Hey, I'm glad you guys love my suggestion of Draftsight - and love me, of course ;-) - but it wasn't my idea: someone on my last thread about drafting for Mac told me about it.
I've worked til 1:30 am three times this week, and looking to do so again tonight. I'm tired of this.
Barry funny enough a student is coming to see me next week about doing grad school in Landscape Arch. And our school just got the green light to start our first landscape course, Intro to Landscape Architecture. All this on the background of the country setting up the legal framework for registering LAs. It's interesting times for scrapers in Jamaica!!
People keep asking me to be a structural engineer....and I keep saying no..."Buildings Fall Down." All I want is the data so i can intergrate structural requirements into my design...
Donna....she has been in the Mud All Week.
I'm hoping to kick another project out the door this week..and we know what kind of hours are involved as you close in on the end of a construction documents. Fortunately there is no bidding involved in this project.
per is a wild ass Dane! wonder if he knows big....wonder if heather ring will meet up with him and the silver screen. Shit I wonder about alot of things. I guess that is what happens when your locked up in the drafting pit day after day doing construction documents.
Hi TC. Still feeling the stress of finishing up the semester, getting caught up on all the things I've neglected the last 15 weeks, and getting ready for Christmas. Plus money is an ever-present concern, of course! Though things generally seem to work out when they need to. Barely.
Barry, husband is applying to a job at CalPoly San Luis Obispo - not your school, right?
The things I'm reading lately make me nervous, alternately hopeful and despairing. In ProPractice our final assignment is to require the students to post a comment on a blog post or online article that we select (we give them 3-5 to choose from). We want to start to engage them in real world discussions and realize the things we talk about in class really *do* exist in the world. Plus, it gets them reading some very immediate opinion of our profession. So today I read probably 25 different articles that all say similar things: the profession is dying, only huge companies and starchitects will survive (the latter by teaming with the former), design will never be able to solve the problems we face, the environment is so screwed up that we can only hope to adapt, never flourish...it makes me feel guilty for leading these youngsters into the profession int he first place, though I've tried to tell them all semester that it's a brutal world out there.
hm, that is sad donna. i feel the exact opposite. i just spent 8 months building, and hanging out with people who are building, community centers and homes and this and that for people in tohoku and i can say without any ambiguity design matters and is important in fundamental and basic ways. believe that enough that some friends and i started local chapter of AFH and hope to be building some of the above as part of our practice as much as the regular money making things we do.
really there are so many inspiring architects out there and we could all be just the same if we wanted to. sure the real world sucks, but what else is new?
of course it is easy for me to say since i also have teaching gig as well as practice, but you know the students here are all out in the field building and seeing for themselves what it all means without me having to tell them. the real world is still harsh when it comes to finding clients and dealing with fees but there is more going on too. that is also a kind of professional practice i think....
It's funny, Will, seems like most of the articles I've been reading are written by academics. Many tenured. Plus Guy Horton.
There is definitely inspiring architecture - very little of it in the US, of course - but lately architecture isn't feeling effective enough, to me. Of course I pretty much only work on private projects. But the public work I see is mostly awful. Is this just a problem with Indiana ;-) perhaps?
Anyway, done grading studio. How awful it is to grade studio output, seems design should just be pass/fail. That's all Cranbrook was.
hey all - anyone else notice the recent proliferation of LED replacement lamps on the market these days? prices have come down a lot too... pretty amazing how quickly these became available.
Hi Donna, Good luck to Brian! SLO is located halfway between LA and SF, while Pomona is 30 miles east of LA. Both are big programs and part of the Cal State University system (for better or worse) - but we rarely engage with each other.
the LED price drop parallels the photovoltaic curve as china ramps up (and gets subsidized to give away the store).
Any Chinese speakers on tc? I want to translate my name into Mandarin - I have a meeting with some officials from Xinjian in a few days...
that project with the funky tree looks cool though donna. could be the wrong part of the world as you say. big part of why i live in tokyo is the work that is on offer. there is a downside though, no question. 33 million people in the backyard can get on a body's nerves.
jump which project with the funky tree? night all.. I am dealing with non working kitchen sink 4 days and counting. haven't been doing as much cooking.
a little help? sometime in the past week or so i read a news story about how, even on housing projects as small as 8-10 units, banks are requiring developers to build in phases... i thought it may have been in the news on the 'nect, but i can't find it... did anyone else read the same thing and know where it is osns the internets?
also, nam, while i was looking i came across the news item about the st. pete pier and realized that i never answered your question... yes, it is a city-funded project with a construction budget of $50M...
phillip cool thanks. one would think that is enough to build a nice pier. St Pete really seems to be putting some money into water-front area with the new museum(s), parks/public space and now this. was there economy not hit in same way or did they just assign all this money before the recession? Do you know?
nam, i don't remember the exact source of the money... it has been 3+ years since i left and there were internal discussions about the pier while i was working there... i was even asked to spend a few days sketching out some very preliminary conceptual ideas while i was working there... if i had to guess about the funding i would say that it came from the waterfront tax increment funding district that also paid for the renovation of the mahaffey theater...
david - I hadn't really been paying attention for a few years because I hadn't involved in lighting design until recently - before they were around $100 and looked like these gnarly DIY contraptions - these days they're somewhere between $20-40 - (they are still a bit too directional - they don't have as nice a spread as regular incandescents), but now you can get them for pretty much any fixture.
I guess if you've been working for a while time becomes relative.
beta i was hoping to see the silent approval robot reappear after your last series of posts on that thread... keep up the good work, and know you have my support in further tirades
Strangest thing. I have hated whiskey and scotch my entire life. Honestly, I can't tell the difference between the two. But he other day, I had a swig of Husband's rusty nail, and then I had a second. Tonight, I've had two whole rusty nails, all to myself. I mean sure, I wanted to learn to like whiskey, but I think I must actually be doing it.
Ok, back to the regularly scheduled conversations.
Bourbon, whiskey, scotch, while I know that they aren't really the same, they've always tasted the same to me. They are all oak solvents, in a sense, and that's what I haven't liked. But I may be coming around. Certainly will make drink ordering easier.
And, Nam, you're a slacker. I've been done for a week. Presents wrapped and everything!
Just for the record: if you ever use 3Form on a project and get something custom, allow yourself 3-4 times as long as they say it will take and count on many hours of work on your part to make sure it's all right. It will be beautiful if you have the stamina, but stamina is definitely required.
just finished hosting a 2day symposium yesterday including a 24 hr workshop which i madly joined in on. now to the christmas shopping and the sleeping and such.
I love it, Will: "Now the shopping and the sleeping and such." like sleeping is just one of those things we do when we have the time....really, architects have a bizarre attitude towards sleep, don't we? My sleep cycles are very off lately, for sure.
absolutely donna. we wanted to host a workshop for 24 hours that would include economists and environmental scientists and people from as many professions and possible and in the end it was mostly the design people who didn't think the entire idea was strange. really, everyone else said "are you crazy?" and walked away, but the architects and the planners and LA's? Yeah, sure sign me up!
huge culture gap. maybe that explains the state of our world a bit too....
It is time to wind down the year. Spent part of the day with a client who builds and restores furniture. He is looking at putting up a building on some land he owns for a new shop for himself, a gallery space, an office for his wife and a couple of rental spaces. It is a very difficult piece of property because of the existing building configurations on both sides of it and the grade change. We are hoping the Zoning Board of Appeals doesn't kill the project, because the zoning regulations were developed with the flat world mentality and this one is really in a round world. I pissed around on the computer this afternoon looking at a project I designed a few years ago which now is sitting in Federal Court. I have been reading all the banter in the paper and I just had to go and visit those drawings one more time just so I could figure out who is fabricating a story to push to the media. It has been an ugly one and it only appears it will move into a deeper ugly before it is all over. As you all know there are always two sides to a story. Wait there is always the third side of the story. You have to include the one is put out by the media which is alot of sound bites with very little regard for the truth. I was hoping it would come to a head before the end of the year but that window seems to be closing fast, so I will have to hope it will end before the End of Chinese New Year.
For all those Hipster Architects traveling over the Holidays, Be Safe!
I am going to finally get my Christmas shopping done today after work. Has anyone checked out the news item re; Koolhaas's interview with Der Spiegel? Pretty interesting i thought.
re 24 hr workshop, i admit i slept for 2 hours. we will put the process online at some point if anyone is interested. came out quite ok. not a design project but a map of issues needed to be managed in reconstruction project after disaster. in real 3D !
still rushing to do christmas shopping. this is not a holiday here in japan so we are just as busy as always. at least christmas is on a weekend this year so the kids won't have to go to school on christmas day like always. hurray!
thought i killed my keyboard earlier this afternoon, damn thing just quit working and everything I did to try and bring it back to life wasn't working. Mrs S. said do the NASA Repair. So I unplugged everything and just then the phone rang and my neighors lady friend (chinese: Shofang) was on the phone screaming for me to come, something has happened. So I run over to the neighbors and he is sitting on the kitchen floor holding one hand so I was not able to see it. His Lady friend in a complete frightened state, so I had to get her to the other room and sitting on the couch in the living room. Then I went back to see what had happened. Seems he smashed the end of his ring finger while doing a home improvement project. He showed it to me and I said we need to go to the walk in clinic and get this thing looked at. He resisted, he wanted to run water over it to clear the blood. Well it was bleeding good and he was looking like a ghost. He started to faint and I sat him in a chair. I guess this was the third time he had headed for the floor. So I called Mrs. S (The One Who Must Be Obeyed). She took a look at it and said we need to take you to the Clinic. I went and got my car, while Mrs S. gave him some orange juice to spike his sugar level. He said I'm Ok, I ask Shofang to get a mirror, so he could look at how white he was, and we should take him to the clinic. So after, two hours we are back home again. When I arrived home Mrs. S had my computer back up and running. Seems she sprinkled some fairy dust on my keyboard after punching a few buttons and here we are back in the game.
Thread Central
Hey, I'm glad you guys love my suggestion of Draftsight - and love me, of course ;-) - but it wasn't my idea: someone on my last thread about drafting for Mac told me about it.
I've worked til 1:30 am three times this week, and looking to do so again tonight. I'm tired of this.
Don't miss CAD at all. Probably the best part of not being in architecture anymore is getting away from the computer.
Been working super early to super late. That's good when u get paid hourly. Been studying Shakespeare and wondering why I never have before.
Barry funny enough a student is coming to see me next week about doing grad school in Landscape Arch. And our school just got the green light to start our first landscape course, Intro to Landscape Architecture. All this on the background of the country setting up the legal framework for registering LAs. It's interesting times for scrapers in Jamaica!!
i would love to do some drafting. no time for it lately which is a total drag. i miss spending time lost in sections and details.
oddly enough we do design. strange idea i know.
David - That's uber exciting about Poly Cal. Keeping fingers crossed for you.
I'm currently in door and window schedule hell. Good Morning all!!!
just had lunch with guy horton in santa monica. really nice guy.
People keep asking me to be a structural engineer....and I keep saying no..."Buildings Fall Down." All I want is the data so i can intergrate structural requirements into my design...
Donna....she has been in the Mud All Week.
I'm hoping to kick another project out the door this week..and we know what kind of hours are involved as you close in on the end of a construction documents. Fortunately there is no bidding involved in this project.
per is a wild ass Dane! wonder if he knows big....wonder if heather ring will meet up with him and the silver screen. Shit I wonder about alot of things. I guess that is what happens when your locked up in the drafting pit day after day doing construction documents.
Agree snook - one's brain gets wonky when cadding all day. But also that Per is a wild ass Dane!
When I go to Denmark I'm going to look up Per.....just cause I have to see the Silver Screen.
Hi TC. Still feeling the stress of finishing up the semester, getting caught up on all the things I've neglected the last 15 weeks, and getting ready for Christmas. Plus money is an ever-present concern, of course! Though things generally seem to work out when they need to. Barely.
Barry, husband is applying to a job at CalPoly San Luis Obispo - not your school, right?
The things I'm reading lately make me nervous, alternately hopeful and despairing. In ProPractice our final assignment is to require the students to post a comment on a blog post or online article that we select (we give them 3-5 to choose from). We want to start to engage them in real world discussions and realize the things we talk about in class really *do* exist in the world. Plus, it gets them reading some very immediate opinion of our profession. So today I read probably 25 different articles that all say similar things: the profession is dying, only huge companies and starchitects will survive (the latter by teaming with the former), design will never be able to solve the problems we face, the environment is so screwed up that we can only hope to adapt, never flourish...it makes me feel guilty for leading these youngsters into the profession int he first place, though I've tried to tell them all semester that it's a brutal world out there.
hm, that is sad donna. i feel the exact opposite. i just spent 8 months building, and hanging out with people who are building, community centers and homes and this and that for people in tohoku and i can say without any ambiguity design matters and is important in fundamental and basic ways. believe that enough that some friends and i started local chapter of AFH and hope to be building some of the above as part of our practice as much as the regular money making things we do.
really there are so many inspiring architects out there and we could all be just the same if we wanted to. sure the real world sucks, but what else is new?
of course it is easy for me to say since i also have teaching gig as well as practice, but you know the students here are all out in the field building and seeing for themselves what it all means without me having to tell them. the real world is still harsh when it comes to finding clients and dealing with fees but there is more going on too. that is also a kind of professional practice i think....
It's funny, Will, seems like most of the articles I've been reading are written by academics. Many tenured. Plus Guy Horton.
There is definitely inspiring architecture - very little of it in the US, of course - but lately architecture isn't feeling effective enough, to me. Of course I pretty much only work on private projects. But the public work I see is mostly awful. Is this just a problem with Indiana ;-) perhaps?
Anyway, done grading studio. How awful it is to grade studio output, seems design should just be pass/fail. That's all Cranbrook was.
hey all - anyone else notice the recent proliferation of LED replacement lamps on the market these days? prices have come down a lot too... pretty amazing how quickly these became available.
Hi Donna, Good luck to Brian! SLO is located halfway between LA and SF, while Pomona is 30 miles east of LA. Both are big programs and part of the Cal State University system (for better or worse) - but we rarely engage with each other.
the LED price drop parallels the photovoltaic curve as china ramps up (and gets subsidized to give away the store).
Any Chinese speakers on tc? I want to translate my name into Mandarin - I have a meeting with some officials from Xinjian in a few days...
Sounds like your going to have to set up some sort of "Archinecture Brain Bank" with all the people migrating to California. Take the world by Storm!
too bad it's not in l.a., donna. marmol radziner is advertising a position you could fill!
that project with the funky tree looks cool though donna. could be the wrong part of the world as you say. big part of why i live in tokyo is the work that is on offer. there is a downside though, no question. 33 million people in the backyard can get on a body's nerves.
jump which project with the funky tree? night all.. I am dealing with non working kitchen sink 4 days and counting. haven't been doing as much cooking.
a little help? sometime in the past week or so i read a news story about how, even on housing projects as small as 8-10 units, banks are requiring developers to build in phases... i thought it may have been in the news on the 'nect, but i can't find it... did anyone else read the same thing and know where it is osns the internets? also, nam, while i was looking i came across the news item about the st. pete pier and realized that i never answered your question... yes, it is a city-funded project with a construction budget of $50M...
phillip cool thanks. one would think that is enough to build a nice pier. St Pete really seems to be putting some money into water-front area with the new museum(s), parks/public space and now this. was there economy not hit in same way or did they just assign all this money before the recession? Do you know?
nam, i don't remember the exact source of the money... it has been 3+ years since i left and there were internal discussions about the pier while i was working there... i was even asked to spend a few days sketching out some very preliminary conceptual ideas while i was working there... if i had to guess about the funding i would say that it came from the waterfront tax increment funding district that also paid for the renovation of the mahaffey theater...
really toasteroven? I sure hope so the last time I found some they were $30+ for one and it was kind of crappy.
david - I hadn't really been paying attention for a few years because I hadn't involved in lighting design until recently - before they were around $100 and looked like these gnarly DIY contraptions - these days they're somewhere between $20-40 - (they are still a bit too directional - they don't have as nice a spread as regular incandescents), but now you can get them for pretty much any fixture.
I guess if you've been working for a while time becomes relative.
relative time is not time....it is a passing of time
We be eating Brazilian time this evening....8:30...problem is were still in America...and damn I'm starving~
Oh, dear. I'm emceeing an event tomorrow night and one of our speakers just cancelled.
ah, they're coming to see you anyway. ; )
can you enlist wil or kevin or scott? you've got some really smart friends!
i notice that most of you sane people have been avoiding the MVRDV thread, good on you. it's filled with raving idiots - myself included.
beta i was hoping to see the silent approval robot reappear after your last series of posts on that thread... keep up the good work, and know you have my support in further tirades
Donna, somewhere there is a student or recent grad that needs you as much as you need them. Find them and hire them, even if it is part time.
Strangest thing. I have hated whiskey and scotch my entire life. Honestly, I can't tell the difference between the two. But he other day, I had a swig of Husband's rusty nail, and then I had a second. Tonight, I've had two whole rusty nails, all to myself. I mean sure, I wanted to learn to like whiskey, but I think I must actually be doing it.
Ok, back to the regularly scheduled conversations.
sarah what about bourbon. personally always been my favorite although I have been learning to enjoy Rye whiskey over the last 6 months...
Also in light of the discussion re: LEDS see this bbc news piece just posted to news feed
miss maloney....your full of baloney...
oh and is everyone done with their holiday shopping yet? I haven't even started...
Bourbon, whiskey, scotch, while I know that they aren't really the same, they've always tasted the same to me. They are all oak solvents, in a sense, and that's what I haven't liked. But I may be coming around. Certainly will make drink ordering easier.
And, Nam, you're a slacker. I've been done for a week. Presents wrapped and everything!
Just for the record: if you ever use 3Form on a project and get something custom, allow yourself 3-4 times as long as they say it will take and count on many hours of work on your part to make sure it's all right. It will be beautiful if you have the stamina, but stamina is definitely required.
Did you guys notice most renderings in architecture schools are now done really dark? It is the new trend.
3form is a pain to use here too.
just finished hosting a 2day symposium yesterday including a 24 hr workshop which i madly joined in on. now to the christmas shopping and the sleeping and such.
I love it, Will: "Now the shopping and the sleeping and such." like sleeping is just one of those things we do when we have the time....really, architects have a bizarre attitude towards sleep, don't we? My sleep cycles are very off lately, for sure.
absolutely donna. we wanted to host a workshop for 24 hours that would include economists and environmental scientists and people from as many professions and possible and in the end it was mostly the design people who didn't think the entire idea was strange. really, everyone else said "are you crazy?" and walked away, but the architects and the planners and LA's? Yeah, sure sign me up!
huge culture gap. maybe that explains the state of our world a bit too....
will - computer programmers and engineers would also be up for a 24-hr workshop... they're nocturnal anyway...
in other news, smurftown votes to remain smurfy.
It is time to wind down the year. Spent part of the day with a client who builds and restores furniture. He is looking at putting up a building on some land he owns for a new shop for himself, a gallery space, an office for his wife and a couple of rental spaces. It is a very difficult piece of property because of the existing building configurations on both sides of it and the grade change. We are hoping the Zoning Board of Appeals doesn't kill the project, because the zoning regulations were developed with the flat world mentality and this one is really in a round world. I pissed around on the computer this afternoon looking at a project I designed a few years ago which now is sitting in Federal Court. I have been reading all the banter in the paper and I just had to go and visit those drawings one more time just so I could figure out who is fabricating a story to push to the media. It has been an ugly one and it only appears it will move into a deeper ugly before it is all over. As you all know there are always two sides to a story. Wait there is always the third side of the story. You have to include the one is put out by the media which is alot of sound bites with very little regard for the truth. I was hoping it would come to a head before the end of the year but that window seems to be closing fast, so I will have to hope it will end before the End of Chinese New Year.
For all those Hipster Architects traveling over the Holidays, Be Safe!
morning all,
I am going to finally get my Christmas shopping done today after work. Has anyone checked out the news item re; Koolhaas's interview with Der Spiegel? Pretty interesting i thought.
Can't wrap my head around a 24 hour workshop. Sounds exhausting.
Just bought a present for me, myself and I - a yoga ball so I can build core strength while archinecting!
yeah i liked the interview nam. he's funny guy.
re 24 hr workshop, i admit i slept for 2 hours. we will put the process online at some point if anyone is interested. came out quite ok. not a design project but a map of issues needed to be managed in reconstruction project after disaster. in real 3D !
still rushing to do christmas shopping. this is not a holiday here in japan so we are just as busy as always. at least christmas is on a weekend this year so the kids won't have to go to school on christmas day like always. hurray!
i have been thinking about buying a yoga ball for my desk at work. better posture etc... do you like?
nam... love it. Do it!
thought i killed my keyboard earlier this afternoon, damn thing just quit working and everything I did to try and bring it back to life wasn't working. Mrs S. said do the NASA Repair. So I unplugged everything and just then the phone rang and my neighors lady friend (chinese: Shofang) was on the phone screaming for me to come, something has happened. So I run over to the neighbors and he is sitting on the kitchen floor holding one hand so I was not able to see it. His Lady friend in a complete frightened state, so I had to get her to the other room and sitting on the couch in the living room. Then I went back to see what had happened. Seems he smashed the end of his ring finger while doing a home improvement project. He showed it to me and I said we need to go to the walk in clinic and get this thing looked at. He resisted, he wanted to run water over it to clear the blood. Well it was bleeding good and he was looking like a ghost. He started to faint and I sat him in a chair. I guess this was the third time he had headed for the floor. So I called Mrs. S (The One Who Must Be Obeyed). She took a look at it and said we need to take you to the Clinic. I went and got my car, while Mrs S. gave him some orange juice to spike his sugar level. He said I'm Ok, I ask Shofang to get a mirror, so he could look at how white he was, and we should take him to the clinic. So after, two hours we are back home again. When I arrived home Mrs. S had my computer back up and running. Seems she sprinkled some fairy dust on my keyboard after punching a few buttons and here we are back in the game.
Aw, good for you helping your neighbor and good for Mrs. S with her magic dust!
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