Creating a Language

Linda Pollak's "Cuts and Patches" from Urban Omnibus, 2010.

These images, which were compiled from the sidewalks of lower Manhattan, appear as a surprisingly consistent set of geometric configurations.  There may not yet be a semiotic association with these found objects, but they remind me of the book, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.  I can't seem to find many images of the book online, but here is an excerpt entry on Alexander's website.  What is the symbology of the sidewalk's "cuts and patches"?  How can we come to read the ordinary as something more extraordinary?

I am impressed by the beauty these patterns assume when published as such, and I am taken by Pollak's assertion that "As a designer, the more you can make sense of the diversity of the physical environment, the more chance you have to enable others to make new sense of it." I'll toast to that.

Miniature Worlds

In my sculpture class this morning we were prepping for presentations on our semester final: "SITE."  More on my idea later (it involves periscopes and is situated in Kevin Roche's Center for the Arts at Wesleyan), but I have been inspired by my childhood fascination with the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.

These rooms give the most detailed entry to another time, another world, from the perspective of a larger-than life voyeur.  As kid you could stand on a ledge, tip-toe as high as posssible, and look into the meticulously placed artifacts, all rendered to extreme accuracy and no bigger than your thumbnail. 

I loved it.  I wanted to recreate them.  I didn't care about playing with dolls themselves, but I wanted the dollhouse.  To that end, I went about creating furniture that would be fit for a small fairy, and complete with miniature french toast for breakfasts-in-beds.

Now I would love to make miniature to-scale models of some of Roche's modernist influences on his work at Wesleyan, such as Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago or Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Cemetery in Stolkhom.  But for now I'll just have to settle for more views into 19th century English homes.

More Thorne Rooms from the Knoxville Museum of Art on this flickr photostream.

Growing Graphics

I recently remembered this map I made depicting the crops planted on our main acre at Long Lane Farm.  The map is incomplete, and I think it could use some revising graphically/typographically speaking.

  

 (click for larger image)

I like the contrast of this image with actual farm photographs posted on this blog almost 2 years ago.  That summer I also attempted some sort of logo for the farm, which I ended up printing onto tote bags.  I wish I had a photograph of the tote bags I made, but this was my first attempt at graphics for the bags:

Opportunities

I'd love to be able to go to this international conference for young urban researchers.  Too bad I'm about to sign away my next year to a job.  Or that the conference is in Portugal.

Poo.