Imagination Art & Architecture

It is a given that success for the average architect necessitates sacrifices. However, Starchitect-level success, the kind that so many ambitiously aspire to (and so few achieve), often requires compromise of an especially perverse nature - namely, of one's manners, ethical standards, objectivity, social propriety, mental faculties, and capacity for reason. As evidenced by the behavior of numerous Starchitects and their suborbital attributes to distract from real investigation into the work itself and undermine the process of design. For those preparing to enter into such and endeavor, we offer the following mission statement, based on years of observation, for achieving success in spite of yourself:

1. Profess a commitment to collaborative design. Proceed by designing what ever you want.

2. Promote employees who excel at flattery.

3. Disappear periodically, leaving your team to work unaided. Upon your return, destroy any progress made. Rinse and repeat.

4. When presented with a superior design not of one’s own making, ignore it. Regurgitate said design weeks later as one’s own- add camouflaging tweaks as necessary.

5. Delegate decision-making authority to the least cooperative member of the team.

6. Keep designers emotionally disengaged from the project by discouraging discovery of their own creative solutions. Rather, instill your leadership with ambiguity keeping designers focused on arguing, worrying, agonizing, and fruitlessly trying to read your mind.

7. Hold a design charrette open to all in the firm. Rule that no presented options suffice.

8. Create a design with great potential. Squander it.

9. Everything is due by the end of today.

10. Cultivate competitive factions within the office and silently watch as they busily undermine one another whilst no work gets done.

11. Model your design based on what someone told you the market wants.

12. Delay decision-making by ordering numerous iterations of superfluous design investigations. Shortly before the deadline, proclaim that, as anticipated, your first design impulse was correct.

13. Pick any employee, and publicly parade them as your exclusive favorite. Share meals, pillow-talk, socialize, and plot the future direction of Architecture together. Inexplicably drop them after six months. Pick another worker and repeat.

14. Cultivate team apathy and low morale by continuing to develop ideas and designs ten-to-thirty years out of fashion.

15. Drive your most intelligent team members off the design team and onto the technical team via wilful, impulsive critiques of their creativity. Proceed to design with an even less creative team.

16. Make your rhetoric not match your actions.

17. Develop multiple personalities. Deploy as needed.

18. Allow your drug, alcohol, or sexual addiction to interfere with your work.

19. When you have attained enough fame, rest on your laurels and lose your interest in architecture altogether. Focus instead on football.

20. Identify an outside person or entity that, due to their continual obstructive behavior, absolves the design worthy of your attention. Delegate the design to subordinates declare the project is “bread and butter” and forever ignore it. Collect fees.

21. Create a police-state within the office. Initiate procedures, audit reported hours, surveil computer screens, question in-out times., spot-check emails, restrict meals, increase workloads, reduce pay, threaten objectors, accuse suspects based on hunches, fire people at will, crush rebellion, and generally make employees think more about their exit strategy than designing buildings.

22. Bring your spouse in to assist in running the office. Watch your workers squirm when they cannot alert you that he/she is undermining the firm with his/her idiocy.

23. If a functional request, city ordinance or building code requirement threatens the viability of a signature design element, do one of the following: question the intelligence of the individual raising the issue, make empty appeals to “higher standards”, dismissively declare”just fix it”, or ignore it until it’s too late. Under no circumstances should you take the issue seriously.

24. Demonstrate your passion for architecture by unashamedly bursting into tears when describing the anticipated transcendent experience of your design. Just assume everyone else feels likewise.

25. Publicly act as a beneficent figurehead, a beacon of positive leadership for all in the firm. Privately direct a squad of your lieutenants to do all your firing, slave-driving, salary-cutting and other dirty work. Feign innocence of their actions.

26. Hire a talented new employee with an impeccable resume, trained in a firm more esteemed than yours. On their first day, give the individual a single chance to impress you with their abilities. The instant they deviate from your design affinities, crush them and declare them ruined by their former employer. ignore them until they quit.

27. Interrupt, interrupt, interrupt.

28. Announce to the office you intention to author a Groundbreaking Theoretical Tome. Do nothing.


29. Initiate loud squabbles with your business partner or spouse in front of all employees. Grumble about him/her under your breath. Act surprised when employees quit.

30. Request several color samples of an architectural element, material, or surface. Rule that the correct color is somewhere between Color 1 and Color 2. Repeat ad infinitum.

31. Change part of the design during project documentation. Next, forget that you made this decision. Upon encountering the change as built on site. Fly into a rage.

32. Optional addendum to #31: insist, INSIST! the change be corrected regardless of cost, schedule, or client desirability.

33. Should an employee quit your office, curse them, disavow ever liking them, disparage their abilities and thereafter ignore them. Upon encountering the employee years later, act as if you’ve remained good ol’ pals.

34. The photograph is paramount. Concentrate all your resources on areas to be photograph. Construction need only be durable enough to survive the photo-shoot, not actual use.

35. Brow beat your computer support fellow. Remember, your computer has never ever worked correctly, and “why must I ask you to keep fixing this?”

36. At least once per client meeting, directly question your project leader’s intellectual capacity. Apologize to the client for his/her ignorance (regardless of the validity of his/her remarks”)

37. When others are speaking, do not listen. Concentrate instead on what you will say next.

38. Assert that you work is better than (insert name of architect more highly-esteemed than your)

39. Hire a young attractive employee fitting your sexual preference, regardless of their intelligence or lack thereof. Never find any fault with them. Never fire them. Just leer at them.

40. Punctuate your speech with words for which you have created your own new, bewildering definitions.

41. When walking by an employee’s desk, briefly glance at whatever lies on top, declare it unsatisfactory, provide no solution, and simply continue on your way. Allow no more than 10 seconds for said exchange.

42. No office-wide staff meetings. This would needlessly give workers a sense for the future of the firm, and consequently, their jobs. Much better to keep them nervous, nervous, nervous.

43. Receive praise only. Never provide it.

44. Assume that the office runs on autopilot. New work arrives, contracts get signs, people get hired, people get fired, drawings get drawn, clients get invoiced, bills get paid, paychecks get printed, buildings get built and your Audi gets washed, all whilst you blithely sip chardonnay in first class.

45. Publicity is absolute. Yield to this axiom: if your name isn't in print, you simply do not exist.

46. Copy robustly from yourself. If it worked with a different client, on a different project, with a different building type, in a different time and in a different country, why bother creating unique solution for this project.

47. Cultivate a voice of condescension, a manner of aggression and an appearance of eccentricity.

48. Acquiesce to all of the following client requests, no matter how disastrous it may be to the firms financial integrity: major last-minute changes, reduction to your fee, reduction to your schedule, reductions to the quality of the project, endless design options, client request for delayed payments, pro-bono side-work, working with out a contract, cleaning up another architect’s failed design, or employing the client’s son or daughter in an internship.

49. Remember, inside you are just a child who needs to get his way.

50. Lastly, pass down you unconditional conviction of your own genius to younger generations, so that they too can nurture an unjustified sense of self (regardless of their accomplishments) and mutate their integrity in the pursuit of fame, thus perpetuating the twisted personality cult of Starchitecture inexorably into the future.

-by Anonymous (may be Conrad) may be you. Anonymous is an architect. Anonymous went to the Right universities, and there studied with the Right professors, and recieved the Right grades, the Right awards and the Right degrees. Subsequently, Anonymous earned the Right professional registrations. Anonymous has the Right architects on the Right projects, but that has somehow turned out Wrong. Anonymous has quietly endured in their little fiefdoms, and observed aghast at their often childish, irratinal behavior, yet inexplicable success. Anonymous is ultimately fearful that s/he may turn out just like them.

From Conditions Magazine, #0310

In professional life you must discover a kind of identity for yourself, that becomes a sort of trademark; a way of working that is distinctive that people can recognize.

The reason for this is that the path to financial success and notoriety is by having something that no one else has. Kind of like a brand ( one of my most despised words)

So what you do in life in order to be professional is develop a brand, your way of working, your attitude that is understandable to others.

In most cases, it turns out to be something fairly narrow...

..and then you discover you have something to offer that is better than other people have, or at least more distinctive.

And what you do with that, is you become a specialist.
Then people will call you to get more of what you've become adept at doing.
So if you do anything and become celebrated for it, people will send you more of that.
For the rest of your life, quite possibly, you will have that characteristic and people will continue to ask you for what you have already done and succeeded at.

This is the way to professional accomplishment: you have to demonstrate that you know something unique, that you can repeat, over, and over and over until ultimately you lose interest in it.

The consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn't aid in your development.

The truth of the matter is that understanding development comes from failure. People begin to get better when they fail. When they move towards failure they discover something because of it. They fail again and they discover something else. So the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success. As a result of that, I believe that Picasso as a model, is the most useful model you could have in terms of your artistic interest, because whenever Picasso learned how to do something he abandoned it. As a result of that, in terms of his development as an artist his results were extraordinary.

Assalamu alaiekum Wr,wb..

























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The living room is an important part of the house. The living room can become the center for the whole family to gather in one place, doing recreational activities or just watch the movie. So, decorating the living room can be very important.

First of all, you must decide ideas or style of your living room. Since the living room with an idea and can be mixed with the style of home renovation designs, you can choose your favorite ideas or style that accommodates your personality. You can get advice and sample design firm to renovate the house or gallery. You can also brows the internet to get some resources to enhance your knowledge about the life of a good idea to space.

These colors will give the sensation of elegance in the living room Anda.Jadi mix, now you can begin to choose the perfect design for your living room. They can design ideas for your living room.

Salam alaiekum.. 

Minimalist interior design is a modern design that offers you the simple and organized design. Usually minimalist design will relate to the stark and cold colors. But wait, actually minimalist design does not always about stark and cold colors.

There are many interior design inspirations you can get either from online sources or offline sources. In online sources you can open many official websites from home interior and design companies or suggestion from those people that concern on the minimalist interior designs.

Modern interior designs are not the cold or harsh decoration that emerges couple years ago, but these designs offer the softer look, personal, comfortable and easier for the owner. Here, you could find your taste in minimalist interior designs, since there are many styles you can take for your home.

With the simplicity and the tidy style, you will be able to maintained it well and stay neatly and tidy in your home. This design will offer the simple thing in your life so you do not feel mess up every day. But if you are typically like the mess in your house will all of your lovely stuffs, this design is not suitable with you. If you like snacks around you while you are watching TV or you like being surrounded by all of your favorite books, minimalist interior design just give you a nightmare.

Since minimalist interior design really concern with the position of the furniture, you cannot put anything you want in any place.  Minimalist interior design scheme is a simple, relaxing style, but also has a contemporary feel.

For the colors of the walls, in the minimalist design interior white color will be the most favorite choice because white will make a perfect touch of minimalist style. but you can also choose the warm neutral colors and also the natural colors for the walls. Try to use stone, beige, taupe, brown, or green color for the walls.

You will use two colors; the base color should be pale color and use splash color for the accents color. Or you can have the furnishings color as the accent color for instance the sofa or kitchen set color. Remember to choose only one color for the color accent. Use the bright color such as red or deep green or brown.

Choose simple and classy for the minimalist design interior. Choose the furniture that has plain, modern-looking, dark leather, white or bright color, chrome, glass, mirror, or stainless steel for the furnishings. The key term for minimalist design is less is more. Thus, choose plain and wooden floors to give simple effect of your floors.

There really is no ‘typical’ Urban Design practitioner, nor is there a ‘standard’ set of skills that, once learned, can be mechanically applied for the rest of one’s career. There are, however, several tasks that are central to Urban Design in practice:

   * Describing characteristics of and transformations in particular settlement patterns, including morphological and typological studies;

   * Examining the operative relationships linking power, politics, and the form of cities and urban areas;

   * Exploring, analysing, and drawing conclusions related to the images and meanings people have of different urban environments; and

   * Describing, interpreting, and shaping the built and natural environment of cities and metropolitan regions, for other professionals, decision-makers, and ‘lay’ populations.


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Accommodating higher densities without overwhelming the street (Vancouver).
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Good urban design enfolds ecologically smart building practices, such as the carport's living roof and porous pavers (yes, that is grass) in this Swiss example (St-Gallen).

As an Urban Design practitioner, one typically works in teams with many professionals furnishing a broad range of complementary abilities. Vital insight also comes from ‘popular’ knowledge, often derived through extensive consultation with user groups through interactive workshops, meetings, and design charrettes. In consequence, emergence is a big part of reflexive practice--that is, Urban Designers learn new skills and aptitudes with each project. In large part this is because Urban Design recognises the invaluable knowledge and expertise that non-professionals bring to bear on the complex problem-solving situations.
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Recognising and embracing the eclectic ways in which users personalise urban space is eminently important in responsive urban design.

How Urban Design best fits into the professional world is an area of continuing debate. There are (as yet) no professional bodies in the Anglo-American world to dictate what should be on the curriculum of an Urban Design degree program, nor what sorts of specific expertise and knowledge are needed to practise as an Urban Designer. This is not a coincidence; it is generally agreed that Urban Design is not a distinct profession in itself so much as a way of thinking, or, to paraphrase Britain’s Urban Design group, as common ground among a number of professions and/or the wide range of people involved in urban change. To practice Urban Design, however, an individual should be a registered member of professional regulating bodies in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and/or Urban Planning.


Works cited

Batchelor, P., & Lewis, D. (Eds.). (1986). Urban Design in Action. Raleigh NC: School of Design, North Carolina State University.
Cowan, R. (Ed.). (2005). The Dictionary of Urbanism. Tisbury (England): Streetwise Press. Available online: http://www.urbanwords.info
Gehl, J. (1996). Life between buildings: using public space. Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag.
UDG - Urban Design Group (2003). The Urban Design Group. Available online: http://www.udg.org.uk/
WGUDS - Working Group on Urban Design for Sustainability. (2004). Urban design for sustainability: Final Report of the Working Group on Urban Design for Sustainability to the European Union Expert Group on the Urban Environment. Wien: Bundesministerium für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, Umwelt und Wasserwirtschaft.

Most of the world's population now lives in urban zones, a first in the entirety of human history. Unfortunately, the demands placed upon these cities forces even the sturdiest to creak beneath the pressure, with many of them growing too quickly to completely address. In order to meet the increasing challenges of environmentalism, transportation, infrastructure and other hallmarks of urban planning, intrepid students and professionals alike must pool their resources, experiences and ideas together. Anyone studying how cities operate will find the following blogs, listed in no particular order, an amazing start to exploring the various insights available. Taking the time to absorb so many perspectives will do nothing but help improve upon particularly deficient areas.

Modern urban planning emerged as a profession in the early decades of the 20th century, largely as a response to the appalling sanitary, social, and economic conditions of rapidly-growing industrial cities. Initially the disciplines of architecture and civil engineering provided the nucleus of concerned professionals. They were joined by public health specialists, economists, sociologists, lawyers, and geographers, as the complexities of managing cities came to be more fully understood. Contemporary urban and regional planning techniques for survey, analysis, design, and implementation developed from an interdisciplinary synthesis of these fields.

Today, urban planning can be described as a technical and political process concerned with the welfare of people, control of the use of land, design of the urban environment including transportation and communication networks, and protection and enhancement of the natural environment.






Chicago - Source : Photo by Arch//Land - http://www.flickr.com/photos/arsenalman/

6. Copenhagen, Denmark:
5. Barcelona, Spain:
4. New York, USA:
3. Sydney, Australia:


2. Berlin, Germany:


1. Chicago, USA:

 


What if spaces associated with the hyper-real media of film and the realism of film production are programmatically cross-bred?


The public spectacle of movie-going and the individual ritual of reception are interweaved in the long barn of industrial building sitting on an organic-inorganic movie landscape, countering the growing preoccupation of individualistic movie appreciation and render the Harcourt Garden as a interactive space of general public and professionals bred by the academy, with a mutually inclusive agendum of movie-appreciation and movie-making that turns into a new urban generator.


Kwong Kit Jerry Lam
The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China

The project follows two main aspects that have given it birth by every meaning: aspect, functionality, flexibility in use, structure, possibility of actual existence. The first aspect regards the site, which has an overview appearance of an “under construction” area, like a fabric texture made of too many materials, some in contradiction. It is situated at the confluence of two different urban typology streets: a main boulevard hungry for architectural evolution, that needs to redefine its density, visual impact, functionality, through the new urban pattern; and a smaller street, part of the traditional Bucharest urban tissue, that feels like a “living museum”, defined by a collection of houses with architectural value and low density. The first question that arises is: how should the living “in-between” be like? In a city where urban development has just begun, where architectural improvement is demanded by the new society, but without harming the nearby “living museum” , eventually highlighting one another, the answer lies in the art of conceiving a lifestyle between collective and individual housing. As a conclusion of the urban analysis, the project proposes a synthesis between the traditional and new-developed tissue translated into 3D plots which compose the model. In addition to this, the answer regarding the living typology requested here, is completed by the second main aspect, which, more conceptually, explains the plans, defines the spaces. It’s about defining the actual meaning of “collective housing” in the way people are affected by it in reality.


“I’d consider a 'collective' to be a group of people who have made a choice to join together towards a particular end, whereas one can be a member of a community without any conscious decision to join it.” 24 January 2009, an opinion from an Internet Forum.


This is an important aspect in defining: private-public area, collective spaces, access spaces, privacy, community. It also gives the rules of division of the interior functions: where the living is located and why. The project consists of 40 living-units: flats, hybrid units somewhere between flat and house, row-houses situated above the ground floor, in the north.


Oana Muresan
ion Mincu' University of Architecture and Urbanism Bucharest Romania