22
Jan
2011
Major study – for those with a lot of patience
There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!
2
Apr
2010
Simple English
I’m going to start a new ‘idea auditing’ process for my thoughts. English Wikipedia has a parallel site in a language called Simple English. In the explanation page the quote is “The language is simple, but the ideas don’t have to be“.
The articles are written using a somewhat restricted word list, and it should force me to think clearly about what I really mean.
I’ve found that when I explain something in simple terms, I generally gain a better understanding of it, which allows me to put the richness back in with the complete range of expression offered by unrestricted use of English.
Anyone else up for joining in?
22
Feb
2010
Zombie copy – reanimated
Take a look at this article: Zombie Copy.
It is could have been written specifically for architects!
I particularly like the transformation of…
Every executive knows that constantly delivering superior customer value is an imperative to veritably creating shareholder value.
into…
If you want to make lots of money, you have to please your customers more than the other guy does.
So I suppose that the moral of the story is that; amongst the people who look at your work there are always going to be a few smart people out there that can read, they’ll notice if you use a thesaurus liberally throughout your writing. So save yourself the ridicule later, and write down what you actually mean, it’ll be quicker, and it might actually be interesting!
13
Oct
2009
The future is important – I’m going to live there soon.
Most people will have realised that I don’t tend to do things the normal way. This extends to education too – I’ve taken 4 years off in the midst of a 5 year course (and 2 more before it even started). See this old post.
This year I’m back at school to do the last year before I become a ‘real person’ and start paying council tax etc. Oxford Brookes has a terrific system where they’ve figured out that you are probably about sick of design studios by the end of your 4th year, and are ripe for a bit of – shh don’t say it too loudly – learning.
This is my draft proposal for what I’m going to do. It is a bit woolly, as it covers up that I really don’t actually know what it is that I am going to do, and it is only barely related to architecture.
The 21st century is hailed by many as a ‘make or break’ time for humanity, the tipping point between a technological utopia and a crushing blow to our species’ capacity to flourish. While every effort must be made to steer a path towards a bright future, contingencies for both extremes, as well as the vast, but discontinuous, range of circumstances and possibilities between must be considered.
Only in a very perverse utopia, or particularly devastating catastrophe, does architecture cease to be pertinent (the importance of architects is less certain!).The risk of global catastrophe, ranging from super volcanoes and runaway global warming to doomsday machines or bio-terrorism, is non trivial. The contingencies in place to contain or manage these events may (if successful) affect societies as much or more than the event itself. Conversely the potential for technology to enhance our lives beyond recognition is considerable. Indeed, it has already been realised. Genetic modification, cognitive enhancement and life extension are just a few of the possibilities.
With these great threats and opportunities come ethical questions about how, and whether, to manage the risks that the implementation of these opportunities (or whether to implement them at all!). While forecasting has its perils, as recent events in the financial sector have shown, it is foolhardy not to prepare to manage the outcomes of potential cataclysms. The continually diverging tree of all possible events makes the odds of a particular event, even in the relatively near future, vanishingly small. We need better tools. I intend learn how to develop a better understanding of the future, and the methods that can be used to improve predictions. Architecture is one of our most persistent projections into the future, there ought to be some consideration of what that future is going be like.
If getting past the next 90 years is really as fraught as is claimed (disasters, divergent societies, etc.) then we have a lot of work to do to get there, but it would make me feel better if I had a bit of an idea of what we’ll find when we do.
If you have any thoughts on things I ought to be looking at then let me know.
27
Jul
2009
Tools or instruments?
This afternoon I went to the the RIBA to see the London design computing group’s latest get together. After being away on the other side of the world for the last 18 months, I was amazed to see how the tiny, intimate meetings we had running three years ago had exploded in popularity to the point where nobody had an office big enough to host it!
There were great presentations from a few of the usual suspects, and a few unexpected faces. David Hines (Populous) showed the latest work on the Landsdown road stadium, and far from being boring (I hassled Roly so much about him showing Landsdown road so much that he mentioned it in his talk at SG this year) it was like seeing the progression of a friend’s baby into a toddler. Seeing the real scale of it finally was fascinating, as it’d always been on a screen so nothing had a diagonal of more than 19inches, but the real scale things were huge!
There was a presentation from Olivier Ottevaere from the Bartlett who was doing tiling patterns based on projections of n-dimensional solids onto a 2d plane that looked terrific, but really made me feel that I ought to have dome my reading before I had gone to class.
But anyway, onto what I was thinking about, there are two streams here that will combine eventually, so bare with me.
Jonathon showed his work on the new Crossrail station for Canary Wharf, and it reminded me a lot of the Dubai metro stations. He’s been having the same issues with solving the node trimming as I did when I was a lowly part 1 at Aedas Studio (rather than just lowly in general). He was taking a perfectionist approach (as usual) to his “systemic design”, and was tweaking the inputs to his system minutely to get the desired results all over the form, playing variables against each other to gain the perfect expression of the intent.
When I started doing my BTEC in mechanical engineering, the first thing I ever did in the workshop, after being shown how not to get a chuck key stick in my forehead or get my tie caught in anything spinning, was to make a tool makers clamp, the meta tool that everything starts with. It’s not a delicate bit of equipment, but it’s pretty versatile. It allows a tool maker to wedge bits of oddly shaped stuff together so that they can drill holes etc. My one was a bit of an odd case. I drilled in the wrong place a couple of times, so I had those mistakes welded up, but I also surface ground all the faces, even the ones that weren’t important, so that it was incredibly slick looking. I still have it somewhere, and I get it out and show people from time to time to prove that I’m not a total keyboard slave.
When I was making the clamp I measured where I should put holes (often wrongly) with instruments, and I then drilled them with tools. Pilots rely on their instruments when they are flying in dense fog. So it would seem that instruments measure things, but surgeons cut skin with instruments, and musicians play instruments, so that would imply that instruments are more to do with skill and precision.
The “architect as tool maker” question popped up briefly again today, and it seems that people are getting used to the idea of building tools to help them in their every day life. Tools seem to be utilitarian, something that is concerned with getting the job done, and getting the wielder of the tools out of work and to the pub as fast as possible.
Given the two definitions of instruments given above, i.e. something to do with precise measurement, or a device that can be mastered as an art form, ‘tools’ seem to be a class of thing that we make to help us in our life that makes it easier, but it will probably never become a thing that we gain much satisfaction from using. Jonathon’s Crossrail model is probably on the way to becoming an instrument as it requires nurturing, and investment of time to make it yeald the quality of result that is desired.
There is probably an argument that a programming language is an instrument, it requires a significant investment of effort to make it do the things that we want it to, but the counter argument to that is that using that argument a piece of wood is an instrument because with an appropriate investment of effort and the right tools and techniques it will do what we want it to.
So where does that leave us? If tools aren’t the raw material, embodied with all the potential, and they aren’t a utilitarian labour saving device then what are they?
They must be something that is more refined than the raw material, but is also not primarily concerned with making things easier (although this shouldn’t be discounted as a side effect).
Does this mean that they are something that needs us to invest effort into to gain benefit from? I think this is probably somewhere on the road to defining it. There is also the aspect that an instrument can also take us beyond what it possible without it. A micrometer can measure more precisely than we can by eye, and a piano can make sounds that are far beyond what we could do without the skill of the expert piano maker – and the virtuoso pianist.
So as architectural tool makers (or architects that make tools of themselves) what is the step into being an architectural instrument maker? I suppose a good start would be to make things less deterministic, once the output is uncertain, yet controllable by a skilled operator then we might be some of the way along. If I can build something, and then someone else can do amazing things with it, then maybe we have an instrument. We needn’t even have intersecting skill sets, but we could work together to produce something great.
So what have I managed to define? Well probably not much, but it’s helped my thinking, partially by just filling the time between the three pints I had after this afternoon’s meeting,and partially by putting my thoughts down.
I’m going to be provocative and define instruments (without recourse to a dictionary as I’m on the train).
“An instrument is something that allows us to go beyond our normal range of ability”
There are probably a lot of problems with that (the difference between an instrument and an augmentation springs to mind).
I’d love to see examples of instruments that confirm my theory, and any caveats to the definition would be welcome too.
If you are reading this on facebook and you feel moved to make a comment, spare a thought for my online karma and copy the comment from facebook to www.notionparallax.co.uk/blog so that it shows up in both places. Ta.