i have dreams about aliens. its dusk and im looking at stars in the sky. suddenly i notice one conspicuously move. then lots move. the lights grow stranger and come closer. then i notice them walking out of the tall grass towards me.

why would aliens travel across the universe and land near me? they could choose anyplace on the planet, but i always see them.

but i think why not? i am a planet of sorts. they know something about consciousness. i imagine they come from far away, their physics is great, but whats mysterious is their knowledge of space and consciousness. they know something. also they are silent and dont say anything, but deep down they know what it is im already thinking.

anyway
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a nice old jewish lady told me
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this morning on the ferry i read a couple short hemmingway stories. it made me think of a quick landscape sketch in oils, alot like some of the sketches I saw in the group of 7. with hemmingway, each sentence is like a brushstroke. no one sentence is perfect, they are a bit rough, but there is not a single word out of place. they are master brushstrokes, somehow communicating more than the sum of their parts. but most amazing is how there is not a single unnecessary brush stroke. nothing is out of place. everything is essential. and even though it is rough, perhaps more can be done, the real strength is that every single mark belongs. there is not one brush stroke that just makes up for another, every brush stroke stands by itself but contributes to the whole.

i cant expect to just go out and create a work with only essential strokes, but at least now i know how to aspire to it.link

There are conservatives who dont recognize the conservative party in American politics. The people who now have dominance in American political society are those who beleive that commerce is the greatest thing in life, that consuming is the greatest jo in life, of the satisfaction of going shopping, being able to buy anything; those that think having anything available, at the grocery store, or shopping centers and large mega stores where any day or night one can buy anything one wants- this they get the greatest satisfaction and sense of stability from- the continual poduction and satisfaction of desire.

This joy is not consciously stated as the sole greatest aim of life, and that is why it is some kind of subconscious politic. Rather, these people often ostensibly claim that the greatest good is religious beleife, separated, disembodied from our capacity to consume.  So when knowing some of these people, you know they go to church and talk about religion. But to watch them and see their view of the world, the greatest comfort in life for them is being able to shop. They may even be aware of this to different extents and try to minimize it or resublimate it, but in the end for these people nothing can get in their way of their right to shop and consume.

Going back to the culture of capitalism- initially for the reasons of improving overall quality of life and stability, capital growth is taken as the leading political and social philosophy. However, after a certain point markets will grow increasisngly large and take on a life of their own, ofen growing to ever increasingly unstable sizes. Now the outlook as capitol to improve our minimal lives, it becomes all consuming as abstraction rows and people consume goods far beyond survival and basic comfort.  It takes a life of its own.

So, thats what the current conservative and middle of America values more than anything- their right to shop.

It is not exactly a cultural or economically conservative view- more only conservative in its inherent love of the status quo.


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Wooo!
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I was standing in a parking lot last night, neatly tarred and painted. I looked at the edge of the lots, some trees huddling against the Safeway. This is order- this is not about good design or architecture or interesting experience. Its about imposing order on the world, making sense where there is chaos. The parking lot, empty and clean, paving over nature which is disorderly, unpredictable, unprofitable.

But I dont mean here to just make a platitude about the human need for order. I'm currently listening to a piece of music that makes me think of the reverse (Tim Hecker's "Song of the Highwire Shrimper"). This piece is like a rescrambling of artificial order back into a kind of natural state.  This track reminded me of sitting out in a natural space, just listening to the haphazard disconnected noises all around, the patterns and rhythms unintentional, complex.

Music like this is created in response to a kind of closing in of order, increasing predictability, routine, environments of human dominated variables of patterns and meaning, the loss of natural random stimulation.

This is not a universally felt predicament. Most people for the same reasons like structured, repetitive, uncritical music the way they like their parking lots and shopping plazas. They dont want to learn anything new from them but be comforted and made to feel secure.

In contrast though the amount of time, space, and opportunity of encountering the unexpected, of experiencing uncertainty and even wonder is diminished the ubiquity of such musical parking lots. 

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It's like a toilet bowl that won't flush, the Pacific Ocean has a region the size of two Texas's and about 300 ft deep of swirling plastic trash. Awesome!

100 years of petro trash accumulation beginning to form aggregate patterns on a large scale, all of it unplanned to various extents.  This is of course in contrast to landfills, which are out of site. Those plastic bags hanging in trees like fruit?
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Arcosanti is a plan for a city of 5,000 people designed by architect Paolo Soleri. Soleri was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and chose to devote his abilities to conceiving and designing ecologically sustainable cities rather than individual buildings. Arcosanti was one of many of Soleri's plans drawn up in the 1960s featuring what he called 'arcological' principles fusing architecture with ecological concerns.

In about 1968, 1700 acres of Arizona desert land were donated to Soleri for the purpose of building one of his proposed cities. Breaking ground with a small crew of apprentices  in an organization modeled loosely after Wright's Talliessen, 40 years later Soleri and roughly 5,000 volunteers have managed to build only roughly 3% of the plan, with an average of about 40 permanent residents at any one time.

Much speculation figures to why the city of 5,000 was never built beyond its present state. A modern developer with funds totalling the investment in a typical skyscraper or sprawling housing development could build out most if not all of the plan in 2 or 3 years. Some say the money has never been available, some say it is Soleri himself who was impossible to work with, most quite incorrectly assume it was just a failed utopian experiment from the 60s. Now, in any case, in its unfinished state, after decades of hard weathering in the desert and thousands of people living in its limited spaces, it does feel as a kind of relic. Not a ruin, for certain.

"...a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community."

"Arcology advocates cities designed to maximize the interaction and accessibility associated with an urban environment; minimize the use of energy, raw materials and land, reducing waste and environmental pollution; and allow interaction with the surrounding natural environment."link

Buildings from the 1950s to 1980s are widely considered awful by many of todays practicing architects. Their styles and sensibilities have been largely abandoned.  They have become outdated architectural ruins. ....

"Historical preservation sees history not as a continuity, but as a dramatic discontinuity, a kind of cosmic drama. First there is that golden age, a time of harmonious beginnings. Then ensues a period when the old days are forgotten and the golden age falls into neglect. Finally comes a time when we rediscover and seek to restore the world around us to its former beauty. But there has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be a discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins...the old order has to die before there can be a born-again landscape."link

it sucks because its obviously very expensive but its not that great. it looks good on paper, but walking through it feels pretentious and discomforting. its not the aesthetic i am against, but the peculiar way seattle has of aspiring to be world-class when everything it touches is doomed to the middle ground between regional quality and fake cosmopolitanism.

I like the aesthetic actually, but not in this place or for its purpose. The landscape competes with the sculptures. They are from different periods with different aims. This though is just the same old argument for what kind of space works should be exibited. But I'm just saying, the Richard Serra pieces are excellent, but not in this lame-ass manner of being accessories to a corner of a 3D CGI fantasy. They would be better exibited somewhere in the 3rd floor of an anonymous parking garage than this spot which is more suited to being a fasion runway for retired wives in crushed purple. Its an inauthentic space.
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luxury colors: prague

luxury colors: chambord

luxury colors: winter lodge link

'Kant defines beauty as "the form of purposiveness in so far as it is perceived apart from the presentation of a purpose." The unity of aesthetic experience is due to the interplay of the faculties of perception and imagination with the faculty of understanding. An aesthetic judgement also claims that the beautiful object is connected with a pleasurable feeling, and that it pleases universally. This universality is merely a subjective foundation in our cognitive faculties, similar to teleological explanations.' [+]link

"I just came from the bathroom on the seventh floor of the Central Library. A homeless man was drying his ass crack with the hand blower. As he left the restroom, he muttered, mechanically, 'This library is a design disaster.' Then I noticed the same phrase, written as graffiti on the door. I dried my hands on my pants."
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Other rules of conduct prohibit “using restrooms for bathing or shampooing, doing laundry, or changing clothes,”
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They should have spent $80m on a new pub bathroom and $100m on the library- separate buildings,
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I don't think the library was designed for the way its actually being used- as a public bathroom. They should have built a state of the art 100 million dollar bathroom with automatic dry showers, ultraviolet clothes washers, and 3 classes of stalls. If you want to pay for it, you can get an upgrade. Put that world renowned bathroom next to the library, and don't put any bathrooms in the library. This would put alot less pressure on the rest of the sleek library design straining under the weight of body odor and gunk encrusted patrons.

My point here is not that homeless people shouldn't be allowed access to public restrooms or that the library sucks (it might). It's just the juxtaposition of luxurious hypermodern sterility with primitive forms of human behavior. Unlike what we've always thought of the sleekness of the future and fetishized its design, there is no escape from human folly and basic animal nature. Why build a bathroom at all? True visionary architects will see this problem and wont include bathrooms.

At the other end, what's up with the decision to fork out $180M on an ambitious library (which I'm proud of the daring here compared with the rest of Seattle's lame, safe, visionless buildings) and next to nothing on homeless facilities?

Well, we did spend millions on those automatic bathrooms around the city and that was a failed experiment (incidents of public defecation has actually increased since the opening of these machines). Visionary architects- public bathrooms! Thats the most difficult challenge in your profession. Are you up to it?

http://www.poopreport.com/Travel/shameless_in_seattle.htmllink

"The Colorado Plateau, centered in northeastern Arizona, and including the adjacent Four Corners region of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, is sometimes included in the Great Basin Desert, sometimes considered a separate desert -- the Navajoan -- and sometimes not considered a true desert. The Plateau includes large barren areas, spectacular geological formations, more juniper and pinyon trees and generally higher elevations."

http://www.arizonaoutback.com/examindesert.htmllink

"hailed as modernistic, space-age edifices with no poles obstructing views, symmetrical dimensions in the playing field and cutting-edge features such as huge scoreboards with computerized animation."

http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/Past%20Ballparks.htmlink

foam house. house of foam. spray foam house...

HAUSEN ZIE DER FOAM HAUSFOAMGELAUFEN! haus des Schaumgummis ist sehr glatt

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One housewife, Suad Hassan, 30, claimed she had been attacked by one of the badgers as she slept.

"My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer," she said. "It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey," she told AFP.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6295138.stm

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003774564_websnorkeler04.html

http://www.nutria.com/site23.php

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"But Mr Sarkozy has rekindled a French suspicion that the habit is for self-centred individualists such as the Americans who popularised it. “Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right,” Odile Baudrier, editor of V02 magazine, a sports publication, told Libération. Patrick Mignon, a sports sociologist, noted that French intellectuals had always held sport in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2022804.ecelink

I work on the 4th floor overlooking the adjacent building's roof- an expansive flat tar plane stretching out to  the waterline of Elliot Bay. This is the first warm, sunny week since I've started here, and I can see what the summer's going to be like living with this roof.  Its  right there with a big dumb parking lot. It's one of those spaces nobody gave any thought to. Its sole purpose- keep out water.

The neet thing here as with all forgotten spaces we create is the way nature creeps in. When its wet, large puddles form and all sorts of city birds come and wade in its tar flavored bath. A couple crows test it with their beaks, an occasional seagul, and those flying rats, pigeons, occasionally use it.

Most of the time this roof just sits empty, the size of half a city block. It reflects water and absorbs the sun. Not on purpose about the sun however. Its like a tar based heat sink.

What needs to happen is grass. Grasses. How many types of grasses are there? Grasses grow all over the pacific northwest without any maintenance. So it seems like it would be a great fit for this roof.

I'm sure (maybe?) that alot of research has gone in to reclaiming lost tarry roof spaces, so the proper technique for both convincing landowners of its benefits and low cost must exists. Its not like dirt goes directly on the roof.

Maybe what needs to happen is a green roofing business. For instance, have prebuilt modules that install as easy as walking up there and placing 'em on the roof, and that can be removed just as easy for maintenaance. The weight would be known, so building capabilities can be calculated. And there can be service contracts. I'll bet many city and municipal 'green' incentives might even help fund this venture.

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