Storm Surge

Everyone is up to their armpits in Katrina right now, not least of which are the poor unfortunates of the lower Mississippi Delta region caught in the middle of it. The biggest tragedy is of course the loss of life that occurred during the storm's impact and will no doubt increase with the rising flood waters. Almost as tragic is the destruction of people's homes and livelihoods, especially considering how economically tenuous that part of the country is these days.

Far down the list of tragedy is the damage done to many of the beautiful buildings in New Orleans, a city I have yet to see. There's something sad and shocking about seeing your landscape change for the worse, I think, and the presumed loss of many great old structures certainly makes me wish I had gone down with friends a few years back when I had the chance.

I know that many will be restored by their wealthy owners, and no doubt many more will be saved by federal/state emergency funds, but I imagine that in a city as poor as New Orleans many will just be torn down.

A stranger bit of structural damage occurred in Alabama during the storm when an oil rig in dock for repairs was wrenched free of it's moorings and crashed into this suspension bridge.

There's a better picture floating around on the web, but it's copy-protected somehow and I can't post it. That must've been a hell of a thing to see, huh? Like one building crashing into another.

Seeing that reminded me that I had heard somewhere about a floating airport that someone wanted to build. I know that a few congested Asian cities have built airports that either jut out into the harbor or are actually built on artificial islands, but this project for San Diego is just crazy.

The idea is to build a road out from the heart of the city to a floating structure that would act as both an airport and deep water marine terminal. I guess they don't have to worry about tropical storms too much out there, but the whole thing seems a bit dicey to me. Still they make some pretty strong arguments on the website, so who knows?

Just an FYI, I'll be on vacation for a few days in the piney woods of North Cackalacka for a few days, then I'll be back in NYC for a fake-ation for a couple more, so my AutoCAD output will be very light. I'll try to post some southern architectural pics from my trusty cell phone while I'm visiting.

Imitation of Art

Interesting article in the New York Times on architectural plagiarism. Apparently, architecture wasn't covered by intellectual property law in the U.S. until 1990!

UPDATE! Here's the slide show from the NYTimes if you don't want to subscribe or want to look at this next week.

Office Tower in Marseilles by Zaha Hadid (Left) vs. Airport Lounge Partition by SHoP (Right)

Eyebeam Museum proposals by Thomas Leeser (Left) and Diller & Scofidio (Right, and also the winner)

Art Museum of Western Virginia by Randall Stout (Top) vs. The Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry Superstar (Bottom)

The One That Didn't Get Away

Gentle Reader, let my words lift you up out of comfortable reading chair and beckon you to come along with me to faraway Southeast Asia, strife-torn and mysterious, once home to people like me who wanted to build whole cities according to their own specifications (except that they didn't have computers and were rich kings, so they just actually built them.) Here, in the lazy waters of the Mekong River, they pulled this monster out of the water.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is a catfish. A 9ft., 650lb. catfish. Look at the size of that monster! It's funny, because there's currently a bit of a dust-up in the southern (catfish-producing) states about whether or not to ban the cheaper and arguably better-tasting Vietnamese catfish from the States after a test revealed some prohibited antibiotics in a few samples. Looking at a picture of what the Leviathan above looked like when cut into steaks, you can see why the more petite domestic model might have reason to be a little nervous.

But SE Asia has been on my mind lately for another reason, namely a compilation of Cambodian popular music from the 1960's and '70's called Cambodia Rocks. It's a winsome collection of garage rock and psychadelic songs performed in the native tongue but obviously inspired by what was going on in America and Britain at the time. I've heard a bunch of '60's rock from South America (Os Mutantes!) and Japan, but this Cambodian stuff was so fantastic and took me completely by surprise. The guitar is edgey and bluesy, and the vocals are really ethereal and affecting.

But as good as the music is, the context in which they were created is pretty mind-blowing. All these huge American G.I.'s come over with transistor radios playing all this rock music, and I imagine that teenagers all over Cambodia must've thought they had just been invaded by rock and roll aliens. I have no idea what they must've thought, but it probably didn't sound like much that they've heard before. I have this record of a neo-traditional Laotian group called the Khac Chi Ensemble, and some of their stuff sounds a bit like rock and roll even though it's recorded on native instruments and they're performing traditional songs, so I'm not sure what the music scene was like, but it still must've been impressive to hear all these snarling guitars and shouting foreigners, all while bombs were blowing up everything.

So there's all these kids learning to play guitar and singing about whatever it is that they're singing about, but really rocking out and it sounds like they're having fun. But then, just as they're putting together all these great songs that could've been hits in the U.S. if they were in English, the nation gets plunged into a brutal civil war and the Khmer Rouge destroy everything associated with modernity and city life. The guitars and presumably the guitarists are all gone. Hauntingly, the record doesn't list any info for who's playing the music, when they were recorded or even what the names of the songs are. I can imagine that somebody must've found a trunk in an attic that wasn't burned, where some kid squirreled away his favorite records and maybe his guitar, hoping that he'd get a chance to play them once again someday.

Imitation of Life

Legendary video game programmer Sid Meier created a game called Civilization (apparently, the best selling video game series of all time) to which I was hopelessly addicted. The basic premise is that the game begins in the year 4000, B.C. and you the player control the first and only village of one of the major civilizations (Persians, Chinese, Babylonians, but also Sioux, Americans?, Zulus -- it's very multi-multi), which you must then grow into a major empire. The game can be won by blowing everyone else up, but you can also win by getting enough technology to develop space travel or by becoming economically dominant.

The reason the game is so fun to play is because it changes completely every time you play it, and it also has a bizarre tendency to replicate actual historical and contemporary socio-political situations. The amazing thing is that it does this not because the programmers inserted a chunk of code that enacts a script for the Cuban missile crisis, but because the rules that govern gameplay are so well-modeled on real-life economic and political theories that the game becames a crudely accurate world history simulator.

See, Sid Meier hit on an idea that has always captivated me, which is that most complex systems are the result of much simpler rules sets that, once understood, can help to account for things that appear to be random or impossibly complicated. It's the reason that I first majored in physics (an early physics TA once told me that the reason that he switched from pre-med to physics was because pot had destroyed his short-term memory and with physics you can derive almost everything from a few equations instead of having to memorize page after page of names and rules) and then philosophy at school, and it's the reason that I'm so fascinated with neuroscience, and it has a profound effect on the way I see the world and how I behave in it. For example, if I go on a diet I want a couple of simple rules that I can follow (like "don't eat two of everything") rather than trying to deal with figuring out which things have carbs or how many "points" my meal might consist of.

The reason I bring all this up on my blog is because it occurs to me that if I take a piece of terrain, follow the basic rules of architectural design and pay attention to the laws of physics, the construction of my virtual city might bring up some intriguingly real-life situations. In the near term, I know that I'm going to be tempted to make some non-descript, standardized houses and commercial spaces to begin to fill out the city. While I don't have to worry about actual monetary cost, my design time is limited and therefore valuable, and I just don't think that I'll be able to hold myself back from making some generic looking neighborhood before long, just so I can have something that looks like a city instead of a portfolio of eccentricly amateur office towers.

Down the road, though, I can imagine more interesting results. I've already had people suggest design changes in the comments section, so it seems inevitable that I'll end up working on some commissions (for free, of course) for my readers, and I'm sure that people will prefer for their home to be on a particularly nice piece of property or in the most interesting neighborhood around, which seems like it could create some kind of real estate market. Similarly, it seems like there will come a time when I've built a first draft of Babble/On and I'll want to go back and revise it a bit by eliminating some of my clumsy early attempts at design and replacing them with new ideas, probably because they'll be occupying some of the best spots in the city center. Will I want to just destroy the old buildings, or will I have gotten used to the neighborhood looking a certain way? Will my readers have an opinion about saving some of the old buildings? It seems like this might result in something like a historical preservation society of a sort.

Of course, all of this depends on maintaining a readership and actually getting a whole city designed, which means I should get cracking on that cheese building tomorrow and get some new pictures up.

Step Into Cheese

Here's another quick post of the cheese building. I only had time today to make the cheese holes a little more crisp. I also decided to make the two holes on the edge of the glass tower carry straight on back to enhance the "chunkiness" effect, but I'm thinking it might be better to have the holes wrap around the corners. Also note the hole that acts as a doorway on the front. The radius is 12'.

Cheesey Design

Perhaps inspired by 30 St. Mary Axe, the building that looks like a gherkin, I have an idea in my head for a big building that looks like swiss cheese. Maybe it will be the headquarters for the Ministry of Cheese in Babble/On. I decided to poke around on line to find some precedents. Here's a link to a little swiss cheese house that looks like it should be used in conjunction with a Monopoly board printed on a giant Triscuit. Then I found this building, which looks like the kind of swiss cheese that classy, jet-setting robots would eat.

Here's a rough sketch of the basic idea. The blue part would be glass and the yellow would be colored concrete or something. I'll probably be working on this for the next week or so, although I'd like to do a fancy modern house also.

The Centre of Attention

My girlfriend and I were having a spirited debate about the definition of gherkin the other day, which prompted us to turn to the final arbiter of such things, the world wide web. It's strange that this is where I turn for so much information these days, I can't imagine what life was like before it became so commonplace. Where did people get movie times? The newspaper? Really? How did you settle debates about who played the title role in Small Wonder? Books? I know that I'm just begging for someone to post a comment about how they had to walk 2 miles through snow up to their waist just to get the movie times when they were little, but it's amazing how indispensible the internet has become for me in my daily life.

So anyway, we turned to the internet to decide whether I was wrong in claiming that all of those little, bumpy dill pickles I like to eat are called gherkins, or whether some of these were not gherkins, or whether gherkins were some other thing entirely. As I'm sure you'll understand, the internet presented myriad sources supporting every possible side of the argument, so the debate still rages today. The gherkin googling did have at least one positive outcome, however. When I clicked on a link referring to an "erotic gherkin for London skyline" (how could I not?), I discovered that someone had built a huge new building in London since I moved away 4 years ago. It's called the "erotic gherkin" or simply "the gherkin" by many because of it's shape, which is like a pickle -- a cylinder that's tapered at both ends. It's also known as the "Swiss Re" building (the "Re" is short for re-insurance), it's largest tennant, but it's official name is "30 St. Mary Axe" which is also it's address in the financial district in London.

Being such a modern and more importantly, tall building in a city with so few buildings that have either attribute, it's drawn a lot of attention, both good and bad, from the press and the general public.

But tonight I went to a screening of a documentary that shows the horror of what happens when a building gets too much of the bad attention. Of course I'm referring to the twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed in a single act of terrorism in 2001, just before I moved to New York. The documentary is entitled "Inside 9/11" and will be shown on the National Geographic Channel in two parts this weekend. They showed us a 70-minute version of the complete 4-hour program, but even from that I could tell how thoroughly they had reconstructed the events from the latest evidence. The recordings of the terrorists and flight crew aboard the planes are particularly engrossing. There's also quite a bit of backstory, tracing 20 or so years of the history of terrorism in the US and the lives of the perpetrators themselves in particular. There followed a panel discussion as well that was both chilling and informative and (perhaps because it was invite-only) surprisingly free of the pitfalls of most audience Q+A sessions.

I'm not going to try to say anything about whether we should continue to build or live in huge buildings, but I think that it's hard to deny that they end up being imbued with a lot of symbolic meaning. The WTC were seen as the embodiment of a certain sort of capitalist power by both the people that worked in them and tragically, by the terrorists that attacked them. Right now, various interested parties are waging a pretty vigorous debate about what sort of new symbol should be built in their place. Should we focus on remembering the tragedy or on the resilience and defiance of the American people? I think that in the end the developer is just going to ignore everyone and go with whatever makes the most economic sense for him, which seems somewhat appropriate, or at least closest to the original feel of the Towers. At any rate, it seems like whatever gets built there will mean a lot more to people than just a place to work or catch the PATH train. Sometimes a Gherkin isn't just a gherkin.

Rendered Useful

I've been messing around with rendering the past few days and thought I'd post what pictures of what might be the final state of that building I was working on. For those unfamiliar with the term, "rendering" a computer model means that you add color and texture so that it seems realistic. Because all of this detail can really make the hamsters running on wheels in your computer so tired that they pass out or slip off their furry little mortal coils, you usually assign textures and details to the model using a bunch of commands and dialogue boxes, but don't actually see the result until you hit the "render" button, go out and grab a cup of coffee and then wander back to see the computer display the finished product. Even then, AutoCAD doesn't let you zoom or pan around your drawing once it's rendered -- you have to go back to your more simple model view to do that. While this building only took about 5 seconds to render on my machine, more detailed objects could take hours or even days to render.

I decided to just slap some texture on the building without worrying too much about color schemes or realism, just to get an idea of how it all works. I used a granite sample with two different color schemes to add to the walls and floors. I used a semi-gloss slate blue on the doors, and I made the roof (and the windows, natch) entirely out of glass. Here are front and rear views of the building.

And here's a close-up of the no doubt impossible window I used for the stairwell. The only way it would work is if you used some really strong reinforcement beam along the axis of the granite "eye", and you'd probably have to add a vertical stabilizing beam as well that would run through the middle and become a mullion on both of the windows. It kinda echoes the shape of the roof though, which I like.

Thunder, Lightning Strike!

I went to the New York City Dragon Boat Festival yesterday, and it was fun but hot, hot, hot. Fortunately, Commissioner Benepe beseached the dragons for some much-needed rain when someone passed him a mic, and boy did those dragons deliver. I've heard that my very own neighborhood, Williamsburg, was especially hard hit, looking like a tornado tore through it. And take a look at this picture, provided by a friend of a friend of a friend.

Just goes to show that those spires are good for something more than beating out the Chrysler Building.

The title of today's post comes from the title of one of the best records of last year, The Go Team's "Thunder, Lightning, Strike" which sounds like the entire 1980's all mashed up into one album. Lot's of old-skool hip-hop sounds mixed up with new-wavey synths and sit-come themes. It works better than it sounds, trust me. Anyway, I saw that they released a tour-only ep in Australia recently, which I was able to procure through the magic of the inter-web. I can't wait for their sophomore sophomoric effort.

Galinsky a Go-Go

After telling you about the movie Proteus, it got me thinking about My Architect, a documentary about another guy on a mad quest to fill the world with perfect forms, in this case legendary (and legendarily nutty) architect Louis I. Kahn. In addtion to showing some marvelous buildings and a who's who of famous architects singing his praises, the film also exlpores his bizarre family life -- or should I say family lives, as Kahn had three of them. That's right, he maintained three separate sets of wives and children at the same time. One of his sons, Nathaniel, is the writer/director of the film. In the end, though, he died alone in a Penn Station restroom, with nobody at his side. In fact, they couldn't even notify anyone of his death for a while because he had scratched out the address on his passport. Obviously he didn't feel like any one place or family was his true home, but whether this was the result of guilt, arrogance or just a desire not to play favorites, we'll never know.

In a bit of a coincidence, I was on-line recently looking up a famous architecture firm that my office will be working with for the next couple of years (Tod Williams/Billie Tsien) and came across a listing for one of their buildings on Galinsky.com, a website dedicated to exploring great buildings. And they mean explore in more than just the figurative or virtual sense as they give driving directions and other visitor info for each building. Very cool.

The coincidence comes from the fact that one of TW/BT's buildings is a next door neighbor to one of Kahn's out in California. Tying things up into an even tighter bundle, TW/BT's only public New York building is the American Folk Art Museum, located right next door to MoMA, also part of my post about the movie Proteus.

This isn't that impressive, is it?

I'm a big fan of TW/BT and I'm super-duper psyched-up to get a chance to see them at work. And Louis Kahn's buildings took my my breath away when I watched the movie. I recommed checking out their work on-line, in film or in person if you want to see some really great design, or at the very least, design that may influence the work I do for Babble/On.

Washington on Washington

Just a quick post today because I've been and am quite busy. In previous posts I showed you a picture of a monument pedestal that I had modeled and discussed the Washington Monument in the context of where to draw the line between art and design. Well, about a week ago I decided to look up the measurements of the Washington Monument and model it in CAD.

The circular thing at the bottom is the foundation, which you normally don't see because it's underground. I worked out the dimensions by taking the depth (36' 10", I think) and the area (16,002 sq. ft.), and then guessing it was cylindrical in shape by looking at pictures which show the surrounding pavement is laid out in concentric circles. If you look at an aerial shot, it looks like I got it right.

The little speck in my model is actually a person that I dropped in to provide a sense of scale. Here's a close-up to get a better idea.

In case you're wondering, that is actually George Washington that is standing there, presenting his own monument to you. I'd like to think that it makes him a little uncomfortable.

Freshman Field Trip

Yesterday, I took off work with the express purpose going to the Mueseum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. This may strike people as being a bit strange for two reasons: 1) why take a day off to see something boring that is open on the weekends and is only 30-minutes away from where you live and 2) why take a day off just to go to midtown Manhattan, a mostly soul-less place where most of my friends spend 40+ hours each week working a day job. My defense is that since the MoMA reopened it's been too packed on weekends to entertain the idea of going, and because my job requires me to spend a lot of time outside in pretty places in Brooklyn and Queens, midtown doesn't inspire the same fluorescent, life-stealing dread that it does for anyone who lawyers or PRs there all week. Also, I have a ton of vacation time saved up and could afford to use or day here or there.

Anyway, it was fantastic. It was my first time in the MoMA, so everything was new to me, but my top priority was just seeing the building, and I wasn't disappointed. The most striking feature of the design is that the building has an assortment of well-chosen openings in the walls which allow bits of the City to sneak into the museum and allow the viewer some surprising and fun views of other parts of the collection as well. My favorite examples of this were the gap in an external wall that nicely framed the gothic spire of a neighboring church and a view from the fourth floor that not only afforded a wonderful view of the large central hall and it's sculpture (Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman), but also allowed some glimpses to a poster on the 3rd floor and a painting on one of the higher floors. And the gaps are small enough that you feel as if you're peeking out of a tiny, private hidey-hole or peering into a keyhole instead of standing on some long, public balcony. It also seems to break up the floors of the museum irregularly, so you wonder not only what floor something is on, but also how you could even get there, even though the whole place is easier to navigate than Macy's. It's a neat trick, and makes you feel like you've leapt into an M.C. Escher painting, which I must confess was always a secret dream of mine.

The only gallery I spent much time on was the Architecture & Design section, which features all sorts of nifty chairs, posters, motorcyles and assorted other things that were designed to be functional as well as nice to look at. Even my own second generation iPod was there. In fact, there was a part of the gallery that almost looked like an Apple store, with a notebook, and several speakers complementing the ubiquitous mp3 player. In fact, many of the items on display have become commonplace, which has the odd effect (as my girlfriend pointed out) of making them seem cheap, in a way. There were definitely a few pieces of furniture that may have once been daring but now look like something you could get from Target that you'd have to put together yourself. I had a similar feeling wandering through the Cezanne vs. Pisarro cage match upstairs (in which Pisarro gets his derriere handed to him). The Impressionists have been so successful that nowadays all you can think of is Hallmark cards or girl's dorm rooms when you see one of their landscapes.

Inadvertently continuning with the theme of art and design, later that night I went to see the movie Proteus (not the gay, interracial love story set in 18th century S. Africa, although that sounds awesome, too), which is about how Ernst Haeckel's twin obsessions for exaggerated form in art and fundamental order in science led him to dedicate his life to studying and painting pictures of radiolarian, single-celled organisms that secrete a mind-blowing variety of silicon skeletons. The movie made liberal references to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and the history of alchemy and ended up being surprisingly (and not at all cloyingly) spiritual. I highly recommed the movie, especially if you're thinking about how you're going to fill up a fake city with form and structure, because it will fill your dreams with stuff like this:

At Least as Good ss a Thousand Words

The third part of the tutorial that I had planned is going to be postponed indefinitely. Instead, at some point next week I'll show a couple of really artistic renderings done with AutoCAD and PhotoShop, an image processing application. I will also talk a bit about the future of drafting as a technique and a profession.

But today, I'll show you what I've been working on after work the past couple of days. The screenshot below shows the office building I've been working on, now with windows and doors and a completed roof. If you recall, I was having difficulty with the roof, but I figured out how to do it by doing the windows. I did most of the windows the same way I did the walls, but there are some fancier windows that I designed for the stairwell that kinda mimic the shape of the roof. I made them by changing how I defined my x,y and z axes, which is a fairly simple trick that I more or less knew how to do already, but didn't think about before.

At any rate, this is just to show how much better it looks with windows. I think that I'm going to try to render it with some realistic surface texture, sunshine and shadows next week.

First Draft, Then Edit (Pt. 2)

Here's part two of the Young Lady's CAD Primer. I'm sorry if these posts are a bit dry, but I thought it might be worthwhile. Tomorrow's post should have some more pics, and then on Monday I'll show you the progress I've made on my office building, which is just about finished. If you have a suggestion for the sort of building I should do next, feel free to stand up and be counted in the comments section.

CAD is all about marking points with your cursor, usually to make some kind of line connecting them. There are a lot of time-saving shortcuts to let you draw rectangles, octagons, circles and arcs with just a few button clicks, but these functions can all be accomplished by making a lot of lines connecting a lot of little points if you really wanted to.

And the great thing about making lines and points in AutoCAD is that you can specify exactly where the points should be, to whatever precision you want. The reason you can do this is because the infinitely big area you work in is divided into a big Cartesian plane. (The Cartesian plane is named after a really incredible guy named Renee Descartes who was a mercenary, philosopher (ever heard of "I think, therefore I am"? That's his), and mathematician. It's basically just two arrows crossed at right angles that allow you to assign an exact value to every inch of space in a two-dimensional plane. And as I remarked the other day, it's easy to extrapolate that into a third dimension to name every point in a 3D space.) This means that you can draw a huge office building plan, then zoom in and draw the bathroom fixtures exactly where they should go.

And while all this is great, the real trick about CAD software is that it allows you to draw things in the same drawing on different layers, allowing you to separate some elements to make your drawings more clear. The best way to visualize this is to think of an anatomy book that shows the human body with all it's skin and muscle and bone and nerves, except that each type of tissue is on a different piece of clear acetate stacked neatly over the silhouette on the backing page. That way, you can pull back each layer and get a look at how everything fits into a human body, without having to have half a dozen separate drawings. For example, an architect might draw a house on the computer that has all of the plumbing on one layer, the electrical wiring on another, the heating/AC ducts on another, and the furniture on another. That way, he can show the where the plumber what he's supposed to do without confusing him with what the electrician is supposed to do, all with just a couple of button clicks. It's especially handy for showing things like a reflected ceiling plan, in which you show where all the ceiling tiles will go and how the lights are arranged. If you have this info turned on on the same time as the floor tile plan, things can get awfully crowded very quickly.

The funny thing is that the layers are the thing that makes computer drafting so amazing, yet it actually grew out of an old-school practice of making plans just like the anatomical drawing I talked about. You would have some pegs at the top of your drafting table that would hold several sheets of tracing paper, and you would just copy your main drawing over and over onto each layer to do your electrical, plumbing, etc plans.

Tomorrow I'll show some images of what a skilled draftsperson can create on CAD software and talk a little about the future of drafting, then I promise I'll get back to something a little more interesting.

First Draft, Then Edit (Pt. 1)

Some of you reading this blog, even those of you who are familiar with computers, may be wondering how exactly this CAD software (in this case AutoCAD) works. I thought that today I might start to give you a rough idea of how it lets people design things, and the sorts of things that you can design. (This is part 1 of what will probably be a tripartite discussion. I love the word "tripartite", by the way.)

The first thing that you need to know is that CAD software began as a way to help draftspeople revise and present their drawings more quickly, and not necessarily to help you create them more quickly. It's gotten better as the software has improved and computers have become more powerful, but even now it's faster for someone with the appropriate skill to create an initial drawing by hand than by computer. The computer advantage comes during the revision process, in much the same way that word processors enable you to edit and reformat your text much more easily than you can on a typewriter or with a handwritten manuscript.

But as much as CAD (which stands for Computer-Aided Design) revolutionized the design process, drafting was a very old and established profession and the software needed to mimic the way people were already drafting enough that they felt comfortable migrating from their drafting table to the computer. (Although it still wasn't an easy transition. Of the people architects I have worked with that are over 40, only one out of five use CAD with any proficiency.)

In the good ol' days, a skilled draftsperson was an bit of an artist. You had an array of colored pencils and pens, you had t squares and french curves and a little bit of bendy metal called a spline, but a lot of what you did was all about technique and aesthetics, like the kind of pointilism you might use to shade lakes or grassy areas, or how hard you would press down with your pencil to indicate a curb or a wall. As a result, old maps and blueprints have a way of looking breathtaking in a way that modern maps do not (nobody really collects modern maps unless they're going on a long trip.)

While there's still plenty of aesthetic judgement in computer drafting (like selecting how your drawings will be presented on a page, what colors to use, how thick to make your lines, and of course fonts, fonts, fonts) the chief reason to go digital is precision and the ability to easily manipulate your work as you go along.

(continued tomorrow)

Of Mice and Men

Almost since it's inception, Apple has made some of the most intuitivue, reliable and interesting computers on the consumer market. They've invented just about everything that we've grown to take advantage of with computers, from desktop publishing, to spreadsheets, to graphic user interfaces (the system of windows and folders that people use to store files.) They even invented the mouse to move things around on their newly designed 'desktop' interface. However, after their initial invention of the mouse, other companies added more functionailty by adding buttons, scroll wheels and assorted other doo-dads. Despite the utility and popularity of such mice, Apple stubbornly continued to only offer a one-button mouse, leading many to wonder why they hadn't chosen to provide users with an Apple-branded multi-button mouse. Well, today was the day that they finally delivered, and it's a piece of work.

Some of you may be wondering why I think this item is newsworthy, and all I can say in my defense is that Apple computers are so good, and provide such a wonderful user experience, that the people who buy them tend to become a little partisan when it comes to the fate of the company. So I'm officially letting the cat out of the bag that I am an ardent Apple consumer, admirer and evangelist. I have a little ibook at home that I've used for 6 years without a problem, and it gets a lot of use. While I wish that I could use a Mac all the time, I am sorry to say that my work computer is an Intel machine running Windows 2000.

I've been a little coy about what hardware and software I've been using for my modeling, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it was to protect my mild-mannered alter ego from discovery, maybe it was to avoid giving out free endorsements to a couple of software companies. But I'm going to come clean, because I'm sure I'll be talking quite a bit about this as my project develops.

At work, I run:
Intel 700 MHz processor
512MB RAM
no fancy graphics card that I can discern
Windows 2000

At home, I use:
iBook SE 450MHz
512MB RAM
no fancy graphics card
not much front-side bus

Currently, I am only able to run 3D software on my work computer, and even then it's a bit too slow. Also, even if I were able to use my home computer, the software that I use is only available on PC. It's a procuct called AutoCAD (the 2004 edition) and is by far the mostly commonly used drafting software in use today.

It seems possible that my work computer may get upgraded soon, and I would love to sock away enough cash to get a new iMac for my personal use at home, but I'm stuck with what I've got for now. Similarly, I hope to take a further drafting/modeling class soon, which may mean that I'll be working with a new piece of software at work (either 3Ds Max or Maya). Were I to get a faster home computer, I may try using one of the drafting programs written for Mac, like ArchiCAD. I'll keep everyone up to date if decide to make a switch, but tomorrow I'll give everyone a bit of a crash course in AutoCAD, so you can understand what I'm doing a little bit better.

Kindred Spirits

There's a little bit about architecture in the last paragraph, but I thought I'd take a moment to talk a little about music, specifically a show I went to this weekend.

Summerstage is a concert series in Central Park that is mostly free and showcases a wide variety of talent, ranging from straight-jazz musicians getting a little long in the tooth to the hippest of the hip in the indie rock world. This summer is their 20th anniversary season, and their show this Saturday featured the remnants of Sun Ra's Arkestra, which also played the first summerstage two decades ago.

There was a more intriguing reunion (and even more history) on the stage Saturday afternoon than just the anniversary of the concert series, however, because the Arkestra was sharing the stage with the three surviving members of the The Motor City Five (aka, the MC5), who were the Arkestra's opening act for a legendary series of shows in 1968.

Back then, both of these bands were making some serious noise. The MC5 were playing a feral brand of garage rock that (along with fellow Michiganders Iggy and the Stooges) was setting the scene for the punk rock explosion in the '70's. Sun Ra's Arkestra, on the other hand, was playing a spacey and entirely unique brand of jazz that anticipated Coleman's free jazz, the back to africa spirit of many of the artists on Impulse's "New Wave", and the science fiction zionism of a lot of african american popular music starting with Parliament Funkadelic and leading right up to the Wu Tang Clan and Outkast.

But that's not the only kind of noise they were making. The MC5 were the house band of John Sinclair's radical White Panther Party and were constantly in trouble with the law for their politics and obscenity. While Sun Ra was less overtly political, it's easy to see how his messages of building a better society in space were born out of the feelings of frustration and disenfranchisement that many blacks were feeling in America, and in light of the race riots that were occurring across the country at the time, their message of cosmic empowerment must've seemed quite dangerous to the establishment.

While 40 years have passed, one could be forgiven for feeling as if the concert were in a time warp. For one thing, many of the crowd looked like they were probably at one of the first shows in 1968, perhaps even wearing the same clothes. And they may have been chanting the same slogans as well. The fact that now, as in the 60's, the US is fighting an unpopular war without much plan for extricating ourselves. I'm the first to admit that the differences between Vietnam and Iraq are far more numerous than the similarities, but it was more than just the tie-dye providing a sense of deja-vu.

Still, a lot has changed in the past 4 decades, even in the bands themselves. Rob Tyner and Fred "Sonic" Smith (husband of rocker/artist/poet Patti Smith) have both passed away in past decade or so, reducing the MC5 to the MC3 ( officially "DKT", reflecting the last initials of the three surviving band members.) The Arkestra's decimation is an even sadder story. Sun Ra famously had his entire band live with him in a house in Philadelphia, where they would practice for 24-hour stretches and at all times of the night on Ra's idiosyncratic compositions. But with the passing of Sun Ra the fortunes of the band have waned. Marshall Allen (with the band since 1958) still lives with some of the aging band members in the house, but it seems like only a matter of time before the band disappears (detailed in a nice piece in the NYTimes on June 30th).

Still, neither the changing politcal climate nor the ravages of time seemed to significantly diminish either band on Saturday, and the results were more than satisfying. The Arkestra performed a crowd-pleasing set of intergalactic big band tunes, and the MC5 practically howled through their set, with Wayne Kramer of the MC5 shairing vox with Lisa Kekaula of the Basement Jaxx, Handsome Dick Manitoba of early punk band The Dictators and especially Mark Arm of Mudhoney (the second best Seattle band of the 90's). The show ended with the Arkestra joining the MC5 for a communal freak-out that was just spectacular. The jams were definitely kicked out.

And speaking of kindred spirits, check out this old Spanish guy and former trappist monk who's decided to build an entire cathedral on his own. And not just in a comfy chair on the computer like the way I'm making my city, this guy is using tires as forms for casting concrete window elements and using all kinds of recycled materials to actually make this thing happen. The rest of the site also seems pretty interesting as well.