In an interview with Ellen Lupton in 1994, Michael Rock said something about meaning coming from “the forms of design itself”, and mentioned that the aesthetics of letterpress having class identity encoded within. I assume by “the forms of design”, he was referring to the relationship between process and meaning, rite?

Similarly, my drafting critic last fall in the BEB said that each drawing methodology (orthographic, isometric, perspective et cetera) can tell a story, and by privledging different viewpoints, you change the story. Seems obvious when I write that point down here, but it was quite illuminating at the time.

Figures 1 and 2: Two views of my final Design Principles project, Geometric Confusion.

But so this weekend, I was having a drink with Laura on the roof of the Gansevoort Hotel, kicking off a >48h bender of idiotic decadence and intoxication, and I was amused that I could see some brilliantly clean examples from the typology described in Steven Holl’s Pamphlet Architecture number 5, The Alphabetical City. I’ve always been sort of a fan of this book, probably just because it addresses urbanism in terms of type, however formally.

Figure 3. T-shaped airshaft in some building in the meatpacking district.

I could only see this shit, however, cuz I was on the roof of a pricey hotel. Generally this is the case with any sort of planometric design: you have to be high up to actually see what’s what, or be the architect.

Figure 4. The cover of the book in question.

My mom used to be the head of the dance department at Wellesley College, where she worked for almost 20 years. I grew up playing around on its campus, which really is quite elysian and gorgeous. I was always struck, specifically, by the distinctly non-elysian science center. The building is actually a strange mashup of an older building, Sage Hall, and newer construction. When I was a kid, I would enjoy getting lost in there, because it was deliciously disorienting.

I revisited the science center when I was in college, and I was amazed at how completely incoherent it seemed. Bridgelike pathways went everywhere, the signage was kind of nuts, and you couldn’t get to where you thought you could get when you looked around. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really, but hey.

My friend, one of my mom’s students, knew how to get up onto the roof, tho, so we did that in short order. When you looked down into the building through the one of the skylights, it suddenly made a great deal more sense, visually. The crazy bridges were actually radially arranged around a central core. Programmatically separate areas were deliniated cleanly. And so forth.

(At this point in my life I had much to learn of bullshit design language, it should be noted, so I didn’t say anything about programmatically separate areas or radial fuckshit. I just probably blurted, “oh so now it makes sense” or something like that.)

So yeah, you could say that planocentrism (a word I just made up just now) is a class thing, no? And a problem, I think. The idea that a program diagram can become a plan is so tempting, given the nature of drafting technique (including, of course, the methodology enforced by contemporary CAD systems). But people end up looking up at buildings way more often than they look down on them, cuz of gravity and whatnot… one could postulate a class gradient that follows elevation from sea level linearly, as well.

Indeed. As I ranted about two or so years ago, these starchitects enjoy their helicopter rides. At that level, one can free-associate with elaborate metaphor, and talk about a monstrous idea like a city as if it was a painting. Such thinking is constrained by the viewpoint, and makes little sense outside of the narrow socioeconomic strata the thinker is operating in. The upshot, then, is that we get coffeetable books filled with baroque but useless theory, and designers who earnestly believe that they are operating somewhere outside their own navel.

Not like I’m any better, of course; I was up at the rooftop bar having an overpriced mojito with the rest of ‘em. I’m just sayin’. Yeah.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

… first read this:

http://www.mkgraphic.com/semiotics.html

… and then this:

http://www.designwritingresearch.org/essays/rock.html

… and finally, this:

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/000723.html

if you are the kind of person that found that sequence of shit even vaguely amusing, and you have an appetite for downloading 10mb pdf files, then this is clearly for you. or just stop by the RISD graphic design gallery any time this week after this monday, for the same thing, only analog. yes!

-fish

so, yeah. haven’t really written on the internet for some time. I used to, with varying degrees of regularity… I have an old MT export file that I’ll put up, to prove this point of fact, but first I have to figure out a way to clean all the spam out of it. blech. yeah. the internet. it’s there… FOR YOU.

anyway I am trying also to kickstart another bloog, for my writing design criticism class. that one actually will hopefully have some life after the class is dead. I’ll fill it with my old articles from classes from the past, and whatnot. I actually like that blog’s template way better than this one, cuz I worked in this completely gratuitous color change thing at the last minute, so the tone of the page in question slowly changes as more posts or comments fills it up. at least in theory. in practice it looks like a typical fucking web page, so BOO.

I am not in a position to be assessing anything, aesthetically or otherwise… I’ve been up all night and I just sucked down the last of a “dunkin donuts” iced coffee. you know that last sip of that shit, which invariably contains a blast of undissolved granulated sugar? that’s what’s in my mouth, right now. indeedy.

anyway so yeah. if you’re so inclined, have a go at talking shit about what I wrote about renzo piano’s revisions to the morgan library, or, alternatively, antenna design’s recent cute lil’ gallery show. do this for me, and I promise you untold riches. yes.

yes!

-fish

the only way to kill a malignant stereotype, effectively, is to ignore it. thinking about it in any way will only serve to reënforce it, as far as i can ascertain. but that’s only inside your own head, right? how do you kill a stereotype that exists in the wild? they spread virally. so. one person can’t kill a wild stereotype. what you can do, as an individual, is actively prevent yourself from becoming a carrier of the stereotype. this means that you must do everything in your power to prevent yourself from passing it. in order to do this, however, you must vigilantly monitor your every thought and transmission, to prevent elements of the stereotype from insidiously embedding themselves in your thoughts, words, and actions. this directly contradicts our primarily established method of killing the stereotype within yourself, which means that the more you attempt to prevent the stereotypes’ spread outside of yourself, the more you must invariably reënforce it within your own mind. thus, it would seem, the stereotype will only end when an entire generation of the society that harbors the stereotype can trick themselves into performing this sort of mental autoablation*, to prevent the stereotype from infecting those that come after them. essentially, you have to live with it, so your children don’t have to. it frightens me, however, to think of the possible secondary effects of doing this to yourself. it seems like you could seriously fuck up your own perceptions if your efforts at self-censorship mutate beyond your own control. sadly, this outcome doesn’t seem preposterous, considering we’re all a bunch of human beings, who are known far and wide for such inventions as stoicheometry, and the crack pipe.