All the rioting just makes me nostalgic of my college days. As a college friend of mine once said "You know there's something wrong with your school when you are sitting in your apartment on 14th watching CNN and seeing garbage dumpsters burning and cars flipped on 12th." Gotta love those Buckeyes after beating (or losing) Michigan. *
so there was this competion on rethinkiing monument circle in indianapolis. its a circle with a big monument to wars of years gone by and office workers and what not eat their lunches there on nice days etc. etc. well a friend of mine posted this image of a presentation board that some team of local indianapolis architects did and in the board is a photo of SOA's La Tour Vivante, wtf???
some team of local indianapolis architects did and in the board is a photo of SOA's La Tour Vivante, wtf???
Isn't "idead 979" the kind of thing that would get you in deep trouble on an academic project? I don't see reference to SOA anywhere. I used a lake house design for a Revit project and in large letters on the title block said something like "Revit plans by me based on an award winning design by X"
donna, wil posted it on fb. i haven't seen any other results. in my mind its one of the best places in the city except for the blaring am talk radio bullshit that is pumped from the station there on the circle. seems to me you might wanna have a competition regarding one of the host of other urban issues in indy.
Ya... the wedbsite colors definitely suck. Makes my eyes hurt. Why are they re-doing it anyway? And what is with the trend of putting TVs on public squares these days? We have one, Columbus has one, etc. ... Are we Americans so addicted to being plugged in at all times that we can't even enjoy time outside wihtout one? That's definitely one thing I loved about Europe in the early 90's. No TVs in restaurants and bars. Come to think of it, I don't remember there being blaring music either. One could just enjoy everyone's company without sensory overload. No wonder so many people have ADD symptoms. Their synapses are always firing.
*M, think it's the other way around. people put tvs everywhere because they have ADD to self medicate. watching tv doesn't cause ADD as it seems to be genetic.
[rant]Moving sucks![/rant] I'm looking for couch(s) to crash on in so-cal in early august as I look for a new abode - any suggestions?
Barry - Let me re-phrase. I know its genetic and all but I feel the fast pace of our society has caused a lot of over-stimulation, which in turn makes our society more impatient, more prone to distraction and more prone to wanting instant gratification. Maybe it's just me but it seems more than 5% of the adult population (which is what statistics from 2010 are saying) is ADD. This is why I tend to question the roll that technology is playing in why we seem so over-stimulated and scatter brained.
Melt, I would agree with you. Husband and I recently got rid of our iPhones, and returned to un-smart phones to save 100 bucks a month on the phone bill. I now carry my iPhone AND the phone I use for calls. The iphone still works in places with wifi, but I will find myself waiting in my car for something, and wanting to check something online just to alleviate the boredom. Before the iPhone, I could sit and gather my thoughts, or listen to the radio.
funny that ADD pops up today, just was listening to a discussion on the local radio about it on my way into the U. there was a recent cross cultural study that looked at lots of different societies and found a statistically insignificant variation around the world of prevalence of ADD. So technology doesn't seem to have a role (even if it makes a convenient boogie man). okay, technology makes life more bearable for folks with little patience - aka electronic ritalin, but don't blame innovations. perhaps, the folks we hang out with are mostly the 5% (as we find non-ADD folks aka non-designers boring).
ADD and design goes together eh...guess that wold make sense.
iphone makes boring commute more endurable in my case. also has replaced my scanner although in most cases it really shouldn't. i decided pictures with my finger holding the book in place completely visible is my new aesthetic. amazingly students never bring it up. so there you go.
i decided pictures with my finger holding the book in place completely visible is my new aesthetic
This is the best sentence I've read in awhile.
vado, that ideas competition brouhaha is sadly a lot of misplaced anger that isn't good for ANYone, distracts tragically from what was actually an interesting competition, and at the end of the day IMO the "offending" firm came out firmly on the high road in the whole mess.
But yes: the initial call for entries website features, as one local blogger put it, "eye-raping colors". It's awful.
credit and credit due seems to be an issue to some. not sure how they could have given credit for that project, but they should have. surely there is a creative way to label the damn thing...
there was a more shitty case on archdaily lately of a building designed by MOLO in Aomori, japan. the local architect seems to say it is his own design, while MOLO totally gives the credit on their site. But you know it was molo who did the important bits and got the job in the first place etc...something wrong going on there.
i guess it is part of the way we do business if that taking credit thread is anything to go by...
Also, since I realize now that jbushkey posted the competition board in question: they didn't credit the designer of those aluminum chairs in the foreground, either - is that plagiarism? The non-SOA building in the background exists and isn't credited - is that plagiarism? This entire fight is misguided.
All I see in this little contretemps is sour grapes and a few people embarrassing local cultural leaders, not only the firm, but the judges and group that sponsored the competition: in other words, the very people who are doing the things we young progressives want to see more of in our city! It's making enemies and turning what could otherwise be a conversation about design into a conversation about attribution. So unnecessary.
morning all, I feel like i haven't been on tc in a minute....
how is everyone doing? i have my second pecha kucha presentation this weekend. Also, went to a public forum about the local university's development corporation's planned innovation square community. Hitech research and walkable urbanism for all!
Does Perkins and Will not do anything? They seem to be everywhere at least around these parts lately.
these parts meaning Gainesville. They are lead on a number of the above referenced sorts of projects. Also got miffed at one student aged girl who asked when they were goign to clean up the streets of all the homeless and quick-stops (aka local color). She said it was scary.....
the isssue with the soa image is that the although the competition was billed as an ideas competition, in effect it was a design competition due to the fact that it was a graphic presentation of those ideas.(in bold 1980's spandex colors!) and when people look at presentation boards with architects names on them and see unfamiliar building on the board, most likely they will add the two together to get four. if joe blow is looking at that board and says wow cool building (which in this board is the focal point just because indy doesn't have buildings like this.) he is going to assume that the person who made the board designed the building. so, in this case i think it did matter.
I read this article twice because it is loaded with good food for thought, so am also posting here. This is just a small point with in the article, but one I'm taking for a ride: Energy changes form to human labor, to capital, back to energy, repeat. Energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable, easy, but then try to add human capital and do the math and the models are very tricky and unpredictable. Right now, our economy is flush with human capital and I can imagine we are riding that part of the wave back towards equilibrium after having been an energy rich society. What does a modern civilization look and feel whose main resources are abundant human capital? What is the quality of life? Is it scary? Is it comfortable? Is it fair and just? Is it enlightening?
interesting beccabec. we are required to drop energy consumption at uni this year by 20-25% or face massive (seriously massive meaning it will add up to millions if we screw up) fines. all major consumers are being tasked with that challenge. not sure what that will mean for our operating budget but the efficiencies we find are not going to lead to more energy consumption. they can't, or we get knocked out. could be an interesting research topic in there somewhere.
@ donnah, that is an interesting point. i guess its like the conversation about wiener and his strange hobbies getting in the way of more important things. but anyway, if you are going to quote other architects' projects might as well do it BIG
about the molo design, i like it, but can dig it if no one else does. i do find it odd that the local architect is not crediting the design architects in an international publication. that gensler thread is also interesting for similar reasons. authorhsip can be kind of hard sometimes. seems best to spread the credit around.
vado, I disagree. On the board the building is not shown in its entirety, and it's definitely NOT the focus of the board. The focus of the board is the foreground stuff.
yes but the foreground stuff is the typical urban designer collection of entourage of kids with balloons etc. the building they didn't design is the only different thing about it imho
it's labeled as 'idea 9xx' or something... i do think it's ambiguous as to who's idea it is... wouldn't it make sense to have labeled who came up with each idea? i mean theoretically couldn't the architect be sued for using the photograph in the first place? since i'm sure they didn't get the rights to the photo..and it's definitely not a stock photo.
i don't think it ruins the idea of the competition..but the idea of copyright and plagiarism is important enough to taint it for me.
LB - even stealing part of an idea is still stealing.. i don't think they're allowed to show any part of the building without attribution... i once used ds+r televisions that i photocopied and collaged into my boards with an armature that they designed. i was almost kicked out of the competition for using them..
Vado - Would Joe Blow even think to put two and two together? He might just see it as a pretty building on a pretty picture and be done with it. After all it is in the background. I do thought see your point and do feel they are walking the fine line of plagerism. I personally think they should have used a more generic building for their Idea No. 979 or "fuzzed" it out a little.
Donna I posted it because someone had mentioned it and I thought it was worth discussing. It brought back memories of how seriously they warned us first semester about plagerism. I absolutely would have included credit somewhere if that was my board and I transplanted a unique building from a different city into my board. I know it is not the main focus of the board, but it does have a note associated with it. They couldn't afford the ink to write: (La Tour Vivante by SOA) as the last line of the note???
For me its a gray area. I don't really see it so much as plagiarism, but it is disrespectful. They thought the building was special enough for their presentation and a note. How about crediting the designer?
i doubt it beccabec. i think it just means in the end we are going to be sitting in buildings designed around air conditioning but with the air conditioning shut off one/two days out of five. i have heard that many of the big companies will shift the work week by a day or two so the energy demand will be evened out over the week instead of peaks and valleys connected to the weekend. the city may be run in shifts!
about stealing other peoples work.....
if a student had used a project without attribution i probably would have given them shit for it. even BIG puts every architects name on their proposal and they didn't just transplant the projects but modified them in photoshop. i forgot in this case the group attached a label to the building calling it out as idea number xxx. that was plagiarism. they were essentially pretending it was their idea. as vado says the rest of the suggestions are rather normal.
whether a non-architect recognizes the thieving is not relevant. it is still not allowed. no?
jump in regards to the MOLO vs. Local Architect thing, when I've been to firm fairs at my undergrad school, several firms have shown pictures of famous buildings they've "done" to attract the best talent. Fortunately I recognized a few, and said very naively to one representative "wait, I thought Morphosis did that school? huh, my memory must be funny." and he replied "oh, uh, well, we were the *executive* architects on that project" essentially meaning that they did the CDs and CA on a building that a much more famous firm designed. It seemed tacky to me that a lot of prospective employees wouldn't realize this and would think they were interviewing with a much better firm than they were. On the other hand, maybe it was a test of knowledge to see whether they would recognize the buildings??
I think the image of using a photo or rendering of the building is even more complex. Many people, when they do that, choose to credit the photographer or image-maker, but don't realize that to many the person who designed the building is more important. The whole way that design work of any type gets credited is even more complex because graphic designers essentially are told that they can sample (the way musicians sample) as long as they change at least 3 things. Those 3 things can be as simple as the orientation of the image, putting type over it, and recoloring something, and then they can get away with using it. Makes for a very complex issue.
william faulkner didn't allow air conditioning in his home as it was another way to try to steal the weather. apparently less than a week after his death though, the house was air conditioned.
No doubt, not attributing the building was a mistake. SOA absolutely should have been credited, and the winning firm admitted this in their formal statement about the contretemps (in which they also donated their prize money to a downtown community group - a very classy apology, IMO).
But then, should the designer of that aluminum chair have been credited? (Jorge Pensi for Knoll, according to DWR.)
Honestly, the bigger issue for me is that *this* in now the conversation we're having, not what the design proposed, or what any of the other designers proposed. And in the very small pond of designers in our town, there is now a division into factions and a lot of bad blood, which doesn't help any of us.
vado what's that dark swoopy roof thing in front of the building?
@ donna i am not sure why you think they are equivalent. the chairs are not the concept while the building they swiped is in itself a single idea with a potent concept they even labeled. i f you want to be upset be upset that the architects buggered up and caused all this mess instead of worrying that they were caught being professionally negligent. stealing ideas (PLUS a building designed around that idea)! and passing it off as their own was not a reasonable thing to do, this is just not question...
out of curiosity how would you feel if they had taken your bus shelter idea and put it in the picture with a number attached to it and an explanation but not your name?
anyway, they apologised nicely, sound like. good thing to do.
My bus shelter is currently appearing unattributed in renderings for a building that's coming soon and I don't have a problem with it, but on the other hand I *did* give it to the architect of the building to use.
I just don't see this as "stealing". I don't see using the chairs as stealing and the building is, to me, the same. The chair wasn't called out with a note, but there is a note that says "give people places to sit". If they had used an image of the Eiffel Tower with a note that said "Use a tower to give a sense of center from a distance" w/o attributing Gustave Eiffel this uproar wouldn't have happened either.
Keep in mind, this was an ideas competition for the center of the city, NOT a design competition for a building. A line can be drawn saying any time someone uses someone else's image without attribution that's stealing, black/white. But in the specifics of *this* circumstance, it doesn't pass the sniff test for plagiarism or grounds for disqualification (which is what local pundits have been saying should happen), and the ensuing discussion has embarrassed pretty much everyone involved.
Yes, the original architects should have been credited. But IMO, the firm that designed this board did NOT try to pass off this building as their own any more than they tried to pass off the chair design as their own.
I'm actually surprised at how much this discussion (not only here but in local blogs etc.) is stressing me out the last couple days - I have friends on both sides of the argument, and I hate rancor.
i get your meaning donna. it sounds nuanced, like you say. i think the distinction is the intent to be generic. the eiffel tower is a "generic" icon, or at least a symbol with so much content that it is easily understood as a place-maker, and so are the chairs. but the building they used is not like that. so i don't think it was ok to use it. it was a bad judgement call, but you know for something as small as this i would pretty much leave it at that.
then again i woulda let wiener off the hook too. he was a moron and everything that happened because of his particular brand of brain-rotted goofiness is all his own to deal with. don't see anyway around that. but you know it was all pretty small time as sex crimes go and this is pretty small time copying too. i am surprised we are still talking about it, interesting as it is...
funny how our collective attention is grabbed isn't it?
It's funny how the Eiffel Tower *has* become generic, and yea that SOA building isn't, you're right.
I also agree on Wiener - bone-headed stupidness is all I think he's guilty of, and he was a great outspoken guy before. Why oh why do politicians and people in power start to think they can get away with this stuff?!? It also just reinforces what sex-negative prigs most of this country are.
I have to give a lecture tonight on what is architecture and what do I do within that discipline tonight. I have 5 minutes to talk. Woo!
if anything, it seems ratio was giving soa too MUCH credit. as i understood it, they were trying to say, with their inclusion of the tower, let's get some superstar architecture on the circle. only, the fact that soa are pretty low in the superstar firmament means that using them to represent stars causes confusion. they're not recognized enough to represent 'superstar' yet. if ratio had used gehry's new tower, for instance, it would have been easier to 'get it'.
On the Wiener thing, I figured it was his personal life, and wouldn't have anything to do with his job, but then my Dad mentioned that he could be easily blackmailed/bought and it would make his job tougher. I hadn't thought about the blackmail/buying side of it, and now I don't know where I stand. Doesn't really matter since I'm in Texas.
Oh, and now that our Governor is all over the TV, am I the only one who thinks he looks like Prince Humperdink?
And Erin, or anyone else that can help, what was that keyboard shortcut on a PC to make the long hyphen? It turns out I use the hyphen a lot while writing my blog, and I always think of you when I do it. But I know you'd be annoyed with my incorrect hyphen use, and I'd like to fix it.
Thread Central
And can anyone forget Four Loko, Tilt or Joose?!
i'm excited donna's on her way!
good god i'm busy. see you guys in a week or so.
All the rioting just makes me nostalgic of my college days. As a college friend of mine once said "You know there's something wrong with your school when you are sitting in your apartment on 14th watching CNN and seeing garbage dumpsters burning and cars flipped on 12th." Gotta love those Buckeyes after beating (or losing) Michigan. *
*shakes and hangs head in shame
those gsa kids are lucky!
so there was this competion on rethinkiing monument circle in indianapolis. its a circle with a big monument to wars of years gone by and office workers and what not eat their lunches there on nice days etc. etc. well a friend of mine posted this image of a presentation board that some team of local indianapolis architects did and in the board is a photo of SOA's La Tour Vivante, wtf???
vado, where did you see this? Were the entries awful?
some results here: http://www.monumentcircleidea.com/ViewTop12_Judges.cfm
...though it's a little hard to tell what's going on in any of them.
is donna in kentucky?!
that website hurts my eyes!
some team of local indianapolis architects did and in the board is a photo of SOA's La Tour Vivante, wtf???
Isn't "idead 979" the kind of thing that would get you in deep trouble on an academic project? I don't see reference to SOA anywhere. I used a lake house design for a Revit project and in large letters on the title block said something like "Revit plans by me based on an award winning design by X"
http://www.monumentcircleidea.com/ProjectPDF/2.pdf
I guess La Tour Vivante is not the main focus of the competition, but they did transplant it from France? and call it out with a note.
donna, wil posted it on fb. i haven't seen any other results. in my mind its one of the best places in the city except for the blaring am talk radio bullshit that is pumped from the station there on the circle. seems to me you might wanna have a competition regarding one of the host of other urban issues in indy.
i did send a link of this to SOA's facebook page. I mean shit if I'd have known that I could use other people's ideas I would have entered myself.
and whats with the yellow and fuscia and blue wtf???
Ya... the wedbsite colors definitely suck. Makes my eyes hurt. Why are they re-doing it anyway? And what is with the trend of putting TVs on public squares these days? We have one, Columbus has one, etc. ... Are we Americans so addicted to being plugged in at all times that we can't even enjoy time outside wihtout one? That's definitely one thing I loved about Europe in the early 90's. No TVs in restaurants and bars. Come to think of it, I don't remember there being blaring music either. One could just enjoy everyone's company without sensory overload. No wonder so many people have ADD symptoms. Their synapses are always firing.
*M, think it's the other way around. people put tvs everywhere because they have ADD to self medicate. watching tv doesn't cause ADD as it seems to be genetic.
[rant]Moving sucks![/rant] I'm looking for couch(s) to crash on in so-cal in early august as I look for a new abode - any suggestions?
Barry - Let me re-phrase. I know its genetic and all but I feel the fast pace of our society has caused a lot of over-stimulation, which in turn makes our society more impatient, more prone to distraction and more prone to wanting instant gratification. Maybe it's just me but it seems more than 5% of the adult population (which is what statistics from 2010 are saying) is ADD. This is why I tend to question the roll that technology is playing in why we seem so over-stimulated and scatter brained.
Melt, I would agree with you. Husband and I recently got rid of our iPhones, and returned to un-smart phones to save 100 bucks a month on the phone bill. I now carry my iPhone AND the phone I use for calls. The iphone still works in places with wifi, but I will find myself waiting in my car for something, and wanting to check something online just to alleviate the boredom. Before the iPhone, I could sit and gather my thoughts, or listen to the radio.
funny that ADD pops up today, just was listening to a discussion on the local radio about it on my way into the U. there was a recent cross cultural study that looked at lots of different societies and found a statistically insignificant variation around the world of prevalence of ADD. So technology doesn't seem to have a role (even if it makes a convenient boogie man). okay, technology makes life more bearable for folks with little patience - aka electronic ritalin, but don't blame innovations. perhaps, the folks we hang out with are mostly the 5% (as we find non-ADD folks aka non-designers boring).
ADD and design goes together eh...guess that wold make sense.
iphone makes boring commute more endurable in my case. also has replaced my scanner although in most cases it really shouldn't. i decided pictures with my finger holding the book in place completely visible is my new aesthetic. amazingly students never bring it up. so there you go.
what were we talking about?
i decided pictures with my finger holding the book in place completely visible is my new aesthetic
This is the best sentence I've read in awhile.
vado, that ideas competition brouhaha is sadly a lot of misplaced anger that isn't good for ANYone, distracts tragically from what was actually an interesting competition, and at the end of the day IMO the "offending" firm came out firmly on the high road in the whole mess.
But yes: the initial call for entries website features, as one local blogger put it, "eye-raping colors". It's awful.
lol donna
credit and credit due seems to be an issue to some. not sure how they could have given credit for that project, but they should have. surely there is a creative way to label the damn thing...
there was a more shitty case on archdaily lately of a building designed by MOLO in Aomori, japan. the local architect seems to say it is his own design, while MOLO totally gives the credit on their site. But you know it was molo who did the important bits and got the job in the first place etc...something wrong going on there.
i guess it is part of the way we do business if that taking credit thread is anything to go by...
jump, am i wrong, or is that MOLO design a total duck, and about as graceful as one, too? Eesh - not crazy about it.
Also, since I realize now that jbushkey posted the competition board in question: they didn't credit the designer of those aluminum chairs in the foreground, either - is that plagiarism? The non-SOA building in the background exists and isn't credited - is that plagiarism? This entire fight is misguided.
All I see in this little contretemps is sour grapes and a few people embarrassing local cultural leaders, not only the firm, but the judges and group that sponsored the competition: in other words, the very people who are doing the things we young progressives want to see more of in our city! It's making enemies and turning what could otherwise be a conversation about design into a conversation about attribution. So unnecessary.
morning all, I feel like i haven't been on tc in a minute....
how is everyone doing? i have my second pecha kucha presentation this weekend. Also, went to a public forum about the local university's development corporation's planned innovation square community. Hitech research and walkable urbanism for all!
Does Perkins and Will not do anything? They seem to be everywhere at least around these parts lately.
these parts meaning Gainesville. They are lead on a number of the above referenced sorts of projects. Also got miffed at one student aged girl who asked when they were goign to clean up the streets of all the homeless and quick-stops (aka local color). She said it was scary.....
I mean safe/suburban urbanism much?
the isssue with the soa image is that the although the competition was billed as an ideas competition, in effect it was a design competition due to the fact that it was a graphic presentation of those ideas.(in bold 1980's spandex colors!) and when people look at presentation boards with architects names on them and see unfamiliar building on the board, most likely they will add the two together to get four. if joe blow is looking at that board and says wow cool building (which in this board is the focal point just because indy doesn't have buildings like this.) he is going to assume that the person who made the board designed the building. so, in this case i think it did matter.
I read this article twice because it is loaded with good food for thought, so am also posting here. This is just a small point with in the article, but one I'm taking for a ride: Energy changes form to human labor, to capital, back to energy, repeat. Energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable, easy, but then try to add human capital and do the math and the models are very tricky and unpredictable. Right now, our economy is flush with human capital and I can imagine we are riding that part of the wave back towards equilibrium after having been an energy rich society. What does a modern civilization look and feel whose main resources are abundant human capital? What is the quality of life? Is it scary? Is it comfortable? Is it fair and just? Is it enlightening?
http://rmi.org/rmi/TheReboundEffectAPerennialControversyRisesAgain
interesting beccabec. we are required to drop energy consumption at uni this year by 20-25% or face massive (seriously massive meaning it will add up to millions if we screw up) fines. all major consumers are being tasked with that challenge. not sure what that will mean for our operating budget but the efficiencies we find are not going to lead to more energy consumption. they can't, or we get knocked out. could be an interesting research topic in there somewhere.
@ donnah, that is an interesting point. i guess its like the conversation about wiener and his strange hobbies getting in the way of more important things. but anyway, if you are going to quote other architects' projects might as well do it BIG
about the molo design, i like it, but can dig it if no one else does. i do find it odd that the local architect is not crediting the design architects in an international publication. that gensler thread is also interesting for similar reasons. authorhsip can be kind of hard sometimes. seems best to spread the credit around.
vado, I disagree. On the board the building is not shown in its entirety, and it's definitely NOT the focus of the board. The focus of the board is the foreground stuff.
So jump, could mandating less energy use mean more idle hands?
yes but the foreground stuff is the typical urban designer collection of entourage of kids with balloons etc. the building they didn't design is the only different thing about it imho
it's labeled as 'idea 9xx' or something... i do think it's ambiguous as to who's idea it is... wouldn't it make sense to have labeled who came up with each idea? i mean theoretically couldn't the architect be sued for using the photograph in the first place? since i'm sure they didn't get the rights to the photo..and it's definitely not a stock photo.
i don't think it ruins the idea of the competition..but the idea of copyright and plagiarism is important enough to taint it for me.
LB - even stealing part of an idea is still stealing.. i don't think they're allowed to show any part of the building without attribution... i once used ds+r televisions that i photocopied and collaged into my boards with an armature that they designed. i was almost kicked out of the competition for using them..
Vado - Would Joe Blow even think to put two and two together? He might just see it as a pretty building on a pretty picture and be done with it. After all it is in the background. I do thought see your point and do feel they are walking the fine line of plagerism. I personally think they should have used a more generic building for their Idea No. 979 or "fuzzed" it out a little.
Donna I posted it because someone had mentioned it and I thought it was worth discussing. It brought back memories of how seriously they warned us first semester about plagerism. I absolutely would have included credit somewhere if that was my board and I transplanted a unique building from a different city into my board. I know it is not the main focus of the board, but it does have a note associated with it. They couldn't afford the ink to write: (La Tour Vivante by SOA) as the last line of the note???
For me its a gray area. I don't really see it so much as plagiarism, but it is disrespectful. They thought the building was special enough for their presentation and a note. How about crediting the designer?
i doubt it beccabec. i think it just means in the end we are going to be sitting in buildings designed around air conditioning but with the air conditioning shut off one/two days out of five. i have heard that many of the big companies will shift the work week by a day or two so the energy demand will be evened out over the week instead of peaks and valleys connected to the weekend. the city may be run in shifts!
about stealing other peoples work.....
if a student had used a project without attribution i probably would have given them shit for it. even BIG puts every architects name on their proposal and they didn't just transplant the projects but modified them in photoshop. i forgot in this case the group attached a label to the building calling it out as idea number xxx. that was plagiarism. they were essentially pretending it was their idea. as vado says the rest of the suggestions are rather normal.
whether a non-architect recognizes the thieving is not relevant. it is still not allowed. no?
jump in regards to the MOLO vs. Local Architect thing, when I've been to firm fairs at my undergrad school, several firms have shown pictures of famous buildings they've "done" to attract the best talent. Fortunately I recognized a few, and said very naively to one representative "wait, I thought Morphosis did that school? huh, my memory must be funny." and he replied "oh, uh, well, we were the *executive* architects on that project" essentially meaning that they did the CDs and CA on a building that a much more famous firm designed. It seemed tacky to me that a lot of prospective employees wouldn't realize this and would think they were interviewing with a much better firm than they were. On the other hand, maybe it was a test of knowledge to see whether they would recognize the buildings??
I think the image of using a photo or rendering of the building is even more complex. Many people, when they do that, choose to credit the photographer or image-maker, but don't realize that to many the person who designed the building is more important. The whole way that design work of any type gets credited is even more complex because graphic designers essentially are told that they can sample (the way musicians sample) as long as they change at least 3 things. Those 3 things can be as simple as the orientation of the image, putting type over it, and recoloring something, and then they can get away with using it. Makes for a very complex issue.
william faulkner didn't allow air conditioning in his home as it was another way to try to steal the weather. apparently less than a week after his death though, the house was air conditioned.
No doubt, not attributing the building was a mistake. SOA absolutely should have been credited, and the winning firm admitted this in their formal statement about the contretemps (in which they also donated their prize money to a downtown community group - a very classy apology, IMO).
But then, should the designer of that aluminum chair have been credited? (Jorge Pensi for Knoll, according to DWR.)
Honestly, the bigger issue for me is that *this* in now the conversation we're having, not what the design proposed, or what any of the other designers proposed. And in the very small pond of designers in our town, there is now a division into factions and a lot of bad blood, which doesn't help any of us.
vado what's that dark swoopy roof thing in front of the building?
sounds typical erin
@ donna i am not sure why you think they are equivalent. the chairs are not the concept while the building they swiped is in itself a single idea with a potent concept they even labeled. i f you want to be upset be upset that the architects buggered up and caused all this mess instead of worrying that they were caught being professionally negligent. stealing ideas (PLUS a building designed around that idea)! and passing it off as their own was not a reasonable thing to do, this is just not question...
out of curiosity how would you feel if they had taken your bus shelter idea and put it in the picture with a number attached to it and an explanation but not your name?
anyway, they apologised nicely, sound like. good thing to do.
My bus shelter is currently appearing unattributed in renderings for a building that's coming soon and I don't have a problem with it, but on the other hand I *did* give it to the architect of the building to use.
I just don't see this as "stealing". I don't see using the chairs as stealing and the building is, to me, the same. The chair wasn't called out with a note, but there is a note that says "give people places to sit". If they had used an image of the Eiffel Tower with a note that said "Use a tower to give a sense of center from a distance" w/o attributing Gustave Eiffel this uproar wouldn't have happened either.
Keep in mind, this was an ideas competition for the center of the city, NOT a design competition for a building. A line can be drawn saying any time someone uses someone else's image without attribution that's stealing, black/white. But in the specifics of *this* circumstance, it doesn't pass the sniff test for plagiarism or grounds for disqualification (which is what local pundits have been saying should happen), and the ensuing discussion has embarrassed pretty much everyone involved.
Yes, the original architects should have been credited. But IMO, the firm that designed this board did NOT try to pass off this building as their own any more than they tried to pass off the chair design as their own.
I'm actually surprised at how much this discussion (not only here but in local blogs etc.) is stressing me out the last couple days - I have friends on both sides of the argument, and I hate rancor.
i get your meaning donna. it sounds nuanced, like you say. i think the distinction is the intent to be generic. the eiffel tower is a "generic" icon, or at least a symbol with so much content that it is easily understood as a place-maker, and so are the chairs. but the building they used is not like that. so i don't think it was ok to use it. it was a bad judgement call, but you know for something as small as this i would pretty much leave it at that.
then again i woulda let wiener off the hook too. he was a moron and everything that happened because of his particular brand of brain-rotted goofiness is all his own to deal with. don't see anyway around that. but you know it was all pretty small time as sex crimes go and this is pretty small time copying too. i am surprised we are still talking about it, interesting as it is...
funny how our collective attention is grabbed isn't it?
It's funny how the Eiffel Tower *has* become generic, and yea that SOA building isn't, you're right.
I also agree on Wiener - bone-headed stupidness is all I think he's guilty of, and he was a great outspoken guy before. Why oh why do politicians and people in power start to think they can get away with this stuff?!? It also just reinforces what sex-negative prigs most of this country are.
I have to give a lecture tonight on what is architecture and what do I do within that discipline tonight. I have 5 minutes to talk. Woo!
just enough time to show them how to mix a drink of some sort.
jump, you're a genius!
Except these are 16-17 year olds on a state-funded program. Can't do. ;-)
if anything, it seems ratio was giving soa too MUCH credit. as i understood it, they were trying to say, with their inclusion of the tower, let's get some superstar architecture on the circle. only, the fact that soa are pretty low in the superstar firmament means that using them to represent stars causes confusion. they're not recognized enough to represent 'superstar' yet. if ratio had used gehry's new tower, for instance, it would have been easier to 'get it'.
Donna they could probably teach you about mixology
Wow, you guys are getting intense.
On the Wiener thing, I figured it was his personal life, and wouldn't have anything to do with his job, but then my Dad mentioned that he could be easily blackmailed/bought and it would make his job tougher. I hadn't thought about the blackmail/buying side of it, and now I don't know where I stand. Doesn't really matter since I'm in Texas.
Oh, and now that our Governor is all over the TV, am I the only one who thinks he looks like Prince Humperdink?
And Erin, or anyone else that can help, what was that keyboard shortcut on a PC to make the long hyphen? It turns out I use the hyphen a lot while writing my blog, and I always think of you when I do it. But I know you'd be annoyed with my incorrect hyphen use, and I'd like to fix it.
this is cool!
ctrl+alt+hyphen
—
Damn if that didn't work in wordpress, or illustrator for that matter. Can I just use two hyphens? Is that allowed?
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