2006..03.30 15:39
Lost ! Need help!!
Make that "The Rites of Retreat and the Rites of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall." Sounds somewhat symmetrical.
2006..03.30 15:32
boo to rendering... yay to games
When I first learned CAD and was doing it professionally (April 1983), a lot of people (other architects) used to say, "You most really like video games." "Actually, I never played a video game in my life." Believe it or not, the part about my never having played a video game is still true.
2006..03.30 15:22
Lost ! Need help!!
The last time I was out front keeping Chelsea company, she noticed I have symmetrical diagonal lines on my forehead just above my eyes. I explained to her that the one on the right is a scar from when I was in third grade myself--I fell on the edge of the coffee table and had to get 10 stitches. And the line on the left side is not a scar, and was not there when I was in third grade, but rather somehow came later all on its own. It's like my own corporal mirrored reenactment of the actual scar.
2006..03.30 14:57
non-event cities
Just got back from biking the 7.5 mile loop along the River Drives. Second time this year, but first time as a 50 year old. I park at the municipal/Temple U. boathouse, and there was a strong headwind going toward the city, which means there'll be a strong tailwind when I'm on the other side. I hate headwinds as much as I like tailwinds, so it evens itself out. A few of the Japanese Cherry Blossom trees are just beginning to show some color. Saw an "honest to God" reenactment of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky jogging up the Art Museum steps--one guy was video taping another guy in wool cap and sweatshirt running up the steps. (If those steps could talk I'm sure you'd find out you're not the only one that is sick and tired of constant reenactments.) There were three fishermen just down stream of the Water Works dam, and a puggie little kid chased some Canadian geese a little while before a Canadian goose started to walk into my path. Since the big trees are still all bare, got a nice view of the venerable necropolis named Laurel Hill Cemetery; I like to call it "Land of a Hundred Obelisks." Well, you're always bound to see a few racers also doing the loop--Kelly Drive is after all part of the course where Lance Armstrong won his first major race back in 1993. Glad to see I still average around 15 mph. And finally I can go have lunch now.
2006..03.30 12:28
Lost ! Need help!!
Anthony Bailey, Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journry, 1983.
I spent two weeks in June 1963 playing miniature golf in the evening in full view of the Iron Curtain. My father's mother lived in Hitzacker am Elbe. It's funny, West Germans behaved as if East Germany didn't even exist back then.
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2006.03.30 12:11
Lost ! Need help!!
Physical scars are not always synonymous with healing. For example, youths of Sierra Leone were abducted and scarred by rebels and then forced to fight their own people. Subsequently, these youths were literally marked as enemies of their own people. There is a doctor from Kansas (I think) that is there now removing what scars he can via plastic surgery.
The "scars" of damnatio memoriae are an interesting case where the scars of erasure actually work to help remember what was erased.
2006.03.30 08:10
Questions about Typography of Architecture
...regarding drafting conventions, the 'architecture' font probably has it's 'origin' somewhere before the middle of the last century. I say this because it doesn't seem to be directly related to beaux-arts conventions, but does appear to have a relation to FLWright's lettering 'style'. It's prevalence within architecture may be the result of WWII engineering standardization--remember, construction documents are legal documents, thus abiguity is not exactly desired in any of its aspects. Frank Ching merely complied with the convention that was already well in place. Also, Leroy lettering, which was very standardized via templetes, was an architectural font standard up until the 1970s/early 1980s. Then there's also Lettreset and then Kroy, and then CAD.
I just looked at a "working drawing" from Le Corbusier's office from 1935 and the lettering there is not quite the "architecture"/tekton font; it is more like the "din" (I think that's the name) font, which was European as opposed to American.
Most of what I've written here is based on personal experience, and not on any extensive research, so take it only as a start toward answering "why".
2006.03.29 20:39
Questions about Typography of Architecture
Steven, it was not the goal of early CAD to see how much CAD drawings could look like hand drawings. In some ways CAD, at least very good early CAD like Intergraph, designed for NASA, had it's own new drawing aesthetic. You could say, however, that it was the goal of a lot of established (CAD resistant) architects "to see how much like hand drawings" CAD drawing could be.
Plus, what I wrote above doesn't just sound right, it is right. I was there.
The second set of CAD CDs I produced were for a project by Carles Vallhonrat (he was the project architect for Kahn's Salk Institute) and he very much sought to work within the CAD drawing aesthetic which ultimately were meshed with the CD drawing standards he set years earlier for the CDs of Salk Institute. There is no doubt in my mind that that was a rare exercise/experience in 1984. I was most glad that he complied with my wish to "print" the drawings at 11" x 17", thus using the electrostatic printer (as opposed to the pen plotter) and then the xerox machine for copies instead of the "blue print" machine.
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2006.03.29 18:25
Depth
I realize that flatness is the "opposition notion" that you are looking for. I just wanted to provide historical context to your question(s).
(I'm kind of just guessing, but) Venturi may too have seen "that a characteristic of modern architecture, is a move away from depth" and thus worked to exploit that very aspect in his designs. Venturi may too have been inspired by the contemporary architecture being built in Rome while he was at the American Academy in the early 1950s.
One could also say that Kahn earlier introduced "depth" via volumetric geometrics and the "cut-outs" thereof, which, for a while, influenced Venturi and later Matta-Clark.
2006.03.29 18:11
Questions about Typography of Architecture
...I can't provide any answers to "why", but the 'architecture' font has been part of Intergraph's CAD program since at least 1983. Back then I remember thinking "how ironic" to utilize CAD to make something look "hand made". Luckily, when the (older) architects I worked for back then were shown that the 'architecture' font was available within "the CAD system" they too found it ironic and chose not to use it.
Most here do not even know how 'shocking' CAD drawings were within a working office back in the early 1980s--there was initially a lot of resistence to having drawings that looked too different than hand-drawn drawings. Many, many hours were spent in discussion on how drawings were to look. The transition from hand-drawn CDs to CAD drawn CDs did not happen overnight.
2006.03.29 17:56
Depth
"The whole aesthetic notion of POP Art flatness (as best described in Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word) is an aesthetic that Venturi still to this day strives ardently toward in many aspects of his designs. This 'style' is rarely, if ever, discussed within the plethora of writing on or by Venturi, yet it is definitely a substantial part of Venturi's design psyche. ... R. offers lots of actually working examples of the quest for flatness in the design process, and then we inevitably agree that it is somehow amazing that hardly anyone (else) knows about this very integral component of Venturi's style."
--QBVS2, p. 50.
2006.03.29 16:31
AN ARCHITECTURE OF REMOVEMENT
Bump, just because I'm working on "The Ride Home".
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2006.03.23 17:10
somebody ate my lunch
"You should be happy that lunch is the only thing that got stolen."
2006.03.23 17:00
black like me
Today New Orleans, tomorrow the Universe.
"Are you sure you didn't stay in the tanning booth too long?"
2006.03.23 16:43
black like me
"I am culture, hear me roar!"
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2006.03.23 12:20
black like me
"...our society has lines you don't cross." Try telling that to the other 3rd graders--four boys, three Blacks and one Vietnamese--that like to use my front lawn as a football field! At one point there was so much yelling and screaming that I had to go out and say something. (I love how they all instantly freeze when they hear my front door open.) "So, which one of you is the President?" They look at me dumbfounded, so I explain. "I heard all this yelling and screaming so I figured the President was out here." Then they all smiled and pointed to my Jamaican next door neighbor Xavier. I think they picked Xavier because he actually is a very good football player.
2006.03.23 11:24
The Best of Rita Novel Anytime
No. -4
[as featured within abracadabra, faia 05/17/05 8:30 and QBVS1 page 110...]
...architects featured generally throughout the museum will include: John Phillipsonian and his partner/wife Whitney Davidoff (of Hybridsburg, Texarkana), Eon Krie[ge]r (architect of the war against time), La Corbusienne (the Alpine 'Suzie Chapstik' of exposed skin architectures), St. Helmut (infamous heretic architect martyr of the cutting-edge [sword of] antiquity, lately proclaimed by the Vatican as a dubious 'real' fraud), Lois Ikonotsky (of Upper Reaches, the Caulklands), Franc-Le-Luc-Adroit (global net-setting architect of 'die schlampigen neue Reichen'), Scott Ventura (pet [house] architect, who btw is inseparable from his brown-nosed hound Dee-leash), Jasper Sterling St. James Goldsmyth VI (most recently lauded for his just completed Good-Looking Sachlichkeit Gesamtkunstwerk Museum on post-shell-shocked Helgoland), and (the 'queen' of all narrative architectures), Rita Novel. . . plus many, many more, like Meandra Refrigidhaar (as the architectural critics love to say, "She be syncin'!").
[...and now you know where Architects Associates steals their best ideas.]
2006.03.23 09:02
black like me
Whenever my 3rd grade neighbor Chelsea comes home from school and can't get into her house and it's a nice day outside, she knocks on my door and asks me to come out and keep her company. She's a fun little kid, and how she manages to know everybody else's business in such detail I'll never know. Anyway, last time she told me she was half black and half Haitian. Since I know Chelsea is all Haitian I told her that she was actually all black and all Haitian at the same time just like I'm all white and all German at the same time. I think she trusts me, but I'm not sure. Finally she showed me the lastest dance. It has a very African sounding name, and Chelsea was shaking her body all over the place. She said the dance started in North Philly.
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