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sha hwang
The Fallen: Home And Away - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Gmail Emoticons are pretty weird
when you line them up like this
9 Years of Sleep - PhobosLab
DesignIntelligence » Blog Archive » Is the Profession of Architecture Corrupt?
The internship that the architectural profession requires for licensure takes place in un-accredited, un-monitored, private offices across the country. Because this three-year period is mandatory, offices have an incentive to exploit intern labor, using it for self-serving rather than educational ends. Interns have no leverage to change these conditions and thereby further their training. Often they work for little or no pay, in violation of national labor laws, which virtually ensures their permanent economic dependency on this flawed system.
via di.net
via Ben Golder, sad but true
Vakko Fashion Center by REX
REX’s adaptive-reuse expertise enabled it to modify plans from another canceled project in the United States, allowing construction to begin only four days after REX received the commission.
The thing I appreciate and love about architecture is that everything is site-specific — I think it's one of the factors that separates architecture as a field from the more incestuous fields of graphic design, product design, and industrial design — and one of the factors that ties it much more closely with things like interaction design.
The act of recycling a canned project (in this case the Annenberg Center) is a little scary and uncomfortable to me, and throws a lot of sand in the eyes of the very idea of Program, which OMA itself spread as an idea so very long ago. Which is to say, if we truly believe that there is a conceptual urgency to X project, how can we possibly say it applies to Y project, in Z country?
Another interesting thread is where the project moved from, and where it moved to. The Annenberg Center was to be a new building at CalTech, and the Vakko Fashion Center is a new construction in Turkey. Turkey is no Dubai, but I get a similar sense of the Excitement of Possibility for architecture outside the US, outside the constrained environment of California, etc.
The last thread is something silly and fanciful and personal for me to gravitate towards, but I can't help it:
By slumping a structural “X” into each pane to increase the glass’s strength, the glass’s thickness was reduced and the need for perimeter mullions was eliminated.
I love this. I love that in the pursuit of a perhaps shallow goal (be transparent about structure), the facade can actually become activated and imbued with structural logic on its own. It reminds me of the chair I did a few years ago, during a summer in Denmark:
The idea of fulfilling both aesthetic and structural goals, by cutting and folding for the chair or by slumping and impressing for the glass, is what I like to think about as the search for the monocoque, that hope of the visual and veneer carrying a deep logic rather than a shallow afterthought.
Millennials: They Know What They Don’t Want
http://bigthink.com/ideas/18170
"They’re going to write a career novel chapter by chapter, but the chapters aren’t necessarily going to be written in one company and in kind of a vertical way at all. It’s going to be much more horizontal and across companies, across industries and that one of the most important criteria in writing that novel and choosing those chapters and navigating through them will be what do I think makes me feel like I am fulfilling my purpose. These students have an astounding sense of their own purpose and this great kind of well or hot spring if you will, of idealism that nourishes, that gushes underneath that sense of purpose"
and
"I think there is something else though that’s very important I’ve learned from these students and it’s fascinating, but it’s a little bit less cheerleading ... most of them haven’t known any real failure. So there is an acknowledged fragility that lives in them and I think it’s been fascinating to watch them through this recession because it hit so fast and so hard. I was teaching last spring as the economy was really unwinding and it was fascinating to see some of the latent fear, some of the kind of almost quiet excitement that oh boy, the world is changing. It’s not going to be so easy. It’s going to be harder. What are we going to learn? How are we going to be tested? And it’s just interesting to see that they know they haven’t been tested. They know their backbones haven’t been built by the opportunity of adversity and it will be interesting to see how they respond to this economy and the new normal that is coming out of it. "
s
Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architect by Denise Scott Brown
Stars cannot create themselves. Why do architects need to create stars? Because, I think, architecture deals with unmeasurables. Although architecture is both science and art, architects stand or fall in their own estimation and in that of their peers by whether they are "good designers," and the criteria for this are ill-defined and undefinable.Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic.
Publique Living Grafik180:CityArt
N Building
via vimeo.com
QR Facade
