September 22, 2009 • 10:24 pm
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”
Image:Stephen Perdue
Image:Stephen Perdue
Filed under: architecture, personal
August 17, 2009 • 4:57 pm
I spent last week on vacation with K. No, internets. (whew!)
We backpacked for 3 days in the Olympics, which was beautiful even though it pretty much rained the entire time. In a show of solidarity, Mattie packed in and out her own food.
It was really amazing. Afterwards, K and I stopped by Olympic National Park (which doesn’t allow dogs– so we’ll have to come back another time without the furry one) to see the rainforest.
I used to read a lot of fairy tales when I was a kid… [Aside: When I first learned to read my father would only let us read books in the non-fiction section. But I found a loop hole! Myths and fairy tales have a call number, so they count!] Anyway, fairy tales and even Tolkien have represented the woods and forests as something mysterious, dark and even scary. For the most part, I didn’t understand it. At the Olympics National Forest, the trees are huuuuge, with roots that make strange shapes, burrows and passage ways. A series of trees will grow in a row on a fallen log and form a nurse log colonnade. Then the log will rot out and you’ll have a tunnel of roots underneath the trees. Architecture!
Filed under: hobbies, personal
My lovely partner, K, has organized a “Salon” at our place and we’re about to have the second of what is hopefully a long series. Basically, we pick two of our talented and unsuspecting friends to give a presentation on something that interests them.
I’ve built a little website for the event here. (still working some bugs and content fixes!)
If you’re around Seattle, and would like to come, please let me know. It’s been really great to talk to people in depth about subjects that they find fascinating.
Maybe you could present?
Filed under: hobbies, personal, projects
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.)
Filed under: architecture, art, friends, hobbies, personal, projects
Had an “art” idea:
Take Derrida’s Différance lecture and run it through google translate, translating from French to English and back again. Repeat until the translations remain unchanged. Voila!
Click on this image for the poster sized version.
Filed under: art, personal, projects
A month or two ago I had some work of mine (a collaboration with Shirley Shen and Andrea Brennen) on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The show was called Actions: What You Can Do With the City. From the CCA’s call to action:
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.
All photos Michel Legendre ©CCA. More photos, courtesy of the CCA can be found here.
Filed under: architecture, personal, projects
April 15, 2009 • 12:53 am
As part of my hiring package at Microsoft, I got a very modest stock award. Those of you who know me also know that I have never owned any stocks in my life and also usually don’t have any savings.
However, these are tough economic times and I’d at least like to keep track of how the stock I have (it’s not much and it’s all in one company) is doing. I’d also like to keep track of it with a daily reminder, a daily notice that fits in with my other daily activities. For me this means twitter.
What I want is something pretty simple. A twitter account that I can follow that will update me on Microsoft’s stock price daily. Now there are a number of twitter stockbots out there. Generally, however, you have to ask them for a stock quote. (Which defeats the whole push model of twitter to begin with) After searching for 5 minutes on the internet and not finding a solution, I decided to build my own.
I took an rss feed from QuoteRSS.com and then used TwitterFeed.com to tweet it to a new Twitter account. I think it’s all working, and it literally took about 10 minutes from start to finish. The only annoying part was having to create a new twitter account; this seems really dumb.
In the same way that I can build and manage my RSS feeds, I’d really really like be able to create virtual twitter accounts. Twitter isn’t just about looking at other news sources or information outside of myself. Twitter should be able to deliver stuff that I can curate.
I need a Yahoo Pipes for Twitter.
Filed under: personal, programming, projects, technology
February 22, 2009 • 3:29 am
As I mentioned a post ago, I was throwing old work up onto flickr. One project was a bird house, the other was a set of stairs and a copper wall.
It was the first architectural project I’ve ever worked on.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I had just learned Rhinoscript and that was my major contribution to the project. Ann Pendleton-Julian and Alex Tsamis brought me in. They wanted to know if I could turn an involute into a staircase.
So I scripted one.
It was an exterior stair for the rear entrance, the one closest to the garage.
The stair was tucked into the innards of the building but still exterior thanks to a copper wall that wrapped deeply inward.
Ann thought it would be boring if all the copper tiles were the same so I wrote another script that basically fit a set of tiles with varying sizes onto the surface. The script used large tiles in areas of little curvature and smaller tiles where the curve tightened.
![copper4 [Converted]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/233/3264995120_01f793fbda.jpg)
If I can find the scripts I used I’ll post them as well.
Filed under: architecture, personal, programming, projects
February 13, 2009 • 6:57 am
While I was digging through my old stacks of “archived” cds and dvds. I found a couple of old projects that I decided to upload to flickr.
One was a competition I did with Sarah Dunbar and Stephen Perdue. The brief was to repurpose the old water towers on the roofs and in the skyline of Chicago. Like other entries, we proposed a birdhouse. But ours was for a very specific bird: purple martins that would actually nest at the height of the towers.
We removed material from the towers to let the birds in, but in such a way (using the solar angles) that the silhouette would still be complete as one looked up. The wooden pieces from the towers were then reconfigured into park furniture. (Probably the more unsuccessful part of the project.) For the watertower, we actually built a huge 3 foot high model and dragged it onto the roof to photograph.
More photos of the project are here. (Photos taken by Perdue)
The other project I uploaded, I’ll share in another post…
Filed under: architecture, personal, projects
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