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SOTM
“Crazy For You” by Groove Armada
Normally, covering Madonna is a sort of sacrilege. But this is actually really nice.
Review
The Elements of Typographic Style
Could I really review Robert Bringhurst’s definitive typographic guide and not give it five stars?
I was introduced to serious typography in 2000, when I started working for The Gateway, the student newspaper at the University of Alberta. At the time, we were lucky enough to have some very talented designers and photographers on staff who brought an uncompromising eye to the visual identity of the newspaper. Their efforts (and I’d like to think some of my own efforts) created a publication that stood out (and continues to stand out) from other Canadian student newspapers. After James Craig’s Designing with Type, The Elements of Typographic Style was step #2 for any editor consciously interested in learning more about, and working with the nuances of, great typography.
I’ve carried my copy (version 2.4) with me since about 2001, but not until this morning had I actually made my way through its entirety. That’s not to say it didn’t get used, of course. The Elements of Typographic Style, while chock full of historical goodness, is more of a reference document. I’ve always reached for its guidance when needed. Being a reference though, a continuous straight read can be quite the slog. Nevertheless, Bringhurst – a notable author and poet in his own right – manages to make the prose dance in a pleasurable way as he tours through typographic technique and history.
A cursory Internet search will confirm Elements’ status as a classic in the field. Anyone even remotely interested in improving their graphic communication skills should start here. Highly recommended!
Bjarke Ingels talks
The obscenely-young-considering-what-he’s-doing Bjarke Ingels has a number of nice videos where he walks you through some of their work. Here’s his TED talk and a feature on BIG’s recently completed 8tallet housing project. (More on the BIG Vimeo page.)
8H - The 8-House from BIG on Vimeo.
The Central Valley Greenway
This was a little trip we’ve been planning for quite some time. We finally did it yesterday, on what ended up being an excellent day for cycling.
The Central Valley Greenway is a 24km trail through three municipalities (Vancouver, Burnaby, New Westminster) that roughly follows the north arm of the Skytrain’s Millennium Line. This is great for a number of reasons, among them, if you ever get tired or your bike breaks down, you’re never far from a Skytrain station.
One CVG terminus is at Science World on False Creek; the other is at New Westminster Quay (map). We started at Science World, but first detoured to check out the False Creek Energy Centre, tucked beneath the Cambie Bridge. The facility recovers waste heat from sewage for district heating (I believe primarily supplying hot water for the Olympic Village condos).
Cruising towards the Olympic Village, we came across the beautiful Vancouver Mill Machinery Ltd 1st Ave Plant, just before stopping at Amato Gelato for some Mario’s Gelati ice cream:
After the ice cream, we finally hit the CVG, biking straight until we entered Burnaby to check out Jack’s All Around Demolition. It’s primarily a shop for salvaged building materials. Lots of toilets. Apparently the film industry loves this place.
The second architectural highlight was Patkau Architects’ Winston Overpass bridge (picture at the top of this post). Getting up close, the bridge is well detailed, with many “I wish I’d thought of that” moments. The inverted tripod piers at either end are great, especially the tensegrity-like nod at the east end. Very clever.
Moving along, we reached our second planned destination: Piper Spit in Burnaby Lake Park. We took a few minutes to say hello to some feathered friends.
These guys were sunning themselves in the middle of the road to the spit, hassling passersby.
The CVG trail in Burnaby passes through some industrial warehouse districts, which makes for some interesting scenery. By chance, we happened upon a Vancouver 2010 Olympics warehouse sale. We of course popped in to check out the wares. Mostly clothes and stuffed animals, so we made off with a $5 Quatchi.
With still a ways to go, we hit the road. As the CVG enters New Westminster, it becomes rather hilly, so if your goal is to eat lunch in New Westminster, you really have to work for it right at the end. We finally reached our ultimate destination: Burger Heaven in New Westminster.
While we biked a solid 24km to get there, this lunch easily negated the calorie-burning effects of our trip. Let’s call it “break even”:
After dinner, we briefly visited New Westminster Quay, which has apparently been experiencing a bout of deadness while the market has been under renovations. We can confirm it was very quiet, although it was nearing the end of the tourism day.
We were feeling pretty tired at this point, so we made use of the nearby Skytrain station to travel back to Broadway-Commercial station and book it home along 10th Avenue bicycle route.
Needless to say, it was an excellent excursion. Though it was my first time on the CVG (JP’s second), I fully intend not to leave it my last.
How to go to a cocktail party
Glen Small on architects and hustling: How to go to a cocktail party
(via Archinect)
Review
Inception
I thought this was a really great film. In a summer filled with Hollywood letdowns (unnecessary remakes, gratuitous 3D, etc), this one was definitely worth the admission. But I had real trouble writing the review, so instead, here’s a point-form list of some items I wanted to cover:
- The trailers don’t do it justice. Inception is visually stunning and about as well-crafted as movies get, from both the screenwriting and filmmaking perspectives. (Director Chris Nolan apparently took ten years to write the script.) It’s conceptually original, and thus, intellectually enjoyable. It’s rare to be challenged with this sort of depth at the blockbuster level.
- I’m not that into Leonardo DiCaprio, and I think he may have been miscast. But I can’t think of who I’d rather see in the role, so, whatever. I’ll deal.
- It’s true: I have a huge man-crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He looks great in Inception and leads the best scene in the movie. If you haven’t seen Brick yet, watch it. Great film, probably some of his best work. And 500 Days of Summer? Don’t get me started. I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be more: JGL or Zooey Deschanel. Here’s a recent interview in Details magazine, and a link to his multi-dimensional creativity vat, hitRECord.
- Ellen Page plays Ariadne, an architecture student studying in Paris and roped into DiCaprio’s mind/dream/reality escapade. Tiny and charming, I liked that they managed to avoid any semblance of Hollywood’s architect archetype.
- I wish I were a Morocco-based dream-drug apothecary.
Children’s Hospital
If you like medical dramas, you might appreciate this, created by and starring Rob Corddry:
We found a whole bunch of the episodes at Rogers On Demand, of all places. Two days ago, all ten were there, but now it looks like only 6-10.
Top 21 since 1980
Vanity Fair surveyed a bunch of folks and came up with this list of the 21 most important works of architecture since 1980: Architecture’s Modern Marvels
A bunch of my all-time favs in there, for sure, but only a few I’ve actually had the pleasure to visit. You can see each person’s picks on the complete results, which includes lots of top-tier architects. Love that some of them name dropped themselves. Especially like the ones who picked the Large Hadron Collider and the Hubble Space Telescope.
(via Kottke)
REX’s JP-R talks about architecture in Forbes
Being a technocrat of sorts, I tend to believe that technology will eventually save the profession of architecture. By “save,” I mean reduce the distance and time between concept, representation and execution. However, like JP-R, I think this can happen only if we accept that architecture is a technical profession, that it will only become more technical as the complexity of building systems continues to increase, and that our education as architects needs to reflect this reality. We need to start clawing back some scope, because trust me, the engineers and project managers will be only too happy to take over if we continue parcelling out our profession’s work.
“Joshua Prince-Ramus On The Myth Of Architectural Genius”
How to uncork bottle of wine with a shoe
It’s French, but you don’t need to know the language to get the gist.
Love that.
SOTM
“Society” by DVAS
Check out, especially, the “Ambient Room SymbolOne Remix” on their MySpace page.
Conficker
If you like long articles about computing and security, start here: The Enemy Within @ The Atlantic
Then quickly scan through this: Conficker @ Wikipedia
And finally, top if off with this: Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing @ Ribbonfarm
Enjoy!
Animation of a Three Gorges Dam turbine
Whether you like crazy big dams or not, this is pretty cool. The little people near the end should give you a sense of scale. Read more here.
Another “biggest” in the power generating leagues: Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant
SOTM
“Odessa” by Caribou
CARIBOU - Odessa from Caribou on Vimeo.
Off to see Caribou at the Rickshaw tonight!
Paul Wells on the “squishy subjects”
From Chris Jones’s prolific Facebook links comes this gem from commentator Paul Wells: “In praise of the squishy subjects” (“Squishy subjects” being the social sciences and the humanities.) I haven’t always been on side with Mr Wells, but occasionally he hits just the right notes:
If you spend a few years wrestling with the idea of society as propounded by Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Rousseau and Marx, you come away with a better understanding of all the alternative ways our own society might choose to configure itself, with their attendant risks. If you study the fur trade in British North America, you learn something lasting about the contribution of aboriginal Canadians to our politics and economics, and you begin to understand the behaviour of today’s Canadian businesses a little better. Read Goethe or Cervantes in the original and you understand things about Germany and Spain today that Goethe and Cervantes cannot have imagined.
Will this knowledge come in handy? Will it have direct application in some lucrative enterprise? It might well. Stranger things have happened. In the meantime, this sort of study instills in the student an appreciation for the richness of our human enterprise. It shows that the way we live is not the way we have always lived, nor is it the way everyone lives. It demonstrates the role of ideas and the possibility of massive change. It is harder, having contemplated such things, to go back to a rote existence. Not impossible, but harder.
Is it the role of government to pay for such things? There can be no authoritative answer, but I think there is a reason why it has usually been governments that did pay. First, it offers a kind of insurance. Since you never know what you’re going to need to know, it is handy to have a stock of people around who know all sorts of curious things. They study parts of the world and moments in history we didn’t know would be relevant again. They think about theatre or music, which is pleasant enough but can provide very concrete benefits when the time comes to make some money off tourists looking for theatre or music.
Second, more important but harder to measure, investing in the social sciences and humanities makes us more human because it multiplies our conscious links to one another and to everyone who has lived. When we value these things we value ourselves, and we understand more deeply why we are worth valuing.
It’s a prescient point, because the opposite is also true: lack of investment degrades those conscious links, and allows us to devalue ourselves and forget why we are worth valuing.
I know I’ve written about this before: the idea that solid, continual investment in education gets to the root of so many issues. Education is the place where we create our “intellectual toolkit,” learn to grapple with issues of all sorts, and conjure ideas and solutions. Politicians today have been focusing on short-term gains (not unlike the finance industry) and are unable to deviate from “popular opinion,” unwilling to take risks in service of a long-term vision or collective aspiration. The gutting of education over the past few decades puts us at a disadvantage, with respect to our global neighbours but also with respect to our own potential.
Like Wells notes, isn’t it obvious that if we can analyze and understand what we do—economically, socially, politically, culturally, etc—we’ll discover more effective and meaningful ways of doing those things?
The Quantified Self
I’m cleaning out my e-mail. Here’s a nice NYT Magazine piece on people who statistically track their lives: “The Data-Driven Life”
One of my favourite people, Kevin Kelly, has an entire blog dedicated to the practice: “The Quantified Self”
Personally, I’m most interested in tracking my food intake vs weight trends, and my sleep schedule. You?
For my next games night…
Hmmm. Again, something intellectual, nerdy and fun: “Phylo: The Trading Card Game”
Perhaps this is something of a trend…
(Thanks, JP.)
Ever wonder what happened to speech recognition?
Here’s something intellectual, nerdy and fun: “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition.”
(Thanks, LA.)
Review
Wordpress, unfortunate Wordpress
Recently, I finished my first Wordpress-based site. For someone who’s been HTML’ing since 1997, it probably seems a little late in the game to get started with the blogging behemoth, but I’ve had good reasons for avoiding it. And now after using it, I have more good reasons why I’ll try to never use it again.
History
Back in the day, I made a decision to test out Textpattern as a platform for web development, based on ratings at Open Source CMS. In fact, Textpattern still bests Wordpress there by a hair, despite the fact that Textpattern has more or less stagnated.
I still quite like Textpattern for a few reasons: easy to understand site structure, simple templating system, ability to define reusable code chunks, pretty backend, and super easy “section” setup. But, like anything, it had its limitations: everything was edited through the browser (not easy to set up flat template files editable via text editor/FTP), everything was an “article” (which confused clients), and it came with a poor image manager (why must it rename all image files with the image ID?).
Among sites I’ve built, many follow a similar pattern. Portfolio sites (for architects, artists, etc) have content that doesn’t fall neatly into the conventions established by blogging software. i.e. article/post, title, body, excerpt, etc. More often, these sites are comprised of “projects” – with title, description, date, project code, status, and an unpredictable quantity of images per project, each possibly with its own image name and caption – plus a bunch of static pages, like about, contact, bio, how we work, etc. And sometimes, there’s a news section or a blog in the mix too.
I rolled out a few custom sites like this based on either auto-discovered files in a folder hierarchy (e.g. one project per folder, numbered and named images), or flat XML files passed to the main site. Eventually, I bent Textpattern to accept the content, but the image management was a real killer. Not only did I need to explain to a client that “article” = “project,” but I also had to explain that image IDs and their ordering in the “project” editor mattered. It worked fine until I came to the most complex site I’ve ever worked on.
Delta National Park
Delta National Park is a research project by UBC architecture professor John Bass centred around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in northern California. Without getting too into it (please feel free to visit and explore, but understand it’s still in development), the site is essentially a map-based database of points of interest, regions of study, and speculative projects organized within a taxonomy of rhetorical themes/categories and tags. In addition to geolocation (that is, the map), content might contain or be related to various forms of media, including images, animation, or video. Users could register and also upload and comment on content. (Last year, we added Twitter and a blog so John could participate in real-time in the ongoing debates revolving around the Delta.)
I initially began by rolling my own database but quickly realized there had to be a better way. A first stab at it with Textpattern proved fruitful until it came to relating all the content and managing users. I finally settled on Drupal, who’s flexibility promised to solve all my problems. It worked for a while, though its means of templating and customizing via hooks and callbacks I could just never get my head around. As the complexity of the site grew, managing it with Drupal became a nightmare, and the lack of a clean division between front-end and back-end was both confusing and unsettling. User-created documentation was also extremely problematic, which I’ve found is endemic among open-source softwares.
Enter ExpressionEngine
My wife urged me more than once to test out ExpressionEngine, but I was hesitant given the price tag. Everyone knows it’s hard to compete with free. I struggled along with Drupal until I stumbled upon two posts from Dan Benjamin (of Hivelogic fame) on his switch to ExpressionEngine. (Regarding the switch to ExpressionEngine and ExpressionEngine: The Details) Having crafted his own website software for years, Dan had strict requirements, but EE fit the bill. He also included a comment that still sticks with me today: “It’s a commercial application, which I see as a plus these days.”
Why is being a commercial application a plus? I understood as soon as I started working. The documentation was well organized, professional and current. The user forums were filled with dedicated, intelligent users, and staffed by real EE employees with real answers. The system simply did what I wanted it to, with minimal effort via a flexible templating language. It offered just enough fine-grained configuration to get what I wanted without becoming overwhelming like Drupal. All of a sudden, that $150 license (non-profit, for DNP) looked cheaper and cheaper compared to the time-cost I had been sinking into other CMSes.
I still hadn’t figured out the portfolio site problem until I asked and was directed to Brandon Kelly’s Fieldframe + Matrix + nGen File Field combo (now Pixel & Tonic). It was a revelation, the kind most EE converts go through. “Why did I not know this existed before?!?!”
(Brandon just released Matrix for ExpressionEngine 2.0 last week, making it my go-to CMS for everything I can throw at it. EE 2.0 is a beautiful progression from the EE 1.6 series, still in beta but too sexy to resist putting into production.)
Wordpress? Really?
Imagine my dismay when a client insisted on Wordpress. It was OK, though. It was just a simple one-page, six-section site, plus a separate blog page. The result turned out fine, but the process was heart-wrenching.
Wordpress is the Windows of blogging software: immensely popular despite its shortcomings. Glancing at the backend installation, it really feels cobbled together, with pieces tacked on to an aging codebase. Templating Wordpress is messy, given the nature of PHP-sprinkled HTML, but as a result it’s given rise to a huge field of custom Wordpress theme developers who have managed to crack the system. Out of the box, I felt like I needed to strip complexity away (for speed and ease of maintenance), rather than build it up as required. And of course, being blogging software, it became an issue just to have a separate content type for employee profiles (where simple things like a consistently formatted headshot required annoying little work arounds).
Wordpress evangelists very often claim that it can do anything. And for sure, I’ve seen it appear in some unlikely places. But time and simplicity matter, and using the right tool for the job matters too. Sure, you can use a screwdriver to hammer a nail if you hit it hard enough, but how satisfied will you feel when you’re done?
Getting to some specifics, here’s two lists:
Things I thought were cool about Wordpress:
- One-click upgrading. This actually blew my mind. How about one-click rollback?
- Rich-text editor out of the box. Cool, but it kept removing multiple line breaks, and when I thought I’d outsmarted it with an extra <p> </p>, the editor automatically removed it.
- Easy to edit permalink settings. Rolling your own .htaccess file can be tense for the best of us.
Things about Wordpress that were stupid:
- Wretched documentation. The Codex is poorly organized and incomplete. On three separate occasions, I searched for a template tag, and despite a page existing for those tags, those pages don’t show up in search results. (For the record, they were body_class (search results), post_class, and wp_list_comments.) Wordpress has real staff and money. HIRE SOMEONE TO WRITE YOUR DOCUMENTATION INSTEAD OF RELYING ON USERS WITH INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF YOUR SOFTWARE AND POOR ENGLISH SKILLS.
- Unthemeable RSS feeds. I had a couple simple edits I wanted to make to the RSS feed. You have to edit the core to do that apparently. But the documentation hasn’t caught up with the software yet. I love opening core files and finding lines that say, “This file is deprecated,” with no direction to where to look next. My question to the Wordpress forum went unanswered.
- Default “admin” account naming. This is a security failure, isn’t it?
- Settings sub-menus. What exactly does “Reading Settings” mean? I’m the one reading, not Wordpress.
I understand that Wordpress 3.0 will fix a few things, and add a new feature: being able to define custom post types, making Wordpress more CMS like. But I laughed when I read this:
It’s sooo easy! I will send you a special link if you can explain to me what that code snippet means. Trust me, it’s a good link.
Anyway, here are a few links that further express my thoughts and feelings:
- An Exercise in Wordpress Integration, or Why Wordpress Sucks This is hilarious.
- Wordpress sucks as a CMS, prove me wrong
- Wordpress Sucks as a CMS
- Why Wordpress Sucks
- ExpressionEngine: My CMS of Choice
- ExpressionEngine vs Wordpress
To summarize, I don’t like Wordpress. That one-star rating is for the one-click upgrade. That was awesome. (Please EE? Backup my database while you’re at it. OK?)
Is the Profession of Architecture Corrupt?
This is a good piece from the DesignIntelligence blog. Maybe a 5-minute read (not including comments).
This is perhaps relevant even to our provincial licensing bodies, some of whom find themselves in the awkward position of both representing the public’s interest with respect to the profession, and also promoting the importance and relevance of the profession to the very same public. Does it make sense to simultaneously govern and promote a group of people? (Not a rhetorical question. What are some other organizations that do this?)