At the risk of sounding like any sort of (design)manifesto, I am simply using this blog to push myself to learn. I welcome any and all comments, suggestions or advice on design, software applications, rendering or even where to get a decent hamburger in New York.
“So what kind of architecture do you do? Commercial or Residential?”
Ah, the age old question; a question that reduces our passions, interests and sleepless all-nighters to either one or the other zoning category. Throw out your phenomenological books describing Kant’s transcendental idealism, stop with your Deleuzian rants about the smooth and striated and hit CTRL-AL-DELETE to force-quite your parametric Rhino script. Face the facts, this is the question that roughly 99.93% of the US asks of architects and designers. We should not laugh or mock the inquisitor of this question. Like anyone outside of a specific field or discipline no one on the periphery can ever know what to ask.
By the way, what IS the right question? What kind of architecture do you do? What school did you go to? Who do you work for? Do you do curvy or rectilinear stuff? Do you do stuff like Frank Gehry?
Every time someone asks me any iteration of these questions I seem to answer it in a fairly diplomatic way. That’s probably the best way I can describe what inspires me architecturally. I will forever be humbled by simple, clean modernism and equally blown away by sexy, parametric masturbation. I am also interested in 18th century French philosophy as much as I can appreciate the built details of Scarpa. I think about design at all scales…the door handle, the facade, the building’s connection to its site and context.
The title digitally (a)mused represents my diplomacy in design. Through this blog I hope to further explore the digital realm of (soft) scripting in Grasshopper and Generative Components and fine-tune my skills in rendering packages such as VRay and Maxwell. This is the digital musings aspect of the blog. At the same time I am not trying to push the boundaries of the underground scripting society. I am merely dipping my toes in it because it’s there, because I can. Of course there is the ironic side of the title as well. One reason I have been apprehensive about plummeting down the dark, endless spiral of scripting is due to its self-proclaimed, scientific performative solutions. Maybe it is the math-major in me but I do not approve of the pseudo-scientific ideas stripped from some Wikipedia article and applied to the facade of a building. I can just hear it now, “The building’s facade is inspired by the hydrodynamic shape of the short-fin mako shark to decrease wind-loads….blah blah.” Anyone can be inspired by nature, but we need a level of abstraction here. It took millions of years for that shark to develop its spindle-shape to make it sleek and agile. We cannot simply cherry-pick an idea out of nature, turn it upright and call it a building. I am also infinitely amused by the somewhat recent hyper-punctuation of designers to be linguistically cute and different…. hence me being (a)mused. I am also using this blog to figure out not only how to answer the questions above but also to determine what to ask (how Tao-Te-Ching of me).
Thank you for your time.
Blake Altshuler
