The Hater

Some of my more astute readers have probably noticed this more than myself, but I've realized that I am really having a hard time giving this city a chance for me to like it. Do I want to like St.Louis? This question is giving me pause, which is odd since I'd think any idiot would want to like the city he's in, regardless. I wish I liked St.Louis as much as I liked New Orleans, so I guess the answer to the previous question is a qualified "yes."

Additionally, when I moved out here, I was bitter about attending a school that in my mind, was towards the bottom of the list of the schools to which I applied. Since, I've realized that I'm at a fantastic school and have come to appreciate the quality of the courses, faculty, and most of all, the students. But that initial bitterness became associated with the city itself.

It's also hard for me to look at the city and appreciate it on its own terms. Coming from Phoenix, Arizona, I can't help but note the spectacular lack of ethnic diversity (and the food culture which it brings), as well as the bitterly miserable winters. Phoenix is a boomtown, still on ascension. St.Louis has fallen a long way and is still struggling to cope with that trauma. I'm having a harder time finding what makes this city a great place to be.

In theory, I should like it a lot more- there's a lot of craft breweries, the meat and cheeses are great, and there's a lot of great old architecture with lots of potential. The people here are generally friendly, and there's some supposedly great local cultural ammenties. Movie theaters with bars and old leather couches for seats. The city museum. The bar and club scene. Downtown revitalization. A day-by-day struggle and attempt by the city to redefine itself which is really a fascinating and fantastic thing to be a part of.

And I've felt really disengaged from all of that. There's a Tado Ando designed museum here where he brought in Japanese concrete workers. There aren't that many US works by Ando. I havn't been there. Ditto for the contemporary art museums. Ditto for the downtown citygarden, hailed locally as a fantastic urban public intervention. Mom had to drag me up to the top of the arch.

I don't even really hate this city- it not like Tulsa or Memphis where my initial reaction was to get through it as quickly as possible with as little contact with the city as possible. It's just kind of there, like a dog you always pass in the street without bending down to pet it. I've never lived someplace where I've been so ambivalent.

Part of it may be that I don't want to get attached to it, as stupid as that sounds. I don't really know what I want to do architecturally anymore, so I can't really say with any reason that I don't want to work in St.Louis, but for me it feels like "if I'm working in St.Louis, I might as well be working in Phoenix."

And I'm sure that if I was born and raised in St.Louis and moved to Phoenix for school, my reaction would be completely the same, chastising Phoenix for its St.Louis deficiencies. It's also hard to find love for a city that I never see. My world revolves around studio and so my interactions with it are the spaces between. Walking through the St.Louis weather in mid-January. Trying to find a decent place to get some food after studio. Waiting for the bus. Pizza runs to Papa Johns. Grocery shopping and personal property taxes. The urban form out here in U city is pretty bland. This is my interface with the city, and with that in mind, it makes it an uphill battle as far as city appreciation is concerned.

Also mixed into this is my general moodiness and the lack of vitamin-D producing sunshine. I hate feeling so miserable and apathetic- nobody wants to hang around someone like that, least of all me, especially since I subscribe to the belief that people who are unhappy choose to be that way, and I don't want to think that I'm the type of person who chooses to be unhappy.

So I guess that really I can't wait for St.Louis to grow on me- too late for that. I have to make more of a concerted effort to appreciate things that are uniquely St.Louis, perhaps starting with the list of the five things that make me happy:

1. Family and close friends
2. Travel
3. Good food
4. Music
5. Making other people or creatures happy - (I guess this is where design comes in)

Hey, look at that, design and architecture didn't even directly make the list. There's a kind of satisfaction, a purposeful groove I get into when I'm designing, but its too complicated, too frustrating to call it happiness. 

And lets just leave it at that. I've been accused several times this semester of overthinking. And perhaps over-blogging falls into that category as well.

Take your V-ray and Rhino it up your Render

There are several things disturbing me right now. 

First, there is the fact that it is 11:15 at night, and frankly, I'd rather be getting ready for bed. Which brings me to the fact that I'm at campus, which is expected, given that we have a review monday. What really irritates me is this pissant v-ray rendering workshop which is technically mandatory for us studio 419 students.

This workshop is essentially how to use a very sophisticated and difficult to use rendering engine, V-Ray, to create photorealistic images of computer models created in Rhino. First of all, it's childish and ridiculous to make this kind of digital masturbation mandatory. If people want to learn this kind of thing, fantastic, knock your lights out. I'm curious about it myself, honestly, but its an insult to graduate students to jam V-ray down our throats. 

Secondly, I just don't like photorealistic renderings. What is the point of representation? To convey a quality of a space, especially where perspectives are concerned, especially to non-architectural people who will have difficulty understanding the drier standard forms of architectural representation. However, the 'reality' of 'photorealism' is bullshit. You can bounce light a thousand times, and spend years rendering a single scene, but when that space is finally built, it will be nothing like the rendering. Buildings aren't built like the computer model, its always different, especially as the built environment is a mediated and negotiated thing, evolving in its own construction. 

Additionally, what is the point? If you are attempting to sell a design to a client, showing everything down to the style of the doorknob closes more doors than it opens. Either the client will love it and then blame you when it doesn't come out exactly like the rendering, or more likely, the client will fixate on the tiny details that are required in photorealistic renderings, and nitpick it apart before you can even get to the discussion of the spaces and the quality of the spaces created. You'll be trying to get a buy off on the atrium stairs, and it will get rejected because the client doesn't like the color of the drapes. A photorealistic rendering is a yes or no proposition, with no potential for negotiation or change. 

Third, this workshop takes place on a weekend, which I'm assuming because they don't want to interfere with studio or other classes. Why do students need weekends, anyway? St.Louis is dead right? We all are here to study 24/7 right? The other sad bit is that I've got a saturday workshop, and Saori has sunday workshops, so between us, we never get a weekend daytrip.

(Pauses to wipe foam off of computer screen)

Anyway, monday is a big day for presentations. I have a midterm review monday at noon, and before that, I have to give a 20 minute presentation for my Metabolic City class. Saturday, I elected to do a workshop in the middle of the day with Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish author and architect, instead of this pathetic, useless class, but I still need to turn in the homework, which is to take a scene and render it.

More Pie a la Node

Steelcase is one of the major furniture companies in the world. They recently designed an update to the traditional school desk/chair unit called the Node. As part of the updated features, they also designed the chair much much wider, and built it to withstand a 300 pound high school student plopping into it. The photo on the right is from the Steelcase website.



I oftentimes struggle with the idea of designers as enablers. There are some who believe that it is the responsibility of the designer to reflect the culture and customs of its users. American kids are fat and it would not surprise me to soon see federal prohibitions on discrimination against obesity, similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Additionally, I think everyone should go to school, and to that end, that they should be encouraged and feel comfortable in school.

However, I worry that the gradual oversizing of all seating will lead to complacency with obesity. If you don't fit into a standard seat, there's a problem. Real and immediate, and a direct consequence of being unhealthy. I do believe that most people who are overweight wish that they were more thin. However, wishes do not translate into direct action and while many think lean thoughts, America as a whole gets wider and more unhealthy.

I believe in individual responsibility, but at the same time, I think that American culture has enabled this obesity epidemic. People make choices about what to eat and how much exercise to get, but our work and food and city environments strongly influence those decisions. Designers have a direct hand in the expression of material culture. It is worth stating my own belief in the matter that "if you build it, they will come," or in other words, if you start designing gun racks at restaurant entrances, you're going to see many more people packing heat to dinner. Maybe that's just a designer's conceit, and that really we are marionettes who dance on the end of the strings. I believe that we can jerk the strings back.

On Tires, a bit about the website, a two paragraph rant on the oil spill followed by a slightly paranoid exhortation

My bike tires are shot. Four years of sitting in Phoenix sunshine, countless miles over less than ideal surface conditions have taken their toll. I've got pretty big wheels so I needed to go to the bike shop to find tires, and I was directed to the $47 tires that are so primo, they went all the way around. I asked if they had anything cheaper and picked up the $14.

I've always been happy that I've learned the basics of bike maintenance. I know its nothing to brag about, but I can change my own flat tires and adjust the derailer. It's a nice feeling to occasionally get my hands dirty from the rust and oil and street gunk that's accumulated on my bike. It's not such a nice feeling to have my attention directed to my sandaled feet by a bite and the sight of dozens of ants swarming over them. I need to remember to not stand on an ant hill while working.

I've made more revisions to the website. Still a work in progress, but its a step further than the holding page. Check it out here, at www.perkinsyamane.com. Pretty basic stuff actually. One of the trickier things was putting the links on the side with the main stuff in the middle.

The gulf oil spill thing is slimy, disgusting, and revolting. And that's just the business and political maneuvering. Up until a few days ago, BP and the US government were telling everyone that the spill was just releasing 5,000 barrels of oil a day. When they put the second small tube in to siphon what some estimates say are a fifth of the total, that pipeline is siphoning off 5,000 barrels of oil a day. BP has admitted that their estimates may be slightly off. They don't want the world to know how much damage they have caused. I can understand that, if the police pulled you over for speeding, and asked you to report on what speed you were going, unscrupulous people are going to lie, or say, "Gee, officer, I don't know."

I think BP is probably doing everything they can to stop the gusher. It's been nothing but a PR and financial nightmare for them. At the same token, I've heard rumors that BP is the laughingstock of the refining world for their lax approach to safety and security. It was their contractor, after all. The oil runs deeper too. The US government is also partly to blame for allowing the industry to largely self-regulate, and for giving carte-blanche sign off (categorical exclusions) to the Deepwater Horizon rig, and many others, because BP told the department that it was a "low-risk" endeavor. It's time to put a bright spotlight on the department of mineral management, as they are way way to cozy to the industry. Shame on the political machine as well, which is defending BP, clamping down and covering up reports emerging from the spill, and in general supporting BP more than their own constituents. In congress today, Republicans argued against a higher cap that would have made BP liable for up to $10 billion in damages. This is still less than BP's profits from last year. Not that the money would be able to repair the damage.

Don't trust the government, and don't trust business. Work with them, work for them, and while we need their systems and they need us, keep an eye on them and hold them to account.

dumbphone for me

Today I looked at cell phones as mine is getting a little long in the tooth. It's been awhile since I've been cell shopping and I was stunned at how 80% of the phones on display were smartphones. Of course, a smartphone requires a data plan, which ranges from $20-$30 a month ON TOP of the regular service plan costs.
Telecom people must be rejoicing as much as the studios are dancing over the 3D cash cows. Look: I spend 90% of my time in a place with high speed wifi that I can access for free. Wifi runs about a hundred times faster than any existing cell network. Yet none of these alleged smartphones let you tap local wifi networks because it's much more profitable for them to sell you narrow bandwidth slow service. They can charge a lot more for tanker trucks instead of a pipeline.
I appreciate the fact that it is that 10% of the time when you may need your wireless 3g or Edge network the most, but don't charge us for it the other 90% of the time.
Compared to cell phone telecoms in Europe, and south America, American telecoms are holding Americans hostage with arbitrary two year commitments. I predict in a year it will be impossible to get a plan that does not include data.