Digital Craft - architecture and ebuildings

Four Eyes Dream House Sports A... (news.arcilook.com)

2012-01-19T00:20:00.001+13:00

Just what we all need. A 3800 sq foot, or around 360 sq m house. Three times our house in size. And! It's a 'weekend home'...

Oh the sustainability!

M

Four Eyes Dream House Sports Amazing Features
http://news.arcilook.com/photos/four-eyes-dream-house-sports-amazing-features/

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10 Stubborn Body Myths That Ju... (lifehacker.com)

2012-01-19T00:19:00.001+13:00

Fascinating... Not least because it seems the medical profession agrees being cold does not cause 'colds', but they do not have an explanation of why more colds in cold (winter) weather...

10 Stubborn Body Myths That Just Won't Die, Debunked by Science
http://lifehacker.com/5873922/10-stubborn-body-myths-that-just-wont-die-debunked-by-science

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Hello Hong Kong. My Name is Fr... (wanderlister.com)

2012-01-19T00:18:00.002+13:00

Hello Hong Kong. My Name is Frank Gehry.
http://www.wanderlister.com/post/9793498150/frank-gehry-outside-the-box

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Elsevier-funded NY Congresswom... (michaeleisen.org)

2012-01-19T00:17:00.001+13:00

Reading Zite over lunch and this gem popped up. Have always been intrigued by the public access to publicly funded research that the US govt. insists upon. Seems to me it's only feasible for the very large organization... But to be applauded nonetheless.

But what's intriguing here if correct is the notion that there is no discussion about the congresswoman being asked to front a congressional disciplinary committee for such an apparently commercially motivated behaviour.

Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807

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10 Environmentally friendly ho... (ecofriend.com)

2012-01-19T00:15:00.001+13:00

Hype city..

What we really need is evidence of these claims of friendliness to the environment...

10 Environmentally friendly housing complexes planned for green cities
http://www.ecofriend.com/entry/10-environmentally-friendly-housing-complexes-planned-green-cities/

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Whatever happened to heisenberg?

2012-01-19T00:14:00.000+13:00

Fascinating First-Ever Images of an Electron In Orbit [Science] - http://pulse.me/s/1ougM

Can a Sustainable City Rise in... (scientificamerican.com)

2012-01-19T00:13:00.001+13:00

Scientific American writing an opinion piece... Annoying. Easy to understand how if this is popular science, science gets a bad name. It's just an opinion piece 'backed' by some collected opinions....

Can a Sustainable City Rise in the Middle Eastern Desert?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=masdar-sustainable-city-in-desert

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Editorial, Editorial, world ar... (worldarchitecturenews.com)

2012-01-19T00:12:00.001+13:00

An editorial worthy if the title: raises the age-old question about quality in architecture: does it have merely to do with appearance in carefully staged (sans people) photographs? Or is there more? Quality work environments.

Moves from this position to question the role of the architect in re-thinking quality work environments...

So reminiscent of the good old days when we ran Post Occupancy Evaluation exercises in design studio as part of the briefing process for improving the design output. Famously I recall involving not only the School Board, the admin Teaching and cleaning staff, but also the primary students in a school prior to designing a new addition

Editorial, Editorial, world architecture news, architecture jobs
http://www.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?upload_id=17285&fuseaction=wanappln.projectview

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Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar... (gizmodo.com)

2012-01-19T00:06:00.001+13:00

Don't know which to find more interesting at this point. The apparent improvement in solar energy collection. A vertical wall seems like an easy thing to do better than. And the Notion that nature understands Fibonacci...

M

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough
http://gizmodo.com/5832557/

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Museum of Liverpool by 3XN (dezeen.com)

2012-01-19T00:05:00.003+13:00

Wonder if we'll ever go back to modelling museums...

Museum of Liverpool by 3XN
http://www.dezeen.com/2011/08/15/museum-of-liverpool-by-3xn/

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New Zealand Snow: Biggest Snow... (huffingtonpost.com)

2012-01-19T00:05:00.002+13:00

Gotta love the idea that snow is so special!

New Zealand Snow: Biggest Snowfall In Last 30 Years Delights People In The Street
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/16/new-zealand-snow_n_928293.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

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Learning from Germany: Spatial... (architizer.com)

2012-01-19T00:00:00.001+13:00

Love the mind twisting imagery ...

Learning from Germany: Spatial Advertisements
http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/27636/learning-from-germany-spatial-advertisements/

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A comic about the real scienti... (boingboing.net)

2012-01-18T23:57:00.003+13:00

Now this is fun.

A comic about the real scientific process
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/03/a-comic-about-the-real-scientific-process.html?dlvrit=36761

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MAKE | Ready-to-Wear Android Wearable Platform

2012-01-18T23:57:00.002+13:00

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/08/ready-to-wear-android-wearable-platform.html
Around 3cm square. 32Gb data. WiFi. GPS.
A gadget looking for an application..
Something that with its tiny display has not enough I/O to make it useful... So the question they ask in suggesting on this site it is available is really unimaginative.

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Debunking the Myths About BIM in the “Cloud”: AECbytes Viewpoint #61

2012-01-18T23:56:00.000+13:00

Debunking the Myths About BIM in the "Cloud": AECbytes Viewpoint #61
Another interesting paper from Graphisoft...
Seems to miss a fifth dimension in the cloud computing world: in addition to the 4 cloud approaches listed in the paper I believe there is a fifth. It is the web as service option. Running background analyses of air flow (CFD) or light (Radiance / 3DS Max Design) or energy (ESP-r or EnergyPlus) for example...

M
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Coop Himmelblau School 9 LA: a POE?

2011-08-05T00:38:00.001+12:00

This Is Fascinating. Metropolis Magazine has conducted a POE on this 'out there' Coop Himmelblau school design.

They surveyed 200 students. Then the journalist / architecture critic produced this piece. It's truly interesting to compare the journalist's views with the snippets of the students' views provided by the example surveys ...

The side bar quotes are standard journalistic 'illustration'. The article itself is an interpretation of the 200 surveys. The standard Research evidence for the illustrative piece is nowhere to be seen. Personally I want to believe the journalist's conclusion: that the students like the quirkiness of the building and as arts students somehow see it as expressive of them. It's such a neat match. But then I read the survey examples. I am hard pressed to see in these how the conclusions could be drawn from the answers to these. Certainly the journalism keeps well away from any statement that might smack of statistically representing the views of the 200.

What's most disturbing about this article Is that this is a good read. It sounds convincing. It makes a convincing case - unless you think about all those students' opinions in the survey forms. For example: who is not intrigued to see the full range of opinions expressed in answer to the question complete this sentence: If I was the architect I would...

This is not a beat up about the trivialisation of information by the media. The question quoted above illustrates the problem I am sure faced the Journalist or the analyst-advisor. How on earth can anyone reasonably summarize open ended questions like that? And if there are several? It does not seem to be a well-designed survey form... It reads more like an inexperienced research student's first draft of a survey - full of interesting questions to ask, but with little clear concept of how to analyze.

Egypt’s Solar SLIDES House Has... (inhabitat.com)

2011-08-02T01:44:00.000+12:00

Egypt's Solar SLIDES House Has a Transforming Perforated Facade
http://inhabitat.com/slides-perforated-skin-slides-in-and-out-to-control-solar-gain/

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Critics Take Jabs at Zaha's Olympic Stingray (archrecord.construction.com)

2011-08-01T22:33:00.005+12:00

Hmm

Sure looks ugly at present.

But according to the Guardian ... link here
"Then, once spectators have negotiated the crowd management arrangements, which the building accommodates somewhat clumsily, they will enter a space that can only be described as stonking, "
Qq

Critics Take Jabs at Zaha's Olympic Stingray
http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/07/1107298-Zaha-Hadid-Olympic-Aquatics-Centre.asp?WT.mc_id=rss_archrecord

Render:

Render:

actuality:
Dezeen has best photos...

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Tips For Improve Your Renders (aleso3d.com)

2011-08-01T22:29:00.000+12:00

Now they are saying use real settings. Not that long ago pretty render advice was all about faking it ( http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=170065 )

And keeping well away from setting for real light:
http://www.amazon.com/3DS-Max-Lighting-Nicholas-Boughen/dp/155622401X

Tips For Improve Your Renders
http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/?p=353

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A Belgian Idea of a Sustainable kit house

2011-08-01T22:21:00.001+12:00

I was on the http://www.designbuildsource.com.au website and thought this made interesting reading...

A cube. Lots of insulation. Smallish windows. Pallet manufacture. But cheap? Like to see proof.

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Teaching Kids About the Enviro... (carbonpig.com)

2011-08-01T22:13:00.001+12:00

Hate the "granny" tone. Ranting on about 'in our day'. Still the real question for the New Right is, since it was 'clearly' more 'efficient' for the economy to stop doing all this recycling, to whom did these efficiency measures transfer the cost of the production, re-use, and manufacture of the packaging?

Teaching Kids About the Environment and Sustainability
http://carbonpig.com/article/teaching-kids-about-environment-and-sustainability

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Green energy: California poll ... (latimesblogs.latimes.com)

2011-08-01T21:14:00.000+12:00

So, what would we find in New Zealand?

Political gain trumps science? (check out this New Zealand political view of the science: http://www.act.org.nz/climate-change-policy - it will interest people not from New Zealand to discover the party that published this document sits at the cabinet table ...!)

Or perhaps 'New Zealanders are just gullible followers of the left wing press'? http://mediamatters.org/studios/video/201107200010.

In checking out references to see if I could find two viewpoints on this issue I came across the main reason I thought Fox news was a brilliant satire when I first encountered it:

Headline from Fox website:

Pirates Swashbuckle Global Warming Alarmists

Original from the ABC website said this...:

Pirates disrupting climate change research

Green energy: California poll finds overwhelming support
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/07/global-warming-green-energy-california-poll.html?dlvrit=142898

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Another Website Ranking

2011-07-24T21:25:00.000+12:00

Another Website Ranking
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

Shared from Taptu | DJ Your News

Archidose publishes some interesting stuff. Most interesting of recent times has been their considered examination of what constitutes an interesting / useful blog / web page related to architecture, This is one.

The other is the top sites as calculated by Alexa in terms of actual links to the sites.

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites

2011-07-24T21:24:00.000+12:00

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

Shared from Taptu | DJ Your News

As it says, the Alexa report of the architetcure web sites linked to most often - as reported by 'Archidose'.

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

2011-07-24T21:18:00.000+12:00

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

Anyone fancy a truly sick treehouse...?

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

2011-07-23T11:27:00.001+12:00

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

An application for Rhino/ grasshopper/generative components /design script?

Something (anything)instead of more blobitecture...

Seems to me it could be resolvable as a formula / explicit coding of constraints which is always the arcane part of parametric architecture.

Let's hope the competition attracts the explicit designer...

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

2011-07-19T19:03:00.000+12:00

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

An essay in images - elevating concrete and light to the spiritual. Follow link and enjoy.

m

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum | OpenBuildings

2011-07-19T19:00:00.000+12:00

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum OpenBuildings

Check out this building. If we were still doing the Digital Craft Museum modelling - I'd want to add this insane building to the list - just so we could explore the interior.

Personally, having visited the Kiasma building, I am prepared to give this folly the benefit of the doubt. Kiasma was uplifting and exciting - as well as a trick to model.

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

2011-01-13T11:15:00.000+13:00

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

" Many examples come straight from Edward Tufte, the information design guru who put the serious study of infographics on the map, so to speak (the New York Times has called him the Leonardo da Vinci of Data)." - So why bother with a regurgitation of Tufte in @SCIAM?

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

2010-12-19T14:32:00.000+13:00

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

Some (small) part of me wants to include this as a tourist destination... on some future visit to Spain

Buildings and Death Rays

2010-10-22T08:40:00.009+13:00

Curved mirrors and the sun. As one newspaper noted, the old saw about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas seems not true in this case. Love to know more detail however as stories of melted plastic bags and singed hair are quite extreme, even given the intensity of the Vegas sun.

Thanks Terri for pointing this out...

Apart from this spoof what is remarkable about this story is the lack of evidence. Youtube has a bunch of links all of which are people talking about the

issue. The melted plastic bag is the only proof offered. Not to doubt the local heating effect of the concave mirror, but singed hair and no burnt skin?

It seems the original story broke in the Las Vegas Review. Illustrated thus:

What I want to see is the video showing what happens. Not the cheap, sun glinting off the facade pic.

form beats function to a pulp: Architectural Record

2010-09-30T21:21:00.000+13:00

Antoine Predock�s CLA Building in California May Be Demolished | News | Architectural Record

Emergent Design-Air Flow Analysis 1

2010-06-18T16:20:00.001+12:00

I fully expected something with a title of 'Emergent design' to be at the very least Digital. It is after all spawned by studies of the digital and lead to "a theoretical framework... for investigating how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms."

Instead it appears to be the use of a very large model and a cooling fan to study the potential for natural ventilation / wind driven air flow.

And so it begins?

2010-03-18T16:30:00.002+13:00

I see on blueprint a reference to 'The World's First Printed Building'.

I'm not sure what to make of it. It seems like it is possibly just another of those 'because I can' exercises where the 'freedom' to create wildly free-form architecture is sufficient justification for the achievement that is documented.

It is - of course - a 'pavilion' so one does not have to deal with windows and other awkward questions like keeping out the rain. Still it is a major step forward from the machines that extrude concrete or that are outsize robots or that modularise everything that I have seen in past exercises of this type.

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Sound the Trumpet: Music Museum Opening in Phoenix

2010-01-03T23:38:00.001+13:00

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/091230musical_instrument_museum.asp

Possibly another modelling exercise?

Could well be a basis for an acoustic model as well..

m

Inserting a Google Earth Viewer into a web page / blog

2009-09-02T23:56:00.003+12:00

This is a trial of the Google Earth Gadget. Link in the title of this to the online gadget which generates the code that inserts this viewer.

It is a model created in Autocad and imported into 3D Studio for a walk through animation back in 1993 by Nick Warring - a student employed by me as a Research Assistant at the time.. The goal was to use the walk through during meetings with the people in the neighbourhood when Victoria University School of Architecture was looking to move into a refurbished building. The top floor and the atrium were added to the existing building.

The building was made into a Google Earth model in 2005 and uploaded to the Google Earth Community. This was during Rachel Ryan's research Masters in Building Science which explored representation of data / information within a 3D digital environment. Part of Rachel's preliminary studies was to construct a 3D Google Earth model of the Wellington CBD. Unfortunately this has not seen the light of day for 3 years because the owners of the copyright cannot agree to making the model widely available.

Here is the School of Architecture in Vivian Street (grabbed from the file uploaded to the Google Earth Community in 2005):

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

2009-06-19T00:48:00.001+12:00

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

"Life seems to be pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the day it returns to being sterile"

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NYT writes: Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago

2009-05-27T02:20:00.003+12:00

An estatic review of yet another Piano building. Or is that - yet another ecstatic view of a Piano building...

Certainly worthy of a look for modelling. Any building that brings the New York Times Architecture critic to write "The beauty of his designs stems from his stubborn insistence that the placement of a column or a window, when done with enough patience and care, brings us a step closer to a more enlightened society." has to be worth a second look.

Check out these links:

NYT

ARTINFO

InteriorDesign.net

BBSC 303 Lecture / Workshop

2009-05-27T01:44:00.003+12:00

Theme for the session: learning to relax ... and solve the problem.

Tactic: when an error message or dialogue pops up: READ IT and GOOGLE IT.

Specific example issue:

Export reliably to LightStudio:

Unfortunately, the Radiance renderer underlying 3DS Max cannot work with the object names that ArchiCAD or Revit are able to create. The work around is to Export to AutoCAD .dwg format. THEN in 3DS Max (9 if you are using Light Studio) using the AutoiCAD Legacy File Import format. This works for most people.

Those who have other issues often find it is due to some other fault with the way the CAD model is organised. One example we examined was the "set overflow in addobject" error message: arising from objects being too close together. This can often be a result of the model having two objects that are co-planar (e.g. two identical copies of the same object).

A further strategy to be explored - particularly if your Revit model has "massing" elements in it - is to select to export ACIS solids rather than polyface meshes...

Use Max efficiently:

NOTES:

Many people are looking to use various combinations of lights (sun+sky) and cameras to create their renders. Rather than save many different Max files each with its own sky (and camera) - the option can be used for switching light sources on and off; and the option can be used to save 'scene states'. This approach permits the use of the option to set up a single job that runs (perhaps overnight?) to render all pictures (scenes) ina list.

has a "Multithread" option for using all the cores of a multi-core processor.

Select a bunch of objects and type a name into the Selection Set box in the tool bar - tis saves this selection set under this name.

The geometry file can be made much more efficient if you have multiple copies of objects such as chairs, light fittings, decorative facade elements, then making them into an array in the original CAD program, or in Max, ensring that all copies are 'instances' not real copies.

Render in mental ray and in Light Studio from the local D:\drive - it is 5 to 10 times faster than via the network to your 'My Documents' location. (Don't forget to keep the D:\ drive files and transfer then to the next computer's D:\ drive.

BBSC 303 Lecture, 19 May 2009

2009-05-26T08:29:00.005+12:00

We spent a good chunk of the lecture reviewing the structure of a good web site that responded to the brief for the web project. The key was that the navigation should be simple, clear and focus on issues to do with making the model of the museum, not on the "assignments" or "tutorials" completed.

This is not to say that the requirements of the course are not to complete the assignments, but rather the brief of the web assignment shold be read and followed.

In addition we covered efficient rendering in Max: mentalray and lightstudio have great similarities in terms of:

saving a map of the final gather / ambient light in a file (both renderers can be made much faster by saving this general light map; only to be used where the lighting conditins are the same, but capable of reducing the second and thirds render in a set for the same light condition by 40-50%.
both programs support creating your own named settings files for the render process which remember all the settings in Final Gather or Light Studio from one computer session to the next.
both Light Studio and mental ray also support excluding the smaller objects from the render.
allowing the saving of image files in .hdr format to allow greatest flexibility in final processing of the render in photoshop (by adjusting the exposure).

Finaly, it was noted with respect to Light Studio:

the 'simpleLS ' interface should not be used to generate any final hand ins as its picture quality is very poor;
the so-called 'expert' LS interface provides may settings for controlling the quality of the final render, including the ability to set a standard (local on the D:\drive for speed of renders) project file location.
as noted in the online tutorial - and already mentioned in an April 11 2009 blog entry - the LS materials are to be found in a library on the P-drive. They are adjusted by the actual physical scalw parameters: e.g. 0.1m width planks for timber flooring. This requires the user to think carefully about the scale of the model imported.

BBSc303 Lecture, 5th May 2009 - Sam Curtis

2009-05-08T22:00:00.001+12:00

3dsmax mental ray Setup Workflow (similar workflow lightstudio, different daylight systems and materials)

1) Setup your units. Make sure you are working in real world units.

2) Import your model (via FBX for Revit). Check the units (Measure tool under the tools tab)

3) Create a Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template), 50% grey. Apply to the entire scene.

4) Hide the glazing in your windows, or create a Arch & Design (mi) 'Glass: Thin Geometry' material (from the template)

5) Create a Daylight system. Say yes to both questions when asked.

6) Make sure the Compass Rose is not too big, and do not drag the daylight system out too far from the scene. Keep it small,just twice as high as your buildling.

7) Setup the correct location for the daylight system. Change the day and time to something suitable.

8) Set up your camera views.

9) Go to Exposure settings and change exposure pre-sets to 'Physically Based Lighting, Indoor Daylight'

10) Bring up the render dialog box. Set render size to 320 x 240. Turn on finalrender and set to Draft. Set image anti-aliasing to Draft (Min 1/64, Max 1/4).

11) Render.

12) Adjust the sun position. Change the time in the daylight system until the sun is in the correct position. Re-render and repeat until satisfied.

13) Adjust your exposure. Go to Exposure settings and again and change the exposure setting (Exposure Value (EV)) and click Render Preview. Adjust the exposure setting until satisfied.

14) Create your materials for your walls and floor.
For gib painted walls create an Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template) with 80% white. This is the reflectance value real white walls.
For a wooden varnished wall, use Arch & Design (mi) 'Satin Varnished Wood' material (from the template)

15) For the rest of the scene, use ony Arch & Design (mi) or ProMaterials. There are ProMaterial libraries you can load with a wider range of pre-defined realistic materials

16) When doing final renders, increase the render size, anti-aliasing the final render quality.

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

F10 Render Dialog
F9 Re-render last
F12 Transform Type-in Dialog (move, rotate, scale)

M Material Editor
H Object Selection
Q Select
W Move
E Rotate
R Scale
Alt-Q Isolate Current Object
Shift-W Turn off navigation wheel
Ctrl-D De-select current selection
Space Lock selection

A new model for financing home solar power

2009-04-20T13:09:00.001+12:00

One of the charms of living in Berkeley for 8-9 months in 2008 was to discover all that "lovely Berkeleyness" as one resident described it during a sustainable neighbourhoods workshop that I attended. This news item refers to a scheme that was proposed to the Berkeley City Council way back in October 2007. To quote the SF Chronicle of the time: "plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say."

Apparently the inspiration was the financing that cities across the USA already undertake for undergrounding cables in a nighbourhood: the city brings together a neighbourhood and brokers the deal with a finance company to pay for this neighbourhood improvement programme. The idea is that the individual house owner cannot afford the individual cost of undergrounding. The Council is needed as the property tax collector to ensure payment over time. Neighbourhood improvements help the house owners, so brokering the deals is not too difficult. Some people in Berkeley thought why not expand this to solar electricity?

I encountered this idea in an East Bay Express article in November 2008: "Will Berkeley's Solar Plan Go Viral?". That article notes: "If Berkeley's plan goes viral and spreads nationwide, it could have a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. According to a yet-to-be released paper from researchers at UC Berkeley, a nationwide program could eliminate a gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions throughout the country. "This would conservatively contribute 4 percent of the savings needed for the US to reach 1990 emission levels by 2020, with very significant additional savings if the program expands to commercial buildings," the report concludes."

On April 19 2009, the Augusta 'Metro Spirit' carried an article by Erica Gies - a freelance reporter - in which she notes:

"In February 2009, Aaron Mann became the first person to benefit from Berkeley FIRST, installing 32 solar panels on his 2,800-square-foot home. Mann estimates that the new system, which generates 25 to 30 kilowatts on a sunny day, will provide 90 percent of his family’s needs. Functionally the electricity works exactly as it did before. Whether the house runs entirely off solar, pulls power from the local utility at night or on cloudy days, or uses a blend, “I don’t know the difference,” he said."

Ths scheme does not come cheap - because PV is not yet cheap. Apparently Aaron Mann got a rebate from Pacific Gas and Electric - his utility company - of US$6,000, cutting the total bill from US$41,000 to only US$35,000! "To repay that $35,000 loan [from Berkeley FIRST] , Mann’s property taxes increased $3,300 a year, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize that his annual pre-solar energy bills with PG&E totaled $4,200. So solar nets Mann an energy savings of $900 a year!"

The most significant part of the Metro Spirit article though is Gies' following two paragraphs which suggest that Berkeley who claim to have lead the world in kerbside recycling may be providing a lead in this solar scheme also 'going viral':

"In coming months, similar solar pay-as-you-go programs will begin in Boulder County and Denver, Colo.; Flagstaff and Tucson, Ariz.; Albuquerque and Las Cruces, N.M.; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore.; Burlington, Vt.; Belmar, N.J.; and San Diego, Solana Beach, Santa Monica, Sonoma County, and San Francisco, Calif." Apparently several other states are amending their laws to make the scheme possible.

And finally - having started with PV: "Berkeley hopes to expand its program to include insulation, new windows, and other energy-saving projects. More places will likely follow suit."

Materials in Light Studio - procedural materials; and

2009-04-11T12:54:00.003+12:00

Procedural issue covered (from Light Studio / Advanced / Materials tutorial online at the course info web site):

Loading the light studio material library from the P:\LightStudio folder.
Opening the .cal file that is applied and changing the scale of the materials listed...

Planning the Modelling - and Materials basics in 3DS Max mentalray

2009-04-11T12:25:00.002+12:00

Lecture April 1

Topics covered:
Set up a consistent underlying structure for the collaboration:

structural grid?

plan AND section joins

scan images and overaly and cross check dimensions

this is a model, not a set of construction drawings

plan to model only what is to be starring in the images at the end

Materials in computer graphics were also examined in the context of modelling. Starting with the online notes about the use of diffuse, bump, displacement and opacity maps within computer graphics, we went through:

applying this picture:

As a diffuse map:

As a bump map:

As a displacement map:

And applying this image:

as an opacity map:

The optimistic green idea

2009-04-11T11:40:00.002+12:00

This article ("The Power of Green", Thomas L Friedman, NYT, April 15, 2007 - and the associated videos - is why the New York Times is such a pleasure to read. Pity their scummy marketing people are trying to sting me for a continuation of my subscription at about NZ$500 for a year, when I am no longer in the country!

Friedman's basic thesis is identified in the byline from the NYT:
What does America need to regain its global stature?
Environmental leadership.

He argues that persuading Brazil/China/India etc to grow clean when the Western world has benefitted from growing dirty (=CO2 and other environmental costs), is futile. His alternative would be for the USA to lead the world with clean alternatives that fuel their growth faster till and thus attract others to the green path...

This is the sort of thinking that is behind the smart grid, the electric car as a storage device for the smart grid, PV on every roof etc... Its fatal flaw seems to be that it ignores the individual people in the equation. How to persuade people to alter wasteful behaviour - to use their share and not keep their buildings (for example) too hot in winter and too cold in ummer. There is clear evidence in the international work on 'Adaptive comfort' that mechanical control of temperature changes our expectation: when people have to open windows for cooling they have very different definitions of what is acceptable than when they push a button on an air conditioner. The Friedman future is more likely to occur if we can change general expectations.

I was reminded of this in a community workshop in the US recently. Some people attending who were significantly altering their behaviour to conserve water (collecting bath water for flushing toilets etc) could not contemplate turning their thermostats down below 20C - overnight, when they went to sleep! And these were so called greenies!

Thomas L. Friedman: The Power of Green - NYTimes.com/Video

Thomas L. Friedman: Green is the new Red White and Blue - NYTimes.com/Video

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Wot is it? Twitterspectrum

2009-04-03T00:54:00.001+13:00

At this address: http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterSpectrum/TwitterSpectrum.html there is a great toy. It lists two interlocking tag spectra if given two words. This example shows the tag spectrum for the two words 'architecture' and 'window'.

The overlap area is for 'architecture' OR 'window' AND 'tag keyword'... not quite what I expected to be the content out. I had hoped assumed that it was showing overall keyword + tag on the left and right and in the middle both keywords + tag...

Still - a search engine for twitter based upon content not person's name is great.

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California Academy of Sciences - a LEED Platinum Museum

2009-03-30T00:28:00.001+13:00

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Munch Museum on waterfront in Oslo - another model?

2009-03-29T23:57:00.001+13:00

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Atlanta's Centre for Covil and Human Rights - another building to model?

2009-03-29T23:55:00.001+13:00

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2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

2009-03-29T23:53:00.001+13:00

2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom | Open Architecture Network

Now this looks like an interesting project.

Let's hope they get beyond the knee-jerk more daylight is good design reactions we have had of late to the work of Heschong Mahone Group.

There has also been some work done in New Zealand on this topic by Quentin Jackson - essentially testing whether the methodology of HMG could be replicated in a very different environment. Quentin concluded that the methodology was sound, but had insufficient number of students to suggest that his conclusions applied to the broad New Zealand population.

What seems to be clear from both the HMG work and from Quentin's work is that the differences in performance between students when grouped according to the differences in the physical environment were about the same order of magnitude as the differences in performance when grouped by teacher. The quality of the physical is surprisingly as important as the teacher if one looks at measurable performance in standardised tests...!

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Movie about Rem Koolhaas coming to Wellington

2009-03-29T23:13:00.003+13:00

Can't find the times on the Paramount web site, but according to Wotzon, on Fri 10 Apr 11.00am and Sun 12 Apr 1.00pm at the Paramount in Courtenay Place a documentary will screen about the former film director, author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan and architect of what to me embodies in one building the best and worst of auteur architecture: the Casa da Musica in Porto:

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Architectural Firms Compete to Design African American History Museum - washingtonpost.com

2009-03-29T22:49:00.002+13:00

The Washington Post writes (28 March 2009): "The future National Museum of African American History and Culture -- as envisioned by competing teams of architects -- will most likely include water features and music halls, evocations of slave ships and the African past, and vistas acknowledging its important, monumental neighbors.

Perhaps not enough information to make a model - yet...?

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Web 2.0 - 2009

2009-03-25T00:27:00.010+13:00

The lecture today trawled through the concept of Web 2.0: A google 'define': search produces the following Wiktionary definition: "The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content".

The original Web 1.0 was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990's. The arrival of Mark Andreesen's Mosaic web browser around the same time created accessible content: the first mix of text and images on the web, proving to be so powerful a trend that it "made the front page of the New York Times business section".

Examples of interactive web sites discussed are:
Flickr
Twitter
Blogger
del.icio.us

Technologies that are useful in the Web 2.0 world include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and folksonomies built on simple tags [A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. ..]. The highlighted links at the top left edge of the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course Information web page is constructed from an RSS feed reporting my Google (RSS) Reader subscriptions under the label 'architecture'. Just below this is a feed of my most recent del.icio.us links.

Other interactive web sites / services include:
facebook
myspace
bebo

In addition, we watched a couple of youtube videos:

The point? Assignment 2 requires you to "... actively document and collaborate online with your team partner and present the development of your project online in the form of a website." The goal therefore is to create a blog EACH, reporting your collaboration. The technologies of Web 2.0 are what will make our web sites readable, informative and able to be navigated simply.

The lecture concluded by referring back to the simple web page tutorial linked to the course web site. We covered again the use of HTML (hyper-text markup language) to place around text or media that affect its display. In particular we looked at the hypertext linking tag.

File translation issues:

2009-03-22T15:51:00.003+13:00

The lecture on Tuesday 17 March and the tutorials on Thursday 19 March focused n file translation issues between the different original file formats in CAD and the 3DS Max file formats.

CAD	3DS Max 9 for LS	3DS ax 2009 for mr
Archicad	Export to .dwg: import via Legacy dwg	Export to 3ds; import
AutoCAD	import via Legacy dwg	import via Legacy dwg
Revit	export to dwg. import via Legacy dwg	export to fbx; import via fbx

NOTE: as covered in the online tutorials and in the tutorial class on Thursday, the Right Hemisphere product Deep Exploration can be used to clean up the object names in 3DS Max so that the renderers work properly.

Lecture 2: 2009 - Rendering with Max

2009-03-22T13:06:00.002+13:00

The strategies for completing a rendering - a summary of the approaches that need to be adopted to Render within Max.

Basic concepts (summarised from tutorials):

Global illumination - Radiance (Light Studio) and mentalray
materials are specific to the renderer

light studio materials for LightStudio
Pro-materials for mentalray OR
Arch and Design materials for mentalray

LightStudio only works in Max 9
mentalray works in Max 9 and 2009: recommend the latter
in both renderers define a sun and sky in very similar ways

Light Studio: Create tab/panel: Systems. Pull-down Light Studio option. Select Daylight. Choose location; date; time
mentalray: Pull Down menu. Lighting System wizard. Select tab. Create. Choose location; date; time. Accept options to make sky match sun and to set exposure for daylight with yes.

in both renderers the 'indirect' illumination in bounces (mr) or as the 'indirect' box (LS) need to be a minimum of 2 outside, and 5 to 7 inside.
In LS there are two render types: "Simple" FOR PREVIEWS ONLY and "Expert" for producing the actual renders.
In LS there are many different materials, but 'plastic', 'glass', metal are the ones normally used. Have fun making a metal walled Gehry building!
The LS manual is siomple and easy to read. The two tutoriala online should take you through all you need to know (the second 'advanced' tutorial is about lighting studies, but the materials section is useful for this course)
mentalray has 'Global Illumination', 'Final Gather' and 'Caustics' settings: for this tutorial and most of this course, we will ONLY use 'Final Gather'.

Lecture - 1: 2009

2009-03-22T11:37:00.003+13:00

Topics covered in the lecture:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives

Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD Architecture and Revit - plus Maxrender
Task 2 - collaborating in the construction of a complex digital model of a daylit gallery
Task 3 - creating a blog and web page to summarise the digital modelling

The Assessment Contract - and its role in reducing stress and workload
Workload management

The links to the past year's work:

The Digital Craft BBSC 303 section of the www.arch.school.nz web site for models created between 1998 and 2005.
And in particular the 'buildings' summary of these models.
Plus the 'Reasonate' web site created by David Harrison in 2006
Plus the Blogger web sites created by 303 students in 2007

Strategies for completing the tutorials and for choosing a partner to work with on the assignments.

More Autodesk Acquisitions!

2008-10-27T21:44:00.002+13:00

At Nex Gen VizTod Stephens has noted the following Autodesk press release:

Friday, October 24, 2008

Autodesk Acquiring Softimage

Autodesk announced yesterday that they are acquiring Softimage.

It's becoming easier this year to see where the conspiracy theorists get their ideas from. Those who would claim that Autodesk is buying up companies so their direct competition do not would point to this as another in the long line of defensive acquisitions. Personally I am not sure, but this is a major buying spree!

I note on the same web site from August 20, 2008:

Autodesk Announces ImageModeler 2009Autodesk announced the release of ImageModeler 2009 at SIGGRAPH last week. This is the first Autodesk release of the software since they purchased it from REALVIZ. ImageModeler is used to create photorealistic 3D objects from photographs, including accurate 3D measurements.

RealViz was one of my favourite non-Autodesk tools that had lots of potential but an apparently small following - and the French developers seemed to have a great web site but no marketing smarts. Until last year when Autodesk bought it. I was starting to wonder what had happened to it. I investigated upgrading our classroom set earlier this year and despite the Autodesk front page to the web site got the usual slow runaround ...

Now, this looks like much better news. Presence with fanfare at Siggraph..

However, on another note, I am working my way through the Max Daylighting tool and wanted to compare its output to Radiance. The best way looked to be to use the 'new' Windows executables available from Francesco Anselmo's MinGW-Radiance distribution with the Radiance Control Panel from Ecotect. I have the RCP from v5.6. However, it is no longer downloadable from 'Autodesk Ecotect' web site... Pity. It was one of the more thorough and robust windows front ends to Radiance. No apparent reason for Autodesk to take it off the list of free software?

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The world of Art has more money than the world of Building Research!

2008-09-15T06:46:00.001+12:00

Check this out!

In Building research we try to get a budget to put some instrumentation into a building someone else is already planning to pay for... Temporarily. With this approach we work with the designers to improve what the owner is prepared to pay for - or if we are REALLy lucky - we get a small part of the research budget to add a detail (solar water heater? fancy smart glazing?) to the design.

It seems the Chicago based Museum of Science and Industry has a different budget!

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New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp

2008-08-30T06:58:00.001+12:00

Mac 3D: New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp -- UK-based developer has new LightUp SketchUp Plugin for Photo-Realistic Rendering and it works on the Mac!The news on the interweb at present - more and more and more plugins for SketchUp. Photorealistic = pretty or realistic or REAL? $64k question

read more | digg story

Planning a Semantic Web site

2008-05-15T12:36:00.003+12:00

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear.

For the first time, in many years of following this stuff - since timbl first started writing his web from 50,000ft missives - the very readability of this article gives me hope I might be a participant, not just a user...

read more | digg story

Experimental REFERENCE (from the article): Semantic Web

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About

2008-01-10T15:49:00.000+13:00

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?

And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.

Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.

Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."

Air Conditioning

2007-11-21T11:33:00.000+13:00

This post is about two things - a talk on Passive Cooling in Malaysia and this extract from an email that i received today:
Attire
Conference attire is business casual. We recommend bringing a jacket or sweater (the conference rooms are air-conditioned) and comfortable shoes for the walk between the [conference hotel name] Hotel and the Conference Center.

At the presentation by a visiting colleague from Malaysia on alternatives to air conditioning in large buildings in Malaysia, it was noted that for passive cooling to work one needs reliable air movement and this is not available in much of urban Malaysia. Even in areas where breezes occur, one needs tallish buildings to rise above the shelter provided by other structures to be exposed to the wind. This suggest some issues of privilege where passive cooling is only for those rich enough to be able to afford to live at a high level. However, what interested me was the temperature set points and comfort in Malaysia: questions of persuading people to lift the set points of their chiller to 24C instead of 22C! In the temperature measurement studies, with passive cooling the spaces being cooled were at 26-28C! This would suggest that passive cooling is an impossible goal - never achieving 'comfort'. Or perhaps - using the the adaptive comfort model [Brager and de Dear (DOI: doi:10.1016/S0378-7788(97)00053-4 Energy and Buildings Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 83-96) ] - we behave differently in air conditioned as opposed to naturally ventilated buildings.

So, coming back to the conference email, someone like myself who has very little day to day experience of air conditioning, and is therefore adapting to my hotel room internal climate needs this type of warning because in my experience the conference seminar room air con is freezing. What these people are saying is that it is so cold in the conference seminar rooms you will need to wear a jacket to stay comfortable! I cannot help but think we might be able to develop a huge window of energy availability by altering thermostat settings on chillers in cold climates. I have recently in China experienced the awfulness of air con: walk the streets and suffer in high humidity and 35+C temperatures. Walk into a shop - though the wide open door and feel so cold that a jersey is needed. This is just plain insanity.

On a rough calculation: if the temperature outside is averaging 34C and inside is set to 22C - then the savings of a 28C set point are around 50%! And I believe that the adaptive temperature studies suggest that people would not be less comfortable - they might even be less stressed, not having to cope with such extremes of temperature inside and out.

Casa da Musica: Rem Koolhaas building in Porto

2007-08-07T18:11:00.001+12:00

VRMAG - VIRTUAL TOUR OF REM KOOLHAAS’ CASA DA MUSICA, PORTO

I visited this building in 2005. My photographs however do not compare to these 15 x 360 panoramas. These do give a good feel for what i might be like to be in / visiting the building.

It is to me a building that demonstrates the power of careful thought and analysis to achieve the best building science as well as architectural outcome. However, given the delays and cost increases, it is also a building that appears yet again to give a bad name to this type of architecture - architecture that tries to push the boundaries.

Technorati Tags: auditorium, architecture, koolhaas, acoustics,

Information Modelling In Action

2007-06-04T23:49:00.000+12:00

The Freedom Tower: Information Modelling In Action - CBRonline.com Computer Business Review online writes about BIM! Quote from Paul Seletsky of SOM: "...Autodesk Revit Building 3D modelling gives the architects the ability not only to visualise their models in 3D, but have those models tied to 2D plans too: if a value is changed in the model, it is reflected in the plans and vice versa. It also enables simulations such as likely building temperatures, pedestrian flow (including in a potential emergency), the lighting as the sun moves across the sky, and so on." I guess this is BIM in action ...

But it all seems a little too pat. The details are sketchy in a general business magazine like this of course. But the details are where the problems arise. Did the HVAC consultants and the fire engineers really use the 3D model? Did they make modifications and send them back to the central model? What were the SOM resources required to make this all happen?

My experience so far is that using the collaboration features of the software (ArchiCAD/Revit?ADT/Microstation) requires a major support effort from technicians running the network and servers to the users rejigging their manner of working to recognise who has control of what parts of the 'model' they are working on. And that's just with the 3D model in-house... well in my class. What about adding in several other software users, their ways of working and their program interfaces...

What is the reality?

Postopolis - blogs about architecture collide in NYC

2007-06-03T14:02:00.000+12:00

Check this event Postopolis. out. (May 29 - June 2, 2007) The home blog pages of the organisers are (almost) all in the useful links in the sidebar at the right. After today I will be adding Inhabitat. At this early stage, the following links are really interesting:

City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Paul Seletsky of SOM
City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Matt Clark of Arup
Inhabit's Jill Fehrenbacher's presentation in Pecha Kucha style
I could not bring myself to listen to Lebbeus Woods yet again after wondering at the level of pretension in hearing him live in San Francisco some years ago... but if you have not encountered him, this could be of curiosity value - if only a la Derrida to hear the background to the person in order to (perhaps) understand his work?

I fully expect these links to grow and become more interesting as the diarists who are not as fast as City of Sound reflect on the event.

Cool idea? Or another hyped toy?

2007-06-03T11:38:00.001+12:00

There is a cool video referenced by Autodesk's '"It's alive in the lab!" blog and available on youtube:

They note that the technology idea was used in the Minority Report movie.

There is also this REALLY cool video about the same technology toy at Fastcompany.com

Looking at it, I can't help wondering what it really shows.

Of course, I'd love a screen that big! And I'd discover many uses for it.
And one with that many video feeds that work simultaneously...
It has been clear to me for a long time that the mouse is only a poor substitute for the hand in interactivity terms. But do I want to have to wear white gloves or spend ages with some cleaning fluid each week keeping the screen-as-mouse operaional?
An interaction work space the size of two offices - that's great for spreading out the work so one can walk up and down and survey more of a whole set of data
And wouldn't the wii be a better interface (see Google Reader via wii below)?

What I am not sure about is whether this particular interactive screen technology from this bloke 'solves' the problem.

As yet there seem only to be positive reviews:

"It's alive in the labs"
"RobiNZ"

I am not convinced. Given the choice, and the budget to play with such toys, I'd like an immersive wrap around wall first. Then this technology for working with it.

lecture topic - May 29 2007 - handin ideas - assignment 1

2007-05-29T17:54:00.001+12:00

Visual Styles in Autocad - there is a video on how to do them a a pdf on how to set up a style on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\autodesk_adt drive - another way of doing the CAd program render and exploring possibilities...

Rendering softer images like this is also possible in Archicad - there are help files and tips on the use of Archicad on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\archicad drive

Quicktime movie sun studies in Archicad / Viz are easy / Revit - and count as one render

Right Hemisphere 3D insert files in pdf (v5 will be installed very soon)

Warn people about impact of your choices:

Right Hemisphere Deep Publish files ONLY Load in Internet Explorer
Big files take a long time to download
Link to adobe for acrobat reader
Format of page may work best ('be optimised for') IE

Light Studio rpict NOT rview images should be produced... (i.e. Saving an rview 'simple', fuzzy, low res. light studio file will be marked down)

High Quality Images from Light Studio (once the geometry issues are sorted) are easy to produce - for examples: Irena Pratley's work from 2002:

NB: focus in Thursday's tutorial on getting textures like brick sorted...

we looked at brick as a light studio material - this has a dirt modifier for better 'realism'
we mentioned that the English version of the light studio material file library is on the P:\drive
we noted that there are many light texture material files (so-called) cal files in the materials\library directory - these can be used to create corrugations or water via a formula
we noted that rendering efficiency is improved in Light Studio by looking carefully at the material definitions

There are two new Revit user tutorials provided by Autodesk that are on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\revit\autodesk_BIM_curriculum drive. In the metric_datasets folder is a 323 page pdf format workbook on the use of Revit! In the files_metric folder there is a guide, also in pdf, on the use of Revit files in 3ds max /viz... Whilst the 323 page book is something I have written about before as incredibly boring, it is worth mining for some gems of information, such as how to key colours on a plan / sectional model to data such as room names or areas:

NOTE: tehre is a simple blog here that describes how to create the space labels that are used for this style of presentation.

"Guns Germs and Steel" author Jared Diamond

2007-05-26T22:16:00.001+12:00

Great title! The follow-up, Collapse is an even better read, but far less memorable title. Can't help thinking there are so many intuitive leaps with little supporting documentation that Diamond is a little like the 'von Daniken' of the noughties.

Still, a challenge is laid down to think and to react and form an opinion as to what to do/ how to react.

Most interesting part of the book? Again, not the mainstream ideas, but rather the process hinted at: Diamond thanks his graduate classes for their participation in reviewing the content of the book chapters. A way of combining teaching in a challenging manner with book writing?

A headline I couldn't resist: The Hippies Were Right! /

2007-05-26T15:41:00.000+12:00

The Hippies Were Right! / Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect
The whole of the Bay Area is full of people who write and think like this. They still sell tie-dyed T-shirts and other clothing in the Saturday markets in Berkeley around Telegraph / Bancroft.

Scratch the surface of most of those comfortable homes in the quiet streets surrounding the University of California - Berkeley - and you will find people who have done quite well for themselves as hippies who grew up. They are still passionate about the whales / spiritual values / improving the planet neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

But, they have had the resources to do this. I keep wondering where the wealth has come from to make this happen. After all the Prius is (in my terms) a rich person's car. These quiet suburban homes cost a bomb in international terms. Of course, there are squillionaires who I am ignoring, and even more dangerous to the environment those people building 1200 sq m mansions by the thousand. But I am left wondering how we can learn from these lessons if they continue to cost as much to implement that only those hippies who live in the readership area of the San Francisco Chronicle can afford to do them well...

Still: love the ironic tone and writing style. This is what large populations do deliver: quality writing that is good to read.

Thom Mayne: Architecture is a new way to connect to the world

2007-05-26T14:44:00.001+12:00

Given that Mayne is leading a firm that regularly uses GC to generate form / explore ideas; that gets involved with LBNL in projects that push the boundaries of what is possible from an environmental performance point of view; that has a 3D printer in-house for constructing models of staff ideas; and that has been adulated / emulated by architecture students in the past for the complexity of its hybrid drawings - it was interesting to see what was focused on here in a TED lecture: the drawings and the environmental performance somehow intertwined. Not quite what I had expected.

My only problem is that having visited the CalTrans building in LA, it seems very much in need of a few emperor's-new-clothes question or two. It is exciting and intersting when you knwo what the parts are supposed to do. However, it feels very much like a New Brutalism - as powerful in its ugliness as much modern classical music. Hard to see it being popular - in the sense of being liked by people who have to walk past it - cannot comment about the worker experience inside.

William McDonough: does Larry Lessig

2007-05-26T14:32:00.001+12:00

Came across this entitled "The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle" whilst looking for other stuff - as you do. What struck me about this was the presentation approach. We have heard all this before over the last 30 years in one form or other.

What seems to be unique here (apart from the obvious - that WM is hugely successful in terms of the work his firm is doing) is the Powerpoint owes more than a little debt to a style I blogged about earlier this year. It is a style of presentation used by Dick Hardt in his Identity 2.0 presentation but named after Larry Lessig - the internet copyright guru.

lecture topic - May 23 2007 - Rendering issues and ideas

2007-05-25T10:23:00.001+12:00

Today Justin presented his Light Flow meter research with a request that one of your Light Studio renders is run with the light flow meter (see above from Kit Cuttle's book on Lighting) inserted into the picture taking up 30% of the view... AND the RTRACE render commands are followed to calculate the light intensity on each of 6 cardinal points of the white sphere.

Educational Curriculum in CAD - why is it the teaching materials have to be boring?

2007-05-25T10:02:00.000+12:00

Scanning quickly through the new curriculum workbook for Revit to ascertain how it might replace our now creaky, because five years old, Villa Savoye tutorial I can see that the workbook is comprehensive.

That my students might want to dip into it to find out particular things I have no doubt. That I would / should subject them to the whole thing - no way.

Reviewing the "Harrison Fraker video" about BIM it seems to me that there is some confusion encouraged by that video to see BIM as somehow computational geometries. In addition whilst my students would find the ideas in that video of interest they would immediately notice the great gap between the hype of the video and the mundane reality of the worksheet:

Students in my experience like to be challenged. They like to work on stuff that is interesting and real and pushes boundaries. We had success years ago now with the Villa Savoye as a basis for an introductory tutorial because it was interesting challenging and real .

I still use it as a two x 2 hour tutorial session with homework in a modelling course that experience shows works well. But I believe it needs updating and extending into construction more than we can do in the one course. I hoped at first glance that this might be the case with the workbook - but no.

What I really want is a structured set of exercises where I am sketching in sketchup - say - Falling Water.

Then I am importing it and modelling it properly.

Then I am exporting it to Viz and rendering it and walking through it and creating interactive views (dwf / QTVR mov / 3D pdf)

Finally, I am going back into revit and building drawing documentation - construction details showing on the sheet rendered views of what it looks like alongside sections of how it is constructed and then exporting the whole to a set of pdf's that include 3D interactive views.

Falling Water this year; Guggenheim New York in the future; Guggenheim Bilbao in the future?

Death by Architecture - Architecture Competitions

2007-05-21T14:58:00.000+12:00

Death by Architecture
How specialist can you get? This site focuses on publicising architectural competitions. Sort by deadlines - type of participant - region etc. Find (at present) claims for 'First Design Competition for Second Architecture' - yet another take on using second life. Interesting but ultimately as with much of SL - vaguely ho-hum.

This web site really ought to have an RSS feed. Who wants to browse it every second day? What I want is to enter some search terms and be kept up-to-date... Apart from this easily fixed problem - a useful source/site.

lecture topic - May 16 2007 - Preparing final hand-in

2007-05-17T09:39:00.000+12:00

The topic was examining images from the past to develop a plan to present well.

We talked about:

Ensuring that the images presented in the final render set developed a theme about the building. The goal was to try to focus on presenting in images some form of narrative that enhanced your reader/viewer's knowledge of the building or of the process of modelling or of the process of rendering... Examples that were presented of acceptable foci for a themed page were:

comparison of the Light Studio and the Mental Ray renderers (e.g. time vs quality)
an analysis of the way(s) in which daylight reaches the interior through sections and other views
an analysis of the architect's writing about his/her building is revealed in the form /light interplay
an examination of the role of light in the progression one makes through the building from outside to in or from gallery to gallery ...
representation / revealing of the qualities of light in the major spaces in early morning / late afternoon - summer / winter - night / day - sun / overcast conditions
interrogation of the design principles - formal / rhythmic / organic / asymmetric - affect the flow of light

We noted yet again that there is a requirement in the assignment to include the following (NOTE again, that both renderers must be used):

Assignment One - Part B

Minimum
The fifteen rendered images should be visible on the website in thumbnail form. Appropriate background image(s) to represent the view out from the building, or appropriate "textures" applied to art works in an art gallery or similar contextual information will be required.The web page should also contain appropriate text documenting: your name, the name of the architect, the course, the date and the name of the modeling and rendering packages used to produce each image.
Below Average
All above, plus: at least ten renderings using Autodesk Viz to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) in a minimum of two different ways using Global Illumination and not (7 of one approach: 3 of the alternate is the maximum deviation from the desired 5:5 split in pictures).
Acceptable
All above, plus: documentation of the image differences and the settings used and time taken to render between the two Viz renderings approaches.
Average
All above, plus: all fifteen renderings using AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) NOTE: with the arrival of the LightStudio plugin, it is important to recognise that the split here is between the (Mental Ray) PHOTON MAPPING rendering approach and the (RADIANCE) BACKWARDS RAY TRACE approach. Thus the different renders are Global Illumination within the Mental Ray Renderer in Viz and Radiance with the Lightstudio renderer in Viz.
Good
All above, plus: use of AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance/LightStudio to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) with some additional images at night (say 6 daylight rendered with one program and 9 daylight with the other, plus 3-6 with artificial lighting); and all thumbnails link to larger minimum 1280x1024 images on your personal web site.
Above Average
All above, plus: association of the idea, concept or theme being communicated with a critical idea, concept or theme: e.g. analysis of relationship between this building and others by the same architect or others from same era; or analysis of natural lighting via sky and sunlighting; or examination of systems of circulation through buildings and demonstration of which system this building belongs to ....
Very Good
All above, plus: use of Autodesk Viz/Lightscape and Rayfront/Lightstudio for four of the views showing how the natural lighting models compare between the two rendering programs.
Excellent
All above, plus: ... you tell me (the possibilities are endless)?

I also noted that the software for hdrshop is available for use on the Course Information directory. This allows one to import a series of identical images of different exposure level and amalgamate them into ONE High Dynamic range Image. (i.e. to take a series of photographs of a sky and thus use it as a light source for ones scene as explained in this online tutorial)

hdrview is available on the same R:\esources directory if one wants to view the hdr image. There are plenty available online - just check FLICKR.

Also we examined the role of procedural materials in making more interesting images than can be achieved with materials which are merely pictures pasted onto surfaces... This work from Irena a couple of years ago is an illustration of a procedural texture in Radiance - the underlying render engine to Light Studio:

And finally, a couple of words of caution:

bringing files into Viz successfully is only part I of the render process. Make sure also that you can render in Light Studio and in Mental Ray. If your object names are very long because of the manner in which you have brought the model into Viz, then the Light Studio renderer will not work. You must fix this somehow by altering the layer / object names in the export process, or by importing the file into Deep Exploration and then re-exporting in the simpler form...
As noted at the beginning of the year, Light Studio only work in Viz - if you have exported to Max for mental ray, then be aware that you will be competing for a much smaller number of licenses than with Viz come crunch render time AND you will still have to export that model and read it back into Viz to use Light Studio
There is a major flaw in the Viz 'section' tool that stops it from producing sections that are orthogonal to the building - because sections are created by setting 'cutting planes' in Viz/Max camera definitions. The work around is that one can create the files in Viz and with the mental ray renderer run the 'render to texture' option. Then save the file out as a 3ds format - with named camera views. THEN within Deep Exploration (DE) one can set up the section plane (+X) rotated and placed where it shows off the interior best and from within DE... Witness this simple B&W model rendered with a cutting plane:

Footnote: link to hdr render and good caustics for water in same tutorial when compiling this blog.

lecture topic - May 15 2007 - narrative

2007-05-14T13:35:00.000+12:00

More video watching - this time extracts from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's documentary about Jacques Derrida.

Specifically:

you call this verite?
Echo and Narcissus
the sex lives of philosophers
without even an ash

As a means of understanding narrative and film - try to get inside the mind of the authors (whom Derrida addresses often on the subject of whose story is being told by their editing decisions). Try to ask -

when did the quotes get assembled? before or after the filming?
why two cameras?
what were the other people shown in the video at the end of the movie doing and why?
would the narrative of the episodes we watched change if played in another order than the movie (ref Eisenstein etc)

Review: Paris Rive Gauche development

2007-05-13T11:28:00.000+12:00

Paris Rive Gauche - Architecture - New York Times no new museums that I can find - in the general discussion. However, this does sound like a really interesting debate. I'd have to say if it ends up like la Defense - then its yet more destruction of a city's fabric in the hope of some innovative freedom for individual designers to express themselves. The wonder of the older parts of Paris is that the anonymity of the similar height / facade / fenestration architecture is enlivened by the life in the streets - the corner cafes and the odd ball petrol stations and cafes jostling for space with the parked cars and bikes and the people wandering and bustling through the streets, occupying the ground floor. It is a revelation and a great pleasure to cram one's luggage into one of the tiny 'hotel' rooms in one of these buildings, where the hotel is merely a couple of floors of the whole apartment complex, with a cafe / bar on the ground floor. This review does not promise that type of 'life'. However, in all these discussions, I wonder where are the voices of the people who have to live in these buildings. Do people actually like / prefer to live / work at la Defense instead of in the hearts of some of the older arrondissements? Will they want to / do they already want to move into this new Rive Gauche? Sounds like a research project?

(Photo illustrates Sunday morning in la Defense 'neighbourhood')

lecture topic - May 8 2007

2007-05-09T17:11:00.000+12:00

Favicon - How To Create A Favicon.ico | PhotoshopSupport.com

This is one of the topics we covered briefly in the lecture on Tuesday: how to create one of those favicons that appear in the navigation bar of IE7 and Firefox?

The explanation here is of using a Photoshop plugin to create an icon in the correct format - so far so good. But then, most usefully, there is a discussion of how to handle the html to make that icon appear in the place(s) it should...

A conference on the web and the museum

2007-05-09T15:33:00.000+12:00

I was directed to an interesting blog today: the NZlive.com Blog written by one Sarah Jones. That blog in istelf promises a lot. Meanwhile, there is a link there on the topic of blogging that points to the following:

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Speakers: "April 11-14, 2007 San Francisco, California"

Those people interested in the nature of the museum - what it might look like would do well to browse the papers presented at this conference. These papers expand on the content of the lively and interesting debate at the digital symposium at the Museums Aotearoa Conference earlier this year showed me some interesting aspects of 'the digital museum'. The cliche idea of the VR environment which is generating so much hype and hot air in our journalistic airwaves and print media at present gets looked at. And the much more interesting real world applications that the likes of Paul Reynolds writes from Auckland about gets the similarly cliche Web 2.0 treatment.

Museums in Second Life - someone has investigated it. Speculative and not very conclusive, rather suggestive of the fact they suspect there is a potential ...

Web 2.0 advocating change, rather than reporting results of research or implementation.

"The next billion"?

2007-05-07T20:16:00.000+12:00

McGOVERN ONLINE
This is what is going to make the world tick in the future - opinions! Paul Reynolds from the first appearances of this blog has a sweet life. Trips every which way - the most recent to China courtesy of Microsoft, following on from Korea courtesy of IBM. However, given the distance NZ is from everywhere - even the West Island is 3 hours by plane - this is not the junket it seems.

What is worth reading here is some speculation about the future of information - increasingly such discussions are are housed in anonymous architecture. Anonymous because the buildings do not seem to be important part of the equation. Also of interest, as I allude to in the title of this blog is: apparently 1 billion people are now online. Microsoft are interested in being an important part of getting the next billion online. They are developing their own competitor to the One Laptop per child scheme. Check out the strategies and links on Paul's blog.

Yet another US Museum - SAM in Seattle

2007-05-07T19:42:00.000+12:00

A paean to art, not the architect - ARCHITECTURE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com

Interesting to see the art vs architecture debate continuing...

This however looks awfully (choosing my words carefully) like an office building from the outside. So of course one praises the verticality...

Lecture 8 - Digital Craft Render Details

2007-05-02T01:06:00.000+12:00

Concepts covered in class today:
Global Illumination and Final Gather in Mental Ray

avoiding long render times for outdoor renders by enclosing the whole scene in a hemisphere
making the hemsiphere normals face inward so it is visible
using a map on the hemisphere as a background - improvement over an environment background
Final Gather as a means of producing quick outdoor renders
10,000 minimum photons may produce blotchiness which may be 'solved' by FG but may not
creating a light that ONLY shines on selected objects to illuminate the background sky...

HDR images

what are they?
Debevec and Ward websites as resources for their work on HDRI
use of HDR as output that is flexible from LightStudio
Use of HDR images as a source of light in a scene
(as an aside - use of a map in a light definition in Viz as a means of cheaply creating shadows)
requirement to include an HDR image in the final hand in

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

2007-05-01T23:58:00.000+12:00

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

Photoshop in 3D! This review makes for interesting reading - but I am unsure how anything offered adds as much as other pieces of dedicated software offer in greater depth. The only advantage seems to be that it's Photoshop! Familiarity with the interface offering 3D image manipulation functionality that is comprehensive because it offers more than Photoshop used to, not because it is comprehensive...

Animation Class lecture - editing

2007-04-30T15:11:00.000+12:00

Today we watched the end (New York onwards) of the magnificent 'Vision of light' DVD about Cinematography.

Then we discussed editing by contrasting the editing efforts in the car chase scenes of The Italian Job (1968), Bullitt (1969), The French Connection and Ronin.

Next week we will compare a scene from Luc Bresson's La Femme Nikita with the exact same scene from Assassin (Point of no return) by John Badham.

We concluded by examining how backburner can be of assistance in speeding up rendering.

Serpentine Gallery 'Folly' to be spinning top made of plywood

2007-04-28T16:27:00.001+12:00

Oh the joys of photoshop. These rather banal photoshop efforts have been used Thursday to announce the Serpentine Gallery in London's annual summertime pavilion. These make it appear a rather innocuous and oddly disappointing work of artitecture.

However, it does sound like the experience of the building could be more interesting if the sculptor half of the design team 'Danish-Icelandic artist' Olafur Eliasson has his way: "These might include adding vibstrational qualities to the building that would make it resonate like a musical instrument..."

Technorati Tags: architecture, folly,

UK Government ~$120k grant for Architecture students' technical education!

2007-04-28T16:03:00.000+12:00

BSEE - Building Services and Environmental Engineer: University improves practical skills

Read this carefully: this is documentation of a grant to the "Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University" to install a heliodon, an artifical sky and other 'advanced' equipment such as has been used by architecture and building science students at Victoria for the past 30 years.

The Director of the new 'ArchiLab' is quoted as saying: "The days in which architecture students focused predominantly on the visual impact of buildings were long gone, Dr Pretlove said. “They are now required to give just as much thought to the wider specifications of a site and the environmental factors that might affect a final design." What is unclear is how the lab is supposed to take these tools and transfer their use from the educational environment into practice. This is an aspect of the use of these tools that is troubling: if they are genuinely to be incorporated into design on a regular basis in the educational process, what happens when a student moves into a practice 1000km away? Are they to fly in for each project? And this is ignoring the fact that an artificial sky is a cloudy climate device, and does not deal well with the mixed / dynamic skies of most temperate countries...

What about new developments in architects' and lighting professionals' understanding of dynamic daylight modelling? Where might programs like Ecotect or Energy+ or ESP-r fit in this mix?

Lecture 7 - Digital Craft Render to Texture / Blogging carefully / Details - details - details

2007-04-26T01:16:00.000+12:00

Tuesday 24 April 2007

Notes to a lecture:
Significant time was devoted to working through the example of making the label cloud generator on the class blog work by solving the clues offered by the misbehaviour: the solution was to identify what were relative and absolute link web addresses for the label cloud generator program.

We also went through again, how the blogging process is meant to provide a structure from which to build a final hand in for assignment 2. I referred people to the web areas of the www.reasonate.co.nz projects from last year... Good examples of web pages can be found from the people who did the de Young Museum - Arles Archaeological Museum - Federation Square. Ultimately the process of reporting in one place what you have done and how you have organised yourselves ought to be no more than collecting together the folksonomy tags / labels you have generated.

We noted the importance, now the tag cloud is generating, of yusing and defining tags that make sense to your group for later use by you in reporting how YOU organised yourself in relation to the group.

We touched on the ABSOLUTE NEED to attribute your sources and to remember the concept of fair use and also to remember to attribute all sources on your web site in teh same manner as you would in an academic essay. NOTE: not all references need be electronic. It is entirely OK to publish the source as the name of a journal / book...

We also touched in some length on the output requirements in terms of rendered views of the building. Some will be in Light Studio; some in Mental Ray. Some will be interactive in the manner of the Quicktime VR output of the tutorial, but some will also be interactive using the type of technology that Right Hemisphere offer through the Deep Exploration / Deep Publish software we have in the school. The latter acts more like an interactive game engine built into the web browser allowing people to walk through your design... In this latter case, the Render to texture ('baked' textures) Viz render option will be the most useful.

Buildings Fingered in NYC Carbon Inventory | News | Architectural Record |

2007-04-17T14:52:00.000+12:00

Buildings Fingered in NYC Carbon Inventory | News | Architectural Record |
Report suggests buildings are ~85% of NYC greenhouse emissions... Guess they don't have many cows / sheep...

Top 25 Architecture Blogs listed at Eikongraphia

2007-04-17T12:51:00.000+12:00

At this link: http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=1395 you can find a list
of the architecture blogs that internet users consider the most
interesting - as assessed by looking at how many times people link to
them..

BLDBLOG )http://www.bldgblog.blogspot.com/) is number 1; Archidose
(http://www.archidose.blogspot.com/) is number 4...

Want to weigh in on the debate?

2007-04-16T17:25:00.000+12:00

Architecture Ed Changing to Keep Up

Now here's something to get you thinking - talking: an article at Cadalyst which says some interesting things:

With the AEC industry moving rapidly to 3D modeling and BIM technologies, universities are nipping at its heels in an attempt to remain viable and keep their students in demand in the marketplace ...

Although CAD courses are offered as electives, most schools of architecture don't require CAD for coursework. "We don't teach word processing for people to write," said Eastman. "We assume that people know how to write. It's the same with CAD. At the university level, it's very hard to justify giving course credit toward a professional degree based on how to use a tool." But, Eastman notes, although it is not formally taught, experience in CAD is gained through assigned exercises. ...

That's Chuck Eastman a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology Colleges of Architecture and Computer Science.

This is a debate that it seems to me has had no adequate answer for a long time, and for which there may never be a single 'right' answer.

I have been involved in core 3D digital design studio exercises for more than 15 years, and now a full trimester long core 3D digital studio for the last 7+ years. There has always had to be an element of training to provide some basics - preferably for no credit - and the conscientious student always does ok in this. There are always some who leave things to the last minute who do poorly at these exercises and the subsequent design projects and who complain that they cannot do as well with this tool as with the tool they would prefer to use. I recall exercises with ink and tracing paper where similar complaints were made.

The issue for me has been that this introductory modelling exercise requires an equivalent drawing organisation / construction documentation or similar phase in a subsequent core course which is a pedagogical experience that I believe is harder to create.

What is clear to me is that schools need to provide some leadership, but they also have to rely on students to practice the basic skills in order to become proficient. With most student copies of CAD software now at the lowest cost to students that it has ever been in 30 years and with computers capable of CAD also becoming affordable, that out of school practice is becoming ever more feasible.

Your thoughts?

3rd annual CGarchitect.com Architectural Visualization Competition (AVC)

2007-04-12T09:18:00.000+12:00

This 'competition' run by CGArchitect.com has a requirement that people enter their best images now to qualify! Qualification round is April 16-21. Actual competition will be from April 23 to June 30.

To quote the site: If you are one of the select few chosen from the qualification round you will be eligible to compete in the 2 final challenges. Full details and rules for each of these challenges will be posted in the CHALLENGES section of the competition site.

Know anyone who might be up for the challenge? Pass on the link...

In any case cgarchitect ought to be one of those 'favourites' in your del.icio.us account. Especially the 'resources' section which contains tutorials and other information designed to assist the development of better images...

It's rather sad that there are only two images labelled Light Studio in the gallery of 10's of 1000's of images: One of them is by Klaus from Lichtplaner - the people in Austria who produce the software:

There are however, 137 Mental ray images like this from Martin Richardson of Flic Digital:

A load of rubbish - otherwise known as the eco-friendly homes of the future | Expat Living | Global | Telegraph

2007-04-10T15:37:00.000+12:00

A load of rubbish - otherwise known as the eco-friendly homes of the future | Expat Living | Global | Telegraph

Great headline - but how long have these been around? Old news...

Still an Earthship in France could (just) be considered news.

Algorithms in Architecture

2007-04-10T12:59:00.000+12:00

Algorithms in Architecture

Doing the Smart Geometry tutorials? Enrolled in the computer applications animation / scripting elective? This is for you. If only to learn the extreme visual pattern making end of the spectrum of R&D effort that parametric architecture offers.

omnispace: Architecture - a blog worth watching

2007-04-10T12:51:00.000+12:00

omnispace: Architecture:

An odd collection of really interesting stuff. Mostly news items. Plenty of interesting links.

No suggestion as to the source. no apparent archives, No listing of the date when items were uploaded just an ambiguous time...

But, if this had an rss feed, worth watching. One is left wondering where all this interesting stuff is collected?

Open Architecture Network

2007-04-07T00:06:00.000+12:00

About the Open Architecture Network | Open Architecture Network

Check out this web site. An attempt to re-write the rules on architecture / community / professionalism. Cannot yet see the shape of what might / might not be from this web site. Like many such efforts - it looks good - the idea has an underlying strength (facilitating sharing of resources to overcome adversity - improving the quality / sustainability of housing). But - you can hear the but in my writing? - but, I cannot see how a web site of this type can yet do anything useful? An idea - an app - in search of a use?

Now the organisation behind OAN - Architecture for Humanity - that's a different thing altogether. Check them out and the good ideas and intentions seem to be getting somewhere.

Tate Modern extension by Herzog and de Meuron

2007-04-03T14:05:00.000+12:00

Despite opposition, Tate Modern extension wins the go-ahead: "

Another interesting / controversial building to visualise in the Digital-Craft course?

Revit Name Change Announced!

2007-04-01T15:44:00.000+12:00

Eat Your CAD
I see on this Bentley/Microstation web site that there is a rumour floating around that Autodesk will change the name of Revit.

The announcement says: "Following the recent news that ADT has been renamed ACA (AutoCAD Architecture), and after careful consideration Revit is to be renamed from 1st April 2007 to ADT to avoid any “potential customer confusion”.

The explanation for this change is probably best found here.

Columbia Memorial Space Learning Center

2007-04-01T09:31:00.000+12:00

A 'Space Learning Centre' is probably not a 'museum' in the conventional sense. But it is part of the whole museums as cathedral
notional paradigm shift in urban design.

Well worth a look to see if it is worth modelling.

Parrish Art Museum

2007-04-01T08:38:00.000+12:00

A design that has already been scaled down to fit the budget and about which the Museum Director is quoted in this article as saying: “this is a very energetic, adventurous design and it needs somebody who’s far more energetic and adventurous than I am to see it through to the end.”

Another building with very large North Lights.

A Lego version of an Escher Picture

2007-04-01T08:06:00.000+12:00

lego_ascending.jpg (JPEG Image, 640x705 pixels) Just for fun!