u so sarcastic^^

No seriously it does

i wouldnt feel bad at all. sure they are pretty images but they may not have the discourse involved at the real "edge". these people are not inventing the wheel, merely drawing it. keep your craft.

evolo is inspiring.

Think of this way-

You've spent your entire life shopping for clothes at Wal-Mart and for the first time you open a fashion magazine - to an Alexander McQueen spread no less - and see that indeed there is more to life than sweatpants and holiday sweaters. You marvel at the foreignness of it all and suddenly feel a sense of inadequacy in your $9.97 Hanes Comfort-Fit color-coordinated ensemble. You feel an immediate need to burn everything in your closest and make haste to New York, Paris, Milan, or perhaps the nearby 'Something about Trees' Mall and indulge in whatever they have that is exceedingly expensive and deemed in high fashion.

Gleefully you embark on a credit-score damaging journey that will potentially cost you your house, but damn if financials are going to interfere with your suddenly and unquestioned need for fashion, whatever they are calling it this year. Going from boutique to boutique (because anything larger is only selling mass-produced last-years looks) you amass a prized collection of designer one-offs, worthy of exhibition at a gallery- or the very least, the water cooler tomorrow morning at the office. You of course try nothing on as this is seen as tacky, instead buying only things that various media-based messages have informed you to purchase. That said, you do wonder if this oddly-shaped garment comes with a user manual so you know how to wear it.

Returning home and seeing the boutique of bags, boxes and other various parcels of packing, you feel a small tinge of buyers remorse, but you reassure yourself that spending this much on clothing surely will make your life more fulfilling; Indeed the key to everything you have ever wanted will happen now that you have clothes that people will notice - will want to notice - and so you peacefully drift off to sleep imagining how much more amazing your life will be tomorrow.

"Wow, I didn't imagine an article of clothing could be so uncomfortable or be so complicated. Where is the arm hole?" you ponder as you get dressed the next morning. You could of course call someone, but that would be embarrassing. Surely everyone else in existence is all familiar with how to wear whatever it is you bought and asking any questions would expose how inept you have been all these years. You remind yourself that pain is beauty, or so you have heard, but you didn't imagine that it would be quite so literally. "Was it necessary to make the jewelry out of barbed wire? And these shoes have now deformed my feet into a shape that is not human."

Making your way out of the house requires an amount of will-power that is only exceed by the athleticism is taking to even move. As you make your way to work, people do notice, but it's one of amused bafflement rather than one of excitement or envy. "They just don't understand fashion" you tell yourself, although you are starting not to believe your own measurement. The day continues and although a few people are truly inspired and amazed by your audacious fashion choices, overall the effect was entirely dissimilar to your feelings earlier when you saw the fashion spread in the magazine. And that is when you realize that some things just don't make the leap from print to reality, a fact you should have realized from the horrible "based on a book" movie you saw last week. Sullen, you crawl home, bandage your clothing-caused wounds and find something to wear that fits your lifestyle a little better, knowing in the future that beautiful images don't always transform the same way in person.

Nice story CC, man I love the smart people who post on archinect,

I don't think its fashion anxiety, but let me analyze it out loud.

I have failed at 3 attempts to actually submit work to eVolo, it is an inspiring competition, one virtually without borders for the imagination. The discourse gives the ideas at the edge meat but the imagination puts you at the edge. Discourse can stifle the imagination and fashion can obliterate the very value of the idea - try doing a voronoi structure these days for valid reasons without looking fashionable.

The anxiety comes in when you realize not only have you imagined an idea that won the competition, but that your discourse was better than the real entry, you had real meat and understood the limits of the idea.

But you don't get your ideas out there your thoughts are never recognized.
If you give too much meat to your ideas at the edge you may spend too much time defending the ideas instead of imagining more.
If your idea is iconic and no one sees the meat you become a fashionable most likely one hit wonder...so you remain conservative and calculation, maybe its best to never show anything.

Who wants to do silver blobs or crystals all there life?

It was says kierkegaard and even kant lived their lives like they were on a schedule, like some goal well worth avoiding the rest of life was worth attaining and there was limited time to obtain in.

I stare at all these innovations, many of them bullshit or failures but someone put it ou there and had time and funds to develop them...but if don't have enough time and funds what did you develop? I think that's my anxiety no expressing imagination in time to be at the edge, by the time I develop it the edge has moved and the idea is stale?

Cute story Cherith

[i've wanted to say that for a while]

^ nice! Thanks Arrested Development.

Olaf - it sounds like your problem stems from hesitation. Instead of just designing something, it sounds like you spend too much time deliberating between the validity of the form-making and the frustration of being too practical. On one hand, that's good as many of the award-winning projects in evolo demonstrate a fundamental lack of real-world constraints that when taken into consideration, totally derail the entire project. However, it sounds like for you, it has turned into a problem as it is hampering your ability to do anything. Totally understandable...I think we have all been there at some point.

I think part of the overwhelmed feeling is coming from the sheer magnitude of the evolo projects and competitions, namely the annual tower competition. The project is essentially limitless in scale, design and has no parameters or program so it's essentially giving you the latitude to design your wildest dreams, which is exciting but daunting.

Perhaps what would work better is to tackle something similar, but smaller. If for instance you were interested in the tower competition and what you wanted to explore was vertical integration or whatever, instead of just jumping right into a tower, work on a vertical integration project at a smaller scale. Figure out the idea or form or whatever it is on a bite-sized project that you can transform into something larger.

Also, maybe you just need to have an unhinged design weekend. No rules, no thought- just pure and simple form making for the sake of form making. Get all those pent-up ideas out. Binge. No Undo button. Make it and move on to the next idea. Then be critical about it later. Sometimes it's just necessary to post-rationalize.

unhinge...don't i need drugs for that?
will do, and i'm guessing I should post-rationalize after I submit it, i'm pretty sure if I do it before it will never happen.

The problem with eVolo, as mentioned above, is that it is too open to anything and thus lacks real world restraints. It is fine if you just want to dream of a beautiful tower.

I would focus my energy on other competitions. Check out the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction. They are free to enter and there is $300,000 USD in prize money for each region. Plus you can submit real projects, or proposals for real projects. They aren't about fantasy but realistic solutions to an important problem - that of sustainable architecture. Check out this link for more info: Holcim Awards US

"the problem with..." that's a good one. [sarcasm].

have you ever stepped outside and looked around? do you really think we need more cheap victorian houses and eco-friendly elongated glass-cubes?

i love evolo and similar sites because they explore what certain architects (myself included) strive for; even if it means you're setting yourself up to run again a big huge wall called reality. i have a quote from manuel de landa about this sort of stuff in my sketchbook, which i happened to have left at home today. so, i guess i'll post it later.

For me, eVolo looks like a group of pseudo-avantgarde who seriously is misunderstanding what the contemporary culture is.

They are treating reality as something imaginary.
However, most of progressive contemporary thinkers including deleuze, foucault, and even Baudrillard keep saying reality is "fatal" or "axiomatic" which are even more restrictive than "Law".

Imagainary is just one end of "oedipal" impasse that is double bound, but never a way out.

Trully a shallow architectural avant-garde...

that's cute, im gonna go ahead and let someone with more credibility than either of us take up the issue, read the third comment:

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2007/10/10/pitch-black-hernan-diaz-alonzo/

So is the us defense department sponsoring this competition yet?
Flux, thanks for the link and I am assuming we are talking about lebbeus comment #3 right? Well if that's the intent I have to really unhinge myself, I believe my architectural education, even the one dealing solely with the likes of Delanda and Deleuze is too damn grounded in reality...

Which brings me to a question in conversation between the nay sayers and yay sayers? What the fuck is reality these days? Who are you where? Am I who I become expressed on the internet or am I who I become physically? Is reality the stuff everyone agrees on that works? So how real is religion? Politically religion is more real than a punch to the head in some parts of this world?

So...is their "Great Idea" able to be Exhibited?
(Exhibited so as to be sold???)
I get it! It works for an individual's interest. And then, how do they work in our society, in our unconscious collectivity?

To me, all that talk sound like a business talk working for an individual interest in an art business community which is really a tiny reality.

Olaf: I think the basic point behind Lebbeus' comment is to state that no work exists in isolation. Being apolitical is an oxymoron. Hence, being "unreal" is exactly the same. It's simplistic and naive to attempt to separate reality from imagination when imagination exists within reality (again, it all eventually devolves into arguments between faith and reason).

Lighter reading on the subject: Pollan's Second Nature and several sections of Taleb's The Black Swan. (Man, however perverse and arrogant, exists within the realm of nature, unnatural things stemming from man are an oxymoron; you cannot separate man from world.)

Syp: Who cares about their "Great Idea", you cannot separate man from society; rejecting the fact that the sky is blue does not make it less blue; that's the point.

Also, yeah, about individual interests: they don't exist in isolation, stop being so narrow-minded. Works that don't take into consideration I personally perceive to be your set of values has no less validity in the grand scheme of things than works that do.

About the idea, that's not what I said.
The guy in your link keeps saying he pushs his "Idea" in his exhibit.
So, I am sarcastically asking "are they really able to EXHIBIT his IDEA?".
If so, that's only to be sold for his individual interest.

And about the individual interest...
What I am saying is that an individual interest is just an individual fantasy, and all their work and talk are came from their individual interest or fantasy which doesn't work with the collective unconsciousness.

And about "man", it is not correct to say that man is not separate from society. On the other hand, "Man" is what separates things from society.
That is why Nietzsche insisted on "Over Man".

Consequently what I am saying is that they are a pseudo-avantgarde who insists the imaginary based on individual Man's (in this case, their own) fanatasy or interest.

so true avant-garde is collective?

Yes.

When just one person does something offbeat to intentional provoke reaction, that person is a crazy idiot.

When 12 people all do the same thing, they're visionaries.

When 24 people all do the same thing, they're hipsters.

When 100 people all do the same thing, they're wearing Crocs.

when everyone calling the 100 people wearing Crocs as visionaries, then it become true.

what if i by all my friends Crocs, have a big party, are we avant-garde then?

eVolo makes me want to melt rubber with a blow torch.

Do not fear thinking big, fear missing the opportunity to do extraordinary work by not taking a risk.