Googie architecture Where uses are in actual fact homogeneous, we often find that deliberate distinctions and differences are contrived among the buildings. But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances represent the desire merely to appear different. Some of the more blatant manifestations of this phenomenon were well described, back in 1952, by Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, under the term “googie architecture.” Googie architecture could then be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. These are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. Mr. Haskell pointed out that the same impulses to look special (in spite of not being special) were at work also in more sophisticated construction: weird roofs, weird stairs, weird colors, weird signs, weird anything. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities Ducks and decorated sheds quirks
Reverse chronology bias Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything. So they didn’t. And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong. The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before. There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. Amy Hoy, How the Blog Broke the Web Navigation by shibboleth timequirks
XXIIVV Webring A Website webring.xxiivv.com This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other. wwwquirksblogging
What Good Means An Article by Dan Klyn medium.com The center of the waySeductionWhat the material wants to beAsking yourself some questionsLosing meaning+1 More
The center of the way The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander: What it would be like to live in a mental world where one’s reasons for making something functionally and one’s reasons for making something a certain shape, or in a certain ornamental way are coming from precisely the same place in you . functionmaking
Seduction “The classic pervasive seduction to designers is finding a solution instead of the truth.” — Richard Saul Wurman
What the material wants to be Part of how Lou Kahn made things be good was to ask the material what it wanted to do and be. He asked brick what it liked, and would get a different answer depending on the context for the building. In Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh, brick said it liked an arch. For the Korman House in Philadelphia, brick said it liked two giant fireplaces with a lintel between them for a doorway beneath and a balcony above. The material finds the right objectWe are working against the grain of the woodThe joy of the humble brick material
Asking yourself some questions All of the moves that we make in space will tend toward being in accord with this phenomenon of wholeness / beauty / life if we’re willing to bring the requisite level of care to the doing of our work. Alexander says that each of us possess the means for accessing this order within ourselves and — here’s where he loses most other architects and many in the so-called sciences in academia — he contends that what we’re connecting with inside of ourselves is an objective criterion for what good means. Applying the criterion is easy: you ask yourself some questions: With any action you might take with regard to placement, and with regard to the situatedness of things in space you ask yourself: does this move increase wholeness / beauty / life? Does the intervention you’re taking intensify the feelings of wholeness in you as the maker when you are performing the work? How does your work on this one part enhance what’s going on among wholes at the system level? goodnessmaking
Losing meaning The people who’ve proven that they can make very good individual products with the radical focus of a spotlight seem to be pushed ever further from making good ecosystems. Products are being made “consistent” with the application of so-called “design patterns,” and rather than bringing coherence to these various touch-points, the painting-on of interface standards and interaction patterns did something far less valuable. Rote consistency, in the way many seem to be going about it (Material Design being just one example), is at odds with making things be good. It simplifies what needs to remain complex. Always, when simplification is underway, meaning is being lost. complexitysoftware
Two coffee trays Show image 0 Show image 1 We speculate that the shop owners designed and built an initial quantity of these remarkable coffee trays, replete with what Alexander considers to be the fifteen geometric properties that correlate with wholeness / beauty / life. Then they got busy. And then they got successful. They needed more coffee trays, and our hypothesis is that somebody decided to simplify the trays to ensure they could be produced in the quantities and at the price that worked for their budget, within an urgent food-service timeline. The simplified tray fulfills every function the more complex tray does, with less fuss in manufacturing on account of having standardized its geometry. The simplified tray works, but isn’t alive. It lacks the gradients, local symmetries, levels of scale, contrast, and boundaries that are all present and accounted for in the tray that’s got wholeness / beauty / life. The tray with wholeness isn’t necessarily better than the simpler one. But it is good.