New York. I'm sure there will be thousands of pictures to follow in mid-November. But for now, all you get is quick ruminations on the lovely wildfires we've had here in Southern California.

1: It has only recently become clear to me that weather conditions exist that can spontaneously start and sustain immense fires. The wind and fire are not independent of one another; this is literally fire weather. If you have 70mph winds, 3% relative humidity and a dew point of negative 25 degrees, it's fire weather. Fire weather starts, without fail, every week before Halloween. It's a season, not a disaster.

2: It is facile to compare natural disasters. Much has been made of the national response to the San Diego wildfires vs. Katrina. Leaving aside the obvious differences in income demographics, car ownership and urban structure, a fire is not a flood. Fires destroy series of homes, at random, along specific routes. If you get caught in a house, you die, but you usually have a day's warning. Floods destroy every house for blocks, can have only a few hours warning, and can be survivable if caught. The only thing these incidents have in common is that FEMA is involved.

3: To continue in the spirit of #1, fires make me even more aware that Southern California has an intricate overlaid geography of wind patterns. Smog and the marine layer are one thing, but you don't know that Long Beach gets blanketed in dense smoke and ash from any fire within a 60 mile radius until it happens. A lot of where you live here is in the air above you-- on any random summer day it's 100 degrees with blue skies in one place, with 75 and cloudy 10 miles away. This is a product not only of the mountains, which channel every tiny breeze, but the fact that SoCal is bracketed by ocean on one side, desert on the other. It's like a giant game of wind pachinko, or some kind of Bernoulli Test Landscape. Oh, and there are lots of jets here. Screw Wyoming. Big Sky Country is in LA.

strangemaps explosion

2007-10-17T22:33:00.001-07:00

There has been a flurry of activity on the strangemaps blog recently which is worth checking out, particularly the Japanese USA Board Game Map and the Map of the Apocalypse, as well as plenty of geocultuhistorical goodness. Go to!

architectural API

2007-10-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

I found this blog entry a few days ago buried in the city of sound del.icio.us links. It's a well-written rumination from a "random" GSD student suggesting that architecture might learn from the rapid development of web programming, which is summarized as

"1. rough html -> 2. static sites by designers -> 3. flash and information architecture (parallel streams) approaches -> 4. template driven design hooked to massive databases (even for personal sites)/web 2.0 cross-site interactivity.
I see architecture at being at best in stage 3 (if not in stage 2) of this. If we can precipitate a stage 4, then I think things will be interesting."

It then goes on to try to define exactly what the analog of web 2.0 would be for architecture. What comes out is interesting if a bit hazy-- something like shelter+decoration+organization+processing. In my mind the answer is something a bit more literal-- if we had an accepted standard for BIM files, and a national code system that superceded most state and local building codes (especially MEP), then we might have something close to a plug-and play, open-source standard for building components. Large producers of things like window walls, prefabricated structural frames, PEX radiant heating and greywater systems could then provide libraries of digital components you can plug into your design and mash up with custom work of your very own. No checking to see if it'll work with the local inspector. No making sure that the j-box is in the right place. And no calling to get the cost and lead time- this is built into the component in the first place for parametric tastiness. If architecture is going to be anything like flikr or google maps, this is the way it's gotta be.

believers

2007-10-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Sellaband deserves some recognition as a fully realized, working example of an alternative social framework, that produces works of art, made only possible by the internet. It is a self-catalyzing popular music production device that, from the looks of it, might become so popular in the near future as to become some sort of A&R pyramid scheme.

Here's how it works: you convince people (somewhat ominously referred to as "believers" to donate $10 towards your band. Current believers help to convince more people until you have reached a final count of 5,000. This collected $50,000 is then used to hire a professional studio, producer, and sound engineer to make a record, copies of which are then distributed to each believer. These people have a license to sell off their extra records (of which they get an unspecified amount). The recording is also available online, for free. If downloaded, the band gets a cut of the ad revenue that Sellaband generates, and so do the believers. In other words, if you donate money to help get the band recorded, you now own stock in the record, stock that pays dividends based upon its popularity, and the popularity of Sellaband as a whole. This is a record label with the business model of Amway, which is brilliant-- the entire music industry (and that of any popular art) has always been based mostly on hype, and bands have often used their most devoted fans as free PR and advertising. But now the process is self catalyzing, which makes it far more powerful than anything Radiohead may be planning in the near future. It's also thrilling that it appears to be happening on such a global scale-- only a fraction of the listed bands are from the US or UK, making it seem that artists from other locales are using this as an opportunity to get the word out.

I do have some issues with this model for music production and promotion. For one, while it's probably better than basing a label's contracts on market research and the safest possible option, popular opinion alone won't often stretch boundaries or support the fringe acts that keep art from getting stale. And as such, unless a more consciously esoteric form of Sellaband shows up, small labels and self-releases will still be very important. I'm also not sure what exactly would happen to this model should it reach a certain size-- it's great when a band gets a contract every few weeks, but what if there's a new group to promote every day? Or ten a day? And finally, part of me is worried that profit is now creeping into the last bastion of the experience of popular music-- supporting and promoting your favorite bands. If everyone is now in A&R, is anyone really listening to music just to listen?

three photography links

2007-10-06T16:45:00.000-07:00

Polar Inertia, a somewhat addictive photo catalog/journalism site about (mostly) the American West and Pacific Rim.

Seam Carving, soon to appear on a website near you (and probably a tool in Photoshop CS4). Free tool to play with here.

PhotoSynth and Seadragon, two spectacular technologies that Microsoft has locked in a vault (video is a 6-month-old TED presentation, but it's new to me so I'm passing it on).

apologia + largest. camera. ever.

2007-10-02T22:03:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like my quarterly spurt of activity has ended at last, given that I am now going weeks at a time without a decent post. I'm going to respond by capitulating to my slothfulness; I am holding myself to one good and one lame post a week now. To begin:

Katy has been listening to a fantastic multimedia photo-history podcast from an uncommonly devoted community college professor. One of the last mentioned what was and probably will remain the largest conventional negative camera ever made, used by George Lawrence to make a 4 1/2 x 8 foot glass plate negative of a locomotive for the upcoming Paris Exposition (Lawrence is most famous for using kites to lift cameras to 2000 feet for arial panoramas, such as those of San Francisco immediately following the Great Fire). Here it is in all of its 1400 lb glory, with about half of the team necessary to operate the beast:

and

Further research revealed the existence of the Moby C at 2nd and Bleeker in NYC, the largest polaroid camera in existence, capable of 40" by 106" prints. It was originally used to make life-size reproductions of paintings, but the scale is also, incidentally, ideal for life-size polaroids of humans as well. There is something about capturing 1:1 images that makes photographs break the bond of representation and recapture some of Walter Benjamin's destroyed "aura". It turns the camera into some kind of frozen mirror, a human-capturing device.

But no discussion of gargantuan cameras would be complete without a mention of the (very recent) Legacy Photo Project, which captured a 25' x 100' cloth negative using an abandoned aircraft hangar as a gigantic camera obscura:

So here you have it, the world's first Borges Mapping Engine. Or perhaps a new weapon, the landscape soul thievery device! Able to steal the special aura surrounding any vista, hillock or monument you can think of, for transport and re-display at will. Ancient town centers and natural wonders beware! Your charms are no longer safe!

fun with color

2007-09-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

When I was in school the only real lessons we got in color theory were "there are no bad color combinations," and then a big "have at it!"

This doesn't even begin to touch on the ways that colors interact. Ever wonder why there is a light purple but no dark yellow? Ever wonder what the real difference between whiteness and brightness is? Well trip on down to LivelyGrey, play some games, and learn some lessons. You'll be glad you did.

"tremendous symbiosis of Progress and Nature"

2007-09-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

This is what archibase calls the Stockholm Metro. I would have to agree:

"The Stockholm Metro, or Stockholms tunnelbana, is the metro system in Stockholm, Sweden. The system has three main lines and one hundred stations, 47 of which are subterranean and 53 are aboveground (surface and elevated) stations."

"Stockholm's metro is well known for its decoration of the stations; it has been called the longest art exhibit in the world. Several of the stations (especially on the Blue line) are left with the bedrock exposed, crude and unfinished, or as part of the decorations."

Tremendous, indeed. I have never, in my years of mass transit, seen anything approximating this. Say what you will about the scale of D.C.'s tunnels and the baroque chandeliers of Moscow. I'll take the caves of Stockholm, thank you very much. Why on earth have the Swedes not let everyone know about this? Those cheeky Swedes.

(Thanks to things magazine for the heads up)

waste=food=bs

2007-09-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

Mr. Manaugh of BLDGBLOG posted a few days ago on a joint performance by Michael McDonough and Michelle Kaufmann at this weekend's Dwell on Design conference. The "big idea" of this presentation was apparently that "conductive" materials, such as metal, should be avoided in new housing in favor of "insulative" materials. I might be slightly biased in all of this, but this seems like a crazily reductive and somewhat specious argument to be making in front of thousands of paying customers. Not only is McDonaugh simplifying the idea of sustainability to a single variable (energy performance), but he seems to be ignoring holistic strategies and even the existence of more than one climate on this earth! In addition, heat conductance is a relative value, and roof, wall, and floor construction is almost always, by necessity, an assembly, so where do you draw the line, and with which material?

My other beef seems to be that Ms. Kaufmann is supporting this argument to differentiate her (wood framed) modular construction from similar (steel framed) modular construction, on the basis of sustainability. Never mind that the first Leed Platinum home in the country is entirely steel framed.

I think that Mr. McDonaugh and Ms Kaufmann are both very intelligent, gifted architects that have contributed greatly to the idea of a sustainable, well designed environment. And I'm definitely not going to claim that recycled steel is a perfect building technology. But this presentation seems to me to be a warning shot-- the first in a series of "sustainability wars" where hype and proprietary technologies overcome the need for shared information and measured individual solutions. If we've learned anything from previous modern mistakes, it's that a single and homogeneous treatment of any problem is going to be seriously lacking in resilience and vitality. So I am making an open request to Michele and Michael-- next time you use your considerable clout to fight for sustainability, please try to acknowledge the need for a comprehensive, heterogeneous, multivalent solution to the problem. Simply saying "metal is bad" does no one any good.

weak ties and strong language

2007-09-09T20:54:00.001-07:00

The new Key Magazine in the NYT has this article of interest, a combination anthropological study of SoCal condo life and general expose on the marketing of "lifestyle" urban living centers. The jury's still out on whether the findings are reassuring or frightening. The (somewhat geriatric) gist is that the young folks don't want to leave their college dorms, which reminds me of this BLDGBLOG post that posits that our wish for pedestrian urbanism is, for most, really a nostalgia for campus life.

One problem I do have with the article is that it casts contemporary social networking as a kind of mass solipsism-- all of the examples cited are chiefly recreational groups. No mention is really made of groups that produce-- other than a sideways mention of Burning Man, which is somewhat equated in the article with flash mobs. Actually, come to think of it, the while article is sprinkled with condescension of this type, which seems to spring from the unspoken assumption that a mortgage and family is the de facto "normal" way of life in our country. So maybe I don't like this article after all. But I like the slide show. Look at that.

gentlemen, there is no fighting in the war room

2007-09-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

I promise I'll start posting more regularly, but for the time being here's some filler. Slate.com has this lovely, detailed article on the true state of international nuclear relations. The gist is that the cold war has not ended, it's just on hiatus. But there are also some great bits on an impervious quartz mountain-cave bunker headquarters.

monstrocity! cementland!

2007-08-26T11:04:00.000-07:00

If the above words make your heart accelerate, you might want to check out the recent NYT article on Bob Cassilly, and his two past and one future creations: The City Museum, MonstroCity, and CementLand. All are junkyard conglomerations built upon former industrial sites for the purpose of, in Cassilly's words, providing a place “where people can come and do things they’re not supposed to.” I have harped on this again, again, and again. Post-industrial lots are the beginnings of great public spaces. I heard just yesterday a person from Friends of the LA River talk about the reclamation of 20 acres of former rail yard next to the river into a combination of wetlands and community soccer fields. In order to do this they had to first sue the county and city to keep it from being zoned for further industrial use. These things do not happen on their own. What is your local Highline?

technopeat

2007-08-22T19:47:00.000-07:00

Once again I have been lazy. I have no excuse.

There is a good article by Beth Daily at the Boston Globe about how there is an enormous market for secondhand industrial and transportation technologies in second- and third-world countries. When a city replaces its bus fleet, or a factory goes out of business and its power plant is dismantled, the detrious is recycled in a very literal way-- it is shipped and reassembled in Guatamala, or Kenya, or Sri Lanka. It is a large scale version of what Bruce Sterling calls "the new composting the old," with "outdated" technologies not disappearing but merely retreating out of the view of those of us who remain slavishly up-to-date, becoming cheaper and more receptive to hacking or modifying.

The article takes the slant of sustainability, and does a good job of conveying the complexity of the issue-- reuse is good, but often repurposed items (such as diesel buses) are replaced because they are polluting or inefficient-- the idea being that, when that coal power plant next door shuts down, it actually will spew carbon for another 50 years or so, only in South America.

I'm tempted to step aside all of this calculation and simply be satisfied that things are being used to their fullest extent; that the world is becoming more complex and interconnected, at a very basic and ground up level, every day. I can only wait for the day when we start using secondhand robots from Nicaragua, or retitled Balinese spacecraft. The world of the secondhand is mostly immune from the world of branding and global identitiy -- what is getting sold is the possibility for energy, or conveyance, or communication. And an intangible alien quality that never quite diminishes with age.

infrastructure urbanism redux

2007-08-16T22:12:00.000-07:00

"...infrastructure should be defined not by what it looks like, and not by who designs it or who pays for it, and not by who builds it or actually uses it. It should be defined by whom it is meant to serve. For all its seemingly disparate parts, infrastructure comprises those elements in a metropolitan region's physical landscape that are meant to serve the public--or rather, the sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes wholly discontinuous publics that populate today's American metropolitan areas and are critical to the growth of our country."

Yes, yes and yes. This New Republic Article (subscription required to get beyond the first page) makes most of the talking points for the post-Minneapolis "rotting infrastructure" harangue, but with enough erudition and restrained anger to be convincing, even inspiring. Good job, Sarah Williams Goldhagen. Even the comments afterwards (mostly) continue the argument in a sane and rational manner. I'm going to start my own harangue here, but Goldhagen is obliquely making the same point I've been trying to drive home-- that infrastructure in now the primary mode of public space and spending, and that it's resources as an urban collector are poorly exploited (if at all). What this article points out is that we have underbuilt and undermaintained consistently over the last few decades, while veritably pouring money into private-public developments like arenas and "town centers," developments that would probably have come to bear with our without government support.

Who will speak for the aqueducts, for the aqueducts have no lips? Um, me.

flaying the beach

2007-08-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

I'm easily embarrassed. I'm not only embarrassed when I say the wrong thing or feel conspicuous, but can cringe just as easily at the shaming, real or imagined, of other people, even complete strangers. So it has taken me a while to get used to Katy lugging around a camera approximately the size of our dog wherever we go. This becomes particularly troublesome (to me only, as Katy is much more well-adjusted about this sort of thing) when we are near the beach, such as the local land of the lotus eaters. Once, on the Santa Monica Promenade, as Katy was photographing some neon, a woman looked at us, shook her head, and said, "more idiots."

This kind of response is actually not what I am afraid of. What embarrasses me the most is the idea that we're being taken for tourists casually and without comment. There is a kind of basic condescension towards visitors that makes me automatically indignant when I feel we don't fit in. There's a great passage in V., which I'm too lazy to look up now, where Pynchon talks about how tourists are only interested in the surface of a place, seeking to get a quick feel for the locale and then on to the next topographical experience. I suppose most of my embarrassment comes from an assumption that other people are assuming that I don't care about where I am that much. Yes, I realize this is very, very silly.

The thing is, I shouldn't be ashamed of my status as a visiting outsider. I should be proud. I can't count the number of times I've tried to look at a familiar landscape with new eyes; every time I visit my parents I try to force my eyes into an alien configuration so I can see my old neighborhood as a stranger would. So what I am bringing to, say, Manhattan Beach is a heroic perspective, a fresh outlook, beautiful misunderstandings and a ludicrous fascination with even the most mundane details. I, unlike a local, am taking nothing for granted. And my wife is recording this heroic exploration in great detail, to forever mark this place and time as ours. I should be planting a flag. A small flag with my name and address, asking people to please, walk down my street, write down what they see, and send it to me. It's the least they can do in return.

gsdelicious

2007-08-13T21:03:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, the post-Miesian tower, the mono-functional rectilinear vertical extrusion clad in dark or mirrored glass (which proliferated around the world in the second International Style era of the ’60s onwards) marks architecture’s all-time nadir, even if some examples were well detailed and proportioned.

This culled from a new article by Peter Buchanan in Harvard design magazine. The article is a lot less polemic than that quote may suggest, but I appreciate the bold thinking involved; indeed, but the rubric that Buchanan sets forth (basically, LEED standards and standard urbanism), this may be true. Buchanan isn't some kind of architectural Luddite; the rest of the article is basically a mash note for the Swiss Re tower. I do like the historical viewpoint that he takes about the current state of iconic international competitions:

All these seem last-fling sunset effects from a waning era when, beside the defects listed, towers helped create dismal cities and aptly symbolized their extreme economic and social inequalities.

Makes me feel like I'm living in Blade Runner. But who would have guessed even ten or fifteen years ago that there would be this sudden explosion of modern pyramids? In the last thirty years of science fiction we went from white iconic idyll (2001) to dystopian megamachine (Blade Runner, Alien) to a banal sprawl where all of the action is virtual (Gibson, Stephenson). I honestly think that the concentration of power and weath will always have dramatic physical expression, even if all of the action is taking place electronically. Sorry, Neal, you might be wrong this time.

i pity the fool

2007-08-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

My good friend Mr. T left a comment on my last post that made me realize that the brevity of my comments may have been misleading. The full text of T's comments are below, with some interjections by myself:

A critical and possibly obvious distinction between branded building materials or components and branded complete environments or buildings is that components, no matter how innovative, will consistently be arranged and assembled according to old notions of space and comfort. Maybe this is the most reasonable and careful route to the “future.” It is certainly the most fluid and it’s not as though one could realistically argue for its end.

However, to submit completely to this kind of slow progress would, in fact, be a real break from history. It would also signal the validation of Tafuri’s grimmest assessment of the architect’s position in a capitalist society. The design of pre-fabricated homes as a supplement to the market’s new components has the potential to expand our ideas of home and even community at a broader scale than a new glazing system or refrigerator ever will. Without a comprehensive reexamination of pre-manufactured space, the use of new materials will effectively amount to “pimp my house.”

While I'm always a bit leery of applying Tafuri to contemporary problems in architecture, I completely agree with this. To flesh out my argument a bit further, I foresee the "pimp my house" situation as a status quo to rise above; domestic spaces are now being commodified in ways more complex than the simple application of "style". These hybrids of furniture, decoration and architecture must be exploited by architects if we are to maintain any agency in popular residential architecture.

While new products represent technological advances, new product-houses represent the synthesis of this technological growth along with cultural shifts. No, the pre-manufactured home is not new, but its continued development cannot be seen as the mere prolongation of a fad or trend. It has become established as a component of our built environment and, therefore, deserves further investigations.

This is as elegant and concise a way of presenting my current attentions as I can think of. Mr T., this is my new thesis statement.

Furthermore, while the market does innovate, it will only ever innovate in ways that sustain the market. For this to be a critique with any merit, the architect must, of course, have real aspirations beyond the market. So with this important condition in place, an architect can offer new ways of constructing that move beyond what the consumer will have otherwise. This is not a denial of the aegis of the consumer over the built environment, but it serves to reaffirm and validate the accumulated knowledge and trained effort of the architect as designer.

Rybczynski's main point seems to be that today’s pre-fab homes are just too expensive. This may be true, but as with any modern product innovation, costs decrease with increased production and market driven competition. Today’s consumer also sets a higher hurdle for the design of his home. As income gaps grow and the cult of the wealthy is fueled by widespread media reassurance, the poorest American has higher or more pointed expectations of comfort. In a hyper-commercialized society such as ours we must recognize that change requires effort.

Italics are mine above. That is a very good point about the dangers of free market determinism, and was the main reason I felt the need to address T's comments here. Architecture has many values beyond monetary value or status or anything related to commodity; the primary reason for the existence of architecture probably lies beyond the realm of calculable value, a fact is consistently overlooked. However, for architecture to regain any agency in residential and popular design, value- and product-driven concepts must be reintroduced into the architectural vocabulary. It is this synthesis that I am struggling to understand and project into the future.

here's to tiny revolutions (per second)

2007-08-08T22:34:00.000-07:00

Witold Rybczynski's latest slideshow in Slate takes aim at neomodern prefabricated housing, with somewhat deadly aim. He makes the valid points that:

a. This has been attempted many times in the past, and
b. No attempt has ever really "revolutionized" domestic architecture.

Both of these things are undoubtedly true. From Lustron to Gropius, prefabrication has been part of the "future" of housing for a century now, and with seemingly little effect upon the vast majority of housing. This is not to say his thesis is perfect. For one, he makes a vastly misinformed case for manufactured (mobile) housing, one which I hope he reconsiders. He also shows us a spec house making extensive use of premanufactured components, and somehow manages to draw the obvious conclusion; that the changes that architects have been attempting to force are being slowly brought to bear by the market itself; prefabrication is now de rigeur for a lot of structure, sheathing, cladding, and even MEP systems, and seems be trending even further in that direction. It is my opinion that this is somewhat unavoidable; that in an age of advanced consumerism homes will become more product-like, a process that must take advantage of the fine tolerances and replicability of factory production. The role of architects in this case is to get on board before we become the rear guard; that is, embrace the ideals of the product world - branding, image, tactility, assembly-- in addition to those that we have been brought up to idealise - form, light, material, process. This may be a tiny revolution against what people have attempted in the past, but it is a significant one.

Iakov Chernikhov

2007-08-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the laziness of recent weeks, I'll get off my ass and start posting regularly again, I swear.

Yes, the work is as fantastic as the name. I was trolling around on my new obsession, Bibliodyssey and came across this post on the aforementioned Russian Constructivist and his incredible synthesis of architecture, typography, and painting. There is a biography here as well as many more images. Chernikhov was called the "Soviet Piranesi" by some, and until his death in 1951 promoted the idea that complexity and a reexamination of detail and even decoration was instrumental to modern design and architecture.

The more I see the more I am certain that I should be selecting my influences rather than attempting revolution.

urban-historical peep show

2007-07-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

(Houston, Circa 1891)

The Amon Carter Museum has a fantastic little toy that allows you to browse through an enormous collection of Nineteenth Century bird's-eye views of Texas cities. As they put it:

Bird’s-eye views, many of which are more than three feet wide, appear as something between a panoramic view and a map, as though they were drawn by the artist while he was suspended in a hot-air balloon. In fact, they were drawn by hand using, most often, two-point perspective to produce a three-dimensional rendering. The city views are surprisingly accurate (even to the point of documenting the presence of a tree in the middle of Gonzales Street in Cuero) and represent a much neglected source for understanding the history of Texas.

My only complaint about this website is that the flash browser is so tantalizingly small that I'm left hunched over my screen, eyestrained, scrolling around frantically, tempted by the "buy" link in the toolbar above and cursing the Carter Museum's for not providing (at least low-quality) full size images. But that's beside the point. The fact is, there is no form of art that captures aerial experience better than first-person hand drawings done while levitated. There is something beautiful about the conflict between penciled subjectivity and the exactitude of aerial two-point perspective. But enough said-- go take a look for yourself.

an internet with less screaming

2007-07-26T23:05:00.000-07:00

First of all, I have to point out the even more incredible than usual hodgepodge of etchings and prints over at Bibliodyssey right now. This post has a running start and just keeps speeding up, traveling through "Multi: clown vignettes; SarcoBosco astronomy; Böhme mystical engravings, allegorical book images; satirical Portuguese 19cent illustrations, German tulip and medieval anatomical sketches; ivory manuscript cover; Wisconsin bookart and many, many links." For those of you who haven't been over there, I hope you become as unexpectedly besotted (that's right, besotted) as I am. Those clowns kick ass.

In other news, I recently installed Adblock on my browser. Seeing sites like nytimes and pitchfork media without the relentless distraction of flashing ads bordering every piece of content was so foreign as to make the internet suddenly foreign. It reminded me of the sudden de-ad-ification of Sao Paolo, Brazil, which has left behind a residue like this:

More astonishing images by Tony De Marco can be found here. What both of these (prunings? cleansings?) point out to me is that the removal of commerce from their locales, while a vast improvement, does not lead to a more streamlined or cohesive fabric. The removal of these ads leave huge holes, scar tissue and voids behind. Meaning that advertisements are not additions or accoutrements; once they have been incorporated they are an integral part of a city or medium, and cannot be removed without a violent afterimage. Read even further, the various texts and images on a city are not something that is overlaid and can be changed or removed with impunity; it is integral and deep-rooted. Two recent works of art explore this kind of removal with different results. While Matt Siber's "untitled" project seems to imply that the text is a separate entity, Stinbrener-Dempf's "delete" makes a bright yellow point of the violence implicit in getting rid of city signifiers. I guess this is the base of my thought here-- advertising and signage is not just signifying. It is also an object that has an independent presence from the message it is trying to convey. And it is only after removal that one begins to see how powerful that secondary presence is.

how I miss my Fisher Space Pen

2007-07-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Subtraction is a blog by Khoi Vinh, the design director for the New York Times website. Among other things, he had a recent post on the fact that, unlike other elegantly designed items, most modern electronics, while often being shockingly well designed, are, due to planned obsolescence and somewhat to the current dominant high-tech design philosophy, are doomed to deteriorating inelegantly, if not catastrophically. The question being, why can't our iPods age gracefully, or even improve over time, like cast-iron pans or good luggage? The battered condition of your laptop or cellphone should be a badge of pride instead of an embarrassment.

My contribution to this discussion is that while lots of currently electronics are taking the right first step in divorcing enclosure from content, they all seem to have it backwards, providing interchangeable or replaceable shells for the (currently expensive) interior components. But, as hardware eventually becomes obsolete, why has nobody examined the possibility of creating a long-lasting, beautiful exterior with upgradable guts? There are obvious hurdles like proprietary hardware and no standard dimensions for most components, but some companies have more control over the future of their hardware than others. I'd be perfectly happy with recycling my cellphone hardware once a year, even paying for it, as long as it had a nice, heavy cast-iron shell. As it is, I just have to keep my trashy hinged plastic model for longer than it can really survive.

In a related note, there was a pretty fantastic article in the NYT about planned obsolescence and the unfortunate orphans it leaves in it's wake. Running shoes and digital watches aren't really getting any better, but great designs are often thrown by the wayside instead of being treated as the classics they could be, just so the parent companies can advertise something brand new. Given the iconic power of objects like Converse All-Stars and old-school Casios, it seems that perhaps better attention could be paid to recognising and preserving contemporary common classics. I'll leave you to find the article, but I will point you as far as the comments section, full of New Yorkers grieving for lost gel pens and Honda CRVs. I hope that these people carry on their collective yearning and form a society devoted to the preservation of lost common objects, tiny pieces of locally perfect design that are in danger of being forgotten.

radio lab

2007-07-18T21:30:00.001-07:00

I don't know why things with the word "lab" in them seem to consistently blow my mind, but there's a new one this week. Radiolab isn't a particularly new show (it's the fourth season), but my only exposure up until now was in short segments on KCRW or This American Life. And it is. Awesome. It combines two of my favorite hybrid genres -- the science narrative and humorous documentary -- into a kind of super-melange that keeps me riveted. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (check out those names) debate socratically and interview supernerds over a consistent blanket of ambient sound in a way that is very. kick. ass.

intermodal fun

2007-07-16T20:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things I miss most about grade school is field trips. So the ability to blow off half a day and go on a bona-fide adult field trip was a truly awesome event. We visited the Union Pacific Intermodal Transfer Facility in San Pedro, for kind of hazy and unspecific reasons (which made it all the more fun).

The "facility" is the place where containers are transferred from ship to train (with a tiny interim on a truck in-between). They had built a fairly detailed model of the facility, which was cool, but perhaps a bit of overkill. Check out the tiny little trucks:

After viewing the model we were brought up to a kind of control tower that overlooked the entire yard. Here is where the trucks check into the "ramp" (slang for a transfer yard). I swear every fifth container said Costco on the side. Note the kick-ass refinery beyond.

Here is the area where the transfers take place. Other than trains and trailers, the two main pieces of machinery were the mini-tractors that raced all over the yard pulling trailers next to the trains, and the awesomeAkira-esque gantry cranes that lift the containers into place. A skilled operator can move a container from trailer to train in less than a minute.

There was also some other pretty awesome industrial architecture visible from the tower, like this freakishly monolithic dry-storage "shed," which looked to be as big as a medium-sized Egyptian pyramid.

To the rear of the facility, you could see the source of the thousands of containers the Union Pacific moves every day-- the dockyards. The cranes look massive even from miles away. More field trips will have to be made.

screwy

2007-07-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Screw Asylum is a prime example of the internet I fear might evaporate at any moment, the fragile tiny nooks and societies that Ben Katchor invents/documents in his Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer series.

Also, the fine people over at SA pointed me to this fantastic Soviet ATV:

wii-ta

2007-07-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

If one was to make a nerdy blog-post chart, cute pictures of pets would be only slightly above posts about people playing video games. This I realize. But when our dog Rita falls asleep on her back, her little front-paw hooks are just about right shape for wii-mote storage.

Gibson made me want those 300,000BTUs

2007-07-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

After my recent post where I blamed William Gibson on my mild obsession with post-industrial products, I feel the need to qualify this blame.

If being a futurist means condensing the present, extrapolating the result and then projecting the resulting mess outwards, Gibson did such a good job that, almost 25 years after Neuromancer, we're still relying on his idea of the future to explain the present. And part of the reason he had so much success was that, despite being one of the founding fathers of the concept of cyberspace, he spends the majority of the time writing about physical reality. He created a world where digital imagery sits as a thin coating over a substructure cobbled together with epoxy, wire and department-of-defense seconds. He spent most of his time examining what kind of people might live inside of this sub-structure.

Inherent to all of this is the idea that obsolete industrial equipment is the new raw material. What is lost in craft and detail is made up for in scale, complexity, and sheer power. This kind of junkyard, collage ideology appears again and again in his written work. In the short story Johnny Mnemonic, there is a shantytown cobbled together in the attic of a domed city, inhabited by people that call them selves "Lo-Tek." This phrase was undoubtedly borrowed by the architecture firm "Lot-ek", who have likewise absorbed the entire post-industrial aesthetic, down to the central irony that such raw solutions require, at times, very high technology.

Other examples in Gibson's work abound. In "Count Zero," you not only have high-rise housing projects with water-jet cutters, hydroponic agriculture and rooftop wind turbines, colonized and cut off from the grid, but also an assembly-line robot hacked and distorted into an automated artist, producing Cornell boxes from floating detritus. In the (horrifically named) Mona Lisa Overdrive there is a reclusive artist living in a Superfund site in the rust belt, creating robotic junkyard sculpture in an old warehouse (a reference to Survival Research Labs). His "Bridge Trilogy" centers around San Francisco's Bay Bride, taken over by the homeless as a suspended shantytown after a 9.0 earthquake. And, finally in Pattern Recognition, he has yet another techno-autistic artist, creating collaged videos with material dredged from the Internet.

These somewhat romantic junkyard notions of ad-hoc technology cut through a lot of the current obsessions of popular culture at an oblique angle, from "Loft-Style" suburban homes to mashups to laser-projected graffiti. A lot of this is simply styling even marketing created by and appealing to the generation that grew up with ubiquitous Japanese cartoon robots and misused corporate laser pointers. But it's also, in my opinion, the leading indicator of a general tendency in manufacturing; as production becomes more and more micro-scaled, cleaner, light-weight and rapid, we are beginning to treat steelyards and coal factories the way we used to treat the Parthenon and Stonehenge, as decaying, monolithic antiquities from a simpler and more powerful time. Even as the things around us are becoming polymers, carbon fibers, nanotubes, aerogels, we long for a nice hefty brick to throw through a plate glass window.

pico and sepulveda

2007-07-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

From the Danny Elfman-scored "Forbidden Zone". This may be the highlight. Made all the more amusing by the fact that there is nothing but a lumber warehouse, donut store, and government offices at that corner. And maybe a discount golf store. Still, were one getting directions to that location (for an unknown reason), I can see how repeating it ad infinitum would lead to exactly this.

ersatz emotion for sale!

2007-07-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin wrote a lot about the concept of the "aura" in art. Photography, and mechanical reproduction in general, he argued, destroyed the history and singularity and sheer object-ness of a work of art, a quality he deemed to be a kind of aura surrounding the work, giving it mystery and a kind of emotional Velcro that can be found most strongly in catholic relics and old baby clothes.

Well, folks, technology has come one hundred and eighty degrees. Have your images lost that aura that once suffused them? Are you tired of the neo-modernist emphasis on clarity and calm?

Meet Jesh DeRox, the proprietor of the reconstituted aura. Through the magic of Photoshop "textures," your special event can have nostalgia applied, long before it has naturally accumulated! You don't have to be eighty to have precious things. Finally, welcome to the photographic equivalent of pre-distressed jeans.

collect all four

2007-06-30T22:53:00.000-07:00

Anyone seen the article about space gloves in the NYT magazine? Someone finally won one of NASA's open competitions for new technology-- a former sailmaker invented a superior astronaut handcovering on his 30 year old Singer and won $200,000, plus a valuable patent.

This adds a whole new twist to a good new article by David Celento in Harvard Design Magazine. In between making fairly accurate assessments of contemporary practice, prefabrication, rapid prototyping and fabrication, and BIM, he makes this point:

Architects are among the very few providing custom design services in a product-infatuated society. this presents a profound problem, especially since few clients possess an understanding of the efforts necessary to create custom, products, and even fewer are willing to adequately finance them

And this one (about the current state of government projects):

An imperfect but illustrative parallel in manufacturing would be if Boeing were contacted to digitally design and construct a one-of-a-kind “blue-sky” airplane. The client is interested in exclusive rights to Boeing’s five years worth of design data, prohibits Boeing from making more than one plane, will only pay for error-free parts, and expects to pay little (or no) more than the cost of a standard plane of similar size. Boeing wouldn’t even bother to return the call, yet architects are competing for design opportunities where the conditions aren’t that much different.

Somewhere between space gloves and t-shirts we have a new solution. Art museums and megamansions can still be made painstakingly bespoke, but perhaps what we should really be competing for and slaving over are systems: structural furniture, cladding signage, countertop/lighting, or even just a better way of doing ceilings. Once the production of an object goes beyond a few dozen, the cost of designing that object becomes only a tiny part of the process, instead of fifteen percent, giving the designer a lot more leeway, and a lot less breathing down the neck.

This has been said before (and more eloquently). But I am not going to take the next step in exhorting all young practitioners to take up the mantle of rapid fabrication and systems design, claiming that if we don't do it, someone else will, relegating architects to mere decorators. That's Arup's line, and I don't buy it. No matter how monolithic the pieces of a building get, you will still need someone to negotiate between all of the internal and external pressures. Someone to dance around keeping the water out and holding it up, while keeping their eyes focused on something more distant. If anything, industrial designers might take this place, and if they do a better job, maybe they deserve it. Maybe we will see a collapse of building, furniture, and device, and we'll all live like Dave in 2001. But if the future is all about products and consumption, why the hell would people choose to buy one thing when they can buy hundreds? And hasn't the last half-century taught us that monocultures are weak and potentially hazardous?

I think that the near future will be just as haphazard, heterogeneous, and multilayered as the present. And we should be here to reap the chaos, and nudge things towards a slightly more ordered state.

Two views of I-45

2007-06-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

Today, two different ghosts of Houston's automotive past, both sent to me some time ago by Jean:

The first, a planned expansion in 1946 (pulled from a newspaper article) that shows how freeways (or "urban expressways") used to get planned... a gradual slowing of traffic through an intensification of on andofframps (incidentally beautiful from above), until it spreads out into a downtown "delta", which reconnects at the other end of the city into tributaries. Note the striking similarity in image and concept to the human circulatory system, albeit one that does not circulate. An oscillatory system, I guess. Nevertheless, it does show that as they were originally conceived and constructed, freeways did not strangle or bypass cities any more than a half-dozen railway stations strangle or bypass Paris. Here is symbiosis, not separation.

A mere fifteen years later, demolition had already begun to run an elevated expressway directly south of downtown, directly through a busy and successful commercial street (Pierce). The property values on this right-of-way were so high they could only purchase one-half the requested width, and Pierce elevated remains narrow today. This diagram was lifted from a detailed (if not terribly critical) history of Houston's transportation systems, commissioned by TXDOT . Look at the 45/59 interchange in the lower right--did you know that it took up more than six city blocks? According to the last census, 43% of land in downtown Houston is taken up by right-of-ways. 2.4% of this same area is public open space. Perhaps some of this transportation space could serve a second use...

industrial consumerism

2007-06-26T20:51:00.000-07:00

When I am overcome by the desire to own something, it is almost always an industrial, not a consumer product. I think this may be the product of too many William Gibson novels in my youth-- the idea that sparsely designed, no-frills tools are superior to the chaff sprinkled on the common people. So, when we were talking about kitchens, I got excited by the 300,000 BTU 10-burner superranges at Surfas. I can spend hours looking at foam rubber and vapor-tight light fixtures at McMaster-Carr. It's even influenced my choice of offices-- I am thrilled that I get to work with a factory every day.

My latest obsession is from ISO. Yes, the International Standards Organization. Yes, the people that brought you such blockbusters as "ISO 22000: Food Safety Management Systems" and "ISO 14000: GHG emissions accounting and verification." What has me all hot and bothered, however, is ISO 7000: graphical symbols.

For a little over $200 (paid in Swiss Francs, natch), you can get over 2,400 fantastic standard icons, from the seat belt symbol, to low tire pressure, to the ever-popular "lightning-bolt" danger triangle, in several formats! Think of all of the uses-- someone at my office already suggested a machine that prints a different icon-based t-shirt every day, for six and a half years.

I'm saving up.

move to bejing? $2000

2007-06-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that it often seems like the future is already here, it's just looks to boring to be noticed. Seabox is a custom container company that makes the current mobile-design architects look like kids in a sandbox.

This may not look like much, but here's the description:

In the closed configuration, the structure meets all the ISO requirements for transportation on a container ship. Once on site, the Folding House can be set up in about one day. Custom designs and materials are also available.

For those of you that are a little more impatient, there's a version that involves a tentlike configuration that can be unfolded in under 20 minutes. Or if you desire the bad-ass over the expedient, go with one of these:

Here we have an open-frame, stackable "ratpac" system with reconfigurable exterior and interior partition walls, capable of pretty daring cantilevers. It was designed as a system for SWAT urban warfare training. Check out the shiny interiors:

Sinister and kick ass.
For something more heartwarming, try this:

Oh, just a portable standing wave generator. Shippable, of course. There are also portable workshops:

And, of course, you could just hire them to make impromptu ziggurats and 100 foot walls, on demand--here's a temporary outdoor movie screen in Central Park:

And, of course, the requisite art opening monoliths:

These guys will design for you a 40' container with integral generator and A/C unit, built-in furniture and even a little plumbing. And since everything still meets ISO code for international shipping, you can ship your house at the going rates (currently, about anywhere in the world for $3000 or under. And China is especially cheap). For a harder sell, check out this video.

I'm going to petition Seabox to change their motto to "Up Yours, Lo-tek."

gardening architecture

2007-06-19T22:31:00.000-07:00

[All images taken from the reference library blog. While I'm not sure the "quality" the writer is searching for is quite as ineffable as he makes it out to be, the site has a fantastically even feel.]

There is an often unacknowledged side to biomimicry that I feel might be as interesting a consequence as the possible responsive and regenerative aspects that are much talked about. These buildings will age.

Your house could get hot flashes and headaches. Your school would slowly weather into a softer, less resiliant, slower form. The subway station would forget things. With the modernist concept of a priori materiality repaced with mutable,ageable substances, one's relationship with buildings would transition from detached viewer to constant caregiver and maintainer. If we build like trees, we must prepare to be the gardeners of our structures.

I'm just hoping that my house doesn't get chronic headaches or a predisposition to the yearly flu.

two views on global warming

2007-06-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

Inaba projects has made a verifiably fantastic video (available on YouTube) forecasting a gently totalitarian, evolving, regenerative urban future. The title, "Moore's Law Meets Sustainability," should give you a teaser of it's unbridled positivism. This relentless, mechanistic optimism could have easily derailed the video, but it is just creepy and unreal enough to inspire rather than pacify.

On the other end of the spectrum, the City of Santa Cruz provides us with a powerpoint presentation entitled "Turning the Tide." Buried within the promises to cut emissions and provide more greenspace, which (to me) only highlight the issues of attempting local solutions for a global problem, is the following slide:

This list can be seen as histrionic and alarmist by some (100 year flood levels, widespread drought, etc etc), but I actually found it to be comforting: here is the end result on urbanism in a few decades if we can't manage to turn around world trends in industrial pollution and unbridled waste-- desalinization plants, levees and dikes, and-- as was suggested in a recent NYT article -- urban shorelines that look more and more like Venice or Amsterdam.

I am somewhat reminded what I was once told on a tour of Prague, that centuries of debris had made the former first floors of many old buildings into the basements. I can only imagine, if the worst-case scenarios for ocean levels come true in fifty years, that some localities might choose canals and waterlogged first floors over losing long-held property. How do property rights fit in when the shoreline moves 200 feet inland in a decade?

march starch?

2007-06-14T22:14:00.000-07:00

One of the localised weather phenomena that I had to get used to, alonside the Santa Anas and "fire season", is the fact that most of the early summer here is cloudy. Not just a little cloudy. End-of the world cloudy.

They give it cute names like "May Grey" and "June Gloom," but the fact is, if you live and work west of Overland Avenue (such as I do), you get pretty depressed this time of year. And it doesn't even rain-- these are angry, but impotent clouds.

It's as if, for the few months of the year the rest of the country is having clear weather, southern California is forced to borrow their clouds, and store them in the first few miles of land next to the Pacific, for use later in the fall.

my line

2007-06-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

Doulas Tomkins, the man who brought us North Face, allowing us to have wonderfully warm clothing that was either fuzzy on the outside, or makes little zip-zip-zip noises when you move, has been buying land in South America, piece by piece, as a private ecological preserve. At last count, he owns around a million acres in Argentina and Chile.

This is something like .15% of these two countries combined. This may seem small, but it is also over 1500 square miles, much of it in a long skinny squath about 35 miles across, next to the ocean. So there is a wee bit of controversy, not only for reasons of access, but because the land also happens to be on top of a very large resivoir.

All of this aside, I wonder what it would be like if someone purchased a long, skinny piece of, say, Utah, piece by piece, until they had bisected the state completely. All of a sudden, you would have a new datum, a Mason-Dixon line of the 21st century. Not to mention that you could now feel free to start a whole series of linear enterprises, from a linear accelerators to speedways for land-speed records, and, maybe, in the future, magnetic space launch facilities.

UPDATE: speaking of strategic reserves in the desert, this just appeared on archinect.

for your consideration...

2007-06-11T20:42:00.001-07:00

... Tony Garnier's Prix de Rome-winning "project for a national bank", of 1899. Image lifted from "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", in which Banham notes the embarassment "young progressive architects" had explaining how such a formalistic, nonfunctional plan could win a trip to Italy. To get a sense of the
scale, check out the tiny conference tables in the lower third. There were no sections or elevations in the submission.

I almost wish that this had been built, leveling some declared "slum-ridden" portion of Paris in the early part of the last century. Over the years, it would decay and the maintenance costs would skyrocket, until 100 years later (perhaps today), Parisians would decide that the only recourse would be to remove all of the windows and make an enormous enclosed city park, much as they did with some slaughterhouses a few decades back. A now-acclaimed losing entry from that competition would be revived and the marble halls meant originally only for "monumental circulation" would be reinterpreted as badminton courts, skating rinks, and art galleries (and, of course, a boulodrome). The collonades provide perfect goalposts, and the main banking room would become a quasi-open air cafe from which one could watch sumptuous anarchy unfolding in every direction.

mp3 copout: audiosports

2007-06-07T22:48:00.000-07:00

Softball today. All I have to show for my efforts this time is a left thumb that looks like a link sausage. Therefore, today's unearthed audio file is of me kicking ass at a perhaps slightly less athletic sport: boules (or petanque, if you're snooty about it):

hydrocarbon atlantis

2007-06-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

[Chris Jordan makes fantastic images of sifted waste. I can't help but imagine Scrooge McDuck swimming in this pile of cellphones.]

Yesterday, I found out (thanks to BLDGBLOG) that Shell Oil Plans to create 1,700 ft high walls of ice in shale under the Rocky Mountains. This is to prevent groundwater contamination when they pump 800 billion gallons of crude sequestered in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

Today, NY Magazine told me about a much smaller oil deposit -- only in the range of 30 million gallons -- that is notable because a) it sits in the middle of Brooklyn, and b) it is manmade (thanks, Mobil!). BLDGBLOG made a quick notice of this one as well.

This oil is going to be massively expensive to recover, and it's not crude but an amalgam of decayed motor oil, benzene and other lovely poisons, but all the same, how long is it going to be before we start mining our own waste? Thanks to microelectronics, there is a higher concentration of gold in some landfills than in many mines. The only problem is that current recovery methods would be as destructive and messing as strip-and-leach mining already is; in other words, we'd just be making a lovely soup out of our trash and sucking up what we like. Kind of makes me think that the real action of much of industry is to select and purify specific, rare materials, make intricate weavings of these threads of pure stuff, and then pulverize these assemblies and scatter them into a giant pit.

total control

2007-06-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

The Isle of Man TT Race turned one hundred last weekend.

The thirty-seven mile circumference of this island, located between England and Ireland, is completed in about seventeen and a half minutes, by motorcyclists, frequently exceeding 150 miles an hour. The world record lap time features an average speed of 129.451 mph.

The villages along the race path are often transited in only a few seconds. For the entire day of the race, motor traffic is shut down, and over 600 volunteers are placed in a continuous line of sight along the entire course. In this way, the entire 37 mile journey is witnessed and protected, not unlike that of Xiang Xiang, the panda whose "return to the wild" was recorded in minute detail until her death.

In the past century the Isle of Man TT has claimed 226 lives. At current speeds, in the two-lap race, this is a death every 15 minutes. To add to this insanity of velocity, there is the annual "Mad Sunday" in which any member of the public can run the 1300 foot mountain section of the course. To those of you that wonder what this might have to do with architecture, may Marinetti visit you in your sleep (as the ghost of futurism's past, of course), crashing ancient motor cars into your dreams.

(All images courtesy of Wikipedia.)

fris-being

2007-06-04T23:58:00.000-07:00

Went to the season opener for Sam's summer-league ultimate team (go blue!). They won, of course, and we also got to dig out and play with my over-powered pre-digital flash from high school. Dragging the shutter is the coolest.

virtual provence

2007-06-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

Continuing on my perusal of old recordings.

To go here:

Look at this:

While listening to this:

now back to our regular programming (dreamsketch 3)

2007-05-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

But first, a brief moment of silence for new beginnings.

Dreamsketch 3: alcove with light panel.
(the most hastily and blearily composed to date)

Here we have, at the ceiling of an unfathomably cavernous space, a narrow, long alcove hidden behind sliding frosted glass doors, in which there are a few concrete benches and a panel emitting a sodium-lamp orange shade of light. The air is hot, still, and tinged with ozone. There is a dry stifling wind in the open space beyond. There is no sunlight.

weekend copout: audio edition

2007-05-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

Came across this old field recording from my brief stint abroad and thought I should share it. I remember the guy playing guitar in the background being obnoxious at the time but given some distance the music seems perfect. Bonus 10 points if you can tell me what the people to my left are talking about.

maybe they should have tried an oil-based product

2007-05-25T00:25:00.000-07:00

Jean long ago sent me the thrillingly titled "Transportation and Urban Development in Houston, 1830-1980," written by Peter Papademetriou of the Houston Metro. Thank you, Jean. I just went back through it and read the really early parts, and I have a passage to share with you:

As a result of [expanding] commercial traffic, early improvements in transportation facilities were undertaken by private businessmen... in 1850 a group of merchants [including William Marsh Rice] formed the Houston Plank Road Company, a plan to construct a road of two-inch oak or three-inch pine planks. However, growing interest in the railroads led to cancellation of the project and through the 1870's even the streets in the town of Houston itself remained dirt, except for an ill-fated shell paving project of 1858 which contributed to the phenomenon of dust rising in clouds, a complementary nuisance to the mud which otherwise plagued city residents. (p.7)

It's tempting to imagine wooden highways stretching as far as the eye can see, met by offramps white with conchs and cowries. The reality is absent or, in any case, far less compelling, but it does make one salient point-- the technologies we use for paving are not self-evident or even necessarily the best. We tried wood and calcite, and then concrete and asphalt somehow stuck. But when the overpasses start crumbling, maybe they'll get replaced by stabilized earth, or close-mowed turf, or piezoelectric thermoplastics. If we're supposed to imagine jetpacks and spaceports, why shouldn't the surface under our feet undergo the same prospective futurity?

Ginsu Rudolph

2007-05-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

So another Paul Rudolph house is threatened with demolition. The owners still claim to love it, but it's just not big enough for them any more. Apparently they've gotten much larger over the years. But this time, two men come to the rescue, cutting it precisely in half, trimming off three inches so it will fit on some trucks and removing it from its beachfront location to some ex- summer camp in the mountains.

Now, there are lots of sides to take in this story, from a simple congratulatory stance to disappointment to appreciation of the surreality of making a building exactly three inches shorter and completely removing it from context. These are all valid positions and emotions, but what each instance of this kind of story brings up to me is what provides the value in residential architecture. Many famous residential structures were never homes to begin with-- they were "pavilions." And other ones (the Glass House, pretty much everything by Corbusier) now exist mainly as an odd combination of personal monument, history museum, and technological archive. But what about those famous homes that people stubbornly insist on still using as domiciles? Aren't they producing their own kind of domestic value? If a famous house becomes a museum, has it succeeded or failed?

Rudolph, like Lautner, is a good test case for this stuff because, in the midst of the architectural expression, all of this complex geometry and rhythm of line, there was a genuine interest in the domesticity of the space itself. Rudolph himself once said that a famous tensioned-roof lakehouse he designed was a failure because the reverse bow to the roof made the spaces look outward, and houses should always look in on themselves, on the hearth. I don't want to sound too nostalgic here, but what paradigm-defining offices operating today are trying to simultaneously push the boundaries of practice while also developing and satisfying a genuine interest in the lives and home-spaces of their clients? I kind of feel that at some point, while being taught the history of modern architecture through the Villa, we forgot that people used to live in these houses.

deconstricting

2007-05-22T22:15:00.000-07:00

Went to our favorite beach again today, and on the way back, I realized that another reason I like the beach so much is that the drive there takes you through the Ballona wetlands.

This area has fortunately been protected from development, and exists as an immense marshy plain, bisected by Playa Vista road, and bordered by the marina, cliffs, the 90 overpass, and the hideously ugly 40-foot wall of the Playa Del Rey lofts. With the condo towers of Marina Del Rey like foothills in the distance, it's like having a scale model of the original valley in your own backyard. As can be seen above this swath of negative space is oriented such that it collects the sunsets every day, washing its interior with smog-enhanced reds and oranges. Somewhere between the waterlogged ground plane, the sulfuric sky full of pelicans, the immense void and a single road both scenic and free of traffic, a uniquely local public space has collected. It is primarily a vital component of the local ecosystem, but with all of the fencing and culverts helping the wetlands to regain a foothold and build in biodiversity, I prefer to think of it as a gigantic piece of land art, LA's own Smithson. A bird/plant/amphibian/sunlight collecter for the West Side.

two los angeles

2007-05-21T21:44:00.001-07:00

When I first heard about cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Robert Sherman's urban futures research program at UCLA, it took me almost a year until I actually went to their website and looked at the work, today. Not knowing the work of either person, I was expecting some well researched but MOR urban solutions-- streetscape improvement, transportation solutions, you know the drill.

What I found was so much more. Two of their projects in particular, LA2016 and PropX: lessons learned, are a delirious combination of projective urbanism and dystopian realism that manages not to flinch away from the big decisions while refusing to mediate between poles. It is sustainable without being green, specific without being perscriptive and comprehensive without being totalitarian. The work frequently toes the line between solution and dystopia, and dances around the difficult questions by posing its own, better ones. It may sound from this description that I love their work. A more accurate description is that I am terrified by it.

Inverted pyramid megastructures above the freeways, inhabitable beach mutations, and postapocalyptic tract housing inhabited by the last existing motorheads-- sometimes it's more exciting than realistic, but we have plenty of realistic urbanisms, thank you. So, all I have to say, is take a look at it, and laugh, promote, or recoil in horror. I think they're looking for all three of those reactions.

___

On the other end of the spectrum, also strangely compelling for entirely different reasons, is the UCLA Urban Simulation Team . This group is dedicated to making a rediculously detailed 3d model of, well, all of Los Angleles. "The model is accurate enough for the graffiti on the walls and signs in the windows to be legible."

These models, built on top of the 3d GIS surveys, are intended for use by urban planners, emergency response teams, transportation planners, and, in a slightly more sinister fashion, security consultants. More interestingly, they claim that "this system is being extended to support a client server capability which will allow the seamless interactive navigation of the entire Virtual Los Angeles Model... while simultaneously supporting hundreds of remote interactive users."

So what do we have here? An accurate, detailed, comprehensive 3d model of one of the largest cities in the world, that can be used simultaneously by many people in real-time. I think sometimes the future creeps up on us because the websites look boring. I'll leave it up to you to imagine what you most want done with this waiting terabyte of virtual city, but personally I'm starting my Godzilla model tomorrow.

a single tear

2007-05-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

My readership of the New York Times is sometimes challenged by articles, usually ones in the House and Home section, or Style, or this time, in Travel, where an article just appeared about the tribulations of the second home.

(emphasis added):

“The vegetable garden — the production of too many vegetables, and the guilt of not eating them,” said Susan E. Bell, a paleontologist from New York City, who with her husband, Byron, an architect, owns a house he designed in Woodstock, N.Y. “And then, of course, all the effort it takes to persuade the house guests to take the vegetables with them. And then the guilt if you don’t have house guests: you feel guilty not to be sharing your house with your friends, who are stuck in the city.”

Do the Bells, like so many others, eventually want to retire to their weekend house, which is on 50 acres between two waterfalls and has 96 windows, some of them unwashed since it was built? “Oh, no,” Mr. Bell said. “We want to retire to New York City — and relax!”

I am convinced that many of the life-style writers at the NYT just make up people when they need anecdotes. This, in my world, does not exist. There are no paleontologists with 50 acre compounds in Woodstock, and they certainly don't complain about their largesse if they do exist. This sort of interview creates some kind of freakish magnetic affect that makes me want to go back to NY while still avoiding it completely.