In the beginning, it was oral. The vessel of cultural knowledge, in the beginning, was oracular; humans communicating with each other with sounds that come from their mouths. The traditions and history of cultures was passed thru generations by re telling the stories. We began to communicate orally around 500,000 years ago, Then, we started […]
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27May
2016
SCARPA SYNESTHETICS
2016
Carlos Scarpa has always been a hero. So it was with great interest when I came across this passage in Harry Mallgrave’s The Architect’s Brain; Neuroscience, Creativity and Architecture. This quote is attributed to Marco Frascari, an architect who used to work for Scarpa. “(Scarpa)…worked entirely through a synesthetic process that entailed, on the same […]
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25May
2016
CORB IN THE M’ZAB VALLEY
2016
In the 23 May 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Julie Belcove writes about a new architectural exhibition that is being constructed in the Guggenheim. The artist is Kader Attia, and he has set out to construct a model of the hilltop fortress Ghardaia in the M’zab Valley of North Africa. Apparently, the material he […]
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23May
2016
PLATO ON PERSPECTIVE
2016
In The Republic, it is nice to hear that Plato was skeptical of the linear perspective. Writing in 380 BC, he states in Book X: “Thus (through perspective) every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is that weakness of the human mind on which the art of conjuring and of deceiving by […]
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20May
2016
KNOWLEDGE DRAWING
2016
Drawings used to be vessels of knowledge. Yet the trajectory of vision has led to detachment. Instead of a body centered experience, the distancing, as we have seen, promotes the nihilistic attitude that pervades our culture. The Renaissance created the concept of the individual. The cartesian picture plane was a key component of this individualization. […]
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18May
2016
SUPERFICIAL IMAGES
2016
Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida have all argued that the dominance of vision in our culture has only served to separate ourselves from the world. While I don’t agree with this premise, I do understand where they are coming from. They see this separation in terms of technology and the meaningless replication of images. Witness the […]
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16May
2016
SPECTATOR CULTURE
2016
The other evening, we made a design presentation in front of a municipal board for a new building. As usual, we brought in an architectural massing model. And we always work to give the most context that we can to our models. So in this instance, we brought in scale trees, as well as a […]
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13May
2016
WATERCOLOR SET HOT RODDING
2016
Black is never included. For just about any of the watercolor sets that I have mentioned as suitable for our purposes, most of them do not contain black. Yet architects certainly have this compulsion to use black. So many of us wear black. Black is, or used to be, the default screen background color for […]
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11May
2016
AMAZING TRANSPARENCY
2016
Art Qlate commented on Facebook about, to use their term, amazing transparency. They ask which brand of watercolors I use. First of all, thanks to Art for their very kind comments. The short answer is that I use Windsor and Newton 1/2 pans from their Artist series. I summarized compact watercolor sets here and here. […]
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9May
2016
SPECTATOR THEORY AND JOHN DEWEY
2016
We are not spectators. We are dynamic beings. We move around. We engage with the world in three dimensions. Yet our culture conditions us to be spectators. Spectator theory insists that the world is observed from a single fixed point of reference. Think of attending an opera; you experience the performance from one fixed point. […]
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