Maryhill Overlook, Axonometric Section

Maryhill Interpretive Overlook (1998) designed by Allied Works Architecture.

Something cool in New Orleans

Of course, after I move away, cool contemporary architecture stuff starts to happen in New Orleans. If you happen to be there this week, and like architecture stuff, you should check out this city-wide installation.

This is where i work...

My desk is in the very front of this photo, on the right. I like my spot; it's closest to the street, and thus to all the homeless people screaming.

LEGO Towers

Architecture Discoursed

While this particular blog is not about Architecture per se-I tend to discuss topics more personal, and random-I would like to mention a few blogs I have added to the Design portion of the sidebar. I am a regular reader of BLDGBLG. I think I picked up on it from a posting at Curbed SF at some stage. Anyway, I like a lot of the content: lots of musings, and discoveries from a broad range of topics, related back, even tangentially, to design and architecture. There is a particularly strong interest in the whole film & architecture genre that seems appropriate for an L.A.-based blogger. Well, the past week or so BLDBLG has been posting non-stop about this Postopolis! event in NYC, which was a recent gathering of several architecture bloggers from across the country. At first I was put off by that exclamation point, because in general I think most architects are butchers of language, treating it much like a material, and refashioning it at their whim with no regard for clarity of meaning, or tradition, and coming up with all sorts of too clever, smarmy results, e.g. (B)architecture: the topology of tippling, or some such. But then I started to read certain Suprematist leanings in the usage of the exclamation point, very Tatlin, very Malevich, very El Lissitzky. And I just love the graphic design coming out of Russia in those days, or I guess it was the U.S.S.R at that point: so collective, so optimistic, so revolutionary.

So I took a closer look, as it turns out these bloggers were actually kinda cute, immediately sparking my interest, since I love it when substance and beauty can be found together. As it turns out, I am loving Miss Representation. A reading (or deliberate "miss" reading as it were) of the name alone is hours of masturbatory, intellectual fun. Whether to refer to the writer as he or she, the complexity of gender and sex, the fluidity of gender in a medium of interaction where we can all adopt any number of identities. And I'm spinning off in a million directions. I mean, architecture after all is total porn, and there are endless ways of associating design and sex, i.e. "queer space and heterotopias". Okay, that last bit references something I wrote offline a long time ago in school, in response to that essay by what's his face; I'll get into that another time.

To the point, Miss Representation's use of prose is nothing short of orgasmic. As a lover of language(s), I can't help but get excited by an architect who really can write, and make use of metaphors, obscure references, oodles of SAT words, and complex sentence structure-I was so totally turned on by that essay on historic preservation.

Tropolism is another site I'm really getting into. His ideas resonate very closely to my own design concerns. I am looking forward to perusing the archive, as I have a lot of free time coming up.

Sunday at the de Young Museum

A view through the grove on approach to the de Young.

The observation deck at the de Young affords a 360° view of the City. This photo is taken more or less toward the north I think, over Golden Gate Park. The museum was design by Swiss uber-starchitects Herzog & de Meuron, and consists of a "digitized" copper skin that shifts from solid to porous and back as it moves over the structure.

The roof suggests the undulations of landscape. These undulations also occur between each of the three linear forms, producing courtyards/light wells that penetrate and break up the overall mass. The tower itself appears as a vertical twist in one of the horizontal forms, reaching up above the museum to capture the view.

In addition to the sexy building, the museum's collection was pretty decent. The permanent collection's 20th century American was very strong, particularly in sculpture (I am way into 3D works), and I really liked the Ed Ruscha pieces which included collages of landscape images and texts, as well as overlays of SF and LA streets. I am not yet familiar enough with these CA cities to really understand the particular juxtapositions, but that's only a matter of time.

Oh, one aside. As my friends and I were leaving the museum, we passed by three meatheads sitting on a bench. I overheard one of them call us fags, which really surprised me in SF. Of course, I was too shocked to react other than give them a confused, "what the fuck, douchebag?" look, which quieted them down. I really don't understand why people expend their energy on being bigots.