Craig Mod
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
An Article by Craig ModThanks Doc
An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig ModA couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced
An Article by Craig ModAnd what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.
Fast Software, the Best Software
An Essay by Craig ModI love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.
Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.
Looking Closely is Everything
An Essay by Craig ModKambara, detail by detail.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
Ri — The Distance Walked in an Hour
An Article by Craig ModA ri is a unit of measure, it’s about how far a person can walk in an hour at a reasonable pace. It clocks out at roughly 3.93 kilometers.
Remnants of the ri system are scattered along the old roads of Japan. During the Edo period, ri were marked recurrently by hulking earthen mounds that flanked the road — ichi-ri zuka, “one-ri mounds.” There are only a handful of “originals” left. When you pass one with an old cypress or oak growing from its center it becomes a tiny moment of celebration.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Life as Protest
A Fragment by Craig ModI’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
Koya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture
The realm of feeling
Alexander: If you say: "Well, look, you're a feeling type, and I'm a thinking type, so let's not discuss that because we are always going to be on different sides", then it removes from this discussion what I feel to be the absolute heart and soul of the matter when it comes to buildings. Now I don't want to deny at all what you are saying about personalities. But I really cannot conceive of a properly formed attitude towards buildings, as an artist or a builder, or in any way, if it doesn't ultimately confront the fact that buildings work in the realm of feeling.
Panic
Alexander: It never occurred to me that someone could so explicitly reject the core experience of something like Chartres. It's very interesting to have this conversation. If this weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get into this on a psychiatric level. I'm actually quite serious about this. What I'm saying is that I understand how one could be very panicked by these kinds of feelings. Actually, it's been my impression that a large part of the history of modern architecture has been a kind of panicked withdrawal from these kinds of feelings, which have governed the formation of buildings over the last 2000 years or so.
Why that panicked withdrawal occurred, I'm still trying to find out. It's not clear to me. But I've never heard somebody say, until a few moments ago, someone say explicitly: "Yes, I find that stuff freaky. I don't like to deal with feelings. I like to deal with ideas.”
The pitched roof
Eisenman: I would argue that the pitched roof is – as Gaston Bachelard points out – one of the essential characteristics of "houseness". It was the extension of the vertebrate structure which sheltered and enclosed man. Michel Foucault has said that when man began to study man in the 19th century, there was a displacement of man from the center. The representation of the fact that man was no longer the center of the world, no longer the arbiter, and, therefore, no longer controlling artifacts, was reflected in a change from the vertebrate-center type of structure to the center-as-void.
The trick of little machines
Alexander: Up until about 1600, most of the world views that existed in different cultures did see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable ... either through the medium of what they called God or in some other way. But all that was understood. The particular intellectual game that led us to discover all the wonders of science forced us to abandon temporarily that idea. In other words, in order to do physics, to do biology, we were actually taught to pretend that things were like little machines because only then could you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick. That's all fine. It was a tremendous endeavor, and it paid off.
But it may have been factually wrong. That is, the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized. Now, I am not talking about some kind of aboriginal primitivism. I am saying that it may actually be a matter of fact that those things are more related than we realize. And that we have been trained to play a trick on ourselves for the last 300 years in order to discover certain things. Now, if that's true – there are plenty of people in the world who are beginning to say it is, by the way, certainly in physics and other related subjects – then my own contribution to that line of thought has to do with these structures of sameness that I have been talking about.
In other words, the order I was sketching out last night is ultimately, fundamentally an order produced by centers or wholes which are reinforcing each other and creating each other. Now, if all of that is so, then the pitched roof would simply come about as a consequence of all that – not as an antecedent. It would turn out that, in circumstances where one is putting a roof on a building, in the absence of other very strong forces that are forcing you to do something different, that is the most natural and simple roof to do. And, therefore, that kind of order would tend to reappear – of course, in a completely different, modern technological style – simply because that is the nature of order, not because of a romantic harkening back to past years.
Merely a building
Eisenman: Le Corbusier once defined architecture as having to do with a window which is either too large or too small, but never the right size. Once it was the right size it was no longer functioning. When it is the right size, that building is merely a building. The only way in the presence of architecture that is that feeling, that need for something other, when the window was either too large or too small.
Fucking up the world
City Hall by Rafael Moneo, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain.
Alexander : At least my experience tells me, that when a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable in such and such a situation, their opinions about it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they're making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won't agree. But if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that kind of harmony.
The thing that strikes me about your friend's building – if I understood you correctly – is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.
Eisenman: That is correct.
Eisenman: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.
A good table
Eisenman: Tolstoy wrote about the man who had so many modern conveniences in Russia that when he was adjusting the chair and the furniture, etc., that he was so comfortable and so nice and so pleasant that he didn't know – he lost all control of his physical and mental reality. There was nothing. What I'm suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything's all right, Jack, which it isn't. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn't all right.
Alexander: I can't, as a maker of things, I just can't understand it. I do not have a concept of things in which I can even talk about making something in the frame of mind you are describing. I mean, to take a simple example, when I make a table I say to myself: "All right, I'm going to make a table, and I'm going to try to make a good table." And of course, then from there on I go to the ultimate resources I have and what I know, how well I can make it. But for me to then introduce some kind of little edge, which starts trying to be a literary comment, and then somehow the table is supposed to be at the same time a good table, but it also is supposed to be I don't know what; a comment on nuclear warfare, making a little joke, doing various other things... I'm practically naive; it doesn't make sense to me.