Archinect - Lian (Harvard GSD M.Arch.I)

Something I haven't talked about publicly: why I care so much about transit

2023-05-24T17:49:47-04:00

Something I don’t talk about much, and certainly not in public, is how I came to care so much about public transit. I wasn’t one of those kids who obsessed over route schedules and maps. I grew up in an abusive home in the suburbs.

I couldn’t just walk or even bike everywhere I wanted to go. The bus gave me some independence, at an early age, to live my life. It was a way that I could get to activities and school and see friends without relying on my parents to drive me every single time. It allowed me to say “no thanks” when it was important to me or when I had no other choice. So I used transit from a young age, benefitting a ton from other riders looking out for me. Getting on the wrong line, missing my stop, getting on the right line in the wrong direction—heck, I still do all that today, and still rely on other riders to help me get where I’m going. The community of public transit riders is a real community. Public transit has always been there for me, even when I wish it was ...

Live Blog - Moving for a Greener Future: The Climate Case for Public Transit

2023-04-20T21:37:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

I'm at 518 Valencia in San Francisco for a panel discussion hosted by San Francisco Transit Riders on the role of public transit in fighting climate change.

The event is moderated by Ellen Wu, Executive Director of Urban Habitat, and panelists are:

Amanda Eaken, Chair of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Board of Directors and Director of Transportation and Climate at the Natural Resources Defense Council
Jason Henderson, Professor in the department of Geography & Environment at San Francisco State University and author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco
Tom Radulovich, Policy & Planning for Livable City, and a former elected director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District from 1996 to 2016
John Anderson, 350 San Francisco Coordinating Committee member

6:39: Ellen Wu asks Amanda Eaken to kick things off, and Eaken asks the smallish assembled crowd: How much of San Francisco's emissions are from transportation? We throw...

How to Stay Home: The Three Easiest Ways to Protect Your Wellbeing During Your Shelter-in-Place

2020-04-04T08:55:00-04:00

Hi Archinect,

Half of the world's population is now under orders to stay at home to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

My own family has been feeling cooped up and longing for simple pleasures like meeting up with friends at a park or joining the hustle and bustle downtown. Then I realized that, as former architecture student on the mundanity of our domestic environments from the point of view of environmental cognition, I’m actually quite prepared for this situation.

So we started incorporating some simple practices during our own shelter-in-place that have been helping us meet some of the physiological, psychological, and social needs that we typically meet by going out into the world. And over the course of a two posts, I’m going to share these ideas--none of which will be new to all of you in architecture, but they're so simple that they're easy to forget.

This first part has to do with bringing aspects of the outside world into your home:

Open your windows for fresh air
Get as muc...

A Hottish Take on the Future of Environmental Technologies in Buildings

2019-05-30T18:52:08-04:00

Hi Archinect! It's been a long time since I've posted; first, because I took a job in a (non-architecture related) tech start-up, and second, because I had a child and took a long pause from the working world to spend some time with him. But I recently had the chance to exercise my typing fingers, and wanted to share the resulting text with you. It's about the possibilities we might find for the built environment when we think from the point of view of our thermal micro-environments and the physics of heat transfer. Thanks for reading!

***

For humans, the boundary between organism and environment has always been blurry. We create smooth floors to ease our walking, cover our bodies in clothes for warmth, and spray our skin with oils to give ourselves an attractive smell.

Contemporary interest in wellness, the mind, and bodily experiences is making us more aware of how sensory input shapes our moods, performance, and health. At the same time, the spread of wearable technologies that g...

A Conversation with Courtney Sharpe and Cara Michell, Black in Design conference organizers

2015-09-28T01:04:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

Black in Design is a conference organized by Harvard Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union (AASU), coming up on October 9-10, 2015. The conference is by, for, and about African descendants in the worlds of architecture and design. But it’s also about the larger role of design in shaping our material culture and the responsibilities that we all share. I sat down with conference organizers Courtney Sharpe and Cara Michell, both members of the GSD’s Master of Urban Planning class of 2016, via text chat to learn more about the conference and the current state of diversity conversations at the GSD.

[All images courtesy Black in Design. Photo credit for this image: Allison Green]

LC: Hello Courtney, Cara!

CS and CM: Hi!

LC: I just got the GSD's very pink Fall lecture poster in the mail. What’s your take on it?

CS: I was digging the pink and purple! And I'm excited by this fall's lecture series. Last year I wasn't interested in as many of the speakers but ...

How Frank Gehry, who doesn't know how to use a computer, started Gehry Technologies

2015-05-12T19:32:49-04:00

Hi Archinect,

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Gehry Technologies CTO Dennis Shelden and writing about Gehry Technologies, Frank Gehry's software and project delivery services company, for the data-driven blog Priceonomics.

Gehry Technologies, as you may recall, was acquired this past September by the GPS, data, logistics, and asset management behemoth Trimble Navigation, as part of a shopping spree that also included Sketchup and facility management software Manhattan Atrium. A few weeks ago, Trimble and Microsoft announced a new collaboration to develop a new generation of AEC tools using Microsoft's holographic HoloLens platform. So it seemed like a good time to trace the company's history.

[Physical model (right) and digitally rationalized model (left). From Dennis Shelden's epic doctoral dissertation.]

Since I've most often written for architecture-savvy folks like yourself, it was a challenge to explain the significance of parametrics and BIM to a more general audienc...

Live Blog: Bethany Lang: Ugly Data Duckling: Grooming Messy Data With Policies and Procedures

2015-05-01T14:38:17-04:00

Hi Archinect,

Another session at Do Good Data 2015. Bethany Lang is presenting. (Warning--no architecture here!) "Ugly data" here isn't talking about the nuances of metrics or computation, but very simply: wrong data. People change jobs often in the nonprofit world, and it's easy for inconsistencies and mistakes to creep in.

Bethany's outline includes:

Why is clean data important?
The Three "I"s of bad data
Data cleanup
Excel tips and tricks
Writing, sharing, and enforcing your policies and procedures
Ongoing maintenance

Why is clean data important?

Bad data makes you look bad. People won't engage or donate if you get their name wrong on mailings, for example. While this is superficial, there are serious cases, for example when someone has died and their family can't get them off the mailing list.
Garbage in, garbage out. If your data is bad, your reports will be bad, [and you are a bad person].
Data analysis and segmentation. You can't do this with bad data.

The Three "I"s of bad data: What da...

Live Blog: Kristi-Lynn Jacovino, Using Data to Influence Your UX Decisions

2015-05-01T11:51:00-04:00

Hello Archinect!

I'm in Chicago with the ACSA at Do Good Data 2015, and Kristi-Lynn Jacovino from the Onion and Clickhole is talking about user experience on the web. The Onion has a very small design team (two people, I think?) and they just launched their new site today! (There's a nice slideshow of the Onion's website designs over the years here.)

KLJ is going to focus on:

Content Strategy
Information Architecture
User Interface

CONTENT STRATEGY is the core of your website, otherwise it's pretty and useless. At The Onion, the editorial team manages this.

If you're not sure where to start, start with an audit of your website: What content do we need? What content can we get rid of? Is our content useful? Too often, people throw everything they've written or done on the website, which leads to people saying: TL;DR.

Are we speaking in a way that our users understand? Too often, people use jargon--names of programs or campaigns, discipline-specific language--that won't be clear to everyone.

I...

Live Blog - Cole Nussbaumer, "Storytelling with Data"

2015-03-30T22:06:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

I wiggled my way up to the University of San Francisco for the first talk of the season in their Data Visualization Speaker Series, given by Cole Nussbaumer. [Update: a video of the talk is here.]

7:05pm: Until two years ago, CN worked in Google's People Operations team, where she told stories using data to help people make decisions. She left Google to work full time on teaching people about storytelling with data.

In school, we learn about stories and language on the one hand, and about numbers and math on the other--but these disciplines rarely mix.

Graphs normally don't look so good and aren't that clear.

Overview of tonight's talk:

understand the context
choose the right type of display
eliminate the clutter
focus attention where you want it (how people see)
tell a story

Here we go! Section 1: Before you visualize the data, understand the context. Once you explore the data and find what you want to say, you move into an explanatory space, where we will focus tonight.

Fi...

Live Blog: ACSA 103 Opening Plenary

2015-03-19T19:04:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

I'm in downtown Toronto for ACSA's 103rd Annual Meeting, themed "The Expanding Periphery and the Migrating Center."

The first plenary session is "the pecha kucha of keynotes." From the program book:

MISSION STATEMENTS

Many things have changed and many things have remained the same in architectural education. This we know. Yet the debate as to what requires conservation and what requires experimentation continues. In this opening keynote event, seven academic leaders of a new generation have been asked to present what they consider to be an ideal mission statement of architectural education, free from the constraints that institutional and professional inertia often impose, in order to articulate what is new or persistent about architecture in the 21st century.

***

First up: John McMorrough, U. of Michigan.

It's all about jobs.
Without a job, one retreats into a defensive posture.
McMorrough ends with a quote from beleaguered former Dean at Princeton, Alejandro Zaera-Polo...

Live Blog: LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne at UC Berkeley

2014-10-20T21:47:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

I'm at UC Berkeley in the beautiful East Bay to hear Christopher Hawthorne speak at the College of Environmental Design. From the UC Berkeley website:

Christopher Hawthorne has been the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times since 2004. Before coming to The Times, he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.” Hawthorne grew up in Berkeley and has a bachelor’s from Yale, where he readied himself for a career in criticism by obsessing over the design flaws in his dormitory, designed by Eero Saarinen.

6:44 pm: Introductions. "What really characterizes Hawthorne's writing is his search to find vigor...what creates that vigor and to put it in a setting of culture and place." He understands what is happening in the profession in both a large and small context.

"What's marvelous about what Chris does is that he looks carefully ...

Live Blog - San Francisco NERT Training, Class 2

2014-10-16T22:03:00-04:00

Hi Archinect,

I'm back at San Francisco's Neighborhood Emergency Response Team Training, for our second class. Same disclaimer as last time: this isn't really about architecture, but I AM focusing on aspects that relate to the built environment.

6:40 pm: The dust in the air after 9-11 spread over a mile and was made of pulverized glass. Sounds nasty, and apparently quite dangerous if you rub it in your eye in response to irritation.

6:55 pm: We are learning how to shut off the gas supply of a building. A gas wrench helps, but an ordinary wrench will do. Extremely simple in principle, but lots of variations are possible and I hope I never have to do this in an emergency. The valves might be full of garbage or hard to turn if they haven't been checked regularly, for example.

The bottom dial will be spinning if you have a leak. That's when you need to shut off the gas--or if you smell the gas, or if the building is heavily damaged. But only if you can reach the gas meter safely. Then call...

Live Blog - San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) Training

2014-10-09T22:01:00-04:00

Hi Archinect,

I'm in a hospital basement auditorium in San Francisco for the first of six sessions to learn how to be part of the city's Neighborhood Emergency Response Team. It's a volunteer team, and the city offers the 20 hour training for free in order to help build the city's resilience in preparation for a major earthquake (or other disaster). Since it's not architecture school, those 20 hours are divided into six sessions.

If you read on, be advised that this not about architecture. It is about urban resilience!

6:40 pm: Our firefighter instructor says there are just over 300 firefighters in the city. In the case of an earthquake he won't be able to go home for at least 72h, and who will take care of his family? NERT, he says.

6:50 pm: We're signing forms. Release forms, etc. NERT members are generally protected by "Good Samaritan" laws, while we're doing things we've been trained to do. He's at pains to emphasize that it's not a "free rein"--you can't try to open up someone's b...

Ai Weiwei is @Large on Alcatraz

2014-09-28T15:04:00-04:00

Hi Archinect,

Here are some images from Alcatraz, including Ai Weiwei's new show called @Large, open until April 26 2015. Organized by the For-Site Foundation in partnership with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, @Large includes seven new installations that consider freedom from points of view that range from the philosophical and even whimsical to the didactic, politically pointed, and interactive.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from the island.

Flight symbolizes freedom for Ai Weiwei.

A series of LEGO portraits of people who have been imprisoned or exiled due to their beliefs or affiliations.

An enormous metallic wing, viewable only through the glass panes that separate the raised gun gallery from the floor of Alcatraz' New Industries Building, where prisoners used to work under the scrutiny of guards.

Ceramic flowers bloom in fixtures in the prison's hospital ward.

A series of sound installations allow visitors to sit in a cell and hear music, poe...

Live Blog: W. Gavin Robb, "Roots Run Deep: A Tomb for Manfredo Tafuri" (M.Arch thesis)

2014-05-18T15:34:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

W. Gavin Robb is presenting his M.Arch thesis, “Roots Run Deep: A Tomb for Manfredo Tafuri."

The tomb and the sublime are closely linked.

Relation between technology and buildings at this scale.

Empathy: a tight fit between a body and its space.

Instrument: a domestic scale and an infrastructural scale.

And strange things I found in Appalachia: machine/building hybrids. From the bottom up they’re designed scientifically in terms of how to move a lot of matter. On the other hand they’re vernacular, and unselfconscious, though highly architectural.

The classical body is static; the modern body, on the other hand, has a mobilized eye.

As such: The classical marked a place between earth and sky, producing a static body. The modern hovered as a sky-platform above an earth-plinth, which produces the body reduced to an eye, vapor. The thesis slips the body in along the infinite laminations of earth and sky, producing a, plural, colloidal body…inscribed by hieroglyphs of telephone ...

Live Blog: Anya Domlesky, "HOT ROT: A Breakdown Manual" (MLA thesis)

2014-05-18T15:08:00-04:00

Hi Archinect,

I’m at the GSD for thesis reviews—Anya Domlesky is presenting “HOT ROT: A Breakdown Manual” for her MLA degree.

Landscape architects should be not just the apologists or ameliorators for solid waste, but active agents in the procedures of dealing with waste.

The site is South Florida, in hurricane afflicted areas, and the debris generated by these events. Hurricanes have to do with collective generation, because unlike municipal waste where the onus is on the individual, this is a shared event.

The way that waste is dealt with now in an emergency is that rules are bent. The President declares a disaster, funds are made available, and waste is quickly cleared to the periphery. The Army Corps of Engineers may help, and there are only a few sites across a large region where the waste is taken (landfill, incinerator). Outside of normal jurisdiction, this waste can be disposed of in almost any way, including burning, although the EPA is trying to improve this.

Anya selected a s...

Live Blog - Marian Dörk, "From Bird's-eye Views to Street-Level Data Exploration: Taking Text for a Stroll"

2014-04-25T14:35:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

From the OpenVis Conf website:

Marian Dörk is a research professor for information visualization at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. Motivated by the design opportunities and research challenges arising from growing information spaces, Marian is particularly interested in the potential of visual interfaces to support exploratory information practices.

About Marian's talk, again from the OpenVis Conf website:

Visualization promises to enable data analysis at a high-level. Typically relying on aggregation, machine learning, and statistics, the resulting representations offer abstract shapes that take the place of rich resources and relationships. While overviews are consensually considered to be useful, they also tend to distance us from the data they promise to help us understand.

In this talk, Marian will make the case against the primacy of overviews and advocate for a navigational approach to visualizing text corpora and faceted collections. He will cover pract...

Live Blog - Mauricio Giraldo, "NYPL Labs Building Inspector" at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf

2014-04-25T12:08:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

The full title of Mauricio's talk is "NYPL Labs Building Inspector: Extracting Data from Historic Maps."

From the OpenVis Conf website:

Mauricio enjoys playing with code, objects and all things interactive. He is currently an interaction designer at NYPL Labs, The New York Public Library’s digital innovation unit.

The New York Public Library map collection contains hundreds of atlases and maps spanning several centuries. Among them are US insurance atlases from the 19th and early 20th centuries. These atlases offer a wealth of geographic information about buildings in New York City such as addresses, building materials, height and use. However, this data is currently 'trapped' in these atlases, unavailable for public research outside of the NYPL map room.

The Building Inspector is the latest tool by NYPL Labs to extract data from these atlases through a combination of computational (vectorization, computer vision, alpha shapes) and human (crowdsourcing, game design concept...

Live Blog - Robert Simmon, "Subtleties of Color" at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf

2014-04-25T10:40:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

Back for the second day of this great event. From the OpenVis Conf website:

The purpose of data visualization is to illuminate data. To show patterns and relationships that are otherwise hidden in an impenetrable mass of numbers.

In many datasets, color is one of the most effective means of accurately conveying quantity, and certainly the most widespread. Careful use of color enhances clarity, aids storytelling, and draws a viewer into your dataset. Poor use of color can obscure data, or even mislead.

In this talk Robert will illustrate the principles behind choosing colors based on human perception through historical examples and contemporary NASA visualizations, and share the many web-based tools he uses to craft perceptually-based color palettes.

Simmons opens with the above image, which was done (decades ago) by NASA (engineers?) while they were waiting for their computer to render the image. They printed strips of paper with numbers representing the image, and used pas...

Live Blog - Andy Kirk, "The Design of Nothing: Null, Zero, Blank" at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf

2014-04-24T16:10:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

From the OpenVis Conference Website: Andy Kirk is a UK-based freelance data visualisation specialist. Andy launchedvisualisingdata.com in February 2010 and this has grown to become a popular source of information about the data visualisation field. He became a freelance professional in 2011 focusing on providing data visualisation consultancy and training workshops. Since then he has delivered over 80 public and private training events across the globe, including clients such as Walmart, Disney, WHO, Intel, OECD and McKinsey.

Well, here's an optimist. Andy Kirk starts by talking about how gaps in our data are not just hassles, but something we can learn from and that we should embrace representing.

Why is there no data where there's no data? You often have to know the context to understand this. For example, seeing a gap for New York's Central Park in a population based map--we know what that blank rectangle means when we see it. On a histogram of Major League Baseball u...

Live Blog - Jen Christiansen, "Visualizing Science," at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf

2014-04-24T14:16:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

The full title of Jen Christiansen's talk is "Visualizing Science: Developing Information Graphics for Scientific American Magazine."

From the OpenVis Conf website:

From its first data-based chart (on the topic of inertia, momentum, and projection) up through to today's web interactives, Scientific American Magazine has been communicating topics in science and technology to non-specialist audiences with the help of graphics since 1845.

Jen will walk through the process of developing print, web, and tablet data visualizations for Scientific American, from identifying source datasets, to working with freelance visualizers--with an eye to developing graphics that embrace their skills and style, but still feel at home within the context of a monthly publication (with an established framework and aesthetic identity on paper and online).

From initial concept through final production, we'll examine projects such as Jan Willem Tulp's flavor connection network (Sep 2013 issue), and...

Live Blog - Kennedy Elliot, "Coding for the News," at Bocoup OpenVis Conf

2014-04-24T11:55:08-04:00

Hi Archinect,

Kennedy Elliot is up now, talking about using data in journalism.

From the OpenVis Conf website: Each week the Washington Post publishes five to ten graphics, many of which are interactive and nearly all of them have a web presence. The reach of the graphics department covers breaking news, investigative reporting, local and national news (and everything in between), features, daily news and enterprise stories. In this talk, Kennedy will explain the tools, coding practices, skills and process behind some of the interactive work we see on the Washington Post.

Elliot opens by admitting that the Washington Post is a "behemoth organization," with a ton of resources, so that talking about how they get all their graphics and interactives done might not be that applicable for everyone. She's therefore going to frame her talk in terms of using data in storytelling.

The team at WP includes writers, developers, artists, designers, etc., etc., but they are all journalists at heart. T...

Live Blog - Mike Bostok from the New York Times, at Bocoup OpenVis Conf

2014-04-24T10:45:00-04:00

Hello Archinect!

I'm in East Cambridge for the two day OpenVis Conference hosted by Bocoup, an open web technology company based here in Boston.

Mike Bostok, graphics editor for The New York Times, is the first speaker. From the conference website: He is also the author of D3.js, a popular open-source library for visualizing data using web standards. Prior to The Times, Mike was a visualization scientist for Square and a PhD student in the Stanford Visualization Group.

"I've always wanted to give a talk about design, but have always hesitated because it's hard to talk about design. Design is hard in a particular way. In design, like coding or writing, everything is continuously in a total state of failure, until it's not. It's subjective, and a solution or technique that works for one person or situation may not work for the next person or situation.

Bostok quotes from the blurb for Dieter Ram's As Little Design as Possible. Ram's tenth principle is: "Less, but better – because it conce...

Live Blog - Eric Fischer, "Mapping Billions of Dots" at Bocoup OpenVis Conf

2014-04-24T10:32:00-04:00

Hi Archinect!

Eric Fischer is up next at Bocoup's OpenVis Conf.

From the conference website:

Eric Fischer is a data artist and software developer at Mapbox. He was previously an artist in residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and before that was on the Android team at Google. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and has appeared in many web and print publications including Wired, Popular Science, and Best American Infographics. He is particularly interested in using geographic data to understand and improve the pedestrian and transit experience in cities.

When he started working, his process was very manual, which made it slow and hard to iterate through options. He eventually learned to "do it right" for a project for the Twitter archive with Gnip, and is currently using Datamaps and Github to organize his work.

When you're working on a project that can be zoomed in to a single block, or zoomed out to the whole world, there's a lot of scales to think about. Wh...

Yestermorrow Design/Build for Public Interest

2014-04-23T09:50:00-04:00

Hello Archinect,

This is a throwback to 2007 for me, when I attended the two week design/build course led by Jersey Devil co-founders Steve Badanes and Jim Adamson, along with New York-based architect Bill Bialosky. I had the pleasure of seeing Steve at our ACSA Annual Conference in Miami a couple weeks ago and he reminded me that his Yestermorrow course, which starts on August 3, is currently open for registration.

Here are a few images from past years' courses. In my year, we designed and built a portable fruit stand for Shelburne Farms in Vermont, a nonprofit educational farm that you can visit, to stroll its walking trails, observe and take part in farm life, and pet the fuzzies. Our fruit stand was smaller than most of the projects here but it had the added constraint of being easily portable along Vermont's sometimes-bumpy roads for regular farmer's market events. The course is an amazing way to spend part of the summer, so I wanted to let you know in case you're thinking about...

Review - GSD's "Platform 6: A Year of Research through Studio Work, Theses, Lectures, Exhibitions and Events"

2014-03-24T23:08:00-04:00

[Image from Pimentel.]

“You will be remembered for what you leave out or neglect.”

Rosetta Elkin, Editor of Platform 6, includes these words in a short meta-essay entitled “Editing Pedagogy,” in which she retroactively imagines a brief for the project of gathering, selecting, and representing a year in the work and life of Harvard GSD. It’s a provocative phrase, and when I came across it I pondered its many meanings.

[Wallpapered graphic in the Platform 6 exhibition]

[Strengthen your core! Third semester architecture in the Platform 6 exhibition]

First, I thought, it’s a nod to the difficult task of being the “decider” among critics, professors, and students clamoring to have their work, ideas, or events included in the school’s annual publication of record. The book doesn’t have space for coverage of every studio, let alone every course, essay, or project. Those who are left out inevitably take note.

Second, Elkin is highlighting the structural peculiarity of this year’s edition: Platfo...

Live Blog - Manuel Castells, "The Space of Autonomy: Cyberspace and Urban Space in Networked Social Movements"

2014-02-18T20:05:00-05:00

Hi Archinect,

It's a packed house in (half) Piper tonight for Manuel Castells, Professor of Communication Technology and Society, USC Los Angeles. His talk responds to recent movements in Brazil and Turkey, drawing on themes from his book Networks of Outrage and Hope; Social Movements in the Internet Age (Polity Press).

6:41pm: Castells is author of 26 academic books, as well as editor of many more--and has been knighted, and is recipient of the 2012 Holberg Prize and the 2013 Balzan Prize. Diane Davis, who's giving the introduction, was Castell's graduate student "thirty years ago."

6:43 pm: Castells takes the podium.

What are the implications of today's social movement for spatial forms and practices?

Social movements are emotional movements that become collective through communication between different subjects. The forms of communication depend on the cultural and technological context.

Starting in July 2009 in Iran, then Iceland, Tunisia, Greece in 2010. Social movements, many small...

Live Blog - Christopher Glaisek and Bruce Kuwabara on Waterfront Toronto

2014-02-11T19:01:04-05:00

Hello Archinect,

I'm back in Piper to see Christopher Glaisek, vice president of planning and design for WATERFRONToronto, and Bruce Kuwabara, founding partner of Toronto-based KPMB Architects and now Chair of the Board at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. As a Toronto-born Canadian who's also lived at two different locations along Toronto's downtown waterfront before this transformation, I was interested to hear more.

6:45 pm: Chair of Landscape Architecture Charles Waldheim kick things off. "Some may say that the landscape architect is the urbanist of our age. You may have heard me say something like that from this podium in the past."

6:47 pm: First allusion to Mayor Rom Ford. "Toronto's relatively weak mayoral system."

6:49 pm: "As a Canadian citizen, I want to say that I think of Bruce Kuwabara as Canadian royalty. If you go in Buckingham Palace, I think there's a file cabinet for the Commonwealth, with a folder for Canada, and it starts with the Governor General and if you go...

Review - "If You Build It," directed by Patrick Creadon

2014-01-30T12:06:00-05:00

Hi Archinect!

Okayyyyyy, I'm back at the GSD to watch "If You Build It," directed by Patrick Creadon (2012), a film about the origins of Studio H's design/build education taught by Emily Pilloton and her team of teachers (including GSD grad Hallie Chen!).

Studio H now hails from Berkeley, but the film focuses on the project's origins in rural Bertie County, one of the poorest places in North Carolina. Pilloton and co-founder Matthew Miller arrive with a grant, a truck full of stuff, and an agreement with the local school board that quickly unravels due to resistance to change among the town's leadership. Pilloton and Miller continue on without salaries in order to teach their high school students--young people who say things like "School--I hate it. My dad hated it. My grand-daddy hated it. I'm carrying on a tradition."

In retrospect, the work that Pilloton and Miller do in the film goes way beyond Bertie County; it was a proof of concept, to demonstrate the potential of a design/buil...

Live Blog - Kyle Bergman and John Connell in conversation

2014-01-29T22:49:00-05:00

Hi Archinect,

After the screening of If You Build It, film festival director Kyle Bergman and John Connell, the founder of Yestermorrow Design Build School, had a short conversation and I wanted to share it with you here. I was interested to see Connell live, as I had been to Yestermorrow for Steve Badanes and Jim Adamson's excellent Community Design/Build course mannnnnny years ago.

KB: John, when you started Yestermorrow in 1980, what inspired you? You were working at Yale?

JC: I forget this chapter a lot, but I was working with underprivileged--actually, kids that would have been incarcerated otherwise… We were told, we'll give you the dump and you can build your building on the dump. These students literally had the choice between jail and coming to this school. But we started giving them power tools…

…and teachers started to come, and other people too, and we thought, this education doesn't have to be limited to these kids, but homeowners and anyone can learn from this.

JC: Building...