Week Nine

After scouring my favorite new pastime site www.virtualglobtrotting.com  I have come across something I think is worthy to blog about.  I have been spending/wasting hours scanning the aerial photos of celeb houses and architectural oddities with this website.  I am fascinated with the perspective that comes from an aerial view, I don't think it is some kind of voyeuristic thing I think it is simply because we spend most of our time 6 feet or less in my case from the ground.  I truly envy the bird's eye view that is only an option to those creatures that have wings, I suppose those artificial creatures that have wings and camera lenses too.  THIS is the one image I will share with you for now and if you get sucked in like I have I encourage everyone to browse this website some more, not at work obviously.  

The page I linked above is interesting to me architecturally, because it reminds me of the Nazca Lines that the ancients carved into the ground.  But in this case these scars on the earth were done by Saddam Hussein in his attempts to cover up the illegal activities that he once perpetrated.  

Well I will let you all get a chance to fly around the globe and scope out your own intriguing shot.  

Week Eight

This is my last blog post processed using my new favorite website, wordle.com .  I think they are on to something.  I know I appreciate the simple idea of taking my words and making them something visual and graphic.  I am reminded when I started architecture school that we were taught in our first drawing class, that if you can write then you can draw.  This defines our writing as art, or a form of art.  I still believe this to be true.  To test this, all of you who think you are no good at drawing, the next time you write something don't look at the letters and characters, but look at the white space in between.  There you will see what I am talking about.  It will appear as another language or something foreign, but after a while you will, like me, be able to jump back and forth between the written words and the negative space surrounding them with great ease.  

This wordle example is obviously not hand written, but by randomly composing the words this way it makes you see the space between the letters.  

I also should give credit to the blog where I first came across wordle.  That would be fellow architect Geoff at bldgblog.com  Thanks! 

week six

Micro Managing Not Macro Managing.  

This is what I mean by the above statement is that all these pretty renderings I see in every architecture magazine I look at are fantastical images of buildings that overreach their means. These designs are very impressive on paper, but most of the time they never come to fruition or if they do, the never come out as successful as the renderings evoke.  I do not want to lead you readers on a long rant, like I have done in the past, I just wanted to air my grievances about the current state of affairs as far as my profession goes.  

I have a prediction, that I hope will come true for 2010.  I predict that the new fad will be to build the smallest building we possibly can instead of the biggest.  (But not as small as the school for ants).  This would be great because it would re-teach architects how to detail a building properly and respect the scale of humans as we are the prime user of almost every project.  All these mega structures lose that sense of scale and detail, because they are just trying to build higher and bigger than the plot right next door.  So, as my title suggest architects will become better micro-managers instead of macro-managers.  Honestly neither kind ever sound good on a resume, but I am stretching their meanings to fit my topic. 

I for one would like to see buildings be more technical as far as paying attention to the detail, instead of talking about how many millions of tons of concrete I was able to devour in the processing of my ridiculously expensive building.