The edge of a petal

More thoughts on representation in architecture… foetal, as usual. I won’t name names, but I find that some architects (as opposed to artists) have strange ways of judging things.

So as to not offend, I’ll pretend it’s me as an example. (Apologies for going all anecdatal here…)

Let’s say I’m into Takashi Murakami: He’s cool. But when I see a building that is colorful and graphic, like FAT’s work, for example. I give it the thumbs down: They’re not so cool. It’s as if I have two separate modes for judging stuff that I see. In my reptilian-architecture brain, architectural representation somehow gets evaluated differently than other visual input. I have an affection for the authenticity of an old wooden bass, but strive to make clean, modern design when I make walls. What?

Of course, by pointing out slight inconsistencies, I don’t wish to prohibit variety of tastes. Quite the opposite, I think architects would feel a certain relief if they tried to unify their judgments a bit.

Why couldn’t architectural drawings and models look like Murakami prints? Or just more like the stuff that you (the architect) likes?

When I look at my own work and it’s a failure, which happens often, there are two culprits to blame.

One: I didn’t work hard enough. (Michel Gondry said at a talk at MIT that when people call him a genius he would disagree. His talent, instead, was “finishing”.)

Two: My idea sucked. Why? Because the series of judgements that went into it were flawed; what I judged to be beautiful was, in fact, a steamy pile.

Sometimes one is responsible, sometimes both. When it’s the second I take a long look at the stuff I like… I try and draw a path between that stuff and my stuff. Was the original stuff stupid? Or am I just not copying it right? I try and answer these questions. Maybe I have to go look at other, similar stuff and decide if I like that too. Then I try again.

This is a pretty fun process!

Filed under: architecture

Post Hyper Post

Ack, Cathy, it’s another architecture post!

Bryan once sent me to this TED talk by Joshua Prince-Ramos of REX, formerly of OMA. (And now Bryan blogs this post, which is a more beautiful way of saying what I’m about to say.)

I still think about it often. The major reason is that now that I live in Seattle I have access to the library itself. It’s a really beautiful building. Filled with surprises both visual and useful. Honestly, I like the building…really.

What I’m obsessed with, however, is the presentation of the building, the TED talk.  Prince-Ramos’ hyper-rational architecture (a sibling to Wes Jones‘ post post-critical hyper-critical architecture) is very presentable architecture. (Perhaps even the most presentable architecture EVAR!) Clear, singular readings of intention coupled with the diagrammatic approach have reached their apex. The buildings argument has no holes or flaws or faulty logic. This is the type of presentation that every architecture student aspires too. Form whose reasons for being are not only completely decipherable but also (morally) indisputable. Prince-Ramos wins!

It is also, as Pete DePasquale put it, a “soulless” presentation. Which is odd, because I find many of REX’s buildings to be pretty provocative, albeit in an old-school way. The Wyly Theater reeks deliciously of early Koolhaus; I can’t wait to see it.

Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on whether or not Prince-Ramos is a good architect (which I think he is) or even if this type of presentation produces good buildings (which it might).

What I enjoy doing is taking buildings that I love and trying to think about how I would present them. Could I represent any of FAT’s work in the Prince-Ramos framework? Many of Bryan’s (who I’m mentioning endlessly in this post, sorry!) colleagues seem to have a strange relation to the firm. They’ll say something like: “I’m glad someone does that kind of work, I just don’t know if I want to be part of it.” If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a backhanded compliment, sadly, a skill which architects are mastering. (Toosh!)

My guess is that some types of architecture just don’t present well, and students are afraid to create and defend projects that they might actually approve of. Which means that there might be a problem with our secret predilection for certain modes of representation over others.

I also suspect that the lovely thing about reopening architectural representation for discussion is that we can also talk about judgment. Though I’m not sure how to draw that link, so that’ll have to be another post.

Filed under: architecture

Preemptive Blogging

So I never tied that David Foster Wallace passage to any concrete thoughts, mostly because those thoughts were fluffy and dumb. This recent post by T got me piqued enough to try. Long story short, T noticed a link on his fathers delicious feed and decided to preemptively blog post about the link. The content of the link and the post are both quite interesting, but what I’m focused on is the preemptive blog from a piece of life stream. T subtly asserts that his father might have deliberately delicious-ed that link in order to provoke an argument.

Which is awesome.

Life streams or life casts are a big thing right now. (Think facebook updates) In future, our life streams will probably be more fleshed out and include a lot of data sensed, mined or sampled from activities, but a good chunk of it will just as it is now: personally constructed. And like all constructed things (read: “the built world”) it has the capacity for falsehood as easily as truth.

Like the video phone face masks of David Foster Wallace, people are just as interested in constructing alternate lives as they are in broadcasting their own. Take this site for example, that, given a few key words, builds a “clever” twitter for you post. Or this story from election time, of a woman who lied (via twitter and flickr) about getting beaten and mugged for wearing a McCain sticker. Or even how Kottke’s RSS feed has Kottke Recommends “Sponsored by…” ads inline.

Last night, I read an article in the NYTimes Mag about advertising in the age of the internet. It kind of made me sick to my stomach. (Although, since my job is mostly marketing, I’m probably cut from the same moral cloth.)

Anyway, what I find exciting behind the practice of false lifestreams is the idea of narrative peeking through. It’s an odd (and somewhat communal) way of writing a story. One of my favorite books, Miss Lonelyhearts, was supposedly written on notecards, a sentence at a time, one sentence per card. Nathanael West might have written his novel on twitter or delicious with equal aplomb.

Filed under: technology

Chronomancer

Saw this vid that I thought was kinda cool:

Reminds me of an old Gondry vid:

Filed under: movies, music, technology

Dreaming about Sleeping

Posted a couple more Giglamesh quotes to flickr…. more on the way.

Filed under: art, projects

Caps Off to David Foster Wallace

I have been thinking about this part of Wallace’s Infinite Jest so gosh darn often these days, that I thought I’d literally rewrite part of it here– just give myself a fresher memory to pull from. Here’s the beginning. Copied verbatim. (DFW, you are sadly missed. There’s one less genius in the world.)

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WHY- THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE’S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. ‘VIDEOPHONY’) ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY- CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAT FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THAT HAD THAT LITTLE ‘INTELLIGENT-AGENT’ HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE INCONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS- BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADILT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANIACALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR…AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONY?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of consumer high-tech.

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You’ll have to grab the book (or borrow it from a friend, as I did) to read the rest.

It’s worth it!

Filed under: books, technology

The Four R’s, Part I: Writing

Too Many MCs, Not Enough Mics

The idea that I’ve got anything original to say is patently false. Most of my good ideas are basically my friends ideas.

A while ago, T and I had a lot of talks about the nature of the web, its relation to what we actually do in real life and what kinds of tools it should have. We’ve talking about the idea of conversations on the web. Specifically, the way conversations happen in blogs.

The major problem (that T observed) is that blogs are not structured very well for multithreaded conversations; they barely work for a dialogue. I’d like to extend this thought to the content that’s on the web, in general.

If you were to imagine the internet as a connected graph, with a site or webpage or document being a node, and the edges being links (hrefs) between the pages, you’d find two things.

First, the graph is “all node”. In the past decade, the size, quantity, and quality of the nodes have all increased or improved. We’ve seen an explosion of tools that allow you to put whatever content you want, in whatever format you want into the ether. However, these tools only really affect the nodes of this graph. The edges remain thin. Not only are the edges devoid of content, but when it comes to links the semantic web is pretty much a dead beat dad.

There are starting to be tools out there which “thicken” the edge. Delicious, in it’s own way, is one (and one of the most powerful). An abysmal example is Snapfish, aka disable-this-wordpress-plug-in-asap. Another richer example, however, might be this web app that my bud Jason showed me called apture.

It’s got the ability to make links rich, with a simple javascript include. And it starts to overlay that information, through rollovers and popups, in such a way that it might enhance my understanding rather than randomize me.

There’s also another approach to thickening the edge, one that’s a little more my style. Imagine again, the entire internet (every site, node, or destination) flattened out into a single sheet. I can browse by panning and zooming, an interface we already see gaining popularity in apps like cooliris and seadragon. With a traditional link, I click on something and I am instantaneously taken there with no transition. In this UI, clicking on a link can either zoom (allowing me to see content at greater resolution) or pan (showing me related content).

What’s cool about these transitions is that I can see what’s happening in between. The edge is an entire transition, a set of nodes that you can see as you pass from one to another, or details that you might miss with single, instant focus.

So what does this have to do with writing? Well, content creation on the internet is still mostly “writing” which is still associated with node creation rather than edge creation. This leads to situations where you’ve got redundant nodes because you can’t “write” an edge very well. For example, how many of you have seen in your feed reader the same post (sometimes with the same wording) repeated on several different blogs? Why can’t these be aggregated and filtered easily? It would seem to be a simple task, at first.

Or consider how you use your social network on your reader or delicious. It’s not enough to know that your friend visited a particular site, you’d love to know more about how they actually used it. I would like to be able to see a delicious url (of one of my friends) in a pan & zoom movie. I can watch, 3rd person, how someone else uses the internet, and at any time takeover and find things myself. (There is a danger here, of course, of “turning everything into a videogame”.)

Anyway, these thoughts are bit random, but I am trying to be quite practical about them. After getting a new laptop, instead of immediately reinstalling all my familiar apps, I’ve tried to switch to things I think I should be using and seeing if they impact my productivity.

Filed under: projects, technology