Artificial Intuition: The Scary AI Under The Bed
AI offers answers based loosely on the average of all solutions in its data set. As the dataset itself is populated with average AI generated solutions, the dataset reverts to a mean and true creativity suffers. That’s one theory, anyway.
Building a Fire-Resistant Home: Strategies taken from DNM’s Deer Park House in California
While no home can be entirely fireproof, the risk of fire can be significantly reduced through strategic design and material choices. These choices are often referred to as “hardening” a home against fire.
Finding A Way Forward
So, for lack of a path forward from their various hilltop fiefdoms, the major players in the building industry wait for change from cross-pollination: radical, game changing ideas with game changing acronyms like BIM, IFC, IPD, LEAN, TQM, and others, that will propel their own company to new levels, and pull the rest of the industry along in their wake.
Holding Space: Fences & Obelisks
The strategy for defining a space depends on its purpose. An enclosure is appropriate when the space’s purpose is to keep people in (or out) and when no common belief system binds them to the space. It can be very expensive to construct an enclosure, however, and it limits future growth, as many walled cities have learned.
Building Is A War Against Inertia
Building is an act of war against inertia. Any change, physical, spiritual, or otherwise, requires effort, and effort is another way of expressing energy. Building anything requires a great deal of effort and energy to alter the physical, financial, political, and even cultural status quo. Building is not just the act of making something; it is also the act of giving up what might have been.
Japan: Connecting Old and New
On a recent trip to Japan, where everything I saw was new to me, I was struck by the way old and new forms are used to express similar ideas in very different ways.
Geometry & Generalist
unlike specialized professionals such as structural engineers, mechanical engineers, or geotechnical engineers, an architect is specifically trained to be a generalist, to see both the big picture and oversee the details. There is a saying that an architect knows a little bit about everything, but not much of anything! No other professional on the building project team can talk with about space, light, building codes, history and the strength of concrete with equal ease (and sometimes in the same sentence!).
Tree, Water, Earth and Sky
When starting a new project, facing a blank canvas or a blank computer screen is daunting. Even after analyzing all of the project constraints, where is the starting point to synthesize the information and for create something from nothing? This is where literary devices, such as personification, analogy and metaphor, are useful tools to think about architectural design in the context of another medium such as literature, sculpture or, quite often, music…
Power of Ten Design
Architectural design can be thought in terms of multiple levels or “altitudes.” Up close is the building itself, its walls, roof, doors. Further back is the building’s physical context, and further back still – with the building now out of direct site – might be its symbolic context or the role it plays in the larger society. All of these views are interdependent.
A Humanist Architect
I am an architect, and I think of myself as a humanist. There are many definitions of humanist (it makes sense that there would be), but among the shortest I have found is “an approach to life based on reason and our common humanity, recognizing that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone.” As a self-defined humanist, I tend to accept people as they see themselves, assume they know more or less what is best for them, and do what little I can to help them along their way.