Christchurch to Auckland
ROAD TRIP!!!
Yosemite photos
Here are the photos from my yosemite trip this march in glorious high res technicolour.
where should I live?
I’ve got a new job in england, it’s for three months, and it involves moving about a bit. I’m in a bit of a quandry about where I should live.
I need to be in London, Cambridge and Farnborough, although I don’t really know how much as I’ll be working from home a bit too, and the splits are undecided so far.
I’m going to start school again back in Oxford at the end of September, and then I’ll live there, but for the next three months I’m floating a bit.
dissertation
Ever since I finished my degree dissertation there was a nagging feeling that there were some ends that needed to be tidied up. Not long after, I went on a massive vector crusade and redrew all the non photographic images. That was just after Christmas in 2005, and now it’s half way through 2009 – it’s taken me 4 years to get around to polishing up the last few bits and re posting it.
Bizzarely enough, even though it isn’t directly linked from anywhere on this site, it is still one of the most popular downloads, with one of the main sources coming from somewhere buried deep inside the rhino wiki. That version has loads of blank pages and over set text, so I’ve tried to fix that.
What I haven’t done anything to is the content. I wrote it in late 2004, and a lot has changed since, the industry has changed, and I’ve changed immeasurably. Going though the text to weed out the spelling mistakes, I’m amazed at the bold, and often factually incorrect, statements that I pepper the text with, but it’s interesting nonetheless to see what I thought in those days!
You can get the file from here as a print res version, or from here for screen res.
Programming.Architecture
Paul Coates’ book is finally scheduled for release just after Christmas. It’s pretty exciting as it covers a lot of historical (i.e. mid to late 20th century) computational design topics. This might sound dull, but a lot of what I come across my students struggling with these days is stuff that people were struggling with 30 years ago, some of it was solved, and would lead to an easy fix, and some of it was proven (pretty much) to be impossible, leading to a painless kill of a dead end. Basically what I’m talking about is precedent, and most people think that computational design doesn’t have any, but in reality, some very smart people have been toiling for the last 40 years to solve a lot of these questions.
The book is a great introduction to a lot of the ‘grander’ ideas of computational design too, if you’ve ever wondered what ? syntax, universal Turing machines, or artificial neural networks are, then this will be a great help.
This should be required reading for anyone who thinks that computers have a bigger role to play in design than just checking your email.
You can pre order it from here
http://www.tandfbuiltenvironment.com/books/The-Programming-of-Architecture-isbn9780415451888