Author: Kurt

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MANDOLIN AND CLARINET

The Transparent Drawing workshop conducted on Monday went super. I will make at least two pages of the drawings that the students did while providing full details of the event. I was hoping to...

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SELF-ACCOMPLISHING ABSOLUTE IMAGES

As we have established, images reside in our memories. When we draw, or learn, we add images to our memories. This adding of images to memory only increases the value of images that are...

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DREAMTIME

Where do we go when we design? I mean in our minds. Where do we go mentally? Is our mental design space recognizable to us? I don’t know about anyone else, but the mental...

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ELLSWORTH KELLY PLANT DRAWINGS

I have become enamored with the plant drawings of Ellsworth Kelly. These are simple outline drawings of various plant stalks and leaves. I guess what attracts me is their elemental simplicity. Mr. Kelly’s rigorous...

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INSIDE OUT

Charles Ellis, who is an architect and educator, wrote to express what he sees as the inside out aspects of Transparent Drawing. He goes on to say that he also like to design from...

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OPTIMISM QUOTIENT APPLICATION

We introduced the concept of the Optimism Quotient (OQ). Let’s make a crude / broad brush / thumbnail / back of a napkin attempt at applying the OQ to buildings and see what happens....

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OPTIMISM QUOTIENT

“…there is a sort of innate optimism in all works of the imagination” This thought, by Bachelard on page 153, is great. The act of imagining is optimistic. The act of problem solving is...

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DRAWING IN AND OUT

“…the mind that imagines follows the opposite path of the mind that observes.” Bachelard, (p151 The Poetics of Space), proposes that observation is opposite to imagining. He is saying that the working of our...

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AYRE HOTEL OVIEDO

Another travel related page as we are in Toronto this week. During our recent trip to northern Spain, we spent a night in the Ayre Hotel Oviedo, which was designed by Calatrava. Now, I...

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ROCKPORT GRANITE

We are away this week. So I prepared this travel related page ahead of time. When you travel, you don’t have to limit yourselves to drawing buildings. I took me years to realize this. ...

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VALUE MINIATURIZATION

“The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. One must go beyond logic...

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BUCKY FULLER INSPIRATION

In my reading this weekend I came upon this inspirational quote from Buckminster Fuller.  Reading Bucky is always a fuller inspiration. “Physics has found no solids! So to keep on teaching our children the...

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SITELESS

I just bought the book Siteless by Francois Blanciak. Seems like I am always finding out about books way after I should. This was published in 2008. And I only found out about it...

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CLIENT COGNITION

Client cognition.  I have been looking for a term to describe one of the themes here at Transparent Drawing;  client / designer interface.  So I thought that client cognition would be an appropriate tag...

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OVERWEIGHTING

I continue to be amazed by the design decisions that people make. Not just my clients. But everyone. How can it be that people are content to live in culturally historical dark boxes? How...

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METAPHOR QUOTIENT

Decrease the metaphor quotient in your drawings. The more directly your drawings relate to the problem you are working to solve, the less of a metaphor they are, and the lower your metaphor quotient....

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VIRTUAL PENCIL AND BRUSH

More thoughts on evolving digital drawing interfaces. SensAble Technologies, a digital interface company operating in the 1990s, manufactured a handheld controller which gave users the virtual sensation of actually touching onscreen objects.  In their...

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MESSY DESIGN

The robotics revolution is upon us. Reports and predictions continually express great concern that the machines will take over. While some robotic systems strive for artificial intelligence, others are geared to intelligence augmentation. Robotic...

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SUI GENERIS

Dubuffet, as reported by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, educates us on the Art Brut movement which the artist Dubuffet championed.  While I have not had a chance to see the Dubuffet show...

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ANDO IN WILLIAMSTOWN

We willingly go far and wide to see museums.  So it was great to see a museum practically in our back yard;  Ando’s addition to The Clark in Williamstown. These pages have addressed the...

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PICASSO AT MOMA 2

Used to be, when I would see a show like the Picasso Sculptures currently at MOMA, my attention would be superficial, for lack of a better term.  That is to say, I would look...

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PICASSO AT MOMA 1

How could there be such free composition, such deft assembly, and such humor? In every piece? This show has to be considered the motherlode. I believe that the entirety of modernism, if not the...