Church on the Water, Hokkaido, 1985–8 At the edges of the outer walls to left and right, the slate floor is held back, creating a shadowed slot into which the concrete wall slips out of sight. Because the wall does not meet and bear upon the floor, as is usual, the relationship of the wall to the ground is uncertain, and the rippling surface of the black slate floor appears to float free of the walls, merging with the rippling surface of the water. Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture weight
Lightness & Heaviness "Lightness is born of heaviness and heaviness of lightness, instantaneously and reciprocally, returning creation for creation, gaining strength proportionally as they gain in life, and as much more in life as they gain in motion. They destroy one another also at the same time, fulfilling a mutual vendetta, proof that lightness is created only in conjunction with heaviness, and heaviness only where lightness follows." — Leonardo da Vinci Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture materialweight
Buttresses Buttresses, Ruskin writes, are structures against pressure: a cathedral’s walls want to fall outward, for example, pushed aside by the relentless weight of the roof. But this gravitational pressure can be stabilized by an exoskeleton: a sequence of buttresses that will prevent those walls from collapsing outward. However, Ruskin points out, there is a similar kind of pressure from the waves of the sea. Think of the curved hull of a ship, he writes, which is internally buttressed against the “crushing force” of the ocean around it. It is a kind of inside-out cathedral. Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG www.bldgblog.com weightarchitecture
Numbers/Words A Gallery by Daniel Eatock eatock.com Christmastime 04:04:044:56Numeric anagrams
Christmastime 04:04:04 Turn it upside down. I was in a hotel room a few years ago and I woke up in the early hours and glanced at the digital clock radio. It displayed the time using six digits HH:MM:SS Just at the moment I glanced it flicked over to 04:04:04. It occurred to me that, using calculator word logic, this would read ‘ho ho ho’ if viewed upside down. That year I produced a Christmas card with those digits on the front and ‘Christmastime’ printed upside down as the message on the inside. In the absence of any further explanation, absolutely nobody understood the card. numbers
4:56 I was looking at my digital clock last-night and it occurred to me that 4:56 is quite an interesting time. 4 uses four segments of the seven-segment display 5 uses five segments of the seven-segment display 6 uses six segments of the seven-segment display numbers
Numeric anagrams "Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one". — Craig Sharp / Twelve + One = Eleven + Two I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13 — Linda Vanderkolk words