"Dirt presents a selection of works that share dirty attitudes: essays, interviews, excavations, and projects that view dirt not as filth but as a medium, a metaphor, a material, a process, a design tool, a narrative, a system. Rooted in the landscape architect's perspective, Dirt views dirt not as repulsive but endlessly giving, fertile, adaptive, and able to accommodate difference while maintaining cohesion. This dirty perspective sheds light on social connections, working processes, imaginative ideas, physical substrates, and urban networks. Dirt is a matrix; as a book, it organizes contributions from architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, historic preservation, fine arts, and art history. The chapters predict and report on city waterfronts revamped by climate change, the reinvention of suburbia, and cityscapes of ruins; dish the dirt with yet-to-be proven facts; make such unexpected linkages as ornament to weed growth and cell networks to zip-ties; examine the work of innovative thinkers who have imagined or created, among other things, a replica of Robert Smithson's famous earthwork Spiral Jetty in "table-top scale," live models of the Arctic ice caps, and an inhabitable "green roof"; and describe an ecological landscape urbanism that incorporates the natural sciences in its processes."
Barry Bergdoll, Alan Berger, Anita Berrizbeitia, Megan Born, William Braham, Lindsay
Bremner, Kim Brickley, Case Brown, Mark Campbell, James Corner, Phillip Crosby, Keller Easterling, Ruth Erickson, Larissa Fassler, Annette Fiero, Helene Furján, Future Cities Lab, Andrea Hansen, Mark Alan Hughes, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Robert Le Ricolais, Lily Jencks, Peter Lloyd Jones, Keith Kaseman, Ferda Kolatan, John Landis, Sylvia Lavin, Andrew Lucia, Ian McHarg, Frank Matero, PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture, Rhett Russo, SERVO, Cathrine Veikos, Phoebe Washburn, Marion Weiss, and Richard Wesley.
Were not big pro sport fans either. Mrs. would be happy to tape the game and then play it back fast forwarding thru the game just to watch the commericals. If it is a blow out that is most likely what will happen at our house. It is a close game I will watch it but not in a mania state. May the best team win!
we just had lesson in communication with clients. it is easy to forget that design and bidding and construction is all totally arcane to most people and we really need to describe even the simple stuff or face worried clients. so much for all the worrying that architects bring nothing to the table !
ah - the superbowl - the bet this year between mayors is that the loser has to host an all-expenses paid trip for a family from the other's city. NYC is offering a broadway show, trip to the statue of liberty, dinner at some fancy restaurants, limo, etc...
Boston is sending their host family to a week-long nuclear physics symposia at MIT - they get to bike there from the hotel (with the mayor!), and their meals are all at locally-sourced vegan restaurants. I think there maybe some bikram yoga as part of the package...
That is awesome Phillip. There is something special seeing your work in print - I can't imagine how amazing it much feel to see it in a book and on shelves. I'll buy one if I can get my hands on it.
Thanks for all of the congrats. David, it is pretty cool seeing the book as an actual object rather than just a few gigs worth of InDesign files. It was even cooler to actually see it sitting on a shelf in a bookstore!
It was doing furniture layouts and arrangements for office and commercial jobs. They hyped up the furniture aspect of it a little bit. Okay, a lot. But pretty much doing floor plans, virtually assembling pre-made furniture and rendering out demo shots. It actually seems like kind of a fun and boring job in the sense that playing Tetris is fun but boring.
If it was $38,000, I would have seriously considered it. Make it $40,000, toss in a bike and a gym membership and I would have signed a contract for 3 years.
Now that I'm on the management side of things in other businesses and other fields, it actually irks me that most architecture, planning and interior design firms don't use tax-free benefits to their full advantage (Fringe Benefits, Publication 15-B).
Toss in a cell phone, de minimis extras, a few meals, transportation and a few other creative fringe benefits, you could technically pay employees even less and their salaries would be even higher because of the tax difference and the value of the fringe benefits.
I'm itching to do a house. A whole house ideally, but a major reno and addition would be fine.
Everyone I know right now is so busy working. The communities I'm in - here on Archinect, my kid's school, local architects, the art scene - have become so disconnected during this extended economic downturn. I honestly believe most people I know are so busy trying to make ends meet or cling to their somewhat stable-ish job that there is no time for COMMUNITY to happen.
Donna, that is exactly why I built Abram toy buildings, ect. Of course, I'm busy right now working on a secret project.
It's a little sad, but I really don't have any friends in my community that are architects/designers. I'm kinda on my own out here. That's partly why I have the blog.
Toast, that purple kitchens is one of the tamest images in the bunch! It does all have me wondering, though, how much of it looks dated simply because of the quality of the photos. I mean, many of those forms, and even colors, would be hip in a house today. That 20 room has a bed that looks like it was picked up at the local Ikea.
But it is irrelevant to buildings that we perceive the landscape as static. Buildings perceive the landscape as in motion. The evidence of this lies in the basic typology of all construction here, a first golden thread of the landscape. The first act of building - by which the landscape is made habitable - is the sinking of vertical elements in search of stable soil below the shifting surface. The appearance of volume in buildings is obtained by wrapping over an order of these verticals.
David Heymann, On the Architecture of the Rural Landscape in Iowa
It was from an old issue of the magazine Iowa Architect, I think - my co-teacher gave me a scan of it today. It's a breathtaking and wonderful article.
I remember meeting David Heymann in the mid 90s at an architectural academy in Texas on summer. One of the most difficult critiques I ever received and really made me feel like I knew very little about the science of architecture. A gentile person with fangs.
Goodness, architectural academia is in a mess, isn't it? Those lecture images were just painful, not to mention the accompanying words. Ugh. I think we all just need to make stuff more and talk about it less.
Did a quick search and didn't come up with anything. Does anyone know whether during the LEED certification process people come out from the USGBC and do a site visit to see if the project is actually being built like all the submittals say it's going to be built? My boss is asking. My brain turned off about an hour ago so I'm not even sure I'm making sense. I said I thought that was all a part of the commissioning process but he noted the comminssioning process is only a part of E&A. Anyone? Anyone? Thanks in advance.
*melt. They will visit the site. On google maps. Anything else cuts into their profits. Speaking of, make sure you get your payment for certification to them on time, otherwise they get cranky. Once you do that, the rest of the process is mindless paper shuffling.
the USBC used to audit a random selection to see if the submittable were accurate. But have no idea if they are doing this anymore. Cx is done by an independent consultant or by a separate department of your MEP consultant with a 'firewall' between the two teams. Not sure of the checks and balances built into LEED these days. It pays to be honest, but that's just my $.02
I stumbled across that Jeanne Gang piece in the NYTimes the other day and got all riled up about it. Just saw it garnered a few comments on archinect... wonder if anyone thought what I thought...
Donna - Looks like the move to Japan has been thwarted, by a large project for BF/future husband by a client that could be on-going throughout the year. Hopefully I haven't already said too much to jinx the deal. The last few months of the year have not been good to him because of shitty clients but I'm hoping and praying for things to turn around. Just another reason why I give you self employed individuals props for what you do. I don't have the confidence it takes to keep the motivational ball rolling when times get tough. With any bump in the road I would have a panic attack.
Good Morning all. Hope everyone had a great weekend.
melt, I am deep in panic attack mode as we speak. No wonder so many middle aged women have heart trouble! I'm sorry the plans changed but hope the other option for BF works out well. I'm sure cats are happier if you stick around.
The heating company is here right now checking to see why we smell gas around the furnace 20 feet away from my desk. I can hear his little meter thingey dinging like crazy. If you hear a big boom please c
manta - Jeanne Gang sounds like a new urbanist, except at the end she makes a left turn... I think she'd get more traction with the pro-market/diversifying municipal revenue/cost savings argument for relaxing zoning laws... but I pretty much agree with her.
Why do schools even bother going through the (probably legally required) process of doing a search for job openings?! They already know who they're going to hire due to some inner political process that you can only know if you're in the inside already, so why get a bunch of already underpaid adjunct faculty to spend a lot of money applying then waste a bunch of your OWN budget sending out rejection letters to people who never had a chance of an interview anyway?! What a fucking charade the contemporary world is.
donna, i think i wrote that exact same tirade last year! the worst case for me was a school that specifically contacted me and asked me to apply and then i never heard anything back from them...
sorry to hear you won't be coming to japan. would be nice to have more people out this way from archinect...but glad for the cats and the future husband/bf. having work is always a good thing.
We just wrapped up our first phone interview for the design foundations post. We don't know yet who we're gonna hire - but we have a great pool of candidates. But to answer Donna's Q, public institutions are legally required to have 'open' searches, even when there is an internal candidates. For my research fellow post at UMN, I wrote the public job description in such a way that it would be hard for somebody else to get hired - especially since I helped write the grant that funded the post. Yeah, it does take a bunch of time to go through the process, but it's all about making sure that the discrimination is validated by narrowly defined job descriptions. Or maybe it's just a baby boomer narcissistic thang.
barry, that reminds me of the weirdest part of the situation that i described above where i was asked to apply... they had run the same search the year before and it was never completed because of budget issues with the state... i was offered a one year position, which i had to pass on because i had already made other commitments... then the next year (the one when i was asked to apply) the new job description for the search seemed to have been rewritten specifically around my interests and experience... then i never heard another word from them...
Donna, when I was in grad school my program had just gone through one such search, and they wound up hiring someone different than everyone expected. The person they expected to be hired full-time still taught a couple of classes, but had a terrible attitude because they hadn't gotten the fulltime and (shocker) I don't believe teaches there anymore. Sometimes even though they think they know what they want, someone better comes along.
I am going through my first issue with trying to get a client to pay. My contact is actually a friend's husband, so I'd like to think he's being honest and things have just gotten tied up in bureaucracy, but I'm getting such a run-around that I'm actually questioning whether they intend to pay me at all and if he's purposely sending me on wild goose chases. I do not like this feeling one bit.
Thread Central
Soooooo, DIRT, the book that I co-edited and contributed an essay to is now officially out and available!
Here it is on the shelves of MoMA's bookstore in NYC!
Here it is on the shelves of the Penn Book Center in Philadelphia!
Here is the blurb from Amazon:
"Dirt presents a selection of works that share dirty attitudes: essays, interviews, excavations, and projects that view dirt not as filth but as a medium, a metaphor, a material, a process, a design tool, a narrative, a system. Rooted in the landscape architect's perspective, Dirt views dirt not as repulsive but endlessly giving, fertile, adaptive, and able to accommodate difference while maintaining cohesion. This dirty perspective sheds light on social connections, working processes, imaginative ideas, physical substrates, and urban networks. Dirt is a matrix; as a book, it organizes contributions from architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, historic preservation, fine arts, and art history. The chapters predict and report on city waterfronts revamped by climate change, the reinvention of suburbia, and cityscapes of ruins; dish the dirt with yet-to-be proven facts; make such unexpected linkages as ornament to weed growth and cell networks to zip-ties; examine the work of innovative thinkers who have imagined or created, among other things, a replica of Robert Smithson's famous earthwork Spiral Jetty in "table-top scale," live models of the Arctic ice caps, and an inhabitable "green roof"; and describe an ecological landscape urbanism that incorporates the natural sciences in its processes."
Hmmm, is it not possible to post photos from Flickr anymore?
Here is a list of the contributors:
Barry Bergdoll, Alan Berger, Anita Berrizbeitia, Megan Born, William Braham, Lindsay
Bremner, Kim Brickley, Case Brown, Mark Campbell, James Corner, Phillip Crosby, Keller Easterling, Ruth Erickson, Larissa Fassler, Annette Fiero, Helene Furján, Future Cities Lab, Andrea Hansen, Mark Alan Hughes, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Robert Le Ricolais, Lily Jencks, Peter Lloyd Jones, Keith Kaseman, Ferda Kolatan, John Landis, Sylvia Lavin, Andrew Lucia, Ian McHarg, Frank Matero, PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture, Rhett Russo, SERVO, Cathrine Veikos, Phoebe Washburn, Marion Weiss, and Richard Wesley.
Congratulations Phillip....we knew you had it in you!
Donna,
Were not big pro sport fans either. Mrs. would be happy to tape the game and then play it back fast forwarding thru the game just to watch the commericals. If it is a blow out that is most likely what will happen at our house. It is a close game I will watch it but not in a mania state. May the best team win!
Thanks Snook!
that's very awesome philip. congrats!
we just had lesson in communication with clients. it is easy to forget that design and bidding and construction is all totally arcane to most people and we really need to describe even the simple stuff or face worried clients. so much for all the worrying that architects bring nothing to the table !
congrats. philip!
ah - the superbowl - the bet this year between mayors is that the loser has to host an all-expenses paid trip for a family from the other's city. NYC is offering a broadway show, trip to the statue of liberty, dinner at some fancy restaurants, limo, etc...
Boston is sending their host family to a week-long nuclear physics symposia at MIT - they get to bike there from the hotel (with the mayor!), and their meals are all at locally-sourced vegan restaurants. I think there maybe some bikram yoga as part of the package...
That is awesome Phillip. There is something special seeing your work in print - I can't imagine how amazing it much feel to see it in a book and on shelves. I'll buy one if I can get my hands on it.
Thanks for all of the congrats. David, it is pretty cool seeing the book as an actual object rather than just a few gigs worth of InDesign files. It was even cooler to actually see it sitting on a shelf in a bookstore!
So, I got a job offer from that interview in NYC.
$35,500. 5 days vacation. 5 sick days. No bennies. No cost of living increases. No commuting costs.
Nope.jpg
at least that offer made it an easy decision!
It was doing furniture layouts and arrangements for office and commercial jobs. They hyped up the furniture aspect of it a little bit. Okay, a lot. But pretty much doing floor plans, virtually assembling pre-made furniture and rendering out demo shots. It actually seems like kind of a fun and boring job in the sense that playing Tetris is fun but boring.
If it was $38,000, I would have seriously considered it. Make it $40,000, toss in a bike and a gym membership and I would have signed a contract for 3 years.
Now that I'm on the management side of things in other businesses and other fields, it actually irks me that most architecture, planning and interior design firms don't use tax-free benefits to their full advantage (Fringe Benefits, Publication 15-B).
Toss in a cell phone, de minimis extras, a few meals, transportation and a few other creative fringe benefits, you could technically pay employees even less and their salaries would be even higher because of the tax difference and the value of the fringe benefits.
@jjr, so why don't you point out the benefits to them and see if they give you what you want?
philip, did you take everyone in your family to see the book on the shelves? don't think i could resist the urge.
TC was almost off the front page!!!
Also, the first review of DIRT is in.
I'm itching to do a house. A whole house ideally, but a major reno and addition would be fine.
Everyone I know right now is so busy working. The communities I'm in - here on Archinect, my kid's school, local architects, the art scene - have become so disconnected during this extended economic downturn. I honestly believe most people I know are so busy trying to make ends meet or cling to their somewhat stable-ish job that there is no time for COMMUNITY to happen.
you can do my house - unfortunately I can only pay in off-brand vodka and the construction budget so far is $20.
hey, guy horton got a mention over at salon about how our profession basically sucks right now.
Ugh vodka, reeetttccchhhh…..
Talk bourbon and we may be able to make a deal.
Donna, that is exactly why I built Abram toy buildings, ect. Of course, I'm busy right now working on a secret project.
It's a little sad, but I really don't have any friends in my community that are architects/designers. I'm kinda on my own out here. That's partly why I have the blog.
donna - and here's your inspiration. I'm definitely going with the purple and yellow kitchen.
Toast, that purple kitchens is one of the tamest images in the bunch! It does all have me wondering, though, how much of it looks dated simply because of the quality of the photos. I mean, many of those forms, and even colors, would be hip in a house today. That 20 room has a bed that looks like it was picked up at the local Ikea.
i love retronaut.
retronaut is a new poster?
Morning all!
This is lovely:
But it is irrelevant to buildings that we perceive the landscape as static. Buildings perceive the landscape as in motion. The evidence of this lies in the basic typology of all construction here, a first golden thread of the landscape. The first act of building - by which the landscape is made habitable - is the sinking of vertical elements in search of stable soil below the shifting surface. The appearance of volume in buildings is obtained by wrapping over an order of these verticals.
David Heymann, On the Architecture of the Rural Landscape in Iowa
where is that from Donna a book or Design Observer/Places?
It was from an old issue of the magazine Iowa Architect, I think - my co-teacher gave me a scan of it today. It's a breathtaking and wonderful article.
I remember meeting David Heymann in the mid 90s at an architectural academy in Texas on summer. One of the most difficult critiques I ever received and really made me feel like I knew very little about the science of architecture. A gentile person with fangs.
Which made me think of those videos going around
Janosh's comment in Lian's Schumacher Live Blog is brilliant:
"Schumacher (accidentally) demonstrates that it is possible to be rigorous without being meaningful."
totally.
Yep, totally, as Will said.
Goodness, architectural academia is in a mess, isn't it? Those lecture images were just painful, not to mention the accompanying words. Ugh. I think we all just need to make stuff more and talk about it less.
Hey all -
Did a quick search and didn't come up with anything. Does anyone know whether during the LEED certification process people come out from the USGBC and do a site visit to see if the project is actually being built like all the submittals say it's going to be built? My boss is asking. My brain turned off about an hour ago so I'm not even sure I'm making sense. I said I thought that was all a part of the commissioning process but he noted the comminssioning process is only a part of E&A. Anyone? Anyone? Thanks in advance.
Hope all is well with everyone.
*melt. They will visit the site. On google maps. Anything else cuts into their profits. Speaking of, make sure you get your payment for certification to them on time, otherwise they get cranky. Once you do that, the rest of the process is mindless paper shuffling.
the USBC used to audit a random selection to see if the submittable were accurate. But have no idea if they are doing this anymore. Cx is done by an independent consultant or by a separate department of your MEP consultant with a 'firewall' between the two teams. Not sure of the checks and balances built into LEED these days. It pays to be honest, but that's just my $.02
I stumbled across that Jeanne Gang piece in the NYTimes the other day and got all riled up about it. Just saw it garnered a few comments on archinect... wonder if anyone thought what I thought...
what is your thought, Manta?
Thanks Barry.
Rusty - No doubt.
Donna - Looks like the move to Japan has been thwarted, by a large project for BF/future husband by a client that could be on-going throughout the year. Hopefully I haven't already said too much to jinx the deal. The last few months of the year have not been good to him because of shitty clients but I'm hoping and praying for things to turn around. Just another reason why I give you self employed individuals props for what you do. I don't have the confidence it takes to keep the motivational ball rolling when times get tough. With any bump in the road I would have a panic attack.
Good Morning all. Hope everyone had a great weekend.
melt, I did although not as productive as I would have liked...
melt, I am deep in panic attack mode as we speak. No wonder so many middle aged women have heart trouble! I'm sorry the plans changed but hope the other option for BF works out well. I'm sure cats are happier if you stick around.
The heating company is here right now checking to see why we smell gas around the furnace 20 feet away from my desk. I can hear his little meter thingey dinging like crazy. If you hear a big boom please c
manta - Jeanne Gang sounds like a new urbanist, except at the end she makes a left turn... I think she'd get more traction with the pro-market/diversifying municipal revenue/cost savings argument for relaxing zoning laws... but I pretty much agree with her.
Why do schools even bother going through the (probably legally required) process of doing a search for job openings?! They already know who they're going to hire due to some inner political process that you can only know if you're in the inside already, so why get a bunch of already underpaid adjunct faculty to spend a lot of money applying then waste a bunch of your OWN budget sending out rejection letters to people who never had a chance of an interview anyway?! What a fucking charade the contemporary world is.
So i shouldn't apply?
donna, i think i wrote that exact same tirade last year! the worst case for me was a school that specifically contacted me and asked me to apply and then i never heard anything back from them...
Sorry to hear that Donna. Been there too. It's the crappy and inexplicable side of academia. Usually something else comes up though... ....eventually.
@melt
sorry to hear you won't be coming to japan. would be nice to have more people out this way from archinect...but glad for the cats and the future husband/bf. having work is always a good thing.
Just got Cameron's 'I Love Architecture' email blast. Brilliant!
We just wrapped up our first phone interview for the design foundations post. We don't know yet who we're gonna hire - but we have a great pool of candidates. But to answer Donna's Q, public institutions are legally required to have 'open' searches, even when there is an internal candidates. For my research fellow post at UMN, I wrote the public job description in such a way that it would be hard for somebody else to get hired - especially since I helped write the grant that funded the post. Yeah, it does take a bunch of time to go through the process, but it's all about making sure that the discrimination is validated by narrowly defined job descriptions. Or maybe it's just a baby boomer narcissistic thang.
barry, that reminds me of the weirdest part of the situation that i described above where i was asked to apply... they had run the same search the year before and it was never completed because of budget issues with the state... i was offered a one year position, which i had to pass on because i had already made other commitments... then the next year (the one when i was asked to apply) the new job description for the search seemed to have been rewritten specifically around my interests and experience... then i never heard another word from them...
Donna, when I was in grad school my program had just gone through one such search, and they wound up hiring someone different than everyone expected. The person they expected to be hired full-time still taught a couple of classes, but had a terrible attitude because they hadn't gotten the fulltime and (shocker) I don't believe teaches there anymore. Sometimes even though they think they know what they want, someone better comes along.
I am going through my first issue with trying to get a client to pay. My contact is actually a friend's husband, so I'd like to think he's being honest and things have just gotten tied up in bureaucracy, but I'm getting such a run-around that I'm actually questioning whether they intend to pay me at all and if he's purposely sending me on wild goose chases. I do not like this feeling one bit.
oh, and hi all!
hey Erin,
Happy Valentines TC!
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