Take Two Aspirin and See Me in the Morning

That post i wrote about "that Damon's" just keeps needing addenda, it seems.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away there was this cine-plex not far from my house. It always showed movies that had been out for a month or two already, but at a discounted price. I wouldn't develop a feel for the cinematic zeitgeist until much later in life, so my parents would take me to this "Super Cinemas" as it was called to save a few dollars, which was fine by me.

About the time i started developing an idea of the world beyond my backyard, the Super Cinemas closed down. There are two important points to take away from that statement. First, that while i might gleefully while away hours playing, say, SimCity 2000, a game which is entirely devoted to city planning, i had not yet developed any sort of sense of how my own city was laid out. That knowledge wouldn't truly develop until after i got my driver's license, but at least until middle school i had no concept of what lay out of sight of the property my parents owned.

Interestingly, men and women develop this knowledge in markedly different ways. The best link i could find at 4am though is this one. As i understand it, men tend to envision themselves as points on a map from which they might interpolate directions. Women, by contrast, find landmarks that they will necessarily follow to stay on path. Thus, a woman might take the long path from A to B to C (a known route) whereas a man might attempt to go directly from A to C believing that a shorter route exists. It might, or he might get lost; i'm not trying to claim one strategy is superior -- or even that the model is always accurate.

Secondly (remember when i mentioned two points?), i find it intensely poignant that the Super Cinemas closed around this point in my life. It had become something of a personal landmark, a place where movies happened. There were other movie theaters around, but until two modern cineplexes opened up i don't think i really "went out to the movies" nearly so often. It was an arbitrary, yet very concrete shift in my movie-paradigm. There was something mysterious about the Super Cinemas to me...behind the parking lot there lingered the remnants of what movie-going had been before me -- drive in movie screens(!). I had always hoped a movie might be shown on them at some point so that i could have the experience of this bygone cultural touchstone, but that wasn't in the cards for me.

I have since then attended a showing of a drive-in movie, don't worry.

My timeline might be off, but i think this all happened around the time my family moved houses to another side of the city. There's an odd coincidence.

Fast forward a dozen years. One of my close friends moved outside the city limits. I have by this time developed a fairly strong idea of WHERE STUFF IS around town, but since the Super Cinemas closed down i haven't ever been there, nor seen it on the way to anything. It was, after all, outside the city limits! Imagine my surprise, then, when the landmark to find the road to my friend's house IS the Super Cinemas!

Pretty cool, right? Ok, maybe not...but get this: A few days ago i was visiting with another friend from here at home. We call up and invite my above friend over, but he doesn't have a car he can take, so we jump on the road and start driving over. It's late at night and there aren't many lights on the road, but the Super Cinemas building is pretty big, so you can see it by the light reflected off the water tower just a bit further down the road. Much too far down the road, i realize we've passed the road i was supposed to turn on. Why, you ask?

The Super Cinemas, tenant-less for almost a dozen years, had finally been torn down.

Just like that Damon's that told me i had arrived, this Super Cinemas told me i had gone far enough. There are plenty of other landmarks i might use instead, but as chance would have it i had chosen THAT one. With it gone i had no idea where i was. That's some pretty powerful phenomenology, and by a building whose blueprint was probably photocopied for a hundred other locations across the States. So don't ever be superficial about your work. Who knows what effect on some little kid's life you might effect.

Strife

This is a topic i have to approach cautiously; i'll begin with a condemnation. I believe that harming civilians is an unacceptable method of advancing your political agenda.

A few years back i saw this chalk writing on the side of a building on campus. It said "Students Against Cancer" -- nothing else. This got me to wondering: are there students FOR cancer? Are they running around campus exposing us to deadly radiation, or spreading carcinogens in the ventilation systems of campus buildings? These people need to be stopped!

But i don't think Students Against Cancer are taking a wide enough view. Why stop there? We need to take in the whole picture. Cancer kills, right? That must be why they oppose it. After all, i don't see any groups like "Students Against the Common Cold" or "Students Against Halitosis". I guess what they're trying to say is that they oppose suffering and death, of which one notable cause is cancer. I can get behind that.

But...what would that accomplish?
Maybe it's not necessary to be vocal about some topics. I'm talking about terrorism, if you didn't click on the link above.

There's a candlelight vigil being held downtown tonight to "honor and remember the victims of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, and to stand in solidarity with those who mourn their loved ones, irrespective of nation and religion." I find myself awkwardly impartial to this gathering. I'm not against it, but at the same time it strikes me as profoundly unnecessary. It serves as a reminder that other people care about similar issues as yourself, i suppose (if you go), but i would be very surprised if you told someone you were afraid for friends/family/people in a terrorist-threatened area and that confidant turned out to be SUPPORTING THE TERRORISTS.

Anti-terrorist sentiment, i think, doesn't need to be organized the way a school bond proposal might be hyped, or even the way Students Against Cancer might try to raise money for research. That's the crux of my argument.

And after reading this, i'm inclined to take that argument half a step further. Maybe -- just maybe -- our anti-terrorist fervor is inciting more terrorism, this time by the guys wearing uniforms.

Does this man Azam deserve to die? Maybe. Death penalties are another matter entirely, and it's not my place to make that kind of judgment anyway.

BUT! Does this man deserve to be tortured?
Does this man deserve to be terrorized?
I contend that no one deserves that.

You might say, and i considered this at length as well, that torture and terror caused this desperate man to reveal information that saved innocent lives. It might have. But from his perspective, he found it acceptable to use terror to "save" the lives of innocent, oppressed members of his particular group who were being just as terrorized by a regime which disenfranchised his voice.

I honestly don't see the difference, so i can't support the use of scare tactics, even to save lives.

Let me close with a statement i think we can all agree upon, by Professor Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Ottawa's Carleton University.
"There is the famous statement: 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' But that is grossly leading. It assesses the validity of the cause when terrorism is an act. One can have a perfectly beautiful cause and yet if one commits terrorist acts, it is terrorism regardless."
----

When drafting this post, i had high hopes of keeping it on an architectural topic. That...didn't happen.

The connection i wanted to make was what i perceive to be a connection between media coverage and visible destruction (i.e., demolished architecture). I don't follow worldwide terrorism very closely, but of that hundreds-of-pages-long list linked, the ones i recognize are all closely associated with a structure. The attacks on the World Trade Center Towers (Sep. 11, 2001), the Madrid train bombings (Mar. 11, 2004), the London Underground bombings (Jul. 7, 2005), and now these attacks in Mumbai at the Taj Mahal hotel and the Chabad House. I wonder if the media chooses to show these more often than other terrorist stories because of the symbolic aspect of striking at the heart of "civilized" urban centers, or because it makes for better television? Some of both, perhaps. I'm not trying to make a point here, i just wanted to share what was on my mind regarding the topics at hand.

Heroes

I want to spend this entry talking about heroes. Not the costumed crusaders of the comic book realm, but the sorts of people that have "day" placed after their names. More specifically, i'm referencing people such as Chris Columbus, George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and so forth. For their "accomplishments" we idolize them, celebrate their lives and aspire to be as "great" ourselves. Their architectural corollary is easily made - iconic structures like the UNESCO World Heritage sites that i've referenced previously.

The mainstream attitude towards this phenomenon is to simply accept it. Hey, you get a free holiday from work (at least if you work for the gov't), right? On the other hand, you could join the counter-culture which just loves to tear down celebrities by pointing out flaws. This latter position can be seductive if you're not already fully brainwashed into proselytizing the greatness of these icons. The counter arguments do often make quite a bit of sense. Columbus did, as far as i know, slaughter both natives and his own men, burned women, raped houses and was generally a rather naughty fellow. Er...something like that, anyway. He also did settle the Americas and establish European influence there, which likely directly contributes to why i'm currently able to sit here IN the first-world country of the United States on a computer and type this entry.

On a side note, i'm still raw about being told that Columbus discovered America in the 2nd grade (mmm, misplaced modifiers...i think i'll leave that sentence as is). By the 3rd grade it turned out that he wasn't actually the first, and by 4th grade i learned that he didn't even hit the mainland, just the Bahamas. And we wonder what's wrong with our education system...
That's a post for another time. I digress.

I reject both the pedestrian acceptance and the petulant refutations of heroic icons.



While i was traveling back from my summer work situation to my year-round home i had the opportunity to visit Wright's Falling Water. Within the architectural community this home needs no introduction, but this intimate knowledge is rather insulated within the profession. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Falling Water is particularly famous for it's situation (literally) atop a waterfall as well as for its dramatically cantilevered balconies.


One of Wright's interests was building to the human scale. This meant rooms in which certain portions of the ceiling were dropped lower than the architectural standards; such a configuration invited a nestled sensation, after which entering onto the wide open balconies would be even more boundless and open by contrast. The family that commissioned Falling Water, incidentally, were considerably shorter than myself - between 5'6" and 5'4". That's 1.6 to 1.7 metres for those of you reading this outside the States (ha!). I, on the other hand, am slightly over 1.8 metres tall (that's 6 feet for those of you inside the States). As a result my head was mere inches from brushing the ceiling -- more claustrophobic than nestled.

Claustrophobia is an unpleasant feeling.

BUT! I do not mention this caveat to Falling Water's brilliance in order to degrade the home's value (2.3 million in 2007 USD from a construction standpoint, or from another perspective 120k visitors per year paying admission...what?), but rather to give an idea of how heroes and icons may have similar downfalls.

I reject both positions because i feel both are too extreme. On the one hand, to reject heroes and icons outright is to rob yourself of the opportunity to learn about something truly incredible. On the other, these are only people. The kind of fawning adulation that, say, presidential candidates drew on the night of November 4th honestly frightens me. Anyone who so totally agrees with a candidate's platform has clearly not investigated that platform nearly closely enough (well...there are probably a few dozen people out of millions who totally agree with legitimate basis). There is no way that millions of people all have exactly the same views on every issue -- some of them are going to be unhappy about one or two of them...and we're not even talking about passed legislation, just promises. Promises which political candidates are notoriously incapable of keeping.

Let us instead educate ourselves about the virtues of each heroes legacy and honor those; let us also ground these icons in the reality of their situations. I would say that we cannot all be Mother Theresa or Mahatma Gandhi, but this would contradict my entire point. I do not believe that either of them were flawless individuals. I do believe that they provided a sublime image of what an individual can be. Let us strive for the perfection of heroes and icons, accepting that such a goal is categorically impossible.

See With Your Eyes

When i started this blog i insisted that it would not be personal, but this story is worth sharing.

Last May, about a month after finishing up my last work for the school year, i found myself out to lunch with some of my relatives on my father's side of the family. This came at a point during which i had no idea what my plans for the summer were. The firm i had sent a portfolio to had never responded to my repeated followup inquiries, and even my backup during-school job wasn't turning up any leads for the summer. I had prepared a number of canned speeches for the typical conversations that arose regarding my future, mostly in the interest of staving off having to make any real choices.

"So what are you plans for the summer?" People would ask. Well, i would think, if i had any worthwhile plans, i would probably be making good on them already by this point, don't you think? But instead i'm drifting, trying to impose as little of a footprint as possible on the people that are generously providing for me.
And i would put on this intent expression and explain how i was pursuing a variety of different paths ranging from architectural internships to construction, all with the interest of solidifying my base knowledge of my chosen field. It was a pretty romantic and promising story, considering that it was all ********. I might have had an idea of what i wanted, but i was lightyears away from achieving any of it.

So when my aunt (who, i might add, i had met maybe half a dozen times in my entire life) asked me what i wanted to do with my summer, i replied with my prepared answer.

"My son works in construction; i'll give him a call -- would you want a job?" She said. "It would be hard work."

"I mean...that would be exactly the sort of thing i'm looking for." I responded, belying my excitement. I had heard this sort of offer too many times before from too many people to put any stock in it...but i underestimated familial ties.

15 minutes later i had accepted a job halfway across the country.

...in a state i had never visited (Virginia), living and working with a cousin i had never met, in a field i had never worked. I waved hello to Alice as i stumbled down the rabbit hole, then took a road trip with my aforementioned aunt and her husband across the United States. I have differences with some of my relatives, but they are, as my cousin and future boss would say, "good people." I hope they appreciate what that means to me.

About ten days later i was legitimately working concrete construction. Now, understand that the company i worked for exclusively promotes from within -- meaning that everyone starts as a rote laborer.

The first day i worked was hard. Really hard, actually, but manageable. The SECOND day i worked, well...

What you see on your right are called concrete piles. They are ~18" square columns that get driven (by a piledriver, hence the wrestling move name) waaaay into the ground. Where i was working, the last few feet of these piles that were poking out of the ground needed to be knocked down to the steel reinforcement rods (rebar) so that the ground slab to be poured atop them would have a stronger bond.

To do this it was necessary to chip off the concrete on the piles using what is known as a "chipping hammer." (Right -- it's a slightly smaller jackhammer, and for the same purpose). I feel that i need to make a few notes about this task.

1) Chipping hammers, with the bit, weight probably 50 to 60 pounds.
2) I am not ripped.
3) It was 110 degrees Farenheit. By comparison, where i live the weather forecasters make cracks about Hell, MI freezing over as early as September.


Eight hours later i was on the phone with my father.
"I'm not sure this was the right decision!" I despaired. But silently i made myself a promise. I would not quit this job while off the clock. If the work broke my spirit or my back, it would happen during the day, and not for lack of trying.

The next day, the temperature dropped 15 degrees. The day after that i transferred job sites to work with my cousin-boss on a new project as an engineer's aide.
"It's still going to be hard physical labor." I was assured. And it was, but after those resolve-breaking first few days my optimism couldn't be diminished. "It's not so bad," i would say. "We need to work you harder, then," my cousin would joke.

I appreciated working with the engineers considerably more than with the laborers (from an architectural standpoint), because i learned more about how construction works -- the engineers being more capable and willing to answer questions. Ten semesters of Architecture 314: Construction couldn't teach me what i learned in two weeks there. I want to be perfectly clear on this point though -- in those three days with the laborers i met some extraordinary people. I had resolved to see with my eyes in this new environment, and in such an alien terrain i saw things i didn't expect.

I don't know if he made it through middle school, if he committed any felonies, if he even had a home, or how he ended up working as a laborer, but i hold for (let's call him) Mr. Samuel more respect than i can muster for most of my current colleagues. Wherever you are, i wish you the best.

I spent three months aiding with the layout of 26 acres of foundation. I learned incredible volumes worth of experiential knowledge that no book can contain about construction and how it relates to my particular passion of architecture. But the lessons i took home with me at the end of the summer were of self motivation and the value of working outside your comfort zone. The view from the other side of the fence really gives some breathtaking perspective. If you ever have the opportunity to step across, i hope you take it.

You might hate it, but i hope you appreciate it.

No,

I haven't forgotten about this blog. I've just been working far too much to have any time to think about it. 58 hour workweeks (plus 10 hours total travel time for the week!) will do that. Don't worry, i'm building up a good amount of material for later. In the meantime, i wanted to share a quick anecdote.

Thursday we were pouring (as we often do) concrete spread footers, but on this particular day we were running rather behind schedule. There was a long ditch which turned at one point and stepped down, terminating in a footing we had poured several days before. While the concrete was being poured, adjustments were still being made to the steps at the turn. As i watched the concrete slowly ooze down towards the carpenters, all i could think about was Pipe Dreams. It was pretty fantastic.
The end.

A Brief Intermission

The new job is preventing me from updating as regularly as i'd like (which means even more infrequently than usual). Hopefully i'll be back to my regular schedule soon.

Do Not Tip or Rock

Some of you may remember Lore Sjoberg's Book of Ratings.

Who am i kidding, none of you remember the Book of Ratings. But it's hilarious. In lieu of a normal post, i thought i'd run something similar, only not purposefully for the sake of humour.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

The Statue of Liberty

The Oracle informs me that the proper title for the Statue of Liberty is Liberty Enlightening the World, which is a much more unique name. I also appreciate how the symbol of American freedom was a gift from the French (which is fitting, really, considering the American Revolutionary War). It's a shame that the symbolism of it is so inaccessible, though. The seven-pointed crown is simple enough (the seven continents/seas), but the rest is lost to that monstrous large podium (she's apparently stepping forward, trampling shackles with her left foot). And the tour guides don't seem prone to explain that either. Maybe i just had a poor tour guide. Even so, there's something about gigantic port-city statues that just makes me feel proud to be an American. Or Dodecanese (also a World Heritage Site). It's hard to say. B-


Cathédrale Notre Dame de Chartres

Our Lady of Notre Dame in Chartres gains bonus points for having its own
groupie distinct from the religion for which the cathedral was built in the first place. Like a lot of Gothic cathedrals, the stained glass and haut-reliefs depict parables from the Bible, which is super boring if you don't know what the story is, and incredibly cool if you do. Luckily, Chartres has a groupie, er...historian to tell you what each one is about. This particular Notre Dame has a rich history (as any building taking 400 years to build ought to); normally i'd link you for more information here, since i just hinted at it, but the internet is failing to produce any legitimate information on this one. The best part about Notre Dame de Chartres is that it introduced and popularized the flying buttress. I have a fond spot in my heart for flying buttresses. Not only do most people love to say the phrase, not having any idea what they are, but if you tried to use them today your architecture prof from back in school would probably hunt you down and rip up your license. A-


Galápagos Islands

I apparently almost fell out of the boat on the way to the Galápagos Islands as an infant. Maybe it was some other island offshore South America, i can't remember -- all i have to go on are stories my parents told me. I've got nothing against the islands themselves, but because it's not an architectural site (and this is an architecture blog, remember?) and due to my near brush with becoming one of the many endemic species there, i have trouble giving this one high marks. D+

EDIT: Turns out i actually almost died on the way to Isla de los Lobos, not the Galápagos. Incidentally, there's also an Isla de los Lobos in the Beagle Channel near the Tierra del Fuego. The channel is named after the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin's ship -- the same voyage which took him to the Galápagos and about which the book of the same name was written. That's such a good Connection that i ought to send it to James Burke.

The Great Wall (of China)

The Great Wall of China, for all its awesome (in the true meaning of the word) size, is really sort of a disappointing story. Against all logical prediction, it actually worked a couple times, which i guess makes the millions of Chinese who died to build it worth the cost? Ok, probably not. Plus, you can't even see it from the moon, and not even well from low-earth orbit. But it's hard to be harsh on four thousand miles of wall. "Well, we can't cross here. Want to go around?" "Nah, i have to be back home sometime in the next five years or the missus will have my hide." The Great Wall took even LONGER to build than the above Notre Dame, and versions of it were used for over two thousand years. Big startup cost, but that's good, sustainable architecture right there (sort of). That Great Wall sure isn't contributing to rising gas prices, anyway. B


Chichen Itza

I don't know very much about
Chichen Itza aside from what i learned from Mayaquest, which taught me that it's much more difficult to bike on a computer than it is in real life. That's not entirely true, i actually do some research on these posts, i just don't have a whole lot to say about it right now. I do remember, however, that Chichen Itza was the home of the Great Ball Court. I hope this is how people hundreds of years from now will remember America's current great cities: Los Angeles, home to the American Gladiators arena! Plus, the game played on the Great Ball Court involves mythology of gods using each others' heads as balls. That's hardcore.
There's actually a lot of really neat stuff about Chichen Itza, but because it's in ruins its score drops a bit to an A-

That Damon's

I passed the Damon's i wrote about earlier the other day. It's not off exit 110, i realized. Does that make me a little bit like James Frey? I hope not, his fictions were somehow more dishonest, maybe because they changed the fundamental meaning of the anecdote (or so i'm told).

Anyway, it's a Hall of Fame Cafe, and the building has undergone dramatic renovations/additions (several years ago, actually). I hardly even recognized it when i made a point to look at it carefully. I guess it's true what they say about leaving home: once you've left, you can never come back.

It's funny how that works. Of course, even buildings that haven't changed more than their marquee don't quite seem the same as when we used to frequent them, years later. I visited one of the elementary schools i went to not too long ago. If you've done the same, you've heard these words sung before; the halls, once unspectacular, seemed claustrophobic and low. The teaching rooms are tiny and even the gym is hardly more than a glorified garage. It's hard to stomach, but we know the building hasn't changed, we have. As Dantès might say, kings to nostalgia, right?

But i bring this up to challenge the limits of architecture's power. An architect built the school, surely, and that architecture may have influenced my education. How, i'd be hard pressed to say, but i can say things about the layout of the school that might have been different in another plan. The halls formed an H with a double crossbar, with one leg The Office. There's no courtyard in the middle though, just the gym and the cafeteria. We were lucky to have them separate in elementary school -- when i went to middle school we had to make due with our Cafe-tor-nasium.

In front of The Office was The Bench. You sat on The Bench to await your judgment from the principal, who (along with calling your parents, i suppose) would often cast down your doom, in the ancient sense of the word: more sitting on The Bench. I rarely invoked such harsh punishment, but The Bench commanded a respect no mere furniture should ever have of a small child. The parking lot was just outside the door by the principal's seat of power, but even after school we would rather stand by the door than sit and wait on The Bench. People would think you'd gotten in trouble.

I never had cause to venture across to the far side of the H, that was for the younger children, but it was a mirror image of the near side. The hallways were single loaded in a manner of speaking, since the gym and the cafeteria took up the entire other side and were accessed by the "crossbars" as i called them above. A straight shot down the hallway from The Office would bring you to the playground doors. Facing that direction down the hallway was certainly exciting.

I reminisce all this because despite all the physical memories i have of the place, none of them are memorable for themselves. They simply remind of a time past, a state of mind, a childhood friendship, an adventure braved. The architecture didn't do that for me. I don't care for this phenomenological outlook that the structure of the place invoked a chosen pattern of thought. My teachers, my friends, they structured my growth at that school.

Or am i metaphorically choosing between walking towards the office instead of the playground? Over a decade later, i hope it's not that insidious.

But damn, if that isn't convincing imagery. I think the difference is intent. We have to remember, always remember that our creations will affect the lives of untold strangers...in ways we cannot possibly hope to control. And if we can't bend our phenomenological impact to our respective wills, how can we possibly hope to be responsible about it?

I could do worse for metaphorical imagery regarding nostalgia, though. There's the whole adage about standing in the same river twice (and how you can't). Browse some forums about that one if you want to read some truly moronic web-rats that have managed to crawl away from YouTube commenting for thirteen seconds. Still, i felt a stranger upon returning to the school. It's the same physically, but it's not the place i once spent my days, not anymore. That's why i take phenomenology with a grain of salt. That Damon's, though -- it was arbitrarily chosen, once. It had no attached memories, aside from sight/site-memory. Now that it has changed appearances, it has no meaning to me anymore. No architect could have planned for that.

A Letter to Ann Pelo

EDIT: I should preface this by saying that i really did appreciate the article. I think it's wonderfully thought-provoking and a fascinating subject. Don't read my rebuttal without reading the article first.

I stumbled across your article "Why We Banned Legos" recently, and i have to say, it bothered me somewhat. I'm not disagreeing with the original assessment that there may have been some disparity in the "fair use" of the Legos between the older and younger children, but the solution seems to me rather socialist and frankly, boring. In particular, i take offense to the statement near the end of the article, "All structures will be standard sizes."

Let me back up a few steps to explain myself better. The whole experiment is supposedly about "exploring power, ownership, and equity" but it seems to me that all you've done is restructured the location of power from the older children to yourselves (the teachers). This may not, in itself, be a bad thing. It certainly allows you to encourage a more "fair" use of the Legos; inasmuch as fair means "equal access to materials." Thus far, i have absolutely no objections. I fully support the opportunity for all the children to create as they will. With one caveat -- the "group of eight children that conceived and launched Legotown" invested time and effort to begin a project -- intellectual capital, if you will. After Legotown's initial destruction, though, this investment was stripped from them and given to the rest of the class. Hardly fair, considering that the rest of the class did not contribute to its original construction.

This is socialism, pure and unfiltered (value judgments aside, it most certainly is). In theory, this should benefit the entire community, but in practice it disenfranchises the students who were entrepreneurial enough to begin something new in your school. In time, given enough similar cues, they will conclude that it is unproductive to invest time and energy into ideas that they themselves will not benefit from, preferring instead to reap the benefits of the work of others. In Sweden, following the economic crisis of the 1990s resultant of this type of policy, this schema played out to its eventual conclusion: total political reform. When less than 30% of the general population showed up to work on any given day, changes needed to be made.

Equality cannot be forced. Some people are smarter than others, more attractive, more driven to succeed. In the case of your students, some are more interested in Legos than others. I support equal access to the Legos. What i don't support is governmentalized rationing of those Legos. "We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.... We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces" says the article. Why should this be? Are there so few Legos that none are left over with 15 or 28 pieces each? Some Lego pieces are larger than others -- is it still one piece if it's a 2x4 block (verse a 1x2 block)? Are "cool pieces" worth more than one block, and can each student have only a limited number of "cool pieces?" These are subjective questions, and the disagreements about worth are simply another form of power brokering no different from the original paradigm. Moreover, why should the houses be standard sizes, especially considering the newly instituted system of 'all public buildings'? Should not the school be larger than a single-family home, perhaps constructed by more than one student?
Diversity is inequality. If one student who plays with the Legos daily happens to have amassed a larger quantity of blocks (and thus, for example, a larger house) it might inspire another student to expand his own house in inventive and unique ways. If his quota of blocks disallows such innovation, though, his creativity has been effectively quashed.

The point is, not only has this new method failed to create an equal power structure, but it has furthermore limited the creative power the Legos granted the students in the first place. In my opinion, anyway; i can only conjecture from my exterior position.

Names

I ran across an article in my local Bastion of Literary Truth (they have a flashy website, though) today -- it was essentially shameless promotion for a book which recently came out called Eat This, Not That. The article in the paper had some troubling "examples" from the book, such as the following, which i reproduce here verbatim:

>> Dairy Queen's banana split has 530 calories and 12 grams of fat compared to Baskin-Robbins' version, which packs 1,030 calories and 39 grams of fat.
From experience, i know that this must depend on (1) the varieties of ice cream used in the banana split, (2) the quantity of ice cream used, and (3) the quantity and varieties of toppings added. So unless Dairy Queen has made a major breakthrough in ice cream technology, i think the take-home message ought to be that Baskin Robbins' banana splits are larger and more delicious on average than Dairy Queen's, and if you wish to cut back on the calories and fat involved, you ought to share it with a friend, or better yet, a date (because if you try to share the Dairy Queen version, there won't be enough to satisfy your craving for sweet, banana and ice cream goodness).

And, although i haven't read the book, i can see from the cover art that it falls into the same trap. Comparing a Big Mac to a Whopper may seem like a fair comparison, but just because they're both "burgers" does not make them the same thing.
Wikipedia (i can't fathom why this information is encyclopedic, but i'm glad it made the cut) lists the following ingredients for each. I organized them to be easier to compare.

Big Mac: Two 1.6 oz (45.4 g)(total 3.2 oz, 90.8 g) beef patties, iceberg lettuce, American cheese, pickles, onion, special McDonald's "Mac" sauce (a Thousand Island dressing variant), three part sesame seed bun.
Whopper (with cheese): One 4 oz (113.4 g) beef patty, lettuce, American cheese, pickles, tomato, raw sliced onion, ketchup, mayonnaise, sesame seed bun.

If you're wondering what Thousand Island dressing is made of, let me tell you a little secret -- it's ketchup and mayonnaise...which makes the two burgers identical, except for two things. One, the Big Mac doesn't have a tomato slice, which in the grand scheme of the comparison is rather insignificant. Two, the total beef patty quotient (bpq) of the Whopper is 25% larger than the Big Mac. It does, admittedly, sport 40% more calories and 62% more fat, but you're also getting MORE FOOD. The squashed down picture of the Whopper on the cover is clearly designed to disguise this fact. Now, you may point out that the conclusion still holds -- the Big Mac is still less fattening per calorie than the Whopper. But caloric quantity is a piss-poor measure of food's healthiness. Would you believe that a single serving of pasta without any sauce packs an astounding 200 calories? And a normal plate of pasta at most restaurants can have TWO to THREE servings, pushing that number to SIX HUNDRED CALORIES?!?

Well, you'd better believe it. Because when you consider that the FDA's recommended 2000 calorie diet often gets compacted into three meals, you have to average at least 650+ calories per meal. That's a low estimate, too, because you're likely eating less for breakfast. That said, calories aren't bad for you. What matters is "empty calories", that is, calories which do not provide any satiety. The satiety index is a measure of this phenomenon, and i've linked to one of many sites listing the values of some common foods.

I'm getting sidetracked in my attempt to make a point. If you're going to compare things, you need to be sure to compare salient details. Fat per pound of burger would be a step in the right direction. It's just not good enough to assume that because both are "burgers" or "banana splits" that they're identical in all ways.

It's the same thing with architecture (wow! he finally brought it back to the topic of the blog!). I sat in on a review of a student's project recently, and the harshest criticism of it was that she described it as a tower, whereas "a tower has to have at least 20 stories". First off, there are no definitions of 'tower' that state this, that i can find. In the context of ants, a blade of grass is a tower. In the middle of a low, sprawling city, i think 15 stories can squeeze its way into being called a tower. It always depends on the context.

But naming schemes affect more than just how we define a building. The aforementioned "tower" is of course not at all comparable to, say, the Sears Tower. As such, it would be abhorrent to try to compare their carbon footprints, whatever that even means. The 15 story tower is clearly going to win (at least, it had better). Calling both "towers" doesn't do them justice. When it's important to specify, it's important to specify, circular though that statement may sound.

Or, if you want to capture elements of the Arts and Crafts movement like in the previous post, make sure you know more than its name. Most people are too busy to investigate every claim they run across, so some are erroneously ignored and other erroneously accepted. When it's in hard print and advertised by your newspaper, enough people are going to accept it on blind faith that it becomes problematic.

So maybe this has been a long winded way to say "don't believe everything you read in a book." Still, you should believe everything i say in this blog. More importantly, don't be dishonest about your arguments. In the long run, it's bad for everybody.

Rules

Some people like to make blanket statements. This is always wrong. ALWAYS. That was irony, you can laugh. I'm talking here about statements like "Rules are meant to be broken". This particular blanket statement i'd like to dissect and, i hope, eventually disprove.

There are three ways to interact with rules. You can follow them explicitly (to the letter), you can follow them implicitly (the spirit of the rule) or you can break them outright. Each position has legitimacy, but (as always) context is crucial.

People often rail against following rules explicitly, but there are thousands of situations where it happens, and that's a good thing. Dicta about murder crop up universally, perhaps the most famous of which is "Thou shalt not kill". It's essentially illegal everywhere. It's quite black and white -- don't end someone's life. You can't half kill someone. There are, of course, gray areas even here -- is abortion murder, and what about animals? How is that different? I don't presume to be able to answer those questions, but i can say that it is the goal of modern governments to clarify those questions as much as possible, albeit through very different methodologies depending on the political schema. And i'm quite glad that we can all agree that killing me is not socially acceptable. I rather like living.

These prescriptive measures are also present in architect -ure. Some are universal, others are determined by the client. The capacity for an elevated floor to not-collapse is pretty much a given. But should it shield you from the elements? Well...probably. The natatorium at Cranbrook in Michigan is quite the counter-example. Those "windows" are glassless, and the colossal well of light in the ceiling opens directly to the sky. Then again, you don't have to sleep in a natatorium.

This is where the line blurs, and you have to follow the spirit of the rule. This can be tricky, because what you do might be technically illegal (or against the rule, when laws are not involved). To be responsible, you have to investigate the rationale behind the creation of the original rule. It is, as legend will have it, illegal to serenade your girlfriend in Kalamazoo, and Fox News reports that it's illegal to shower in the nude in Florida. I'm totally baffled by the latter, but i suppose the former may have caused a series of problematic public disturbances. It would certainly arouse my anger should men nightly approach my neighbor's house (all girls) and sing bawdy love ballads in the wee hours of the morning. The law was likely a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that got out of hand, and as such is worded much more generally than it ought to be.

Most laws aren't so absurd, though. The rolling-stop at stop signs is one of the most common complaints of police nit-picking. However, i see plenty of bikers barrel right through stop signs even when the intersection is crowded. It's just stupid...and dangerous, and it makes drivers less amicable to bikers on the roads. All around, you should pretty much just stop at stop signs.

And the previous comment about floors being built to not-collapse -- within that statement is the moral value not to injure people in your buildings. I happen to think that's rather important, but it might be less so if you're designing a trap door (every evil genius needs a trap door in front of his desk). Or if you're designing some kind of crazy plastic hamster-cage for kids (you know, the kind with all the the tiny plastic balls that little kids get lost in? Indoor playgrounds -- they go by a lot of names) maybe you actually WANT them to fall through the floor! Of course, you want them to do it safely -- safety and convenience are two good reasons for the no-collapse rule in the first place.

At the risk of sounding pedantic...
It's when you don't think about the rule you're breaking that passes into the realm of irresponsibility. You can even outright break rules completely if you think they're unjustly founded. Insurgents call this revolution, the RIAA calls it piracy, and parents call it teen angst. All these are legitimate forms of expression, equally valid with voting, i might even argue.

Now, this isn't to say that i think you need to study theory religiously in order to have a responsible practice, be it in architecture or any other field. That's not necessary. A working knowledge of theory is required, though, in order to be able to be aware of what direction your work is taking. Should you be a jazz musician, you may not be terribly interested in Baroque teaching methods. But you should be interested in blues, ragtime, and precedent, because it's directly related to your personal direction. Should you be a developer who claims to support the Arts & Crafts movement, you should probably consider how it arose from Art Nouveau and preceded Modernism. It's ALL about context. ALWAYS.

Interlude

If you haven't check out Tomek Baginski's work, now is your chance. Unfortunately, these videos aren't as high quality as i'd like, but the questionably legal medium of the torrent site *cough cough HINT cough* has the originals. Katedra (Cathedral) is...amazing.

Katedra
Rain
Fallen Art

While i'm on the topic of digital shorts...

Undo, by Marcin Waśko
Duel, by Colin Elliot
Guy's Dog, by Rory Breshnihan

I guess only Katedra and Rain really have anything to do with architecture whatsoever (although Duel has some interesting landscape), but it's so rare to come across high quality short films (Although Pixar popularized more than a few) that i thought i'd share the ones i'd found.

Perspective

A recent comment by one of my colleagues reminded me of this topic, and i think it's important enough that it should be shared. It doesn't have much to do with architecture, but my argument does, so i hope to bring this post full circle by the end.

So then, homosexuals.

I believe rather strongly in the concept of "live and let live," so i really don't care one way or another what people prefer sexually. It doesn't affect me in any way, shape or form, so i have no objection to it -- homosexuality doesn't cause global warming or unrest in the middle east. The LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community doesn't rail against psychology like, say, the Church of Scientology. I think many people will agree with me on these points.

Of course, there are a large number of people who do not. Some fundamental Christians, for example, find homosexuality a perversion of the natural order of life, or a sign of moral degeneration. I have no desire to argue with those people. They're welcome to their beliefs. Just don't push them on me, or anyone else. No one is forcing you to be gay, why would you force them to be straight?

Never mind those people. Let's talk about the people that fall halfway between the two. Tolerance is "trendy" these days, which i suppose is good, but it also means a lot of people have no idea what they're talking about, which doesn't do much good convincing this halfway group of the error of their ways. Before i continue, let me define the group.

These are the people who use "gay" and other references to homoesexuality as a pejorative. "This test is gay. What a faggot! I got gayed by some kid on Halo. (This, interestingly, shares a syntax with the older "I got jewed by..." slang). That guy was a total cock-gobbler." I apologize if i've offended anyone's sensibilities with these examples, but they're all too common. This kind of language is absolutely rampant in middle schools and high schools, and there are more than a few that continue to speak this way in college.

The odd thing is that these people do not consider themselves to be homophobic, or in any way gay bashing. If confronted, they'll make excuses like "Well, i didn't mean it to be offensive to gay people. I have gay friends!" (This, interestingly, shares a history with the older "I'm not a racist, I have black friends!"). Or, they might say "I was using the word ghey, which isn't the same thing as gay." I even know people who consider gay bashing to be acceptable within the confines of their own home, as though it's acceptable as long as there aren't any gay people around.

All of these excuses are completely irrelevant. They may, in fact, all be true excuses, but they have nothing to do with the problem at hand. The problem is the zeitgeist. Every time anyone uses an epithet involving homosexuality, or speaks of homosexuality in a pejorative tone, it fosters an environment of intolerance. Translated by the independent observer, the speaker is saying "Being gay is not acceptable. People who are gay are social misfits."

This information is interpreted in two major ways. The first way is to understand that the speaker is biased against homosexuals. The second is to be afraid to admit that you are yourself homosexual for fear of social suicide. The fear of this information reaching the speaker may cause intense distress. I posit that no one should live in fear because of a personal choice, be it religion, sexuality, profession, or otherwise.

It doesn't matter how you meant it. What matters is how it is understood.

This poses a problem. Perhaps i say to a friend "Man, that pop machine totally gypped me", without realizing that i had just made a racial epithet. It's against gypsies, if you're wondering. By my above bolded statement, it should be my fault that i had been interpreted as racist. In this case, ignorance truly is a legitimate excuse. However, knowing that i can avoid insulting gypsies in the future, i ought to cease the usage of that particular word. If i were to continue its use, it would be my fault again.

Some people will continue to argue that it is irrational to be offended by the pejorative usage of the word "gay". "It means something different now," they might say. This is almost a good argument, but it has a massive flaw. Before this argument would hold, you would have to prove that being gay was irrational (any argument for that is far, far beyond the scope of this blog). Consider this absurd analogy; "You shouldn't be insulted when i take the Lord's name in vain, because God doesn't exist anyway. It's irrational to believe in God."

You can't force other people to understand you a certain way. But if you want people to understand a certain thing, you can gauge the context of the situation and use certain language, gestures...typefaces? I bolded the take-home message of this post. I'll write it again, for gravitas.

It doesn't matter how you meant it. What matters is how it is understood.

Ok, so what does this have to do with architecture? Everything. Substitute speech for architecture and you're done. I don't know that the built environment can be racist or homophobic or whatever by itself (a drinking fountain is just a drinking fountain, until you only allow, for example, whites to use it. But the drinking fountain isn't reinforcing racist stereotypes, the sign is.) Still, the Parthenon means something entirely different now than it did to the ancient Greeks. Like art, architecture means whatever the observer gets out of it. Whether the observer be an architectural historian or a 4 year old kid, the perspective is equally valid.

And we should all be aware of the impact of our choices, regardless of what those choices may be.

Landmarks

The Grand Canyon. The Eiffel Tower. The Great Wall of China. The Damon's off exit 110 on US-127?

I was discussing a project a few months ago at an interim stage of the work, and my colleague suggested to me that the structure might be a bit too monumental for the small scope of the assignment. My gut instinct was to argue that there's no reason to avoid monumentality, but following the suggestions of some folk to whom i am terribly indebted, i considered the point. It makes a lot of sense on a lot of levels, i have to admit.

Monumentality can be an awfully annoying thing. For example, most stores take shot at it in one way or another, usually through signs (the McDonald's arch is pretty iconic in that regard). Monuments say "hey! hey look at me!". The "good" ones say something culturally, historically, or otherwise important, like the examples of the Eiffel Tower or the Great Wall. Still others, which are neither "good" nor "bad" but simply "awesome" (in the true meaning of the word), like the Grand Canyon, instill in us feelings which most of us ignore most of the time; this is why we flock to them in the first place -- rare, sometimes new experiences.

But i was not designing anything on the scope of the Eiffel Tower. Would my building draw needless attention only to reveal...nothing beyond it?

I'll interject with a story. I visited some relatives in a mid-sized town in Wisconsin a year or two back. One of my younger cousins was working in a diner, and we had all gone there one morning when she was working. Here, in the most unlikely of places, was this big, leather-clad biker dude. His jacket was tossed across the back of his chair. Where his t-shirt ended, tattoos picked up covering the skin of his arms -- more were visible on his neck. Totally cliché biker, totally out of place. But what was even more strange was what he was doing, waiting for his food. He was reading a book (no no, that's not the strange part). I looked closer, expecting to find some trashy novel, fulfilling my stereotyped biker. It was Sophie's Choice. Wow. I did NOT see that one coming.

My brother had pointed this out to me, and he proceeded to launch into an explanation of how he loved to have his stereotypes challenged, how it reminded him that each person is an individual.

In my previous post i wrote about causes, and how we cement certain understandings of them in order to keep them straight. This applies to humans, too -- if you go into a 7-11 and the guy behind the counter has an AK-47, a mask on, and is "stocking" the liquor into a box, he's probably not going to ring up your Slurpee. That's a stereotype -- and, if i do say so myself, a damn useful one. It's important for us to distinguish characteristics of people based on appearance -- if you didn't, the 7-11 teller might shoot you one day, and you'll feel pretty stupid! When we do this wrong, it's called prejudice. When we do it properly, it's discerning.

I read an article once (sadly, i've lost the citation) which described a number of attributes upon which strangers evaluate you on first sight. These included the obvious like physical attractiveness, but also intelligence, social standing, and relative wealth. I wonder what first impressions people make of buildings?

Which brings me back to the topic of the project, which i eventually reined it in so that it would stand out without falling victim to landmark-tropes, and by referencing other landmarks in the area. The details are unimportant, but the mechanism by which it was interesting was much more subtly appreciated than the original design. When it advertised its monumentality, the design was not an individual in my mind, but an archetype. But no building should be designed as an archetype, because it can never achieve that goal. It may be perceived that way as a way to understand the environment, but that would be only a superficial involvement with the site.

So why would i mention a restaurant that hardly anyone knows (remember the beginning of the post)? Despite its blasé (archetypal) qualities, it is an individual. Unfortunately, i doubt its architects conceived of it as such.

When i return home from a particular direction, it's the first building that says to me "hey, you're pretty much home now." Sure, i can read the signs that tell me i'm, say, 3 miles out (that's 5 km for you metric folk), but it doesn't really have the same feeling of arrival. And i don't even go to that Damon's. In fact, i think it's owned by a different restaurant chain now, but it's still the same building. It's nothing special, really, but for some subconscious reason, it's the furthest point from my house that heralds arrival.

Which is just one example of how anything can become a landmark. There are others, to be sure. Admittedly, some places are more likely to be landmarks than others. Still, no matter what the building, there's no reason to shy away from monumentality. Ostentatious self-presentation, sure, but if you have a really great idea, there's no sense dumbing it down because it's loud. Let the world hear your thoughts!

And if it's a building, and your idea sucks, we can always tear it down later.

Every Minute Zen

A Zen koan (original source unknown)

Zen students are with their masters at least ten years before they presume to teach others. Nan-in was visited by Tenno, who, having passed his apprenticeship, had become a teacher. The day happened to be rainy, so Tenno wore wooden clogs and carried an umbrella. After greeting him Nan-in remarked: "I suppose you left your wodden clogs in the vestibule. I want to know if your umbrella is on the right or left side of the clogs."

Tenno, confused, had no instant answer. He realized that he was unable to carry his Zen every minute. He became Nan-in's pupil, and he studied six more years to accomplish his every-minute Zen.


A few minutes after completing my last post, i was walking down a hallway in a similar direction as a colleague of mine. Absently -- as i was considering two articles i had just read -- i asked him how he was, or some permutation of that question. His answer was startlingly honest, describing how he hadn't been feeling that well lately, etc. etc...
He never realized it, but i felt terribly embarrassed by his (unintentional) chastisement. Here i had just finished writing about that sort of social interactions, and i was falling into the same old rut. I had lost my Every Minute Zen.

Of course, you can't care about everything all the time. You'd probably go insane. From one perspective of that statement, i can't truly interact with every person i ever pass in a hallway. It might be nice to imagine, but there are simply too many people, and no one has a memory quite that amazing. From another reading of that statement, there are just too many issues to worry about at one time before you crumple under the combined stress of a thousand injustices. The humanitarian crisis in Darfur, AIDS in Africa, civil conflict over the Tibetan Plateau, global warming, crooked (lecherous) politicians, the food industry...

I often shy away from debates about such things. It's not that i don't feel they're important, but i haven't got the time to re-evaluate my position on each subject three times a day. That's the providence of the politicians we elect. They get paid to re-evaluate based on new information; they also have dozens of staffers. Once a position has been carefully considered, most of us have no desire to think about it again, unless we are actively working with that particular problem.

This is what i had done with my previous post. I had been considering human interactions as an anecdote to push an architectural ideal. Architecture is my work, and although work absorbs a large part of my thought and life, there are (*gasp*) times when i am not thinking about architecture. Is this enough?

Is it good enough to be a paragon of certain ideals while at work if you can not uphold those ideals elsewhere?

I have three answers for that. First, the politician argument. A politician is a professional face, a symbol of our ideals. In public, the politician is expected to uphold certain ideals. Like the see-no-evil monkey, we're content if we don't know about the adulterous secret life of the person behind the politician. When we do know, however, it becomes problematic. Our symbol no longer stands for the same things. In this way, the private persona is inextricable from the public works. The best the politician can hope for is to conceal his/her clandestine acts for as long as possible. This lack of every-minute Zen is unacceptable. You are free to disagree. Thomas Jefferson, for example, kept slaves while simultaneously writing the Declaration of Independence, which includes wording which is anti-slavery. You might argue that his lack of every-minute Zen was outweighed by the triumph of his public works.

One the other hand, you have the Luke Skywalker type of hero. I use a fictional example because all real heroes will in some way fall into the third category. Luke Skywalker is essentially perfect. He makes mistakes, but he makes them in good faith. He consistently strives to heal the overtly Fascist regime of the Empire (ever looked up "stormtrooper"?). If he slights a friend while drinking in a cantina, no one is going to disbar his hero status as Savior of the Galaxy. He is not a person, he is a symbol. His every-minute Zen is irrelevant.

The third example is Christopher Columbus. Columbus Day is a national holiday here in the United States. Columbus Day commemorates the "discovery" of the New World. Columbus also started wars, spread disease, and abused the good faith of many native American tribes. How is this different from the Thomas Jefferson example? Both did um, great things...well, maybe accidentally finding 10 million square miles of land isn't so great, but that's not the point. Columbus committed such blatant atrocities that he cannot ascribe to the Luke Skywalker status of symbolic hero. I refuse to accept him as a symbol of greatness, because other people view him as a symbol of suffering, and i choose not to disenfranchise those people with my opinions.

The answer then to all this might be: Keep as much Every-Minute Zen as it takes to be sure your legacy is not affected by it. When in doubt, err on the side of caution, though. The moment we stop trying to get better at it is the moment we aren't doing enough.

Ants

From Waking Life

(Main character is coming out of a subway and bumps into a girl.)

Excuse me.

Excuse me.

Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant, you know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continuously on ant auto-pilot with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw, I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, no. I don't want to be an ant either. Heh. Yeah, thanks for kind of jostling me there. I've been kind of on zombie auto-pilot lately, I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one. It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road. And instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls "the confrontation between their souls." It's like, um, freeing the brave reckless gods within us all.

Then it's like we have met.

(They shake hands)

There's something unusual to me about the inanity of human interaction. Even when you take the time to legitimately ask someone a personal question, there's no guarantee they're in the divulging state of mind requisite for them to respond in kind. You're more likely to get a dismissive "fine" or "all right" to a question à la "how was your day?" than the cathartic expression of emotions that the question ought to elicit.

Of course, this is not terribly surprising. Most people ask such questions as a courtesy, to establish what linguistic theory calls a communicative channel. No one really wants to know "what's up", most of the time. And who can blame them, when the real answer (even from a friend) might be "Well, i didn't sleep very well because i kept having to get up to relieve this explosive diarrhea i've been having, plus my ex-wife isn't speaking to me since i took our kid to that Slayer concert, so that was awkward picking him up before work. Then i missed breakfast, which i was really looking forward to..."

Who cares?

Well, maybe no one, for that example. But the point is that sometimes people really need you to listen to them, and sometimes you really want to know about a person. Especially if you haven't spoken to them in a while, and want to re-establish the connection. But that's not what i wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about crazy architecture. Or at least, architecture which ostensibly has little function, but which i'm going to argue is worthwhile anyway. In another post, i might argue that anything worthwhile is functional, but for lack of a better word, i'll stick with functional. The Vanna Venturi house is a good example. Not the whole thing, just the nowhere stair. It truly is useless. It goes nowhere. But it's interesting, because it's different, and it jostles us out of our ant-mode. That's worth something, right?



Bear with me for a moment as i describe something else entirely. In an entirely appropriate way, the Zumthor Baths at Vals epitomized an idea i had had for years before i'd ever heard of the project. These images taken from another blog.


Here the walls drop directly into the baths, more like naturally flooded caverns than pools with decks, albeit, you know, quartzite and concrete. Now, i've always appreciated an extreme use of water, especially in unexpected places. I suppose baths aren't exactly the most unexpected of places, but the style is pretty fantastic. What if you had something like that in your basement? You know, you open the door to the basement, take a few steps down, and BAM! it's a pool! Pretty awesome, right? Maybe if you really had to have a deck, it could be on the opposite side, so you had to swim there. I guess you could have another entrance of some sort for the land-bound, but that's really not the point. The point is avoiding the banality of normal, almost institutional forms like pools...or stairs.

This is all well and good for design studio, but how can it be realized in the harsh consumerist reality of a practice? Can it? It's certainly not easy to sell something on the basis of how cool and unusual it is. There's validity to the opposition, too. If you live in a house with a second story door that opens to the outside...air...after a while the novelty of it will wear off, and you'll never open the door again, except maybe to laugh about it with visitors. The same goes for the useless stair. It has to be both unusual and useful in another way. You have to want a pool to appreciate a secret basement-pool.

But if you do want one, wouldn't you rather have one that's different from everyone else's? And the more people that feel that way, the more often you'll be jarred out of your ant-mode.

The Post-Secondary Model

Last week i had the opportunity to speak with representatives from a number of architectural firms displaying their works (in the interest of recruiting students, naturally). One of these firms specialized in grade schools around Michigan, which, at first, strongly piqued my interest.

Grade schools, more so than many other clients, have an extremely prescriptive idea of what the school should include, but they also vary wildly in shape. There need to be X number teaching rooms, of which Y need to be science classrooms with sinks and natural gas, which, in the case of an emergency, need to be removed by Z distance from the other classrooms. If the school has a developed music and/or theatre program, those rooms need to be removed from other classes sufficiently to not disturb them or each other. Each teaching room must accommodate at least A number of students, and be flexible enough in use to facilitate subjects B, C, or D. There must be E amount of circulation space around lockers, of which there must be F amount. More recently, there must be sufficient exits for an emergency, but only G entrances, of which all must be observable by the administrative faculty. I could go on, but i think i've made my point.

So i thought a relevant question would be to ask about the ideology of the firm, as far as layouts go. They tempered the answer by stating that the schools themselves vary greatly as far as how "progressive" or "conservative" they want their new building to be, and money, as always, limits how much innovation they can make in any one school. Essentially, they told me nothing at all. I persisted in my questioning, and finally i got to the gory details.

In one example which i was shown, they detailed how the general ideology had been to keep the students in one classroom throughout the day while teachers moved from classroom to classroom (following the post-secondary model, he said). This, he claimed, helped the students develop a sense of community with each other. In addition to staying in the one room for essentially all day, the students would keep the same classroom from year to year, often with similar teachers. "Instead of having a 'sixth grade science teacher'," and i paraphrase, "you would have general science teachers who would teach science to the same cohort of students for many years." This, he again argued, would allow for the teachers to develop a stronger relationship with the students.

I was horrified.

At this point i gave up my previous, spineless courtesy (which i had adopted in the interest of getting the firms to reveal as much as possible to me) in favor of actually standing up for an issue. Why was i so horrified?

"I feel like being stuck in one room all day would be terribly claustrophobic." I said. "Children and teenagers have well documented needs for exercise. Learning in such a stagnant environment can't be good." That was it, i blew any chance of an internship there. But i had just begun to speak to the representative a few minutes before, and these sorts of introductory chats generally lasted about a quarter of an hour. He must have felt a compulsion to continue the conversation for the prescribed amount of time to save face instead of brusquely dismissing me. Or maybe he didn't realize that i was criticizing his style. I don't know.

No, he countered, repeating himself, this would forge community in the students. I went on; the post-secondary model (the collegiate model) operates on a fundamentally different level beyond the form of the school.

First, where do the teachers keep their educational and personal materials? In education there is what's called the "teachable moment," a narrow window during which the instructor can, if they handle it properly, eloquently teach some specific point to great effect. The architect to whom i was speaking informed me that the teachers can carry their materials from room to room on carts. Carts, huh? I've seen teachers forced to use carts. They HATE them.
And that doesn't even address the issue, it just shunts it to the side. Most teachers have more 'stuff' than can be carried in a cart. They'd need personal offices (and not just for their stuff, but so the students would be able to find their teachers during non-class times). Honestly though, how many public schools have the kind of money necessary to give all their teachers private offices? If they did, they wouldn't be adopting this more "cost-efficient" (the rep's words, not mine) model.

Secondly, why should we aim to emulate a model in which the vast majority of the teachers are not actually trained in educational pedagogy? They may be experts in their field (and you can't even make that argument for graduate student instructors, or T.A.'s as they are sometimes called, as they have no field experience, only theoretical knowledge), but that doesn't mean they have any idea how to teach. Classes often take the style of the lecture, which is not an effective teaching model for younger, more easily distracted students.

I told my mother this story the next day (she's a language teacher), and she added an excellent point. A huge amount of the learning in schools is social learning. Figuring out what is socially acceptable, and finding your place in the complex social network is crucial to developing maturity, and more importantly, a sense of self. Additionally, having a larger group of students with which to interact is the epitome of the diversity argument. There's only so much diversity present in a single class, but an entire school's worth of students can have much, much more.

I don't really think i got through to him. His answer is the easy one -- it's sufficiently different from the norm to suggest that he's edgy and progressive, but mainstream enough that it's easily accepted without his having to legitimately validate it to clients. What the alternative, though? There's certainly a problem with the physical forms of our schools, else teachers would be clamoring for restoration projects instead of completely new buildings (which is the case occasionally, but only when bond issues fail and money becomes a problematic limiting factor).

I don't know. I don't know if anyone does. But the answer is not inconsequential.

Context (One)

There are a fabulous number of buzzwords in the architectural realm. There's a bizarre need for ideas to be "organic", "generative" or, my personal favorite (not really), "dynamic". Most of the time these are thrown around so flippantly that they've lost any real semblance of meaning. Even when they are used with a particular meaning in mind, the overuse of the words has caused a cornucopia of understandings. Essentially, people are talking about different things all while using the same words.

What's most amazing is that no one really seems to notice this. They'll have a conversation with a colleague, superior, or student without realizing that the other has absolutely no clue what is being said. This is fun to watch, if you can hold both meanings of the word in your head at the same time, like an Abbott and Costello skit.

Incidentally, the ability to understand contradictory situations at once has been held up as one of the ways in which Humans separate themselves from the Lesser Animals. Of course, before that was metacognition(disproved through rats, of all animals), and before that was self recognition (disproved through elephants,, dolphins, and others), and so forth. I digress, but that's ok, because that's the sort of thing that i'm interested in anyway.

So if you can hold those two ideas in your mind at once, you'll notice that the conversationalists are not even truly responding to one another but rather homing in on a single word (usually the misunderstood one) and saying anything that they know about that particular word-concept. While this continues the talking, it doesn't really push the conversation anywhere. I would say this kind of speech doesn't serve any useful purpose, but i suppose it helps to elicit an image of a polite, informed individual to the other person. After all, if you're lucky they'll assume you're really smart and know much more about the topic than they do.

What i really wanted this post to be about, though, was context, which is, admittedly, one of those kinds of words.

Context is often shunted to the side of an architectural project, or at best considered to be on par with issues like form and function. But i argue that while words like environment, culture, and other local factors relate to particulars (that is, they exclude certain qualities), the locus of topics within context is infinite (plainly said, nothing is not part of context). You might rightly say that developments in the fishing industry has no cultural impact on Tibetan farming villages. What you're doing is putting fishing in the context of the farming village. It's inescapable.

So when so-called experts make claims like 'this building does a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings, but fails programmatically because the local vernacular style is ill suited to the construction style of a hospital/school/absurdly dangerous chemicals plant', they're ignoring the idea that the local vernacular style being ill suited to the construction style of whatever IS the contextual relationship to its surroundings.

On a side note, a teacher of mine way back in high school informed me that her husband owned some kind of small factory (i want to say it made fire extinguishers, but that's almost too ironic) which produced a large amount of shredded scrap magnesium. As you may or may not know, magnesium, in the presence of friction, ignites. Explosively. With a white-hot searing flame of permanent annihilation. Ok, i made up the last part of that, but i think it actually is white flame. That's not important in the context of this article, i was talking about um, something.

The thing those "experts" are overlooking is at the crux of my argument. If the building failed to take into consideration the program, then it did not "do a good job of contextually relating to its surroundings."

When you look at context, you have to look at everything. And that's key -- in all facets of life.

Genesis is a good place to start

I was thinking about what to call this blog just a moment ago, so i consulted the internet for help. Foolish. Names are important, i get that. In fact, that was one of the first things i wanted to write about in this blog (but not yet). What then, do i come across as i'm searching for beautiful words that people will use when TELLING THEIR FRIENDS about this blog? A post from the xkcd forums (which, i might add, is an excellent webcomic).

Allow me to regurgitate the words of AKADriver on Tue Dec 04, 2007, whom i have never met.

I've got a few hypotheses.

In a low-context culture like that shared by English-speaking Westerners, it's considered a requirement to be polysyllabic to succinctly convey any sort of richness of meaning. The longer a word is, the more nuanced its meaning becomes.

Historically, in English, longer words of Latin and Greek origin were considered more prestigious among literati. A lot of modern English vocabulary, including all those fussy SAT words, was built in the 16th and 17th century because of this trend.

A word that's used infrequently lends itself to aesthetic study, because you're less apt to examine it based on its meaning.

For fun, try rephrasing that second sentence with only the vocabulary of Simple English.

Just to play devil's advocate, words with strong beauty associations can sound beautiful too, even if they're short -- like love, or rose.

I couldn't help but shake my head in frustration and groan upon seeing that. It is the archetypal argument of sign/signifier/signified which i have heard so many times in my Design Fundamentals classes. But like i said, that's not what i wanted to talk about in this first blog.

I wanted to set forth a list of a few topics for later discourse. I encourage any and all readers to suggest more.

(The Big Ones)
Context
Sustainability
Homogeneity
Materials

(A Few Recurring Topics)
Architects as People
Students as Architects
Pedagogy (Resistance)
The Vernacular and the Monumental
The Future of Architecture vs. The Reality of Architecture

(Context)
Architecture as related to other professions, such as
-Psychology
-Philosophy
-Science & Math
-Music
-Art
-Education
-Health
-Recreation
-Commerce

And within all this i hope to make a blog that you enjoy reading, because that's the point of putting my opinions out into the public realm, right?