I so wanted to go to Expo 86. I’m not sure exactly what it was really, but I became quite enamoured with the fair back then (collecting all manner of info and images, best I could in the days way-pre-internet) and would’ve totally loved to head out to Vancouver to revel in it. 22 years later this past week I hit up Vancouver, certainly missing Expo 86 but revelling nonetheless in what I got.
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I love architecture.
I love great spaces, love great light, love great materials, love great volumetrics.
I love stained glass, tall rooms, diffuse lighting.
I love the ecofire company (and what they make) for my love of fire without the soot and emissions.
I love the quote by Winston Churchill :”We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.”
I love the simple yet sublime geometrics, interplay of spaces and quality of light of the great moderns. I love the complex richness and carved surfaces of the gothic. I love the solid simplicity of the ancients. And how each of those show up in each other, and in combination in the new today.
I love the power of the monument (and monumental). I love the beauty and whole-istic-ness of small constructions.
I love surprise. I love spaces that fit like a great robe.
I love adaptive reuse!
Ah, alas. After 31 years my beloved CN Tower has been surpassed in height, with the Burj Dubai building going beyond the 533m mark (onto a potential max height of 818m??! Ca-razy) last September. 30+ years, that’s a good long time to hold onto the record (and let us not forget Dar Robinson jumping off the tower not once, but twice)… rock on.
An article on the City of Angkor in Cambodia, the largest pre-industrial metropolis in the world: http://www.mercurynews.com/search/ci_6618259.
Interesting in its own right, but this caught my eye especially: “The hydraulic system became “not manageable, no matter how many resources were thrown at it,”".
That got me to thinking. Reliance on technology to brute-force the environment with rapid growth to fit to some vision of human dominance and success? That breaks down eventualy? Hmm, is that much dissimilar to where we may be today? Following the same path, trusting in yet more technology to make our current way somehow work out?
If so, it is pause for thought.
“I think as designers we realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence. So as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we in a way need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system, and the frame conditions of a planet. I think the exciting part of that is the good news that’s there, because the news is the news of abundance and not the news of limits. And I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits, and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share…” — William McDonough
If you have not yet read Cradle to Cradle, please, do so now. It is an amazing and beautiful introduction to a shift in context, one that is logical and powerful. McDonough is quite a visionary, and out there, in the world, doing it. He gave a talk at TED, an ideas conference in Santa Cruz in 2005 and the other day I was sent a link to his remarkable talk… which I now share with you. See it here.
I hadn’t realized this would be so when I posted my pictures the other day, but it actually lined up with a gallery viewing I went to yesterday. Tiff, Evan and Evan’s parents and I (and Jet, of course) went up to the city to the main branch of the SF Public Library to view the exhibit Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change.
I really enjoyed it. For starters, it was mostly black and white photography of moderate size, punctuated by these huge (3′x4′) colour prints. Each of the photographer’s (there were about 6 who’s work was on display) had a different tact and a different take on what they were shooting and on how, and taken together it was quite evocative, some scenes amazing, some wrenching. Juxtaposition was the word of the day (which is really not surprising), not only in between each photograph, and also not only even in between the elements in the photographs, but sometimes between the emotions and the humanity within. As a purely visual exhibit with no set narrative what each person would take away from it, I would assert, would be different — which works beautifully.
For myself, the exhibit had a double ring because many of the pictures were taken in Henan province, which is where the bulk of my travels in China have been. Looking at some of the pictures brought nods of knowing from me, simply by recognition of what was depicted (as in “I saw that”), but also as I recognized what I saw and took it in the larger context of the exhibit and viewing the familiar through (pardon the pun) a different lens made possible by the ‘big picture’ (again, pardon the pun). Let me put that another way: in the context being created by the show, the familiar images gained new layers, new levels of meaning.
Great exhibit that runs until June 24th in San Francisco — I recommend it.
In the ‘you really can find anything on the internet’ category, the other week I had the inkling to do a search for some lyrics. While we were in China in 2005, on our daily travel to and from the Wushuguan, our bus’ DVD player would start anew. That first video/song shown on the DVD became, over the days, adopted as our group’s sort of unofficial anthem. Enough so that several people bought CDs and DVDs with the song on it… but I never knew what exactly the song was about. It was a pretty nifty video, that was for sure. So, I sought it out. And found it (link also contains the video and the song)!.
This is very cool. Some years ago an architect had this flash of insight and developed a new theory for the constructions of the great pyramids at Giza. To test his theories, he turns to a realtime 3D model and AI systems… which is precisely what I began to investigate in my own Thesis for my architecture degree (at about the same time he came up with his theory, actually, interestingly enough). Rock on — I may not have been able to persue the fruits of my thesis, but it is very cool to see the very concepts and hopes I had being put into practice.
Here’s the paper you can download: http://khufu.3ds.com/introduction/datas/intro/downloads/Kheops_Story.pdf
Sadly, my own thesis (Maya Visions) is not on the web right now. Hmm. And I’m leaving it that way… because? I might well just rectify that!
(Ok, that’s odd — if you misspell my last name (the missing n) and put my name into google, the first article that comes up is the article about me in the Mountain View Voice… how about that.)
Current Possibility: Being Infectious
