It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Instead of talking about my work, I thought I’d give a little shout out to all my friends who are making interesting things happening.
A friend of mine from MIT, Sarah Dunbar, is showing a piece at the biennial in Korea. She’s posted a few in progress photos of the installation to flickr. It looks amazing!
Image:Sarah Dunbar
Image:Sarah Dunbar
Bryan Boyer, who works for Sitra these days, just finished running creating the website for a Low2No a sustainable design competition. Arup was the winner in a field that included REX and BIG. The designs were “sketchy”, but I thought the design brief itself put some stakes into the ground at the appropriate scale– somewhere in-between an urban and architectural project. I’m excited to see what comes out of it!
In the spirit of green, my friends over at Howeler Yoon have posted a couple of rad looking renders of a new project they’re working on. I wonder if those pods are truncated octahedrons.
Image: Howeler Yoon
Image: Howeler Yoon
Last but not least, Stephen Perdue, one of my close friends from MIT is recently underemployed thanks to the construction recession in Boston. I’ve worked with him on a number of projects and he makes beautiful work. The upside of this is that you can hire him. He’s quietly updating his portfolio here. (Expect more great stuff in the next couple days.)
Some of my favorites are “Malibu Nights” and Stephen’s thesis “MegaShed”
I went to the thrift store the other day to pick up a baking pan. While I was there I decided to get an inexpensive refill on Louis L’Amour paperbacks. At 65 cents a piece, these little books are meant to be consumed by the stack, but I am really enjoying these low budget Westerns.
After reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and a review of Pynchon’s new book in the New Yorker (and another review in The Stranger) I get the feeling that noir is back to being a stylish repository for real intellect. (Whoo!)
Seriously, from the review it sounded like Pynchon (Pynchon!) has written a novel that’s like The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and a little Easton Ellis (the west coast Ellis) all rolled into one. I’m pretty excited to read it.
Maybe the Western has already been played, but somehow I see it making a similar stand. There are characters, tropes, and story lines which could play nicely when modernized. (I wish the guy who made Brick would make a Western…) And I wonder, if I decided to make a building that was in the style of one of these Louis L’Amour books, what it mightlooklike.
I’ve been away from this blog for a while, but it’s because I’ve been sort of busy…. and also lazy, so lazy. Here’s a batch of updates in no particular order. More to come, of course.
For work, I’ve been managing construction for two interior projects at Microsoft.
One is an office remodel for my group, Office Labs. We’ve been working in an old building: Building 4– the buildings are numbered by when they were built on the Redmond Campus– that’s been less than ideal for team work and collaboration. Basically, we’re taking down a lot of walls and putting up some glass to provide areas where people can work together more easily. I’ve designed a couple really simple pieces of furniture for the space too. Pictures will come soon.
The other is the second phase of the Envisioning Center, a lab space where my team (the Envisioning Team) will experiment with different software and hardware prototypes. I’ll talk more about this later. There’s still much more work to be done on the space. Another phase. Furniture. Technology pieces. For now enjoy the renderings.
At home, I’ve been playing around with type and some Oppen lines (many thanks to K). Posted a few more to flickr.
In older news, my friend, Pablo Herrera, has published a book which accumulates the work we’ve (Kenfield, Daniel, Pablo & our students) done in a series of Rhino Workshops in Latin America.
Last but not least, my good friend Arthegall is finally engaged to the lovely R. Congratulations! (It’s about time.)
I’ve been fooling around with 3d studio max recently and vray displacement maps. I made a movie.
(Probably, better quality on youtube HQ)
And a couple of “archtectural” collages with gynoids stolen from Hajime Sorayama (NSFW!), an artist who I admire. He’s a little soft core, but I think his work is striking.
It’s been pretty fun and I’d like to make some more. One problem I’ve run into is how to extract geometry from the displacement map rendering. Basically, the mesh is calculated at render time. (All I’ve modelled in these images is a sphere, cube, and plane.) So the mesh is there, but I can’t export it. If anyone knows how to get it into a .3ds or obj file, please let me know.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.
The proposed project, was sparked from an early art piece by Gordon Matta-Clark called Odd Lots. In the project, Matta Clark mapped out a series of tiny plots of land in New York that because of their shape or size, were “valueless”.
For our contribution, called Super Neutral, we proposed that a carbon credit market could be used to connect small projects with small design firms. Individually, the projects could be tiny, but taken together you might see changes on an urban scale.
I uploaded a few of the rough renders I did for the props I designed for the Productivity Vision Video. I modeled them all in Rhino, rendered in Max. And then had them milled out of acrylic at a local shop out here.
This is the clear desk monitor that one of the office workers uses:
I’m going to be running a Rhinoscripting workshop at the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts in Portland on the 29th and 30th, with the illustrious Kenfield Griffiths as my copilot. My understanding is that most of the attendees will be design faculty from the school who wish to brush up their digital chops. (Although, I’ve been away from the Rhino so long, they might be teaching me instead.)
It should be a lot of fun. I’m still working out the lesson plans. Since there’s only two days, things will be very compressed. I guess I should toss this out there: for anyone who’s ever taken a workshop with me (or is an architect), what would be a valuable lesson that you could learn in two days about Rhinoscripting?
Hello! I am recent graduate of the Masters of Architecture program at MIT, now a UX Designer at Microsoft. I write about design, architecture, technology and whatever else strikes my fancy.
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