FACTUAL DESIGN
Show me the facts. Where’s the facts? Just the facts, maam. Architects and designers need more facts. If we can establish visual facts, we will operate with a much higher degree of objectivity. The...
Tagged: TRANSPARENT DRAWING
ALGORITHMIC DESIGN
In the Huffington Post Arts and Culture section, there is an article titled “Towards a Science of Design” by Lance Hosey. As the title suggests, the author is expressing the oft lamented duality of...
THE POETICS OF SPACE 1
A great advantage to having your daughter study architecture is that you are exposed to books that you did not know existed. Our daughter was reading from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space this Thanksgiving....
SENSORY OVERLAP
Architecture is a rich, multi-sensory experience. There is great sensory overlap to our sensory input. It is richly three dimensional and simultaneous. We should therefore push ourselves to include as much of this overlapping...
ROAD NOT TAKEN
At the confluence of the analog and the digital, we need to reference as many analogue instances that we can so as to continue to demonstrate the validity of what we are about. We...
CONSTRICTIVE 2D MODELING
Most of our input to computers is 2D. Why is the majority of our input not directly into 3D? For our daily, run of the mill, typical interaction with 3D digital systems, we spend...
VOLUMETRIC, NOT PICTORIAL
The word volumetric is replacing the word pictorial. To operate optimally, we can no longer think in pictorial terms. We must think volumetrically. Case in point. Thomas French, one of our venerable far flung...
TRANSPARENT DIGITAL INPUT
We spoke about digital to digital. We spoke about free or low cost scan apps for our devices. Now, someone needs to write an app that takes a scan of our analogue transparent drawing...
DIGITAL TO DIGITAL
Last week, I mentioned how we are on an unstoppable arc toward digitization. Our sacred act of analogue drawing is being skewed toward digitization. Yet there are technologies which help integrate our analogue drawings...
BAKER HOUSE AT MIT
Walk to the back side of the building. That, in a nutshell, describes the Transparent Drawing mindset when looking at a piece of architecture. We were in Boston on Wednesday, and I had a...
HOW TO STEAL
Picasso’s famous quote that good artists create and great artists steal has already been covered here. And true to Picasso’s great quote, it seems that he stole this? Or is it that great minds...
SKETCH DIGITIZATION
While the arc of the sketch universe it long, it bends toward digitization. My apologies to Martin Luther King. I am a Luddite. Anyone who thinks that the answer is one pencil, one piece...
DESIGN TRANSLATOR
We all design under limitations. We might have budget limitations on what we can propose. We might have limitations put upon us by our clients. And another common limitation is architectural review boards. These...
LET’S ELIMINATE 2D DRAWINGS
When we draw transparently, we by default are drawing in three dimensions. A two dimensional drawing does not exist in the transparent drawing worldview. Because we are drawing our enclosures and forms so as...
INCOMPLETE PARADIGMS
A scientific paradigm is incomplete when it cannot explain all of the scientific facts with which it is confronted. Does a scientific paradigm explain or predict everything? No. There are always interpretations, transference and...
THE TOOL WE CALL DRAWING
Science uses tools to collect facts. Scientific facts are essential to maintaining paradigms, which were introduced here. Scientific facts are also required for anyone working to originate a paradigm. We saw that paradigms typically...
THE MINDSET OF CONSERVATIVE CLIENTS
Humans have an innate tendency to avoid losses rather than to achieve gains. We are hardwired for this. All of our design discussion with our clients is, fundamentally, one of losses and gains. Let’s...
AUTOMATIC VISUAL PROCESSING
What exactly is our state of mind when we are drawing to solve problems? Much of what goes on between our ears is automatic. The common act of seeing is automatic. We are continually...
EL LISSITZKY
The Russian constructivists have been a cultural influence upon use here in the West. Many of the current famous architects developed their first architectural responses in the guise of constructivism. I am thinking of...
PRECEDENTS IN ARCHITECTURE
Some of the books that we have mentioned in these pages are by Ching, Lauseau, Jenkins, et. al. And they are great books. Elegant books. Theoretical books. Classic books. Yet all this theoretical power...
APRES TRAVEL
The trips that we take are often way too short. I always find that however long we travel, the time could have at least been doubled. One great way to extend your trip is...
GUGGENHEIM BILBAO
It extends under an ordinary car bridge. The Museum. Gehry’s Guggenheim. It extends under a four lane, mediocre vehicle bridge that spans the river. The bridge runs over the museum. We were just in...
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