Gothic Sublime: Ruskin Meets Wood

What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence.
The only consequence is what we do.
- John Ruskin

 
All the really good ideas I ever had
came to me while I was milking a cow.                        
- Grant Wood

(There’s something about those two guys that make them a good [...]

Yet Another Reason Why I Love My Job: Deliverers’ Deliverance

A major factor in whether people enjoy the place they work has to do with the quality of the people they work with, and whether there are ample opportunities to learn from those people. Some professions lend themselves to this naturally. Take the firm I work for, RogenSi, which is a Business Performance Consultancy.  Back [...]

Managing Through Tough Times : Finding Your Inner Ball

What is presently the tallest completed skyscraper in the world (but not for long) also has the world’s most massive ball. 
As an elegant solution to stabilizing the tower against lateral stresses such as wind shear and earthquakes (because human civilizations have a tendency to build along windy coasts and major fault lines), the designers of the Taipei [...]

Enough to Fill Yankee Stadium…

Last week a friend took me out to see a baseball game at Yankee stadium, a first for me. The New York Yankees were playing the Toronto Blue Jays, so based on my history of metro-area residency, it meant I had the pleasure of watching two of my hometown arch-rivals play against each other.  The Yankees [...]

Life After People : The Architecture of Deconstruction

Segue from my previous post:  This month the History Channel is premiering a special called “Life After People” where a group of engineers, artists and visual effects technicians have created simulated long term decay scenarios for large, well-known structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Sears Tower. 
PREVIEW HERE: http://www.history.com/minisite.do?content_type=Minisite_Generic&content_type_id=57582&display_order=1&mini_id=57517
The emphasis of the [...]

“Crystal Island” by Sir Norman Foster

With this latest announced world’s-biggest-building-ever, “Crystal Island,”  I’d say we’re finally catching up to the imagined utopian future of “the year two thousand.”  No flying robot cars, but then again, I’m sure the place will have great Internet access, something they didn’t predict back in the early days of color television and Isaac Asimov.
Moscow’s rapidly growing [...]

R.I.P. “IS” (Is is dead. Long live is.)

About a month ago, Facebook announced that it would drop the required verb “is” for its users’ status updates.  However they had some technical issues (Is is very complicated), so that change only took effect today. 
All the pundits seems to agree it’s a good thing. They write about how users were too constrained by starting [...]

Hug a Professor Day

 Maybe it was a professor you had in college or university, a teacher in high school (or even CEGEP, for those who know what that is)… or maybe it was a TA (teacher’s assistant), or your thesis advisor… but whoever it was, you haven’t spoken to them in years. 
 Well, it’s time that you reached out [...]

28,224 hugs, 32,931 lies, 29 broken hearts : Chris Ware’s Building Stories

Chris Ware has recently completed his 29-page series, “Building Stories,” which is soon to be published in book form.  Here is a page from it:

Many years ago a wise man said to me, “Meaning is architecture comes through use.”  Designing a building with particular forms, symbols, signifiers, etc. is all well and good, but what people [...]

Geocaching : Rediscovering The World Through Augmented Reality

Although I first heard about it several years ago, only recently have I embraced the hobby/sport of geocaching. If you haven’t heard about geocaching, here it is in a nutshell:  A worldwide treasure hunt, using GPS.  This involves people hiding (and seeking) little boxes of stuff, all around you and logging the geographic coordinates on public websites.  [...]

What I Learned From Michael Jemtrud

I learned a lot of different things from Michael Jemtrud, but one thing that has really stuck with me over the years is the following idea, sketched out on a scrap piece of paper in a School of Architecture computer lab.
This graph represents a Generalist… i.e., someone who knows a little bit about a lot of different [...]