For those of you fascinated by the prospect of architecture/building practice in the virtual world

Second Life's population problems - Computerworld Blogs



This blog puts some of the hype about second life into perspective.It's clear that this community that I found gets very boring very quickly is only used by a small number of people. (57,000+ does not seem small, until one thinks about the total number of people who the hype suggest might be 'users'.



What I found most interesting about the blog was not the second life stats but the suggestion that 84 million Americans have home broadband and of these more than 5 million a day are taking tours in virtual space....

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'Hero' architect builds green - but is it different?

TOWERING EXPECTATIONS / S.F.'s new federal building challenges ideas of what a government high-rise should look like -- its humane design is green, dazzling One of the interesting architectural design questions people have tackled over the last 30 years has been the idea that green buildings might define a new aesthetic.

Back in the late 70's, the question was would a passive solar non-residential building define a new aesthetic. There was even some speculation about the inclusion of some of our other senses in the definition of aesthetics. Could a definition of the spiritual values of a welcoming warmth in winter and 'coolth' in summer; a calm quietness; become a new aesthetic?

Now, however we have a corporate architecture that is allegedly more comfortable because it is naturally lit and naturally ventilated. However, looking at the illustrations, I wonder whether the future of this brave new idea is to be similar to the critical acclaim / popular opprobrium of that wonder of mid last century the new brutalism...?

Architectural Record News | At Long Last, Museum for African Art Finds a Place to Call Its Own

Architectural Record News | At Long Last, Museum for African Art Finds a Place to Call Its Own - another museum to model? A Robert Stern design. In Manhattan. Illustration on this web site looks potentially interesting. Risks being a corporate clone dog's breakfast because it incorporates "116 housing units on top...".

Animation class Lecture 2

The lecture on Monday covered some of the basics of film making. Ignoring these principles make animations about buildings very much exercise in non-communication. I presented a pre-cursor of the whole course by introducing the classic film maker's handbook: The Five C's of Cinematography'.

My suggestion is that understanding these principles will significantly alter what people want to render/represent and hence will alter how / what they animate. In the 403 course we are examining the notion that the Scene (the building(s) can be the Actors, rather than the backdrop...the scenery.

We watched

• an extract from Lawrence of Arabia - focusing on Omar Sharif and the interminable ride out of the desert to meet Lawrence that is, as I understand it his first Western feature
  
• a 'teaser' from a Walt Disney - Disneyland - presentation of the 'Plausible Impossible" - preparing people to answer the question that will be posed next Monday: find your own example(s) of plausibly impossible acts in movies
• a 30 minute doco on the Satolas station near Lyon by Calatrava - what works and does not work; what genres are being accepted by us when we understand the content of the doco
  
• 
  

Seoul National University Museum

OMA/Rem Koolhaas - Seoul National University Museum :: arcspace.com
This is a building I visited last year - inside and out, but was unfortunately unable to take the interior shots shown in this Arcspace entry. Definitely fun though very much a visual one-liner with the large cantilever emphasising the simple rhomboid form as shown by the near end in the photo.






Having visited this and the Casa da Musica in Porto, and been impressed by both these little jewels, I find it hard to imagine that this is the OMA outfit responsible for their proposed Louisville fugly building. (See the earlier post on eyesore of the month web site).

Archinect - online journal AND people who developed blog of architecture schools

Archinect - Making Architecture More Connected (since 1997) I have checkedand found that I have apparently not pointed to these people before... Strange. Because their blog of blogs from architecture students around the world was something I found around two years when setting this blog up. Check out the Architecture School blog - it still has many blogs from many schools - but quite a number are defunct and archived: including the one from our school. A couple of years ago the blog of blogs looked like a brave new experiment in world wide communication. It begins to look more and more like a failed experiment...

I can only speculate what the issue is. It seems to me that the problem may be that there were no linking issues. In its early days it looked like a collection in one place of online diaries - with no other linking theme. Without that theme I wonder whether there is any major incentive to return to the site to participate.

That said, the news value of the site is high. The RSS feed is definitley worth subscribing to. The writing is hardly the insight yet of a Beard Goldberger or Huxtable (Ref 1, Ref 2, Ref 3) - it seems to describe rather than critique (but then I have not read it all).

Pictures of Ugly Buildings!

Eyesore of the Month by James Howard Kunstler The pictures here are just SO much fun. Don't always agree that the buildings photographed have no redeeming features, but this seldom misses the mark pointing out 'how little clothes the emperor is wearing'. Perhaps he could borrow from the fashion mavens who coined the term used here:fugly?


Interesting opinions about buildings. This is apparently someone who likes this:

Romantic at heart?












Hates buildings like this: (understandable)













And has nothing good to say about either of these buildings: (which I have to say I like - from the pictures). We've even modelled this first one in the Digital Craft course.

A Blog to promote a book

City Comforts, temporarily known as Viaduct, The Blog Despite the book promotion focus - this has some interesting comments. I really like the review of the Disney Hall in LA. The description of what works and doesn't work expresses my own conflicted feelings about this jewel of a building and its relevance / position in a street as a contributor to urban quality.

I should add that attending a concert at the icon made me feel a lot more comfortable with the building as a place / destination. The quirky circulation serves only to enhance the spatial experience.

Museums to model in the UK...

And yet another potential source of inspiration.

Museums to model in New Zealand ...

Another source of ideas...

Virtual Museums

Possible source of information on Museums to model - Virtual / unbuilt?

Makng "Algorithmic Forms" with Revit

1-2-3 Revit: BIM and Algorithmic Form Finding - Parametric change engine provides advanced modeling techniques for exploring innovative real-world building designs. - Cadalyst AEC Check this out... Something to try if you are bored with the Villa Savoye tutorial!

The Digital Craft course 2007 began today

Two hour lecture - February 27 2007:

After Catherine Nelson had presented the excellent self-help guide to healthy use of the computer, we covered the following topics:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives
Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD ADT and Revit - plus Viz render
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

And an introduction to Web 2.0 - merely promising to talk about it soon.
Web sites mentioned:

• Flickr - look for the tags
• This blog
• The 1998-2005 web sites produced by students in this course
• The 2006 web site/blogs produced in this course
• Del.icio.us - more tags as a means of organising my bookmarks
• Youtube - tagging videos
• Myspace - tagging friends' web pages
  

AND a late night footnote: 'Are you blogging this?'

Frank Gehry is interviewed by the Wall Street Journal - and it's insightful!

OpinionJournal - Featured Article
Apropos of nothing in particular: I was searching for some stuff for the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course and came across this interview. It's not often pieces like this give you an insight - no matter how processed by the inevitable interviewee desire to sound good...

Architectural Record: now an online magazine

Architectural Record: The resource for architecture and architects
Architctural Record the magazine - has a feauture called Building Types Study which means searches for museums will reveal a whole range of new project ideas to follow....
It's also a great resource for things architecural. They have a set of blogs of architecture related blogs such as news and 'great projects'.

Former Bus Terminal as New National Design Center for Hungary

Architectural Record News | Hungary’s New National Design Center Takes Shape in a Former Bus Terminal
A converted bus terminal as a 'gallery'. Another interesting building to model.... An architecture very distinctively of the 50's re-used.

A really Annoying web site - for Steven Holl

STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS

Another Flash powered web site that provides no information - no intelligence, but rather annoys in its rich organisation and anally controlled access to the information it allows you to see. No mashups of this info with Google Maps!

Contains some interesting links to new museums - a successful practice.

Convenient Truth Contest: How to Enter

Convenient Truth Contest: How to Enter An opportunity to make a statement - a video about what could be done to deal with the issues in 'An Inconvenient Truth'

Some thoughts on CAD in Architecture generated by reading 'Futures Exploding' [ Alexander Pincus ] [ Architecture / Research ]

Budapest Bank Tower - Futures Exploding - [ Alexander Pincus ] [ Architecture / Research ] This, it seems to me, what might begin to define a debate on the way we might use the computer not merely to replicate paper processes but to extend architecture into realms of thought or process that might define an other experience. If you link to this blog topic by Alexander Pincus who apparently works for Asymptote you will find his own work has a self-applied tag of 'Empty Formalism'. It turns out that Alexander did a presentation in March 2006 at the 'Banff Session 2006' where the Asymptote architecture was described in these terms. Check out the links - engage in the debate - decide for yourself.

My 2 cents worth? With all the hype about BIM, it seems to me that there is a lot of rhetoric about the role of the computer in architecture, but little substance or clear direction. There are the people who are exploring the various strands of blobitecture, in what I tend to see as often degenerating into "empty formalism" and 'documented' by simplistic computer graphic images that 2 weeks playing with 3DS Max could easily produce. What is exciting in amongst all this is the people who have taken the time to understand the craft of 3D digital modelling. Someone who understands what a family is in Revit and who uses it to explore how this might be expressed in built form is to me genuinely exploring the future of the role of the computer in architecture. This is what is interesting about Robert Aish's Smart Geometry work. It seems to me that in amongst the 'Empty Formalism' of the forms that often illustrate the presentations on this new software, there is the thread of a very new way of thinking about buildings. Alexander Pincus refers to a Smart Geometry model of one of his Asymptote designs produced by David Farnsworth - structural engineer of Arup London. Here he says the engineer was able to

resolve the geometry of the tower’s unique structural system and enable the structure to redistribute itself based on changes to the buildings overall geometry

Now that sounds like a re-thinking of the way we build IF the geometry - the formal design expression - is linked to and interacts with the structure.

What is also of interest with Smart Geometry is re-thinking the geometry - the architectural relationships underlying a building. My (limited) experience with SG suggests that it will take quite some time for a person to start thinking through the structuring of a model of a building so that it permits exploration of the design principles of the building. It's all very well imagining the possibilities of re-configuring a design based on some axes, proportions or other fundamental design principle. It is another thing altogether to build these dependencies in from the beginning to allow the exploration of form to happen later. If, as is apparently happening with the Pincus/Farnsworth model these dependencies are modelled in such a way that the structure and construction can also be dealt with then we truly have a new paradigm of design.

The struggle that I see holding things back, and making 'empty formalism' easier than genuine re-thinking of the architectural design paradigm, is that until people develop sufficient experience for the craft of modelling with SG to be innate and not conscious, it is far easier to construct a rich dependency SG model of an existing building or drawn idea than it is use SG as a modelling medium in its own right. Watch this space. I will have 10-15 people exploring the potential of SG over the next 12 weeks...

Footnote: Because I thought that this was an important topic I have looked a little behind the scenes. The problem with the web is that obscure web sites like Alexander's could easily be proffering a poorly based/researched personal opinion. On the 'Current events' portion of the Asymptote web site, which has one of those really really annoying Flash based non-searchable wizzy-for-no-purpose interfaces, the most recent note suggests that "Hani Rashid will be a guest lecturer for the Banff Session 2006 event entitled DESIGNfronts..." This suggests that Alexander is indeed a member of staff at Asymptote. His 'about'entry also notes he works at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is listed by Columbia as an assistant in Asymptote principal Hani Rashid's "advanced architecture studio".

Architectural Record News | AIA, Harris Interactive Poll: Empire State Building Tops the List of Beloved U.S. Buildings

Architectural Record News | AIA, Harris Interactive Poll: Empire State Building Tops the List of Beloved U.S. Buildings Yet another example of how surveys have all sorts of in-built biases. One might at first glance be tempted to rate this list as demonstrating that old is better in the eyes of the average punter. Top 10 includes a bridge and three sculpture / memorials. But recognition factor and exposure might be more telling here. The USA being so large that people from the East will often never have travelled all the way out west and may even take great pride in the fact... Nationally known monumental buildings become the only possibility at this point.

If one wanted to get really disappointed, one might look at the Las Vegas Bellagio appearing at number 22 as being a much more disappointing result. My reaction to that building when I walked through it last December was: fun fountain; great Christmas decorations; facarditecture was even more anonymous than expected. In this case instead of gilding the lily we seem to have the designers (one hesitates to call them architects) gilding a thorn bush.

To return to the theme: that Taliesin West and the Robie house by Frank Lloyd Wright appear after the San Francisco International Airport seems to me to highlight the recall factor and the status and experience of the people who voted, more than the genuine worth of the buildings listed in the eyes of the voters.

People talk about chart junk invading graphs and destroying our understanding of the underlying data by decorating the graphs rather than contributing to understanding. This to me is much worse: pseudo-systematic 'surveys' of a group of people whose characteristics and preferences are unknown and representing their vaguely gathered opinions as a genuine viewpoint...