How To See: Skier's Edition

 
I can't rave enough about this segment from the All.I.Can ski/environmental movie by Sherpas Cinema.  It's a fascinating way to analyze a built environment, albeit from a gravity-intensive point of view.  And the cinematography is just terrific.  Please follow this link to view the video.

"Landscape is valued, while architecture is not."

Click on the title above for a link to an essay on how architects use site to rationalize building form.  There are interesting questions on form generation and how architects can be disingenuous in their site analysis.  From the essay:

"Architects are not required to be intellectually rigorous. They only have to convincingly sell ideas about how value is embedded in form in order to build. It is precisely this need that makes architectural intellectualism so suspect, and, just to reiterate, nothing sells today like landscape, however shoddily conflated in theory. The conceptual problems I have been describing are thus not a big deal professionally (though they are frankly unforgiveable within academic architectural discourse). Still, given that architects are, in my experience, a fairly conscientious group, it's interesting to speculate why so many continue to go out on this particularly logic-challenged limb, despite its evident flaws as theory."

Collaborative Consumption

Rachel Botsman speaks about shared resources in this 17 minute video from TEDxSydney.

Architecture Fight!!!

We think Coco may have gotten a flyer from FA004, and now he owes us some royalties.  Click the title above to follow the link...

Far Out

That's all I have to say about this....

Murmuration

If you have enough birds, they become spatial.  This is amazing filming and canoeing by Liberty Smith and Sophie Windsor Clive.  Enjoy!

More from Mr. Foster

For those who tuned-in to 'How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster' and even those who missed it, here's a series of short essays on various design and practice related topics from the man himself. Happy reading!

Building Futures: Required Reading

The Royal Institute of British Architects released a publication examining the future of the building design profession in 25 years. Through interviews and analyses of small, medium and large practices, the study explores the implication that contemporary economic conditions pose for our profession.  While we've emerged from a period of rapid growth and change into a stage of stagnation, designers are at the forefront of global change and the building future's group is seeking out what will make us viable during changed times ahead.

 

"It can sometimes seem that the long shadow of the gentleman architect still hangs over the profession, obscuring the fainter, earlier memory of the master builder. Contemporary society has more interest in the latter than the former. While the future for the practice of architecture as a discrete business is uncertain, the opportunities for architects have never been greater, notwithstanding the current recession. However to grasp those opportunities architects will need to develop greater financial nous and commercial acumen, to welcome the integration of their work with others in the wider industry, and continue to work hard to promote the extraordinary benefits which society gains from the design process. "

A quick read of the 'Practice Futures' report will be a great primer for a special December Funday featuring Douglas Parker of the Greenway Group and the Design Futures Council - a national design thinktank (put December 19 @ 8 a.m. on you calendar!).