what friedman says is exactly what we are trying to do. it is the only way we are going to survive. it is not easy, because we have to learn an entire new profession as we go along. interesting experience though, and to be honest, i think there are few architects out there with the knowledge we been picking up over the years. still doesn't make things easier/safer/saner. or not yet anyway.
i am perfectly content if a contractor designs and builds a kitchen (or whatever). it will probably look like it was designed by a contractor too.
contractor-designed projects are great advertising for architects.
what i like more from that quote is that he thinks architects job is about communication. absolutely true.
hey gang. I gave a tutorial today to a bunch of wide eyed first years. It was one of those that I picked from the guy resigning, who really isn't resigning - yea go figure, I'm confused too. Anyway we spent an hour and a half drawing and labelling different parts of Greek and Roman temples. No brainer stuff, but I really enjoy the abstract way you can record things and still communicate it to fresh architecture students.
And the word for the day is CARTOUCHE - a carved medallion, usually with the insignia of the family placed in series on the entablature
jump, I agree on the architect's job being about communication. When I started getting into information design, after a bit I started thinking that it was nothing new, really, because most of my job before that was not actually to design buildings, but to make drawings that communicated to a very specific audience how to make the building that already existed in my head.
yes, that too rationalist. i can believe that 100%.
i was thinking more about verbal communication. we spend very large part of our day talking to people - clients, brokers, contractors, engineers, city permit-giving people, future clients, and just people we think it is cool to talk with in a day. the drawing part of work is not such a large part of our job. very small actually. which why it is so strange that it is so important if we are going to make all that talking worthwhile...
I remember the day in my final year of undergrad when I was ruminating with a friend on the essence of architecture, and it occured to us that architecture is communication. For me personally that means the building itself; not just the act of creating it, but the form even. All of it. In the years since I haven't changed that view.
funny thing is, i told my shrink that i am tired of explaining my ideas to people, i want the work to speak for itself. i want the viewer to find, struggle and mis-underestimate the image/drawing/text for themselves.
Nam & SH et al, my lecture slides & notes are available if you email me. They will be featured content on my website, if I ever get infrascapedesign.com up and running. Web casting would be fun, but the classrooms aren't wired for this (yet).
LB- had a weird dream last night where you were a juror for a studio review for me and you insisted on getting spaghetti with cheese whiz (must be a philly thing) and parmesan from a can before you'd review the student's work. All this was up in some skyscraper and I had to keep riding the elevator up and down to the kitchen...
verbal communication is important, but the stuff with the pretty packaging is the stuff that gets noticed (even if the ideas behind them are really stupid). That's why we place such a high value on drawing.
it's a miracle that any of us made into & through school before the internet. an absolute miracle.
and my post above was a cut & paste accident. i don't have a "dawg" and i doubt that skippy "looks hot" in a kilt. i was just trying to use an example of valley girl talk for something else, complete different?
had another class (the same as yesterday), then it rained. I love this time of year. It is so simple, the place smells fresh. Makes you want to curl up and ooooh.
SH I couldn't get that arggg site open either. And I'm not iphoning it.
thats true toasteroven. until you have to not only make the buildings but find the people who want you to make them too.
then most of your day is about communication of an entirely different nature. very strange reality to digest. i believe the pictures are important and the spaces are really important but the most important of all is the talking with the strangers and the people who you want to meet. its like being a politician. in our case its also being a property manager a real estate agent and all other kinds of silliness that really are predicated on communication with others on 5 minute intervals. then we put it all together and sit on it with a pile of drawings and see what happens....
the starchitects i have met have all been charming so far. i think that is part of the typology for success in that field...
adrian forty is very interesting read. we are using some excerpts from that book for course i am teaching on modern architecture. we didn't read his stuff in archi-school but wish i did. goes perfect with kenneth frampton and william curtis...
not to sound daft or anything but did I completely miss this article that everyone is referring to? I feel like the little island boy in the corner that no will talk to because he smells like butter. Sigh
speaking of architecting-as-communication - and as a completely different thing from designing buildings, i spent hours with a client group today in a meeting to build strategies for how to accomplish a project.
the full project budget is available, all of it earmarked for this project. but it comes through multiple funding sources, each with multiple strings attached. getting the thing built will require parcelling out the project so that some monies can go for some things (meeting the conditions for that money) while other monies can be applied to other pieces - all with their own reviews and schedules for releasing the money.
"designing" phasing/delivery strategies based on complicated funding packages: not something you learn in school.
I hear you, SW. There was a point when I had the requirements for low-income housing assistance memorized because I was in charge of making a project funding-source-compliant. And my main reaction was... WTF. The majority of the stuff doesn't make the housing any better for the occupants, some of it actually conflicted with local building codes, and it was generally diverting my attention from the ultimate users' needs.
I was actually thinking about this today, that I very rarely got to think about what would be best for the users when I was in architecture. It was all about what would the city like, were various funding sources requiring, what would my boss like? Thinking back, I may have stayed in architecture a lot longer if I was able to carve out more time thinking about the end user, instead of all these middlemen. Bleh.
any read the Fast Company article about architects and our apparent [url=http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/does-architecture-have-foot-fetish]foot festish?[url] *m no laughing at me
sounds fun steven. we had to do similar for large projects from govt that were intended to be economic stimulus deal in the 90's.
in some cases was a bit like what rationalist describes. i didn't mind except for one project intended to be environmental pilot project, which was in the end mostly for show. bureaucracies can be self-defeating some times....
the designful company by marty neumeier
six thinking hats by edward de bono
a whole new mind by daniel pink
and anything by anyone affiliated with IDEO.
Jump, is it true that Smitherines are people fro
smithers in Canada? Just heard it on Wondrous Words. Since you're the only Canadian I know, you get to field my questions.
Morning. Gonna be a ling day here. Abe woke up at 545. Ugh. It's supposed to be in the 50s and I can't find the sweater I want to wear.
"this video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions", says big uncle on my youtube connection.
no smithereens for me.
i have no idea sarah. i always thought that was where things got blown to when there was a large explosion.
up early here too, but for me is chance to get work done while everyone sleeps. my prediction is the quiet will last for about 45 seconds more...but i LOVE mornings. the best time of day is 4:30 in the morning. fresh air and quiet. running at that time of day sounds awesome puddles. especially since you live in gorgeous part of world anyway, don't you?
Atechno - I'm not laughing AT you per say, just laughing NEXT to you. Ahhh shoes. I have a love hate relationship with them. There are so many awesome ones out there but my stubby fat feet can't fit into many. I try to go up one size and they're too long :o/
Anyway, tonight I'm going to go see the Capitol Steps. Can't wait.
i was talking about am...5:00pm is 17:00 on my watch
it is gorgeous here in the tropics, but not so much for running. the heat, the hills, narrow roads & lack of sidewalks & frequent rum-induced hangovers make serious training difficult...even though i still try.
i preferred it when i was living up north in michigan. pre-dawn runs are often surreal during wintertime...first tracks in the snow, nobody around and the air can feel so cold & still that you almost believe that the only thing keeping the entire world alive is you own beating heart. summertime is great too as the cool air provides relief before the sun scorches the earth. fog can be a great feature too.
part of the problem with the tropics is that not only do we lack the seasonal variations but, because we are close to the equator, days & nights are about the same length all year. dawn & dusk also happen really quickly. the sun comes in & out, hard & fast. we never get those long, lingering transitions between night & day that are characteristic of the sun's soft landings in the north. the gradual transitions & long shadows are definitely something that i miss and are difficult to appreciate while you have them. christian norberg schulz, by the way, writes very nicely about such things in his book of scandinavian architecture called 'nordic nightlands'.
I'm back two days early form my long weekend. The plan was to drive to Milwaukee, take the ferry across the lake to Michigan then drive up to Traverse City. but the ferry was cancelled both yesterday (when we had our original reservation) and today. So we came back home. It really kinda sucks, though I have so much work to do I guess I might as well be at home instead of in my inlaw's house. Grr.
The best part of the trip was just getting some time in Milwaukee. What a fun, smart little city! It's really lovely, feels like a real downtown, very funky, has both hills and the drama of the lake, and friendly. Plus lots of beer. We're seriously considering a move up there in a few years if my research is positive.
The Calatrava was OK. It's really a hat trick, and I did take a picture of how embarrassingly badly it connects to the existing Saarinen. But it definitely is thrilling to watch those big wings open up, and the interior vistas are elegant and controlled.
where the f do you live puddles? Always thought you were a midwester. NEways, hit two partes tonight, am all kinds of dizzy. Amazing friends, love them all, fu this shite. Pce out.
liberty! i went to the calatrava addition too, a few years back, and all i could do was complain to my wife how horrible the connection was to the original museum. where's the celebration? the collision? it just kinda of thud.
i've been bouncing around the lesser antilles islands for the past few years (building a secret lair for my evil empire)...but i sneak back into detroit frequently enough to keep an eye on things.
milwaukee a nice town, except that it's on the wrong side of lake michigan.
Lb, that is the single most succinct and perfect description of that museum I've heard. I completely agree with all of it. You might even add that the space under the butterfly is kind of underwhelming, since they go to all that trouble to build this amazing, sculptural element and then put... nothing underneath it. It's basically one big overly-large entrance space. And then you get shunted to the side through this too-small, horribly detailed and awkward entrance to... the REAL museum, the Saarinen (which is underrated in my opinion).
I wish I could have been to the museum before the addition, because I'm curious how the entrance worked for the Saarinen portion (they way he designed it). Probably would be a much better experience of that side of the building.
I kind of feel like the city of Milwaukee should have just built a separate, stand-alone cool Calatrava building, if that's what they wanted, and had it as a cultural center w/ rotating functions and small exhibits under that roof.
i don't know if there's been much coverage of the flu in the united states at the moment, but i just saw this map at wonderblog and i'm willing to bet that it will be the story of the upcoming week
Thread Central
Ooh, tk, I think you should do a live webfeed so we all can wath your lectures. Would that be too much?
Abram is playing with the wine bote opener. You know, the lever style... I wonder if I should take it away.
what friedman says is exactly what we are trying to do. it is the only way we are going to survive. it is not easy, because we have to learn an entire new profession as we go along. interesting experience though, and to be honest, i think there are few architects out there with the knowledge we been picking up over the years. still doesn't make things easier/safer/saner. or not yet anyway.
i am perfectly content if a contractor designs and builds a kitchen (or whatever). it will probably look like it was designed by a contractor too.
contractor-designed projects are great advertising for architects.
what i like more from that quote is that he thinks architects job is about communication. absolutely true.
the bartlett project is charming.
hey gang. I gave a tutorial today to a bunch of wide eyed first years. It was one of those that I picked from the guy resigning, who really isn't resigning - yea go figure, I'm confused too. Anyway we spent an hour and a half drawing and labelling different parts of Greek and Roman temples. No brainer stuff, but I really enjoy the abstract way you can record things and still communicate it to fresh architecture students.
And the word for the day is CARTOUCHE - a carved medallion, usually with the insignia of the family placed in series on the entablature
LB - Trust me... you do NOT have Bipolar Disorder.
I'm still kickin'
jump, I agree on the architect's job being about communication. When I started getting into information design, after a bit I started thinking that it was nothing new, really, because most of my job before that was not actually to design buildings, but to make drawings that communicated to a very specific audience how to make the building that already existed in my head.
yes, that too rationalist. i can believe that 100%.
i was thinking more about verbal communication. we spend very large part of our day talking to people - clients, brokers, contractors, engineers, city permit-giving people, future clients, and just people we think it is cool to talk with in a day. the drawing part of work is not such a large part of our job. very small actually. which why it is so strange that it is so important if we are going to make all that talking worthwhile...
I remember the day in my final year of undergrad when I was ruminating with a friend on the essence of architecture, and it occured to us that architecture is communication. For me personally that means the building itself; not just the act of creating it, but the form even. All of it. In the years since I haven't changed that view.
funny.
i try to go through my day communicating as little as possible.
at least, with product reps, clients, owner reps, contractors and permitting officials...
funny thing is, i told my shrink that i am tired of explaining my ideas to people, i want the work to speak for itself. i want the viewer to find, struggle and mis-underestimate the image/drawing/text for themselves.
Architecture is Definatly communication. A building is just a building unless it says something.
Ok. Wasn't somebody here expecting? I can't remember whom. Did she have it? Did I miss something?
Got my mothers guestroom finished. Still working on her office. Maybe I'll post a picture later. It's not cool and clean, but she likes it.
Adrian Forty wrote a brilliant book about communication in architecture called Words and Buildings...
_Slide/images/uploads/20081003-adrian-forty-a.jpg)
Morning all,
SH, wasn't strawbeary expecting? I think....
Also, i found ten dollars in my shirt pocket this morning!!!
Oh I LOVE that 'found money' feeling. You feel lucky like you just won somehing, though you know it was yours all along.
Looks like an interesting book.
Design is rapidly spreading from "posters and toasters" to processes, systems and organizaiotns.
my lil dawgie, Twinkle, is a chihuahua. You can tell my mawm but she already knows.
Skippy, that's hot!. I bet you look totally awesome in that kilt. Tell me, do you wear anything underneath?.lol.
Nam & SH et al, my lecture slides & notes are available if you email me. They will be featured content on my website, if I ever get infrascapedesign.com up and running. Web casting would be fun, but the classrooms aren't wired for this (yet).
LB- had a weird dream last night where you were a juror for a studio review for me and you insisted on getting spaghetti with cheese whiz (must be a philly thing) and parmesan from a can before you'd review the student's work. All this was up in some skyscraper and I had to keep riding the elevator up and down to the kitchen...
verbal communication is important, but the stuff with the pretty packaging is the stuff that gets noticed (even if the ideas behind them are really stupid). That's why we place such a high value on drawing.
anyone else enjoying aaarg as much as i am?
Beta, I couldn't get the site to open, but could be an iphonething.
Music class has been cancelled for today. Shame. Time to make a blanket tent!
it's a miracle that any of us made into & through school before the internet. an absolute miracle.
and my post above was a cut & paste accident. i don't have a "dawg" and i doubt that skippy "looks hot" in a kilt. i was just trying to use an example of valley girl talk for something else, complete different?
had another class (the same as yesterday), then it rained. I love this time of year. It is so simple, the place smells fresh. Makes you want to curl up and ooooh.
SH I couldn't get that arggg site open either. And I'm not iphoning it.
thats true toasteroven. until you have to not only make the buildings but find the people who want you to make them too.
then most of your day is about communication of an entirely different nature. very strange reality to digest. i believe the pictures are important and the spaces are really important but the most important of all is the talking with the strangers and the people who you want to meet. its like being a politician. in our case its also being a property manager a real estate agent and all other kinds of silliness that really are predicated on communication with others on 5 minute intervals. then we put it all together and sit on it with a pile of drawings and see what happens....
the starchitects i have met have all been charming so far. i think that is part of the typology for success in that field...
adrian forty is very interesting read. we are using some excerpts from that book for course i am teaching on modern architecture. we didn't read his stuff in archi-school but wish i did. goes perfect with kenneth frampton and william curtis...
not to sound daft or anything but did I completely miss this article that everyone is referring to? I feel like the little island boy in the corner that no will talk to because he smells like butter. Sigh
speaking of architecting-as-communication - and as a completely different thing from designing buildings, i spent hours with a client group today in a meeting to build strategies for how to accomplish a project.
the full project budget is available, all of it earmarked for this project. but it comes through multiple funding sources, each with multiple strings attached. getting the thing built will require parcelling out the project so that some monies can go for some things (meeting the conditions for that money) while other monies can be applied to other pieces - all with their own reviews and schedules for releasing the money.
"designing" phasing/delivery strategies based on complicated funding packages: not something you learn in school.
this one?
I hear you, SW. There was a point when I had the requirements for low-income housing assistance memorized because I was in charge of making a project funding-source-compliant. And my main reaction was... WTF. The majority of the stuff doesn't make the housing any better for the occupants, some of it actually conflicted with local building codes, and it was generally diverting my attention from the ultimate users' needs.
I was actually thinking about this today, that I very rarely got to think about what would be best for the users when I was in architecture. It was all about what would the city like, were various funding sources requiring, what would my boss like? Thinking back, I may have stayed in architecture a lot longer if I was able to carve out more time thinking about the end user, instead of all these middlemen. Bleh.
any read the Fast Company article about architects and our apparent [url=http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/michael-cannell/cannell/does-architecture-have-foot-fetish]foot festish?[url] *m no laughing at me
I'll just laugh at myself for misposting the url foot festish?
sounds fun steven. we had to do similar for large projects from govt that were intended to be economic stimulus deal in the 90's.
in some cases was a bit like what rationalist describes. i didn't mind except for one project intended to be environmental pilot project, which was in the end mostly for show. bureaucracies can be self-defeating some times....
Yeah for bureaucracies!!!
Also, here is too Friday.
i suggest everyone read:
the designful company by marty neumeier
six thinking hats by edward de bono
a whole new mind by daniel pink
and anything by anyone affiliated with IDEO.
Jump, is it true that Smitherines are people fro
smithers in Canada? Just heard it on Wondrous Words. Since you're the only Canadian I know, you get to field my questions.
Morning. Gonna be a ling day here. Abe woke up at 545. Ugh. It's supposed to be in the 50s and I can't find the sweater I want to wear.
Found it!
5:45 is early......
i often wake at 5:00 to go running. it may be early but it's also gorgeous.
Puddles, I talking AM not PM.
did someone say Smithereens?
"this video is not available in your country due to copyright restrictions", says big uncle on my youtube connection.
no smithereens for me.
i have no idea sarah. i always thought that was where things got blown to when there was a large explosion.
up early here too, but for me is chance to get work done while everyone sleeps. my prediction is the quiet will last for about 45 seconds more...but i LOVE mornings. the best time of day is 4:30 in the morning. fresh air and quiet. running at that time of day sounds awesome puddles. especially since you live in gorgeous part of world anyway, don't you?
Great song, great group Emilio.
Atechno - I'm not laughing AT you per say, just laughing NEXT to you. Ahhh shoes. I have a love hate relationship with them. There are so many awesome ones out there but my stubby fat feet can't fit into many. I try to go up one size and they're too long :o/
Anyway, tonight I'm going to go see the Capitol Steps. Can't wait.
i was talking about am...5:00pm is 17:00 on my watch
it is gorgeous here in the tropics, but not so much for running. the heat, the hills, narrow roads & lack of sidewalks & frequent rum-induced hangovers make serious training difficult...even though i still try.
i preferred it when i was living up north in michigan. pre-dawn runs are often surreal during wintertime...first tracks in the snow, nobody around and the air can feel so cold & still that you almost believe that the only thing keeping the entire world alive is you own beating heart. summertime is great too as the cool air provides relief before the sun scorches the earth. fog can be a great feature too.
part of the problem with the tropics is that not only do we lack the seasonal variations but, because we are close to the equator, days & nights are about the same length all year. dawn & dusk also happen really quickly. the sun comes in & out, hard & fast. we never get those long, lingering transitions between night & day that are characteristic of the sun's soft landings in the north. the gradual transitions & long shadows are definitely something that i miss and are difficult to appreciate while you have them. christian norberg schulz, by the way, writes very nicely about such things in his book of scandinavian architecture called 'nordic nightlands'.
sounds perfect puddles. even if it is hot.
strange question, but can you see the stars at night? we can see venus here but that is about it.
watch out for botflies, puddles!
I'm back two days early form my long weekend. The plan was to drive to Milwaukee, take the ferry across the lake to Michigan then drive up to Traverse City. but the ferry was cancelled both yesterday (when we had our original reservation) and today. So we came back home. It really kinda sucks, though I have so much work to do I guess I might as well be at home instead of in my inlaw's house. Grr.
The best part of the trip was just getting some time in Milwaukee. What a fun, smart little city! It's really lovely, feels like a real downtown, very funky, has both hills and the drama of the lake, and friendly. Plus lots of beer. We're seriously considering a move up there in a few years if my research is positive.
The Calatrava was OK. It's really a hat trick, and I did take a picture of how embarrassingly badly it connects to the existing Saarinen. But it definitely is thrilling to watch those big wings open up, and the interior vistas are elegant and controlled.
hat trick as in getting 3 goals in a single game?
where the f do you live puddles? Always thought you were a midwester. NEways, hit two partes tonight, am all kinds of dizzy. Amazing friends, love them all, fu this shite. Pce out.
liberty! i went to the calatrava addition too, a few years back, and all i could do was complain to my wife how horrible the connection was to the original museum. where's the celebration? the collision? it just kinda of thud.
for the hat trick...
i've been bouncing around the lesser antilles islands for the past few years (building a secret lair for my evil empire)...but i sneak back into detroit frequently enough to keep an eye on things.
milwaukee a nice town, except that it's on the wrong side of lake michigan.
Lb, that is the single most succinct and perfect description of that museum I've heard. I completely agree with all of it. You might even add that the space under the butterfly is kind of underwhelming, since they go to all that trouble to build this amazing, sculptural element and then put... nothing underneath it. It's basically one big overly-large entrance space. And then you get shunted to the side through this too-small, horribly detailed and awkward entrance to... the REAL museum, the Saarinen (which is underrated in my opinion).
I wish I could have been to the museum before the addition, because I'm curious how the entrance worked for the Saarinen portion (they way he designed it). Probably would be a much better experience of that side of the building.
I kind of feel like the city of Milwaukee should have just built a separate, stand-alone cool Calatrava building, if that's what they wanted, and had it as a cultural center w/ rotating functions and small exhibits under that roof.
i don't know if there's been much coverage of the flu in the united states at the moment, but i just saw this map at wonderblog and i'm willing to bet that it will be the story of the upcoming week
a milwaukee tradition! gone awry....
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