cool cats at the haight

Swing sunday across the street at Swig, "lets have a swig," says my dad. 

Inside at first sight the suited man (did he work today?) swiping a blonde number and stealing her kiss. On the dark leather couch a lady in faded jeans and vans, blues in the background with cats cutting it up keeping it real (atmosphere is important) on whiskey coloured wooden floors.

"Good night?"

It's always good, so says he. 

man, dog, cat, rat, san francisco

23/05/2009, originally uploaded by lennard_.

im just goin to jump straight into this: i'm in wine country now, lovely, absolutely. 

but leading up to this, (this is our third night, more on this later), the first night was an asphalt bender, doing a 5 hour marathon from los angeles to yosemite to make the sunrise across the ridge and over the cascading waterfalls by a hairs breadth, but a bender of a drive it was through the thick dark of the night. 

yosemite is beautiful, with ridges weathered with the marks of their own history and age: the land before time before The Land Before Time, or so it goes. 

in sonoma, the inn is "historical", with the owners referring to them as "innkeepers", but the irony is disarmed with the amazing authenticity of the restoration work: rooms, cellular in the classic enfilade arrangement. a new appreciation for the scripting of spaces via sliding doors etc. bathtubs, white as ivory standing on brass-clawed feet and the smell of mildew, not overpowering, just enough for atmosphere. bottled nostalgia for my grandmother's old house, so much so we had to extend an extra night, Just Because.

Dinner is a story in itself: lamb never tasted so good and service was never so impeccably gracious. beer at bear's run with mike, another another story. "haight ashbury ain't what is it" so he says and so i'll believe. 

a fire in the background now, j.m. barrie in the background, i miss you (whoever you are). good night! 

dramas of privileged 

"fuck is that blood? shit i don't have time for this!"

"ooooooh lennnard it hurtssss sooo baddd. i can feeeel it in my eye on the other side. uggghh"

The Designer and The Grid

-architecture structurally resolved via repetitive grid elements - hegemony of physics

-movie grid tripartite, middle cut into half, all cut into scenes: scripting an audience's attention

-music grid time determinant

-shift from tectonic concerns, most diagrams are now programmatic - i.e. liberated from the literal imposition of the grid, the architect now has an ability to script, shift from tectonic grid to a scripted grid. =tschumi, koolhaas. mine diagrams. (hierarchy? // Palladio Villa Rotunda, which doesnt take program into acct to Le Corbusier Villa Stein (major and minor bands, use of golden section but this is to generate vectors of movement through space - scripting a spatial experience - to Villa Savoye to Koolhaas, Seattle Public Library. Savoye elevation subsumed, the diagram is no longer of tectonic inclination but a programmatic one. vs Norman Foster Great Court in British Museum, tectonic concerns still rule.

"the typographic grids of this book have a different function from the time-based grid of the screenplay, but they share the same governing principles. For the typographer, the choice of a three, five or seven column grid depends whether the job is a poster or a magazine, a book cover or a leaflet. For the screenwriter, the kind of story will dictate a 3, 5 or 6 act structure....

all of these constraints must be seen as positive, not limiting."

a grid is a parti is a diagram is a distillation.
ref page 56/57, diagramming screenplay structures

// neural networks? Epagogix. epagogix. how. data mining and scraping, with the increase in the scale of the data, the resolution of the grid is increased to a minute scale, like a chuck close painting. even at arms length away, it is enough for one to have a clear picture of what it is instead of just an idea of a jist.

lennrd says:

its like paris after the apocalypse

lennrd says:

and STILL the architecture is hauntingly beautiful

nerual networks and prediction.

movies future fantasy

movie present possible

realism of image cultivates desire, drives reality

maybe its because my job is to imagine better futures and spaces, and thats why i keep getting cynical or angsty to move on from the present

Good magazines.

Quaderns

Abitare

Form / Function

=

Content / Design

its one of those days where the sun is crisp and everything coloured pops like in a 3D movie. Simulcra Simulcrum I'm confusing the order the virtual which simulates the real is now used as the benchmark. Ironic. or not. 

It feels like a holiday - the straw hat on my head reinforces that. The rolled up jeans more so. You can't help but smile and no not too many words need to be or should be spoken because we'll spoil the illusion. So shhh keep silent, stay still, smile and imagineer something better than what it really is. 

The sombreness of winter is gone. 

"I just love beautiful things. I want to own them all."

"I think you're the first bisexual I've ever truly met."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/

http://popartmachine.com/masters/BUT_TODAY_WE_COLLECT_ADS.html

Dear Future-Lennard,

Please remember these following questions to yourself.

Today was the talk "Thesis?!", a conversation between Brett Steele and Hernan Diaz Alonso,

Architects make arguments, not projects. A welcome relief. And maybe, for lack of an argument, such an issue should be invented. "Build the world differently", said Brett. The limits of my experience is the limits of my world is the limits of my architecture. One has to exceed the other and all should surpass everything(one?) else. Build the world differently. Please remember this. 

The construction of an idea, so make that idea provocative, compelling. Ultimately, the inhabitation of an idea. Remember the moment after you read Rand, Terazni, Calvino. The world changed even though nothing changed because you changed. Your world view changed and thats what you have to do en masse. "Enframing, reframing"

The 19th century was the institutionalization of architecture via the ecole de beaux arts et all. The 20th,  the era of the singular project. Superstudio. Rem. 

The 21st? "this is a hunch... but its about the network. its about information and communication. ether."

What happened to Negroponte and Mitchell. Was it a cynicism or tiredness with architecture that turned them away? Maybe the game we play as we know it is too small. "architecture isn't constructive", said rem. or something along those lines. Jettison the title or redefine it, but don't subscribe to it. 

Remember this please future-lennard.

Lennard-Past.

what is modularity? 

language as we know it is a vehicle for the communication of ideas. it is a concretization or a formalization of what was previously abstract. taking it another step, perhaps language itself is the building blocks of ideas - we think in words, don't we? 

so if the layman thinks in terms of words, what of architects or other design professions. Language in the form of words, in my opinion, has sometimes served as a barrier to communication. We think in the form of sketches. So lines then become a form of communication. Line, shade - lets communicate simple ideas or partis. 

As a concept or design gets fleshed out, it gains bulk. line becomes plane. shade becomes volume. And as this aggregates onward, it gets bulker and bulkier - its a little ball that gets more complex. not in terms of intention - that should be pure - but perhaps in execution.

Modularity is a way to handle this and to communicate this complexity. it allows a project to be handled by various hands. is it the removal of a "signature"? perhaps. but then again, isnt the signature in the concept itself?

There is a perverse freedom in living which la has shown me far removed from material excess or luxuries. 

Its the simple fruit of life, the feeling of unfettered freedom coarsing through your veins. 

The horizon never comes close and the limits are never reached, its like driving on the highway getting lost in the familarly un-familiar. The world is too big for the spirit to stay so small. 

they write with words, we write with lines. the question then is what you're tryin to say

from archiecture as in art, there is a reality to it. it doesn't matter where the abstraction or the inspiration lay, because once its born of itself, it becomes an experience that has to stand on its own.