quare id faciam?

Find

2008-04-12T22:30:00.001-05:00

A customer of mine has been clearing her house of a lot of old stuff over some months. While there to replace some doors recently, I snagged from her latest pile of outgoing junk her late husband's 1949 edition Ginn & Co. algebra text. I thought I'd keep it in the truck, with the idea of boning up a little, since I want to take the GRE later this year. When I finally took a look at it this week, I was delighted to discover that it contained as frontispiece a facsimile of a sixteenth-century English algebra — in fact, it seems, the very first English algebra, The Whetstone of Witte of Robert Recorde.

In the mid-sixteenth century one wouldn't publish even an algebra, apparently, without some opening verse to put things on sound footing. Here's that metrical matter rendered in today's less noble & arbitrary orthography:

Though many stones do bear great price,
The whetstone is for exercise
As needful, and in work as strange:
Dull things and hard it will so change
And make them sharp, to right good use:
All artsmen know they cannot choose
But use his help; yet as men see,
No sharpness seemeth in it to be.
The ground of arts did breed this stone;
His use is great, and more than one.
Here if you lift your wits to whet,
Much sharpness thereby shall you get.
Dull wits hereby do greatly mend,
Sharp wits are fined to their full end.
Now prove and praise as you do find,
And to yourself be not unkind.

Lovely!

If you're wondering what 'the cossicke practise' might refer to, and whether the term as used here contains a pun, see the bottom of this page.

Cul de Sac

2008-04-11T00:30:00.000-05:00

Now they're reading it in Italy.

The shepherd's voice

2008-04-08T23:30:00.012-05:00

Who is the shepherd here? It is not the good, faithful, orthodox pastor; Jesus is the shepherd. And there is a fundamental difference between Jesus and all Christian pastors. Jesus is the God-man, God in the flesh; and as such, He is our Savior. The pastor is not the Savior; the pastor points to the Savior. So the point of this text is not good pastors vs. bad pastors; it is that no one can love the sheep like Jesus loves them, because only He owns the sheep. ...
[L]ook at Jesus! ... He lays down His life for sheep who love to wander. There is no selfishness in Him, but love. That is the one who says, “Follow Me; listen to My voice.” He says it not to dominate you or control you, but because He knows what it best for you.
So that is what it means to be a Christian — to hear Christ’s Word and follow Him. You can’t do that on your own; He has put us all into one flock, one Church, and there is where He has promised to be. The Church is found not where things are hippest or smokiest, not where things are biggest or oldest, but where the Word is rightly preached and where that Word is joined to water, bread, and wine as Christ instituted it. The Church is institutional because Jesus instituted preaching and Sacraments; and the human aspects of that institution — meeting and bylaws and hierarchies — must always and only serve those things, the ways in which sheep hear the voice of Christ the Good Shepherd.
So what does the voice of your Good Shepherd say to you? He says,
Repent, and be baptized for the remission of your sins;
Repent, and sin no more.
I do not desire your death, but that you should turn from your wicked way and live.
Rejoice, your King comes to you!
I forgive you all your sins;
On this mountain I will prepare a feast of the choicest cuts of meat and the finest of wines;
I will wipe away every tear from every eye;
I will never leave you nor forsake you;
Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life;
Lazarus, come forth from your grave!
Little girl, I say to you, arise! Young man, I say to you, arise!
Take and eat, this is My body given for you;
Behold, I make all things new!
These are the things your Good Shepherd says to you. Those words are your life. All other words are innocuous but temporary and un-saving; or, they are devilishly deceptive and damning. Do not listen to them. Keep your ears tuned to the voice saying to you continually, “Repent! Follow Me!” and “I forgive you! Do not fear!”

From a recent sermon by Christopher Esget of Immanuel Lutheran Church in Alexandria, Virginia — published on his blog. Read the whole thing.

American conflict

2008-04-04T12:00:00.002-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee 40 years ago today. We owe a great debt of gratitude in this country for his extraordinary commitment to the healing of a crippled public conscience, still on-going, and for the personal sacrifice it came to.

In the last few weeks The Baltimore Sun has been running a number of articles about the events of urban upheaval that followed King's killing. Stories, photos, & video looking back at the destruction in Baltimore and at societal & individual change that accompanied are collected here.

Also in the Sun a couple of weeks ago, one account of the very different scene that week in the state capital, Annapolis, twenty miles south of Baltimore. The article covers the first showing of a film about the consequences of the unusual friendship between Roger Moyer, mayor of Annapolis in '68, and Joseph Simms, a black man with whom Moyer had had a basketball rivalry during high school, in prison for theft in April of '68. Take a look at the film's site: Pip & Zastrow, An American Friendship.

The new consumption take 2

2008-04-01T15:30:00.006-05:00

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas — roads, sewer and water lines — cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.
The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families — and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

From the March Atlantic, an article called "The next slum?" (Might've caught this sooner if I'd been paying attention.)

Author Christopher Leinberger goes on:

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.

There's certainly truth in that. (Though I wonder what he means by "little upkeep" on those older houses — especially in an era of high inflation in energy costs.) If you work on houses of varying ages, as I've been doing for some years, you know well enough about the relative solidness of a pre-WW2 house.

As an aside, it's worth noting that on the whole, American residential construction has always gone more for short-term value than long. And on this question of general decline in quality, at least, (like a good writer) he paints conditions a bit more dramatically than they warrant. His last line in that paragraph comes near absurdity: "Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall — their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up." Actually, American-style wood framing is a good construction system, and methods of today achieve increasingly impressive structural performance in those "thin wooden frames" — when the methods are followed, that is. And drywall is never relied on for structural value, because it essentially has none.

Supersized houses & the new consumption

2008-03-27T01:00:00.005-05:00

From a Hartford Courant article (via 'Residential Tuesday') on the apparently accelerating 'not so big house' market shift — some cautions and a trend projection for the longer-term:

But there is also plenty of evidence that Americans' appetite for large homes continues. The average size of new homes built in recent years is still edging upward, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president for research at the National Association of Home Builders. He expects the average to level off soon around its current figure of about 2,500 square feet.
"They are not choosing smaller homes," he said. "People are not choosing mansions because of the capital cost, the running costs, but they're still choosing bigger homes."
Home buyers increasingly want higher ceilings, open floor plans, more fireplaces and windows — all features that require more energy to heat and cool the house, Ahluwalia said. And, he said, many Americans are still willing to live far from work and shopping.
Arthur C. Nelson, who has studied housing trends for 20 years, expects that to change in coming decades, with sweeping repercussions for American society.
Nelson projects a surplus of between 3 million and 22 million homes on large lots — built on one-sixth of an acre or more — by 2025. This will be driven by a swelling tide of empty-nesters, young professionals and young families who choose to live in cities or in the first ring of suburbs outside them, Nelson says.
He foresees these big homes in the exurbs eroding in value, and then becoming homes to a much different clientele than today.
"I think what's going to happen, and I'm seeing it anecdotally already as I talk with people, is that these large homes are now being occupied by multiple families, extended generations of immigrants, low-income households, typically family-related," Nelson said. "The trend is so new, but my guess is we'll begin to see this kind of outcome coming out statistically in the 2010 census."

The Big Chart

2008-03-24T00:30:00.002-05:00

(No, not that Big Chart.)

You probably think you know a thing or two about things, as things go — I know I did — but I can pretty much guarantee you're going to find it's a whole different thing to know about things the way you know about them before you've understood the Big Chart® and after. Go to el dorado inc. and watch their presentation. It takes about twenty minutes; and as these will be twenty minutes of perfect illumination, you'll only wish it were longer.

I think I'm moving to Kansas City.

Villa Nurbs

2008-03-24T00:15:00.004-05:00

Apropos of the mention of my coursework intro to computer-based 3D modeling, check out this slick NY Times web special about architect Enric Ruiz-Geli and his Villa Nurbs*, a house designed with use of related computer-based modeling. It was commissioned for property near Barcelona and is under construction now.

While I don't think the notion of house as 'machine for living' is any more convincing today than when Le Corbusier & those like him first promoted it early in the last century, and while I think architects like Ruiz-Geli and publicist-critics like the NY Times's Ouroussoff misunderstand something fundamental about well-living when they can talk about a house functioning as 'isolation chamber' and 'luxury car' as though this were a good, or at least an indifferent, thing, it can't be said that the latter-day expressionist-futurist formal exploration and the technological tricks on display in this luxury villa aren't impressive & intriguing for their own sake.

Life of my life, death of my death

2008-03-21T01:00:00.007-05:00

Jesu, meines Lebens Leben,
Jesu, meines Todes Tod,
Der du dich für mich gegeben
In die tiefste Seelennot,
In das äusserste Verderben,
Nur daß ich nicht möchte sterben:
Tausend, tausendmal sei dir,
Liebster Jesu, Dank dafür!

Jesu meines Lebens Leben, Ernst Homburg, 1687

School fun

2008-03-15T23:30:00.019-05:00

click it
I've been taking a few technical classes at a community college here in the Baltimore area. The program I'm following — just a handful of courses — is meant to qualify you as an entry-level drafter in architecture/construction settings. Sooner or later I expect to have a use for this training.

For the most part, it's been quite basic & predictable stuff in these classes. ('Blueprint Reading' — e.g.) But last term I found a fruitful challenge in the course apparently designated this program's crash intro to the brave new world of BIM, and in this final term there've been some surprises in 'Technical Animation.'

'Technical Animation' essentially means an introduction to 3ds Max, which is one of the software packages supplied by industry giant Autodesk in their sponsoring role with the college's CADD department. It's software much better known at present for uses in the entertainment world than in architecture, though. Besides this, our instructor's education is in fine art & graphics and his technical experience mainly in medical illustration. So we're not really much concerned with architectural modeling & rendering, except to the degree we pursue it ourselves. I'd say it's just as well not to be too application-oriented here, however, because this software really is awfully complicated stuff from a novice's point of view. Knowing where to find things in its menus, alone, is a semester's work.

We're at the middle of the term today, it happens, and just getting started on the individual projects that take up the remainder of the course. As the parameters for this original-concept project necessarily have to do with basic software features rather than with any real-world-like design problem, I've figured there's no reason not to have some fun with it. What I have in mind re-uses the product of a 'mesh modeling' lesson from an early session and works it into a whimsical minute-long (or so) animated fancy. We'll have to see how it comes together between now & early May.

That 'mesh modeling' lesson of a few weeks ago leads step by step to the slightly surreal ash tray in the picture here. You perform certain numerically specified transformations on a flat-ish cylindrical virtual object and you end up, Voilà, with this ash tray shape. (Don't think the instructions that get you there are easy to follow, though.) After I had the ash tray, I couldn't resist adding a cigarette. It just seemed to want that.

And now the afterthought of the cigarette is the center of my plan for finishing out the class. Looking at this image I'd made of apparently solid non-existent objects, I began at some point to imagine the cig crawling across the ash tray like an inch worm; and on that, a whole little dream sequence has taken root.

At top, my first trial study for the motion of a cigarette hopping. I'm pretty pleased with the effect. Call to your mind's eye, if you will, the vision of a partly smoked cigarette scooting off an ash tray and hopping around a table (ideally, with little puffs of extra smoke coming off its 'head' with each hop). I call the pleasure in trying to see such an absurdity become 'real' very sufficient reason to keep showing up in class for the next few weeks.

Costs of War

2008-03-07T06:30:00.006-05:00

And the one question I ask here, in terms of the cost of the war, 620,000 deaths in a population of 30 million people. If you standardize that for today’s population of roughly 280 million, that would be the equivalent of about 5 million deaths, or 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
I look at that, and it’s absolutely horrible; no one would disagree with that. In the book Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman, they do a survey of emancipation in this time period, and they find that dozens of countries, including the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, the French and Danish colonies — dozens of countries ended slavery peacefully through some sort of compensated emancipation.
Now, of course, the standard argument is that this could never have happened here, we could have never have done this. But I don’t see any reason to believe why British slave owners valued their slaves any less than American slave owners did. They didn’t want this. The British government paid them off 40 cents on the dollar. It might not have been possible in 1861, but I think in terms of the sheer amount of the death and the total destruction of the economy of the country, North and South. The North took a huge economic hit as well as the South. The one big quandary is, why didn’t we do what every other country in the world did during the previous 50 years that ended slavery, and end it peacefully through compensated emancipation?

Thomas DiLorenzo, from a fascinating discussion about Lincoln and the Constitution and the politics of Lincoln's Republican Party's abolitionism. The discussion's a debate, in fact, held by policy group the Independent Institute (what a name!) in 2002, between DiLorenzo and the Claremont Institute's Harry Jaffa.

From later in the session:

TD: Well, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island asserted the right to secede from the Union as a condition of ratifying the Constitution. And they asserted that right for the other states as well, and they were allowed into the Union after doing that, and so, that is one thing that happened.
HJ: That is absolutely wrong. It’s just flat-out wrong.
TD: Well, they did. I quoted the Virginia thing in my —
HJ: They did not speak of secession as a lawful right under the Constitution.
TD: Sovereignty. Sovereignty.
HJ: It was an exercise of the Right of Revolution, which they had recently exercised under the British Constitution. But you simply, stubbornly refuse to recognize that there’s a difference between secession as a Constitutional right and revolution as a natural right.
TD: I disagree with that, and I just —
HJ: No, you’re wrong. [Laughter.]
TD: I think you’re wrong.
HJ: You’re just wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Fun!!

Arrival & abandon or the town as erotic figure

2008-02-18T00:00:00.009-05:00

From Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling, opening to chap. 2:

To settle in the landscape means to delimit an area, a place. We stop our wandering and say: Here! Then we create an "inside" within the encompassing "outside." The settlement is therefore a point of arrival. Still we may somewhere have the fine experience of approaching a settlement which waits for us like a "thing." First we may grasp the main outline and perhaps a dominant element, such as a steeple. Getting closer, the shape becomes more articulate, and begins to suggest something about what is hidden inside. Depending on where we come from, the experience varies. If we come through the forest it is different from coming across the fields or over the sea; but always we have the sense of having reached a goal. Like a magnet it attracts us, and arouses our expectations.
How, then, does a settlement become a goal? The very experience of arrival implies a relationship to what is left behind. A goal does not exist in a vacuum; it is only a goal in relation to its environment. . . .
To serve as a goal, a settlement has to possess figural quality in relation to the surrounding landscape.

From Madame Bovary:

Gradually the four benches filled up, the coach rattled along, row upon row of apple trees flashed by; and the road, lined on each side by a ditch of yellow water, stretched on and on, narrowing toward the horizon.
    Emma knew every inch of it: she knew that after a certain meadow came a road sign, then an elm, a barn, or a road-mender's cabin; sometimes she even shut her eyes, trying to give herself a surprise. But she always knew just how much further there was to go.
    Finally the brick houses crowded closer together, the road rang under the wheels, and now the Hirondelle moved slowly between gardens: through iron fences were glimpses of statues, artificial mounds crowned by arbors, clipped yews, a swing. Then, all at once, the city came into view.
    Sloping downward like an amphitheatre, drowned in mist, it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges. Then open fields swept upward again in a monotonous curve, merging at the top with the uncertain line of the pale sky. Thus seen from above, the whole landscape had the static quality of a painting: ships at anchor were crowded into one corner, the river traced its curves along the foot of the green hills, and on the water the oblong shaped islands looked like great black fish stopped in their course. From the factory chimneys poured endless trails of brown smoke, their tips continually dissolving in the wind. The roar of foundries mingled with the clear peal of chimes that came from the churches looming in the fog. The leafless trees along the boulevards were like purple thickets in amongst the houses; and the roofs, all of them shiny with rain, gleamed with particular brilliance in the upper reaches of the town. Now and again a gust of wind blew the clouds toward the hill of Sainte-Catherine, like aerial waves breaking soundlessly agains a cliff.
    A kind of intoxication wafted up to her from those closely packed lives, and her heart swelled as though the 120,000 souls palpitating below had sent up to her as a collective offering the breath of all the passions she supposed them to be feeling. In the face of the vastness her love grew larger, and was filled with a turmoil that echoed the vague ascending hum. All this love she, in turn, poured out — onto the squares, onto the tree-lined avenues, onto the streets; and to her the old Norman city was like some fabulous capital, a Babylon into which she was making her entry. She leaned far out the window and filled her lungs with air; the three horses galloped on, there was a grinding of stones in the mud beneath the wheels; the coach swayed; Hivert shouted warningly ahead to the wagons he was about to overtake, and businessmen leaving their suburban villas in Bois-Guillaume descended the hill at a respectable pace in their little family carriages.
    There was a stop at the city gate: Emma took off her overshoes, changed her gloves, arranged her shawl, and twenty paces further on she left the Hirondelle.
    The city was coming to life. Clerks in caps were polishing shop windows, and women with baskets on their hips stood on street corners uttering loud, regular cries. She walked on, her eyes lowered, keeping close to the house walls and smiling happily under her lowered black veil.
    For fear of being seen, she usually didn't take the shortest way. She would plunge into a maze of dark alleys, and emerge, hot and perspiring, close to the fountain at the lower end of the Rue Nationale. This is the part of town near the theatre, full of bars and prostitutes. Often a van rumbled by, laden with shaky stage-sets. Aproned waiters were sanding the pavement between the tubs of green bushes. There was a smell of absinthe, cigars and oysters.
    Then she turned a corner. She recognized him from afar by the way his curly hair hung down below his hat.
    He walked ahead on the sidewalk. She followed him to the hotel; he went upstairs, opened the door of the room, went in — What an embrace!

Urbanisms

2008-02-08T21:00:00.000-05:00

A feature in this month's Architectural Record puts alongside one another six short interviews with architecture critics writing from six cities across the U.S. — Following, excerpts from four of them.

Robert Campbell, Boston Globe:

Campbell views the hot topic of sustainability as perhaps finally putting an end to the debates about arcane design theory, and becoming a new version of what had been considered Regionalism. "Sustainable design is a great opportunity for architects to sell themselves as environmental experts," he says. While sprawl is not as much a concern in Boston — a well-developed historic city — as it is in faster-growing cities, Campbell says the biggest environmental concern for the city remains the prospect of rising water levels, which he sees few architects addressing. "I can’t believe people are still developing big buildings on the harbor near sea level," he muses. He also laments the view that high-rise buildings are the only answer to increasing urban density in the name of sustainability. "The density of Paris is just as high, if not higher, than cities that have tall buildings," Campbell says. "In Midtown Manhattan, where every block is a single building with a single door, it becomes oppressive."

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune:

Kamin surveys the landscape of contemporary American architecture and sees a lot of Modernist projects he considers "one-offs," buildings that visually register within a city but don’t always contribute to street life. Exceptions include David Chipperfield’s Des Moines Public Library, which Kamin sees as part of an overall strategy of enlivening that city’s downtown. "The city is a project that takes generations to realize," he says. "To think that architects alone have the silver bullet that will change a downtown’s fate is ridiculous." But Kamin says more architects need to stop getting caught up in style wars and the obsession with sustainable "gadgets" — to borrow the Chicago architect and urbanist Douglas Farr’s terminology — that have the tendency to marginalize the profession. "Sustainability and architecture are ultimately about how we are going to live," he says. "You can’t ignore the small picture, so, yes, buildings should be green, but the real architects are the planners, politicians, and people who write codes."

David Dillon, Dallas Morning News:

Echoing most critics, Dillon says affordable housing remains a challenge for architecture. "If you ever wanted a real laboratory for developing affordable housing and prototypes, New Orleans is it," he says. "But what I’ve seen mostly is just a lot of New Urbanism stuff that doesn’t seem to get to the real problems of accessibility and affordability." Dillon, in his teaching role at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, studies affordable housing in the U.S. "It’s not a style exercise; it’s a community-building, economic exercise," he says, explaining why high-design architects don’t pursue the arduous process of piecing together funding for such projects. "Dallas is 40,000 units short in terms of affordable housing, and the houses built by Habitat for Humanity and community development corporations don’t even begin to touch this need."

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times:

"People are starting to lead more local, circumscribed lives, because it takes too long to drive to the other side of town. Much of the appeal of L.A. has been having access to the whole area — Malibu, Santa Monica, downtown, Pasadena," he says. Traffic jams, more planning, and more regulation "may well change the local myth of architectural freedom." For the past 30 years, architects like Gehry and Thom Mayne have drawn inspiration from industrial construction and the commercial strip, redefining what is ugly and what is beautiful. "We’ve been evaluating architects in Los Angeles on the basis of expressiveness and virtuosity. I don’t know if that’s appropriate anymore." With the new generation of L.A. architects working on tighter sites where freestanding expressions are less possible, "we may need a new way of thinking about these designers and whether they’re succeeding. Their work may be less loud, less in-your-face."

Audio

2008-01-30T11:30:00.000-05:00

Book listening possibilities opened up wide for me this Christmas. My dad and my brother & sister-in-law got me an iPod Nano, the first mp3 player I've owned, with an adapter for playing through the tape deck in my truck. Not only can I now draw on the CD collections at the libraries along with the tapes, I can also stick the Nano in my back pocket and listen while I work sometimes. And there's all sorts of downloadable stuff out there to be taken advantage of, of course, besides what the libraries offer. Among download sources, Librivox is something pointed out to me last year by Fisher, and now I've had a chance to give it something of a closer look. Listened to their recording of More's Utopia earlier this month, for example, and have started getting a little poetry into the mix. Very grateful to be suddenly so enriched.

I understand that people put music on their mp3 players, too, but so far I haven't tried this.

In the truck, it happens, I'm staying old school for the moment, still working on (not being on the road to the usual extent in past couple of weeks) a tape set of Madame Bovary — something I should have bothered getting to a long time ago. Here, one of the striking passages from Bovary:

When Emma burst into tears he tried to comfort her, protesting his love and saying things to make her smile.
"It's because I love you," she would interrupt. "I love you so much that I can't do without you — you know that, don't you? Sometimes I want so much to see you that it tears me to pieces. 'Where is he?' I wonder. 'Maybe he's with other women. They're smiling at him, he's going up close to them....' Tell me it isn't true! Tell me you don't like any of them! Some of them are prettier than I am, but none of them can love you the way I do. I'm your slave and your concubine! You're my king, my idol! You're good! You're beautiful! You're wise! You're strong!"
He had had many such things said to him so many times that none of them had any freshness for him. Emma was like all his other mistresses; and as the charm of novelty gradually slipped from her like a piece of her clothing, he saw revealed in all its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and always speaks the same language. He had no perception — this man of such vast experience — of the dissimilarity of feeling that might underlie similarities of expression. Since he had heard those same words uttered by loose women or prostitutes, he had little belief in their sincerity when he heard them now: the more flowery a person's speech, he thought, the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

An excerpt: Holl, on being receptive to daylight

2008-01-23T23:00:00.000-05:00

Natural light is an essential force interlocked with time. The sun arcs through the sky each day at a different angle; the season's change plays out in the vessel of the house like a volumetric sundial. Unexpected changing intensities and consistencies drive sunlight in the counterpoint of moving shadows. Black against white, blurred against crisp, dissolving against knife-sharp edges, the subtle music of light plays out in space. Porous light and shadow, like the dapple of the sun's rays penetrating dense foliage, is often ordered in elliptical shapes. This phenomenon is due to the fact that the sun is not a point; it is like a sun picture on a sheet of paper.
    Shadow, sunlight, and geometry are interlocked in experiential phenomena. Looking at my own shadow on the ground I notice that the shadow of my head is blurry while shadows of my feet are sharp.
    The shadow of a porous plane, like the shadows of wire mesh, can exhibit curious properties. For example, a rectangular mesh at certain sun angles only shows vertical shadows. In his 1954 book Light and Color in the Open Air, the physicist M. Minnaert writes about nature's phenomena, exclaiming, "It is very difficult to see new things, even when they are before our eyes."
    The distance of the shadow to the plane of projection drastically alters its character. To see this phenomenon, simply hold a perforated plane immediately in front of a piece of blank paper then move it farther away gradually. If the architect engages this natural light phenomenon, these very different shadow patterns might be created by a certain architectural space.

From Steven Holl's introduction to House: Black Swan Theory, in which fifteen of his designs for residences and small semi-residential buildings, 1986 to 2006, are presented as studies in phenomenology of place & space, one-offs, discrete and situation-specified.

Fisher news!

2008-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Congratulations are due to several-times-previously-mentioned artist friend Jeff Fisher and his wife Jenn, on the birth last week of their son Rowan, the small reddish person pictured at right. See photos and a brief light-hearted account of the events of Rowan's delivery, successfully managed in Jeff & Jenn's home, here. (Just received permission to post the link today.)

Jeff & Jenn are a remarkable couple, alike & together gifted & enterprising, and it's delightful to imagine what new effort & accomplishment this little guy will call forth in their lives, as also to imagine what wonderful things we may hope to see, transmitted & transmuted from them, someday in his.

Cul de Sac!!

2008-01-16T12:00:00.000-05:00

Dear Reader (er .. meaning all 3 or 4 of you, equally), Richard Thompson himself was gracious enough to pay this blog a visit last night. I assure you, this is a moment of celestial exaltation for my humble blog.

If you click on his name there in the comments, as I quickly did, you'll find that Richard Thompson indeed has a blog. And it's terrific, not surprisingly. But don't take my word for it!

Incidentally, that blog appears on the 2nd page of Google returns if you search "Richard Thompson" today. When I mentioned him here in September, though, having just searched for what material was out there (as I've done on several occasions over some years), there was no blog to find. His inaugural post is dated later that same month.

It would be unseemly, perhaps, for me to praise Thompson's work in a very impassioned way, here, especially since I'm not the book-&-print-collecting, convention-going comics & illustration fanatic that others out there who appreciate his stuff undoubtedly are. But I've long thought him a superb illustrator. I'm really grateful to have more access, now, to what he's doing.

P.S. See particularly the Beethoven's Birthday posts of last month — 1, 2. Hilarious!

Cul de Sac

2008-01-14T23:00:00.000-05:00

Now a regular weekly feature at WashingtonPost.com! Don't miss it!!

Louis Sullivan artistic limitation in flower

2007-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

From Michael J. Lewis's 2001 New Criterion article on a century's evolution in views of the work of Louis Sullivan:

To say that Sullivan’s work was often two-dimensional is not to disparage it. After a truncated education, most of his formative years were spent devising frescoes and ornamental borders for other men’s buildings. This cannot have been satisfying to his ambition but to it he brought the full force of his intellect. Artistically engaged but intellectually underused, he inevitably came to invest his ornament with the profoundest personal meaning. In this process, character traits that might otherwise be handicaps — narcissism, self-importance and a certain obsessiveness — were essential, even advantageous. A less self-involved man simply would not have taken the design of foliage so seriously.

When Sullivan at last turned his hand to the composition of tall buildings, he was the right man for the right time. He saw clearly that modern construction had outpaced the expressive potential of the historical styles. Massive arches, piers, and cornices were conceived in terms of masonry and were sculptural by nature; they were inappropriate for a light steel frame, which needed but a thin cladding of ceramic materials to protect its girders from fire and water. In short, the wall was dissolving into a thin planar screen. Such a screen, mounted across the face of a steel cage, is not a promising field for personal expression, but here Sullivan was on home territory. He invested these taut and lofty planes with almost fathomless feeling. He did not see the curtain wall as an ordered heap of bricks, and therefore inert, but as the physical manifestation of a thought, and therefore a living thing, “designed in a high pitch of sustained emotional tension,” as he once put it. The burst of flowers in the spandrels and the gale of tendrils in the cornice were not an afterthought at all, as modernists insisted, but the thought itself.

Lewis's interesting, though for me not entirely convincing, historical sketch & critique of a current of celebrity culture dominating high-profile architecture today, in the December New Criterion, was featured at ALDaily yesterday. Sullivan features prominently, there, not coincidentally, in his account of the modern rise of the "starchitects."

An excerpt

2007-12-10T23:00:00.000-05:00

Who was the wisest person I ever met in my entire life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who, like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, "the geese looked in the windows."
    I said, "Saul, how should I feel about Picasso?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he said, "God put him on Earth to show us what it's like to be really rich."
    I said, "Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he said, "It's very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."
    I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"
    Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

Thoughts worth pondering from a book I didn't otherwise much like, Kurt Vonnegut's A Man without a Country, 2005.

An excerpt: Brand, on layer ecology in buildings

2007-12-01T02:00:00.000-05:00

Pulled old favorite How Buildings Learn off the shelf and have been re-reading parts of it here & there this week. Here's a prime bit, from chap. 2, "Shearing Layers:"

Buildings rule us via their time layering at least as much as we rule them, and in a surprising way. This idea comes from Robert V. O'Neill's A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. O'Neill and his co-authors noted that ecosystems could be better understood by observing rates of change of different components. Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees slow, and whole redwood forests even slower. Most interaction is within the same pace level — hummingbirds and flowers pay attention to each other, oblivious to redwoods, who are oblivious to them. Meanwhile the forest is attentive to climate change but not to the hasty fate of individual trees. The insight is this: "The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along." Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.
The same goes with buildings: the lethargic slow parts are in charge, not the rapid dazzling ones. Site dominates Structure, which dominates the Skin, which dominates the Services, which dominate the Space plan, which dominates the Stuff. How a room is heated depends on how it relates to the heating and cooling Services, which depends on the efficiency of the Skin, which depends on the constraints of the Structure. You could add a seventh "S" — human Souls at the very end of the hierarchy, servants to our Stuff.
Still, influence does percolate the other direction. The slower processes of a building gradually integrate trends of rapid change within them. The speedy components propose, and the slow dispose. If an office keeps replacing its electronic Stuff often enough, finally management will insist that the Space plan acquire a raised floor to make the constant recabling easier, and that's when the air-conditioning and electrical Services will be revamped to handle the higher load. Ecologist Buzz Holling points out that it is at times of major changes in a system that the quick processes can most influence the slow.

"Architectural ideas"

2007-11-18T22:45:00.000-05:00

Precedents in Architecture, 3/e, p. 258

The success and longevity of this work suggest there is a need for this information about architecture. As we started to produce the material for this third edition, we were keenly aware of the initial premise for the study — the commonality and significance of design ideas that transcend time and place. As the work progressed, these assumptions have been reinforced. Architectural ideas are the underpinnings of architecture upon which other concerns — social, technical, economical, cultural, legal, and political — are layered.

An easy enough thing to say!

From the preface to the third edition (2005) of popular graphic-analysis text Precedents in Architecture.

An excerpt

2007-11-15T23:30:00.000-05:00

I think it is possible therefore, both historically and phenomenologically, to speak of the human encounter with the sacred as having a "structure" of sacred presence and sacred anticipation, of sacred call and human response. Sacred presence is simultaneously experienced as sacred call; and part of the human response to that call is to seek and anticipate the presence of the sacred. Historically, the most obvious human response to the sacred has been to worship it; and human worship typically entails ritual actions in which the presence of the sacred is invoked. But the experience of the sacred as call and response is not limited to religious ritual. Cultural historian Philip Rieff argues that human culture itself is, in its origins if not its essence, the human response to the sacred. To this I would add (anticipating what is to follow) that cities are the foremost physical form of culture; and that some sort of spatial and formal hierarchy — if only as crude as the simple dichotomy between "sacred" and "profane" precincts — is the distinguishing mark of cities in which artifacts are created for and in response to the sacred. Rieff argues that every human culture is marked by the specific behaviors that it encourages and the specific behaviors that it prohibits. Books and vows, prayers and parading, law and architecture, music and the sciences, dancing and piety toward parents, theater and athletic competition: each and all of such marks of culture originate as an address to the sacred — which also issues forth a variety of prohibitions, of "shalt nots," of things that are not to be done.
Sacred "shalt nots" may include such "rational" prohibitions as idolatries, profanations, murders, thefts, betrayals, incests, rapes, abortions, and adulteries. But it will also include apparently irrational prohibitions, emblematic of that universal attitude that Chesterton once referred to as "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy," an idea he found represented most prominently in fairy tales, and paradigmatically in the story of Cinderella: "You may go to the ball, but you must be home by midnight." Both in fairy tales, and for those with a sense of the sacred, human happiness requires a primary and fundamental obedience. But this obedience does not preclude (and in fact sometimes both requires and inspires) other rebellions. Rather, the obedience circumscribes the rebellion, in much the same way as the non-rational circumscribes the rational. Thus for Chesterton (an English patriot), the Irish rebel justly opposes English tyranny, which is

something he [the rebel] understands only too well; but the true citizen of fairyland obeys something he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeit. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

This insistence on a sense of prohibition as a constituent element of sacred sensibility may strike moderns and post-moderns as odd, but only a moment's attention to examples from both literature and everyday speech will confirm it. "If God is dead, everything is permitted," was the conjecture of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov; and in The Brothers Karamazov, "everything" included parricide. But we often express the same idea in a phrase even more mundane: of a social situation in which anything and everything seems possible we do indeed commonly say "there is nothing sacred." A sense of the sacred therefore necessarily seems to include a sense of prohibition as a pre-condition of that fundamental pleasure of agreement that culture affords. It is within the constraints of sacred prohibitions, tight or loose, that every creative freedom in a culture arises, as well as the very possibility of remission and forgiveness for their transgression. The psychoanalytic terms for this personal and cultural dynamic of prohibition and creativity are "repression" and "sublimation;" and Freud well understood what many of his heirs perhaps do not, that there can be no culture without repression. The social effect of culture, Rieff observes, is that individuals learn through a variety of ritual roles and actions to express fixed wants; and the limitation of possibilities is the first pre-requisite of human happiness.

From Philip Bess, "'Making Sacred:' The Phenomenology of Matter and Spirit in Architecture and The City."

More honesty

2007-11-06T14:00:00.000-05:00

Found today that Gregory Baus, congenial controversialist originally from the area of Baltimore where I now live, is back to blogging, after a break of some months. I met Baus through friends at New Hope Presbyterian, the church in Fairfax, Va., I attended for a number of years. His blog was my introduction to the blogging phenomenon, and thereby to a lot of thought-provoking encounter with people — a wide (& gradually still widening) spectrum of personalities and conversations. I'm grateful for it.

His most recent post occasions a brief but interesting exchange, in comments, on questions of treaties and national sovereignty in reading the U.S. Constitution.

Agro-urbanism?

2007-10-26T22:00:00.000-05:00

As far as I can tell — not having looked into it in any great depth yet — these two essentially equivalent concepts for urban high-rise dwelling, embodying 'sustainability' to the point of incorporating small-plot agriculture for every residence, have been published about the same time as solutions in two quite unrelated design competitions. The project at left, named Agro-Housing, is a proposal by Knafo-Klimor of Israel for a city in China, winning entry in a contest sponsored by the International Iron and Steel Institute. For further info, see the article here (via ArchitectureWeek's 'Green Wednesday' headline aggregator, last week's edition). At right, Center for Urban Agriculture, proposal for a specific Seattle site by Mithun, this year's winner (in the 'visionary' category) of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council's Living Building Challenge. For further info, see this article from today's 'AIArchitect This Week.' Mithun goes so far, apparently, as to call its project an 'urban farm.' That sounds like a pretty big terminological stretch to me, particularly as no such radical attempt to merge city living with the habits of tending the earth has yet gotten off paper. Still, one wonders if these things will start getting built in some form — and if so, who might want to buy in and make a go of urban-agriculturist lifestyle.

Update: The current ArchitectureWeek feature article covers the IISI sustainable housing competition in greater breadth.

An excerpt: O'Connor, on Christian world view

2007-10-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.
    There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.
    I find that students are often puzzled by what she says and does here, but I think myself that if I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention. Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them. The devil's greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist.
    I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.
    I don't want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that's another story.
    This story has been called grotesque, but I prefer to call it literal. A good story is literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul, and not for the dead bodies.

From the collection of writings of Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners.

Made in Germany

2007-10-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

The 2007 Solar Decathlon (see earlier) has been won by the trim entry from Technische Universität Darmstadt. In my inbox this morning was an AIA news bit reporting Darmstadt's win in the big one, the Architecture competition. Local kids University of Maryland took second in Architecture, and the other Euro entry, from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, won third. Darmstadt and Maryland retained their Architecture leads, in the end, to place first and second overall, with third place going to California's Santa Clara University. All three were among the entries scoring a full 100 points in the Energy Balance competition.

The exhibition continues through tomorrow, the 20th. Unfortunately, though the whole thing's just a few miles away from my brother & sister-in-law's in Fairfax (where I'm staying while I work on the house), I've had a terribly busy week and will not get down to the Mall after all. It looks like there's been no shortage of visitor interest, however. Check out the photos at the event site.

From the blogosphere

2007-10-18T01:15:00.000-05:00

Respected Lutheran theo-blogger Chris Atwood, prof. of Mongolia history at Indiana U., on Monday posted part 2 of what looks like it'll be a 3-part series on modern views of 'the Joshua event' in Israel tradition, told mainly in the biblical book of that name. The posts are longish by comparison with a lot of usual blog fare, but considering they're coming from an academic habituated to writing about history, they're not so long really. In any case, fascinating history-of-an-idea reading — well worth a look.

From the blogosphere

2007-10-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah Irani, at Nine Tons of Marble, has been posting since roughly spring/early summer, a little sporadically but with continuity, about re-establishing herself in the regular habits of creative enterprise. (Sarah's a sculptor — mainly concerned with large-scale figure in the 'classical' mode.) One of the pleasures of reading her is the opportunity for some insight into being an artist as a problem bound up in the total effort of a life — as something quite different from, in other words, the idea of a profession pursued 'at the office' or 'in the field' and set aside at home on evenings & weekends. Tuesday's posts are especially suggestive, I think, of this totalizing sensibility, the on-running contingencies & conflicts of mind, body, & relationship self-awareness & -adjustment intimately connected with finding oneself operating with a fruitfully artistic mind-'set'.

Audio

2007-10-14T16:00:00.000-05:00

Maybe a year & a half ago, now, I began (here & here) something of a recovery from a long disconnection from 'literary' reading, by finally giving books on tape a try. It seems strange, in retrospect, that I didn't bother taking advantage of this possibility sooner. Public radio, for all its charms, has since then been entirely supplanted as a drive-time habit; and I'm making regular trips to the library, a place I'd gotten pretty unfamiliar with over a period of years.

Embarrassing, in a way, to acknowlege what tremendous works & important authors I've neglected, which only now with the audio option I'm getting an opportunity to know. Heart of Darkness. The Scarlet Letter. Steinbeck, Eco, Rushdie. On the other hand, if I'd read any of this stuff twenty or even ten years ago, I'd have been a much less invested reader/listener than I am now — there'd have been a good deal less to attach to them, or to attach them to, in my thoughts. (As was the case, sadly, for all the stuff I read to acquire my degree — which is, I almost want to laugh to say, in English Lit.) So it's not entirely with regret that I consider what for me are this last year's discoveries.

Currently listening to, and wish to recommend, a terrific reading of Chaim Potok's The Chosen, recorded by Jim Weiss.

Fisher news

2007-10-08T10:00:00.000-05:00

Thoughtful & talented friend Jeff Fisher, whom I've had occasion to mention here a few times before, has been working through a range of web site changes in the past few months, and it seems like a good time to point them out here.

His whimsical site name & brand Cloverfish.com came back this summer, after a couple of years' disuse, and with it a graphically excellent & fittingly whimsical new logo. Jeff's web design work, at present his primary means of income, now has its own presence at this revived address.

JeffreyBrianFisher.com, coordinately, is now exclusively for Jeff's illustration work. This site has undergone some updating & revision — it looks like he's aiming to keep it simpler & more flexible. Layout & typography are a little more spare, a little more direct & functional. Together with these adjustments in look & useability, and of greater significance, Jeff's added a sort of sub-site that he's labeled Concept Art. The work in this functionally distinct section of the site isn't strictly separate from what he's got on display at the main illustration site, but a lot of it is much more sketchy & unrefined, and it's being pursued to a freer, more fanciful, more experimental end. In a way, the idea seems to be to set space apart for giving the creative reins over to a fruitful but until now somewhat repressed, somewhat more adolescent vision than 'paying' work has allowed for. (Ability to sustain, or unleash, this adolescent imaginativity, I think, is a good deal of what we have to credit the prolific & vividly conceived work of celebrity Tolkien illustrators Howe & Lee, for instance, to.) This un-specific concept art of Fisher's looks like a promising thing to me, and I'm watching to see what evolves there.

Change comes to Washington

2007-10-02T23:45:00.000-05:00

The National Mall in DC again in 2007 turns green in October, with start of the third biannual Solar Decathlon tomorrow. Opening to the public won't be for another week & a half, but teams will be putting their entries together at the Mall site from tomorrow — or rather, from tonight, at midnight (about the time I'm posting here, in fact), as one team website informs readers.

The upcoming event was only very dimly present on my own radar, I acknowledge, until a couple of weeks ago, when I stopped by the architecture school at the University of Maryland to poke around a bit, as I was passing through the area. The fenced enclosure where their entry was awaiting some finish work was open, fairly irresistible, and I walked in & chatted with a team member about the event & the entry's competitive prospects. He seemed pretty up-beat about things.

He might've had reason to be, since in some respects there's no need for guesswork about what sort of competition they're up against: all twenty entries, published as detailed construction documents, are available for view (& download) on the Solar Decathlon site. But at the same time, there's a lot one can't know, surely — even about one's own team's entry — until all are built & performing (or not) under the common test conditions. Competitors include other US universities with notable technical & design programs — like MIT, entering for the first time — along with less prominent US programs and a few schools from outide the US (one Canadian, two European). The two earlier competitions' winner, University of Colorado at Boulder, is in the running again. (There seems to be some feeling that Colorado-Boulder's cheek-by-jowl relation with the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden, CO may give it a degree of unfair advantage. But who knows whether that's reasonable fear or not.) And there appears to be a great deal of sponsor interest & investment, from many angles US & international. On the face of it, the likelihood of an easy prediction about the competition outcome seems small to me.

I've only spent a little time on the Decathlon web site, & on a few of the teams' sites. There's a lot about the whole grand thing, though my interest is strongly piqued, that I won't get to look into even after the event's come & gone. I do hope to get down to the Mall, however, and actually see some of what's on display this go round.

Election

2007-09-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

Then You spoke in a vision to Your holy one,
And said: "I have given help to one who is mighty;
I have exalted one chosen from the people.
I have found My servant David;
With my holy oil I have anointed him,
With whom My hand shall be established;
Also My arm shall strengthen him.
The enemy shall not outwit him,
Nor the son of wickedness afflict him.
I will beat down his foes before his face,
And plague those who hate him.
But My faithfulness and My mercy shall be with him,
And in My name his horn shall be exalted.
Also I will set his hand over the sea,
And his right hand over the rivers.
He shall cry to Me, 'You are my Father,
My God, and the rock of my salvation.'
Also I will make him My firstborn,
The highest of the kings of the earth.
My mercy I will keep for him forever,
And My covenant shall stand firm with him.
His seed also I will make to endure forever,
And his throne as the days of heaven.
If his sons forsake My law
And do not walk in My judgments,
If they break My statutes
And do not keep My commandments,
Then I will punish their transgression with the rod,
And their iniquity with stripes.
Nevertheless My lovingkindness I will not utterly take from him,
Nor allow My faithfulness to fail.
My covenant I will not break,
Nor alter the word that has gone out of My lips.
Once I have sworn by My holiness;
I will not lie to David:
His seed shall endure forever,
And his throne as the sun before Me;
It shall be established forever like the moon,
Even like the faithful witness in the sky."

From Psalm 89.

Kitchen

2007-09-26T01:00:00.009-05:00

For some weeks I've been working on my younger brother & sister-in-law's roughly 40-year-old townhouse, in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside the infamous Washington Beltway. The windows in the place, which they moved into just last year, were essentially inoperable, and replacing them is one thing I've got underway; but the main job, a good deal less straightforward in execution, is a full kitchen remodel. At right here (click for full-size) is an overhead view from a Sketchup model of the kitchen as it was when we began — unchanged, in essentials, since the house was built. Through-traffic, working traffic, standing around for conversation, having a meal: all end up in conflict, crossing paths in the middle of the room. And there's no good stretch of counter space. A pretty bad setup, in short.

So here, correspondingly, is the kitchen we're working on realizing, a complete reconfiguration. Sketchup (free software, my gosh) is the tool I started the thinking with, concept & rough modeling; no paper or pencil involved. And on a job this size, Sketchup is entirely sufficient — fully efficient in fact — for the whole drawing process. Appliances, fixtures, those yellow bar stools: all lifted from the Sketchup 'warehouse,' a library of free, downloadable 3D models. Almost too easy. — Due thanks, here, to the Google people.

Work began with demolition of everything down to framing — and a good bit of wall framing, to boot. Even the ceiling drywall wasn't worth saving, since we had a fair amount of new electrical going in, and a support to suspend from up inside the ceiling for the cabinets that would go over what we're calling the 'island'. After we'd gotten this start (and filled the dining room with my tools & the living room with cabinets, rendering the whole first floor a work zone, & a barely navigable one at that), though, we stopped and did a bit more design. We hadn't planned, at the outset, to do anything to the main doorway, the doorway to the hall that leads from the house entry; but with work already under way, we reconsidered this & decided to widen the door radically, to gain some additional feeling of openness overall and to let the basement stair & the kitchen communicate light & sound a bit — as seen in plan, above, & in the eye-level view here.

The doorway wall is the wall that bears floor weight mid-way (roughly) between front & back of the house. We'd already had to get our planned altered opening for the new fridge niche approved for permit, and this more drastic alteration required getting a further approval. Ended up doing a couple of extra drawings — the old-fashion way, t-square & triangles — to answer the county reviewer's concerns. At left, one of these drawings, an isometric showing the direct relation of the first-floor & the basement-level bearing walls, to demonstrate that nothing would need to be changed in the basement. This drawing is overkill, kind of, but helped me keep a few framing matters clear in my head & made answering questions easy enough. (And it was fun to do.)

To redo this doorway wall, then, called for temporarily supporting the floor above, a little distance from the wall to front & to back. Beyond the new wall framing in foreground of the photo is the temporary wall toward house back, in the kitchen. There are two smaller temp walls opposite, toward house front, one inside the fridge niche & one in the hallway. And there's another temp wall in the basement, more or less directly under the one in the kitchen — just to be safe. (I don't think this last actually had to do much — it never felt much tightened up against the joists, once the temporary walls were taking all the load.) The temp walls are built mostly from the studs of walls already removed in earlier demo.

Like a lot of aging houses built in the manner we're accustomed to in North America, this one sags considerably from outer walls to middle, in both directions, length & width. (Seems a little odd to me that this house slopes to middle as much as it does, though, since it's a townhouse, the spans aren't great, and the load goes straight down to concrete. I imagine there's nothing but dirt under the slab, at center — but even so, it's only 21 feet wide.) I can't do anything about the overall sag, of course, but with my new 2x12 header in place, supported at either end but not at the point between doorway & fridge niche, it seemed like a good idea to try to counteract the tendency to curve, as the whole wall does, along its length. So I jacked it just a little, less than a 1/4", at its center, before putting in the doubled stud between the openings. (The curvature apparent in the photo isn't in the wood, by the way — that's all lens distortion.) Note that the bottle jack is set up to bear on either side of the doorway in the basement below it.

One of the tricks at this point is to try to secure that new doorway knee-wall against wobbling whenever someone bumps into it. It's not enough to nail it down to whatever it sits on, even if what it sits on is pretty solid with framing members under the plywood. What one wants is to get some vertical member from the knee-wall down through the floor and tied in — bolted — into floor &/or wall framing underneath. I didn't show it in the isometric drawing for proposed framing, above, but I knew roughly what I needed here. In the photo you can see, in part, the way it got worked out: one stud turned 'flat' (long side, instead of short, in parallel with the drywall) and run down through the subfloor. That's less, though, for rigidity than I'd have preferred to get in the framing, since it's the stud's short rather than its long cross-sectional dimension that's in line with the force to be resisted, if someone walks into or otherwise puts bending force on the knee-wall. But the room available underneath the subfloor for bringing framing down, and tying it in, turns out to be scant in that location. In the end I compensated a bit for less-than-ideal framing by using the drywall — gluing up heavily & then pushing the drywall firm to the subfloor, while holding the wall plumb, & then screwing it with about three times the usual number of screws. I hate to depend on drywall to help hold anything in place, but it's working alright in this case. The knee-wall's got a very satisfying stiffness.

An inch-&-a-half sandwich of plywood set on 2x6s in the wall at one end, and glued & screwed into a shallow rabbet in the 3/4" piece hung in the joists above at the other, serves as a pretty solid spine for the cabinets that will go over the 'island.' There's drywall on that wall now, and just tonight we set up the counter-top on sawhorses and hung a cabinet in place, to do a position test with my sister-in-law. (She wants to be sure she can see out the window without having to duck her head, when there are little ones playing in the yard.) This structure's looking like it'll work nicely — those upper cabinets should feel as solid as if they were mounted to a wall.

Redemption

2007-09-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, let those who are in the midst of her depart, and let not those who are in the country enter her. For these are the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing babies in those days! For there will be great distress in the land and wrath upon this people. And they will fall by the edge of the sword, and be led away captive into all nations. And Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations, with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near.

From Luke's gospel, ch. 21.

He finds you

2007-09-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

This Gospel today is not for the righteous but for sinners, not for the healthy but for lepers, not for the rich but for the poor, not for the haughty but for the lowly. This Gospel gives you everything you sinners need in these little words: "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"

You cannot redeem yourself with those words. But lift up your voice, and your Redeemer will draw near. "Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!"

You cannot bring back your lost child, your dead spouse.
You cannot rectify the missteps you have taken.
You cannot atone for your sins.
You cannot fix your marriage, sharpen your failing eyesight, bring back your fading memories.
You are the walking corpse, the leper who cannot even get close enough to Jesus for Him to hear you without shouting.

So shout, and keep on shouting. He hears you. Keep on knocking — the door will be opened. Keep on seeking, but know this: it is He who finds you. You lepers cannot draw near to Him, but He draws near to you.

From Sunday's sermon at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran in Alexandria, where I was a visitor this week. The whole sermon — not very long — is posted on Pastor Esget's blog.

The other Richard Thompson

2007-09-07T11:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Whisky P offered qualified praise re: music of one Richard Thompson — the one who turns up front & center when you google Richard Thompson.

Seems like a good occasion for mentioning the Richard Thompson I've long been bonkers over — and there is, I find, finally a page worth linking to. And the occasion's that much more perfect, right here, in following directly on a post referencing George Herriman — whose work's legacy Thompson's surely reflects, on every level, better than any other noteworthy cartoonist active today.

Images d'un monde

2007-09-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

Two sites to point out briefly, both rich in images of worlds past, both made in France.

The lesser I came across only a couple of days ago. Sat down at my brother's machine to check email and found open in the browser this intriguing little gallery of caricatures of people smoking, mostly from the 19th century. At left, one of several by Daumier. The page relates to an exhibit at Le musée du Fumeur, Paris. (Like me, my youngest brother occasionally smokes a pipe — he, between us, the more 'serious' & informed smoker.)

That page, with its titles in French, recalled to my mind a far greater collection of art works to be found online, a site I encountered a month or two ago via Google search for material about George Herriman. Not the first time I've done a Herriman search, but it had been a good while since the last time. New to me among the search returns was the visually extravagant Coconino World: dedicated, as the name implies, to Herriman's Krazy Kat — but also to much more than Herriman. Of special interest (to my mind), the 'Coconino Classics' pages, 'une ressource encyclopedique sur l'histoire de la narration graphique,' replete with 19th- & early to mid 20th-century humor illustration both American & European. I've hardly begun to look through all of it, to tell the truth — hence the neglect to mention discovery of it here, before now. Perusing the Herriman archives alone, there, could occupy many hours.

From the blogosphere

2007-08-26T12:00:00.000-05:00

To have daughters.

From the blogosphere

2007-08-22T23:30:00.000-05:00

poetry comes from love, not from despair or darkness, this is only self-indulgence....
despair looks at a point, eyes downcast, a view inward. love looks all around and into eternity.

From brief notes posted today by Chris Godfree-Morrell.

From the blogosphere

2007-08-14T00:00:00.000-05:00

Calling life a "battle" may sound outlandish, but speak to anyone who has experienced or witnessed any amount of true suffering and they won't be so eager to prescribe tips on how to say "farewell to the blues," because they are dealing with so much more. How ridiculous we North Americans are — I don't want to be stuck in this cesspool of comfortable living forever. It's like eating yourself.

Bit taken from new expressive rumblings/ruminations of the thoughtful Tala Strauss.

(Interesting to think of ending in consuming ourselves as reflecting a sort of perverse societal attainment, & as an image exactly opposite to the church's coming, corporately, at Jesus' call, to 'feed upon' & be nourished by him.)

Drive-by: Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox

2007-08-13T02:00:00.000-05:00

Linthicum, Maryland
click for full snapshot

An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on architectural figure

2007-08-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

From The Concept of Dwelling, by Christian Norberg-Schulz:

That the role of the public building was understood in the past, is proved by many old representations of cities, where nothing but the engirdling city wall and the landmarks within are shown. The public buildings thus "constitute and inform" the city; they stand forth as figures which reveal reality. Our discussion of their morphology and topology has shown that certain properties of form and space are necessary to secure this role. It remains to say a few words about the figural quality of the public building in general.
We have already mentioned some of the most characteristic types, such as the basilica and the rotunda. Both are double functioning forms, in the sense of possessing figural quality both in their exterior and interior aspects. In general, their quality resides in the hierarchical symmetry of the volumetric composition, whereas the monotonous repetition of the hypostyle hall does not produce a similarly powerful image. Figural quality is therefore not the same as order; it rather presupposes a certain articulation, which relates to man's life on earth under the sky. The basilica possesses this articulation in its concrete distinction between down and up, while the hypostyle hall places man within an abstract network of directions. Articulation as such, however, is not sufficient, as is proved by the caprices of innumerable late-modern buildings. A powerful, easily imageable overall form is imperative, and the basilica and the rotunda in fact possess this quality. Le Corbusier was therefore almost right when he defined architecture as "the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light."
He was almost right, because he understood volume in terms of "cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders and pyramids," that is, abstract geometrical forms, rather than concrete figures which stand on the ground and rise toward the sky.

An excerpt: Barth, on trust & responsibility

2007-07-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Q: To what extent is a Christian culture the goal or fruit of Christian faith?
A: What is Christian faith? Christian faith means: "In God We Trust." You know that phrase? I have learned this beautiful definition, and it is a great thing that in God we trust. We Christians live as members of the people of God in the world. Living in the world — to which we must witness and with which we must live in a responsible way — we trust, having ourselves been entrusted. But to what? Why not say that we are entrusted to cultivate God's wonderful garden — "The Garden State" perhaps? Wherever there are human needs and miseries, obedience and desires, and so on — well, that is the garden of God and we have to cultivate it. I don't like very much the term "Christian culture"— do you?"

From "a transcript of a question and answer period held in the Princeton University chapel" published in Theology Today, July 1962.

Freaks

2007-07-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Darby Conley is brilliant. This isn't news — just a sentiment I'm overdue in expressing.
It took me a while to start liking Get Fuzzy, to tell the truth. But I've long since come around. I don't mind saying I'm a bit in awe.

Perseverance

2007-07-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

He said to them, "You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it. And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail."

For best results

2007-07-07T16:00:00.000-05:00

Signed up for another two years with my mobile phone service this week, and got a new phone, a Motorola product, in the bargain. Here is the User Guide page covering proper treatment of the device:

Wait — what's that instruction at bottom left say?

Ah. Of course.

Well, can't say I haven't been warned.

Illustration illumination

2007-07-06T07:30:00.000-05:00

The handful of people who check in on this blog from time to time may recall my April 17 post pointing out Diane Rehm's show with Richard Preston, about his book The Wild Trees. Glad to be able to report now that the illustrator for that book, Andrew Joslin, into whom WP's comment got me to do a little investigating online, found the post and has added there a comment that gives some insight about his own background and his approach to the drawings. My sincere thanks to Andrew for taking time to connect with us here.

LATER: Andrew's left a further comment and a link to the climbing gear sketch that caught Preston's eye and got him the illustration job. Do take a look at the comments there.

An excerpt

2007-07-02T21:30:00.000-05:00

From an essay, "On History and Culture," by Juhani Pallasmaa in the June Architectural Record:

Creative works are always supra-individual accumulations of experience and wisdom. Milan Kundera, the Czech-French writer, points out "the wisdom of the novel," to which all good writers listen. In my view, architects should similarly listen to "the wisdom of architecture," the accumulated understanding of the essence of architectural culture, encoded in the ancient and contemporary traditions of building. Architecture is truly a collective art form, although not only in the sense that it creates lived metaphors that concretize the cultural and mental structures of the society. Architecture is an art essentially based on collaboration — the obvious cooperation with numerous experts, builders, and craftsmen, to be sure — but moreover, collaboration with history and the wisdom that it possesses.
Although I am emphasizing the significance of the historical grounding of creative work, I am not promoting architectural conservatism or implying that architects need to become historians. As T. S. Eliot already advised us in his seminal 1919 essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," writers and other creative individuals need a "historical sense." This sense grasps the continuity of traditions, as well as the ruptures in the processes of traditions.
Most importantly, the history of our discipline and practice teaches us the art of respect and humility. The poet Joseph Brodsky writes, "Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty," and continues, "Poetry — writing it as well as reading it — will teach you humility and rather quickly at that. Especially if you are both writing and reading." Brodsky's statement applies equally to architecture — particularly if you are both making it and theorizing about it! To work within our shared architectural heritage is to enter into a special realm of architectural responsibility and humility. The primary significance of this historical sensibility is that it assigns you your position in the continued dialogue of culture.

Vocation

2007-06-24T16:30:00.000-05:00

"Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live."

Drive-by: The Church at Severn Run

2007-06-21T01:30:00.000-05:00

Severn, Maryland
click image for views

Sighting

2007-06-08T23:30:00.000-05:00

The illustrious Pinhead turned up in Baltimore today. He's not so easy for me to enjoy when he gets overtly political, I confess. But surely such a visit's a moment to savor, regardless of what might seem to have occasioned it.

From the blogosphere

2007-06-08T09:15:00.000-05:00

Do go & let full-auto-witted Lutheran (ex-)seminarian Josh S. show you where to cut the crap, with his helpful recent guide to church growth.

An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on the modern house

2007-06-08T08:30:00.000-05:00

From The Concept of Dwelling, by Christian Norberg-Schulz:

The event of modern architecture contributed significantly to the development of domestic typology. Wright's "destruction of the box" and the resulting "free plan" broke with the conventional use of paths and goals, in terms of passages and enclosed halls. Instead, space was intended as a "flowing" continuum without clearly defined zones. The general aim was to make man feel "at home" in the modern, open world. Thus Moholy-Nagy wrote: "A dwelling should not be a retreat from space, but life in space." Wright therefore created a centrifugal plan, which represented a new interpretation of the concept of refuge. Rather than a retreat, the house became a fixed point in space, from which man could experience a new sense of freedom and participation. This point is marked by the great fireplace. Wright's re-interpretation of the human dwelling remains one of the most significant achievements in the history of modern architecture. "Behind the whole development of free design was the insistent belief that man must live as a free human being, in close contact with nature, in order to realize his own potentialities," Scully writes, and "America consequently produced her most original monuments where one would after all have expected to find them: in the homes of individual men." During the following development, however, the free plan degenerated into a kind of general unidentifiable openness, making alienation rather than freedom manifest. Thus we recognize the eternal need for spatial figures to tell us where we are.

From the blogosphere

2007-06-04T21:30:00.000-05:00

If I had to pick something, I don't think I'd hesitate to say that Laurie Bertrand's photos of children's (mainly her nieces' & nephews') faces are just about my favorite thing about the World Wide Web. (I've made enthusiasm for them known here before.) There may be an infinite variety of artfully compelling portraits of children to be found out there in photographers' portfolios, Flickr galleries, and so on, but it's safe to say there aren't so many in which, as with these, it's the photographer's love for the sitter that's often so evidently present as subject, as registered in the very acceptance in the gaze returned to the camera.

Today's post and last Tuesday's deliver us a few more of these wonderful images.

More Hergé

2007-06-03T16:00:00.000-05:00

Many thanks (again) to our man of letters up north for the tip, in comments below, on the article "A boy's world: the Tintin century" by Anthony Lane, in this last week's New Yorker. (It happened this week that I had to pick up stuff from a supplier in the near vicinity of a Borders; so didn't have to go out of my way to grab a copy, thankfully.) Won't say much about it, except that it's worth getting hold of if, like me, you can't help enjoying Tintin and its lightly cast boy's ideal of the ever expanding mid-20th-cent. global prospect. Hergé himself is Lane's central subject, in a way, and the problem of reconciling the man's cultural stature with his ambiguous stances with respect to great political & moral conflicts Europe underwent in his lifetime receives due attention. But Hergé's personal story doesn't dominate here to the detriment of the story of his enduring creation, its evolution & significance; he's central for Lane mainly in a structural sense, it might be right to say, in order to get a sketch of the history of a publishing phenomenon.

One little excerpt perhaps should get notice & a quick comment. Lane makes this nice observation toward the end:

If [Tintin] reminds me of anyone, it is Charlie Brown. Both characters are more profoundly understood by their dogs than by any human. Both, indeed, are barely characters at all, being a bundle of unchanging qualities — courage and curiousity in one, hope and defeatedness in the other — allied to the simplest of graphic gestures.

What might be added is that for these similarities, the two comic-strip icons are all the more starkly contrastive, at least for me. Charlie Brown, with all the Peanuts figures (except maybe Snoopy), has always seemed to me to be an adult character written to respond to an adult view of the world, portrayed as a child among children only (though of course with unequalled brilliance in simplicity) as a kind of over-arching conceit of reversal. Tintin, on the other hand, is pure youth literature, responding to a child's view of the world. And it's still entirely in imaginative withdrawal to boyhood, I assure you, that I best enjoy those books.

Thanks are also due here to film & TV buff Christian Hamaker, who pointed out to me well in advance, last year, the PBS airing of recent documentary Tintin and I — which I managed to miss anyway, dammit — and to Dave Rathert, who just last month highlighted in an email some of the wide-ranging material on the web site tied in with the PBS presentation.

(By the way: some time ago, for a friend who hadn't been exposed to Tintin before, I put up three pages containing a favorite sequence from The Calculus Affair. Still have them up, here.)

Gospel

2007-05-31T00:00:00.000-05:00

"I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished! Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. For from now on five in one house will be divided: three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." Then He also said to the multitudes, "Whenever you see a cloud arising out of the west, immediately you say, 'A shower is coming'; and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, 'There will be hot weather'; and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?"

Ehh ... you feeling alright, Jesus?

An excerpt: Barth, on religious decline

2007-05-27T22:00:00.000-05:00

Forceful words from the Dogmatics (or, in my case, from Gollwitzer's Selections).

Knowledge of God in the sense of the New Testament message, the knowledge of the triune God as contrasted with the whole world of religions in the first centuries, signified, and still signifies, the most radical "twilight of the gods," the very thing which Schiller so movingly deplored as the de-divinisation of the "lovely world." It was no mere fabrication when the Early Church was accused by the world around it of atheism, and it would have been wiser for its apologists not to have defended themselves so keenly against this charge. There is a real basis for the feeling, current to this day, that every genuine proclamation of the Christian faith is a force disturbing to, even destructive of, the advance of religion, its life and richness and peace. It is bound to be so. Olympus and Valhalla decrease in population when the message of the God who is the one and only God is really known and believed. The figures of every religious culture are necessarily secularised and recede. They can keep themselves alive only as ideas, symbols, and ghosts, and finally as comic figures. And in the end even in this form they sink into oblivion. No sentence is more dangerous or revolutionary than that God is One and there is no other like Him. All the permanencies of the world draw their life from ideologies and mythologies, from open or disguised religions, and to this extent from all possible forms of deity and divinity. It was on the truth of the sentence that God is One that the "Third Reich" of Adolf Hitler made shipwreck. Let this sentence be uttered in such a way that it is heard and grasped, and at once 450 prophets of Baal are always in fear of their lives. There is no more room now for what the recent past called toleration. Beside God there are only His creatures or false gods, and beside faith in Him there are religions only as religions of superstition, error and finally irreligion.

Arms make the man

2007-05-26T17:00:00.002-05:00

Great friend & life-long workout fanatic David lifts weights Saturdays in my parents' garage. Here's a nice view of his extraordinary, 100% dope-free, 44-yr-old arms &c. in mild exertion on the fold-away chin bar I put up last weekend. Click for the whole rep.

There are pictures of me on that bar, too. But they will never appear here.

Drive-by: Jessup Baptist Church

2007-05-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Jessup, Maryland
click for full snapshot

For starters

2007-05-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

One of the bits from a recent email newsletter from Coastal Connection, a publn. for builders & remodelers I've been getting — this, headed "Making sense of green building":

Alex Wilson has been at the business of "green building" long before it was a hot topic. He's the founding editor since 1992 of Environmental Building News — a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is, advertising-free monthly assessment of green-building practices — and president of BuildingGreen.com, an online portal for rational green building know-how. Builders and remodelers entering the "green space" will surely want to consult Wilson's Green Building Products: a compendium of some 1,600 products that qualify as green. But first, you should pick up his most recent book, Your Green Home: A Guide to Planning a Healthy, Environmentally Friendly New Home, as a primer for prioritizing the issues and steering customers in the right direction.
My take-home message from this book: Green is not about choosing pressed-granola flooring and whole-wheat cabinets. Material selection takes a back seat to the two most important steps to building a green home. First, build a smaller house, so you use fewer materials in the first place, and second, focus on making homes more energy efficient, so the continuous consumption of energy is limited. After that, reliance on alternative-energy supplies and resource-efficient building materials makes sense.

Someone might add (though at first glance it seems out of place, directed at architects & builders): first, consider seriously whether a new building's needed at all.

Tintin day

2007-05-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Belgian comic-book artist Georges Rémi, better known by his reversed initials, R. G. — as written, in French, Hergé. Hergé gave us the enormously popular & influential (albeit principally so in Europe), exquisitely linear visual storytelling of the adventures of Tintin & Snowy.

There was a Centennial Exhibition ( ! : PDF ) at the Centre Pompidou earlier in the year.

I discovered Tintin as a kid, maybe 10 years old, I'm grateful to say. Managed to collect a majority of the titles while we were in Germany, 1982–85 — but never became a serious enough fan to require the whole corpus on my shelf. The ones I have (even the two in German, my rudimentary knowledge of the language notwithstanding), I can tell you, have been quite, quite thoroughly read over the years — studied, even, in a manner of speaking. They're richly rewarding in many respects.

Incidentally, Spielberg & Peter Jackson are now evidently set to bring Tintin to the big screen — three installments. Let's hope they're good.

Malatya clarification/correction

2007-05-10T08:15:00.000-05:00

Emeth Hesed has commented below to inform anyone reading here of an additional, eyewitness report she's come by, concerning the April murders in Turkey of three men in Christian service. She posts the letter here.

An excerpt: Chang, on boundaries & margins

2007-05-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

More from The Existence of Intangible Content in Architectonic Form Based upon the Practicality of Laotzu's Philosophy, or The Tao of Architecture — also taken from the third chapter, "Balance and Equilibrium." (Previously excerpted here.)

That which is growing never has a limit. Unfortunately, an environment becomes intelligible to us only when we are conscious of its physical confinement or, in a lesser degree, when we experience its visual definition. In many cases, our experience of an environment is arrived at by both.
In contrast to mechanical matter, man is always a flexible being. Wherever possible, he stretches his arms, moves, jumps and swings in space. Whenever possible, he also grows. The contour formed by his bodily movement and growth is an elastic volume of void to which no physical form can ever precisely conform. Unreal but so true, this elastic volume of void is what we really live in. It has no boundary. Yet, its formless form is an indispensable field in which life takes form and flourishes.
Since it is nearly impossible to have a conditioned space without physical boundary, the elasticity of this formless form could be only meagerly preserved and suggested by flexible space deliberately provided. Laotzu's emphasis on contentment within allowance of becoming has its reason in every aspect. Following this idea of contentment, our search for this flexible space shows that it exists in the margin between the boundary of physical confinement and that of a space visually defined. Architecturally, it means that when there is a small rug whose size is smaller than the room, the atmosphere of flexible growth in the room will be strongly felt.
This does not mean that the physical confinement should always be large enough for deliberate contraction of a visual space. A door may be unnecessarily double in size, but if it is not provided with a visual margin, an observer would always have the feeling of being limited in a mechanical boundary. On the other hand, no matter how limited the size of a door is, if ample margin for visual reference is provided, one will feel free within the allowance of the margin and be guided to go through it comfortably. Size does not necessarily count in architectural space. It is the growth of size which is vital.
This suggestion for growth of space by deliberate contraction probably has its highest success in an interior canopy. Cutting space horizontally, it suggests the growth of height by its lowering from the ceiling on one hand, and the growth of width by its inward contraction from the walls on the other. By contraction, a small room may become psychologically spacious, a road with a shoulder of inferior pavement may be felt as widened. The same principle is applicable to an environment of any scale. Hesitation to accept the significance of contraction created by a moat, a flower bed or a picture moulding is indeed regrettable.
But in creating the feeling of flexibility, what really counts is the indefiniteness of the physical confinement, not necessarily its physical elasticity. ...
The elasticity of space created by the interaction of defined and confined boundaries is the human factor within a single environment.

From the blogosphere

2007-05-04T22:00:00.000-05:00

Tala Strauss, in a nice bit of blogging earlier this week, recalls (?) a conversational incident:

A good piece of advice is one you can't take. In an intellectual hotspot around the corner from an Ivy League school, I ask my victim of the hour what he thinks I should do with the rest of my highschool years. I'm prepared for something like "get the best grades you can" or "work hard" or "figure out an attack plan to shoot down those evil _____ who are destroying our country with their lies." And he looks me straight in the eye and says, "Learn to love the people you find it hardest to love."

Drive-by: Cape St. Claire United Methodist

2007-05-03T23:30:00.000-05:00

north-east of Annapolis, Maryland
click for full snapshot

Drive-by: First Christian Community Church

2007-05-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

north-west of Annapolis, Maryland
click for full snapshot

Malatya, 18 April 2007

2007-04-27T23:30:00.000-05:00

I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" Then a white robe was given to each of them; and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer, until both the number of their fellow servants and their brethren, who would be killed as they were, was completed.

Gideon Strauss connection Emeth Hesed posts today a lengthy, moving Evangelical account of the gory murders more than a week ago of three Evangelical Christians in eastern Turkey — a German missionary and two Turkish citizens, involved together in Bible publishing. The story isn't prominently reported in U.S. press, so far, from what I can tell. (Nothing, for instance, turns up in search on various related terms at NPR.org.) More, via Google News.

I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, "Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them!"

Gideon's back

2007-04-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Or nearly so. And there are changes. See the new setup in the works at gideonstrauss.com.

I don't know what to think of Mr Strauss's positions, often enough; but I'm delighted to see him set to get making his case again in the online arena, and hope he'll return to it with vigor.

An excerpt: Chang, on structure & construction

2007-04-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

Something from The Existence of Intangible Content in Architectonic Form Based upon the Practicality of Laotzu's Philosophy, by Amos Ih-Tiao Chang, 1956 — for a couple of decades or so now published as a popular title, The Tao of Architecture. On my shelf (or in the pile) since I picked it up at Borders several years ago; but only lately has it found something of a fit in my reading. This, from the third chapter, "Balance and Equilibrium."

Unlike other visual arts, architecture is an art of life itself expressed in life-size scale. Visual elements as the means of an architectural composition, therefore, are not only something to attract interest and to induce movement, but also essentially to create restfulness in which the potential of life, work and human continuity are embedded. This quality of rest and recreative potential is made visible in architectonic form in terms of mass and equilibrium of environment. They make man feel at ease, stable and in a state of relieved satisfaction for a certain length of time. It is the intermittent combinations of these feelings, ease and stability created by balance and equilibrium, which control the secondary and tertiary sequences in architectural space. Without it, transitional motion created by contrast and complement would lead to endless action and eventual fatigue. Among these two, balance of mass usually is minor and controls sequence of shorter duration.
Balance of mass is a compound being. It has its physical aspect as well as its visual aspect. And any attribute in one aspect will influence the state of the other. The basic principle of physical balance seems to be provision of ample resistance against possible loading. To refine the application of this principle, loadings are accumulated from various directions and concentrated on few supports. When the potential of materials is high, a building built of these materials becomes hollow and the size of materials becomes visually not representative of the force required to transfer or resist the loading. Theoretically, as exemplified by a balloon, force could be formless.
Man's liberation from heaviness of masonry and his knowledge of synthetic application of new materials and new principles make him understand that a solid section of a member means stress, its depth means better resistance against bending, and two members acting on one joint may mean but one force. He also realizes that in many new materials, size does not mean weight as we would think in seeing traditional masonry. In short, we know that construction is not structure.
Construction is tangible but not necessarily what it appears to be. Structure is intangible and never is fully manifested. In fact, we are living in a field of gravitational forces without our consciousness of its existence.
Investigation of structure instead of construction will show that basically the creation of all architectonic constructions are based upon one simple principle, namely: provision of the minimum of available material to resist the maximum of possible loads. While construction methods change, structural principle remains the same.
But unlike pure engineering where the objective is efficiency and economy in construction, architecture is something deeper. It aims at emotional satisfaction as well as physical integrity. It is a language which has the emotional power to express with authority the structural meaning of a functional space.
Physical space calls for a factor of safety in structure. Every joint, every bay, and every building is designed on this basis. The factor of safety required in each case is different, but it is always greater than unity. The allowance for intangible and upredictable loading in physical structure is usually exaggerated, but man counts on this unused provision so that he may live in a space without fear.
The recognition of this intangible state of safety is not a matter of surface consciousness. To pronounce it with accent, to reveal as lively a trustworthy structure, allowance for growing and counterfusion of structural meaning must be contained in architectonic form.

An excerpt: Barth, on Mozart

2007-04-20T23:00:00.000-05:00

I've heard or read in one or two places reference to the collection of short writings by Karl Barth about Mozart, whom he's well known (apparently) for having revered. Occurred to me last week to track down a cheap copy. Here's a highly quotable (and in all likelihood indeed frequently quoted) bit from the brief lead piece, "A Testimonial to Mozart":

I have sometimes been asked whether, if I were to have proceeded on the basis of my theology, I should not have discovered quite different masters in music. I must insist (like those Indians from Orinoco whose first hearing of European music we have read about recently): no, it is Mozart and no one else. I confess that thanks to the invention of the phonograph, which can never be praised enough, I have for years begun each day with Mozart, and only then (aside from the daily newspaper) turned to my Dogmatics. I even have to confess that if I ever get to heaven, I would first of all seek out Mozart and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther, Calvin, and Schleiermacher.
How am I to explain this? In a few words perhaps this way: our daily bread must also include playing. I hear Mozart — both younger and older — at play. But play is something so lofty and demanding that it requires mastery. And in Mozart I hear an art of playing as I hear it in no one else. Beautiful playing presupposes an intuitive, childlike awareness of the essence or center — as also the beginning and the end — of all things. It is from this center, from this beginning and end, that I hear Mozart create his music. I can hear those boundaries which he imposed on himself because it was precisely this discipline that gave him joy. And when I hear him, it gladdens, encourages, and comforts me as well.

(The first paragraph here is undoubtedly the one that catches the reader and makes one smile; but it's the second, clearly, that deserves some dwelling on — and, not incidentally, that gets amplified & developed through the remainder of the collection.)

Living high

2007-04-17T18:00:00.000-05:00

Climbers, Tolkien readers, and other persons with an interest in life on planet Earth, if they haven't already encountered Richard Preston's story of recent discoveries in the rarefied ecosystems of high California rainforest canopy, are bound to find Monday's Diane Rehm interview fascinating. I certainly did.

Recommend

2007-04-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

I want to point out that my man Jeffrey Fisher seems to have just completed the modest renovations to his web site that I've been hearing, since he & his bride returned from their honeymoon a couple of weeks ago, were in the works. Without at all altering its essential style or tone, which already reflected his personality & his approach to business pretty much exactly and didn't (to my mind) want a change of direction, he's refined the code under-structure that makes the pages work, made some adjustments in type & layout, and added a few new elements to the material — all elegant workmanship, to harmoniously varied, eye-compelling effect. It really is fine design work on both technical and visual/graphical scores. See for yourself.

If you or someone you know is looking for web design/typography or illustration & art services, needless to say, I'm urging you to give Jeff a call.

Reload

2007-04-15T00:00:00.000-05:00

Starting up again. Can't attend much to the details at the moment, but I'm getting things under way and hope to be posting a bit again soon.

Thanks for checking in here.

quare id faciam?

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Cul de Sac

The shepherd's voice

American conflict

The new consumption  take 2

Supersized houses & the new consumption

The Big Chart

Villa Nurbs

Life of my life, death of my death

School fun

Costs of War

Arrival & abandon  or the town as erotic figure

Urbanisms

Audio

An excerpt: Holl, on being receptive to daylight

Fisher news!

Cul de Sac!!

Cul de Sac

Recommended reading for the building lover

Louis Sullivan  artistic limitation in flower

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An excerpt: Brand, on layer ecology in buildings

"Architectural ideas"

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More honesty

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An excerpt: O'Connor, on Christian world view

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From the blogosphere

Audio

Fisher news

Change comes to Washington

Election

Kitchen

Redemption

He finds you

The other Richard Thompson

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From the blogosphere

From the blogosphere

Drive-by: Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox

An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on architectural figure

An excerpt: Barth, on trust & responsibility

Freaks

Perseverance

For best results

Illustration illumination

An excerpt

Vocation

Drive-by: The Church at Severn Run

Sighting

From the blogosphere

An excerpt: Norberg-Schulz, on the modern house

From the blogosphere

More Hergé

Gospel

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Arms make the man

Drive-by: Jessup Baptist Church

For starters

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An excerpt: Chang, on boundaries & margins

From the blogosphere

Drive-by: Cape St. Claire United Methodist

Drive-by: First Christian Community Church

Malatya, 18 April 2007

Gideon's back

An excerpt: Chang, on structure & construction

An excerpt: Barth, on Mozart

Living high

Recommend

Reload

The new consumption take 2

Arrival & abandon or the town as erotic figure

Louis Sullivan artistic limitation in flower