Blueue's Survey

Friday, January 15, 2010

Nature 01 - Beautiful Cap Cloud




(Mt. Hood)





(Fuji Mountain)


First saw this striking natural scenery in today's elective studio presentation, perhaps the momentary beauty of nature is never that we could fully duplicated.
Although one of my professor suggests that we should read more books rather than purely rely on wikipedia, however, for a lazy me, wiki will give me a quick intro. But I will read books when I find time. :)
Its scientific name is "lenticular cloud", which "forms at a high altitudes, normally aligned perpendicular to the wind direction."
Hoping that one day I could shoot one by myself, then that means travel to Japan first.
Also found this interesting diagram from wiki to tell us how it is formed above the mountains.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_wave

Monday, November 09, 2009

Survey 2 -- Central Park @ New York City


Survey 1 -- High Line @ New York City


After Midterm, NY trip for us to learn more landscape typologies through real example. High Line is a must see. Transforming the abandoned elevated rail line to be a complete new type of city park, having trade off with private companies, energy and support from the community, the outcome is a great success with the booming of commercial activities, high-end residential development, increased value for the neighborhood.
Will research a little bit more about this project, and here some photos to share, more is coming soon. :)

Sunday, November 08, 2009

My Professional Space?

It is amazing that I could even find this blog back, then I should let it grow again based on my original vision. Hopefully, I could be more professional. :)
I wish that on top of this post, every new piece is not only for expending my own knowledge, but also expressing my own ideas.
I am thinking about the title, couldn't think of something better, maybe just a survey for now, a survey for architecture, landscape architecture, infrastructure or urbanism. Learning to use all these highly complex words, hoping my survey could help me more.

Friday, December 24, 2004

PARALLAX -- CHROMATIC SPACE

Goethe's "Theory of Colors"addressed chromatic phenomena in space. He described the experience of fixing his eyes on bright flowers, then looking at a gravel path and seeing it studded with spots of the opposite color. The afterimage of marigolds is a vivid blue, while that of peonies of a beautiful green. This constant law of complementary color phenomena was observed acting on the whole retina. Goethe wrote, "If we look long through a blue pane of glass, everything afterwards appears in sunshine to the naked eye, even if the sky is gray and the scene colorless."
In chromatic space, light is phenomena, mystery, and wavelength.
Our ambition is to achieve a space of gossamer porosity with chance-located reflected color that "paints" the DeSingel Canal in reflection.

WORKING WITH DOUBT
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
-- Nietzsche
The subjective-objective transformations in the actions of life are not predetermined in genetic givens; we move, adopt, and live in new ways. In order to live and act we make errors, corrections, and correlations in an active advance; that is, we work with doubt.
We desire an architecture that is integral rather than empirical, that has depth rather than breadth; we desire an architecture that will inspire the soul.
(Building construction continues regardless of the lack of architecture.) Architecture is for the bold in spirit; it rises t oa pledge of inspired space out of a crowd of shrugging shoulder. A fusion of changing functions finds its flow within the open volume of an emphatic testimony, so that architecture today can in and of itself shape and inspire new feelings.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

PARALLAX -- SPEED OF SHADOW

"There are some qualities, some incorporate things, that have a double life which thus is made a type of that twin entity which springs from matter and light."
-- Edgar Allan Poe
Light can be read both as the phenomenon of light in words and the pressure of light in science. ... Language becomes a form of light while light becomes language.
Light eventually becomes "lumpy" -- the ultimate lump or "atom" of light is photon.
..., every day is different. Low winter sun refracts in luminous waves while a prismatic rainbow washes the blank wall in unpredictable iridescence. Diffraction in gentle waves suddenly merges with pulsing shadows that appear as inverted dancers near the ceiling. The speed of shadow is vibrant.
In Rome, history bends light. The elephant struggles not just under the weight of the obelisk, but under the weight of history.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

COLLAGE CITY -- 12/23/2004

UTOPIA: DECLINE AND FALL
For unto you is paradise opened, the tree of life is planted, the time to come is prepared, plenteousness is made ready, a city is builded, and rest is allowed, yea perfect goodness and wisdom.
The root of evil is sealed up from you, weakness and the moth is hid from you, and corruption is fled into hell to be forgotten.
Sorrows are passed, and in the end is shewed and treasure of immortality.
-- 2 ESDRAS 8: 52-4
Where we do not reflect on myth but truly live in it there is no cleft between the actual reality of perception and the world of mythical fantasy.
-- ERNST CASSIRER
Their appearance was a thinly disguised alibi; and, essentially, they were didactic illustrations, to be apprehended not so much for themselves but as the indices of a better world, of a world where rational motivation would prevail and where all the more visible institutions of the political order would have been swept into the irrelevant limbo of the superseded and the forgotten. ... 'For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God;' and, with this belligerent and somewhat samurai dictum in mind, the austerity of the twentieth century architect must be abundantly explained. He was helping to establish and to celebrate an enlightened and a just society; and one definition of modern architecture might be that it was an attitude towards building which was divulging in the present that more perfect order which the future was about to disclose.
Scratch the surface of modern architecture's matter of factness, simply for a moment doubt its ideals of objectivity, and almost invariably, subsumed beneath the veneers of rationalism, there is to be found that highly volcanic species of psychological lava which, in the end, is the substratum of the modern city.
... Frank Llody Wright's 'In this way I saw the architect as the saviour of the culture of modern American society, saviour now as for all civilisations heretofore' and Le Corbusier's 'On the day when contemporary society, at present so sick, has become properly aware that only architecture and city planning can provide the exact prescription for its ills, then the day will have come for the great machine to be put in motion.' ... More explannatory because they disclose something of the architect's state of mind and make evident a quality of messianic passion, an anxiety both to end the world and begin it anew, which must surely have acted as some sort of intellectual distorting lens, enlarging or dimishing whatever material -whether formal or techonological- it made visible and was, therefore, able to make useful.
..., the ideal city always allowed itself simply to be observed and enjoyed for its own sake.
To be very brief: it was a combination which acted to substitute the formula of Serlio's Tragic Scene for that of his Comic, a convention which insinuated itself into existing situations in order to convert a world of random and mediaeval happening into a more highly integrated situation of dignified and serious deportment.
For, if the properties and behaviour of the material world had at last become explicable without resort to dubious speculation, if they were now provable by observation and experiment, then, as the measurable could increasingly be equated with the real, so it became possible to conceive the ideal city of the mind as presently to be cleansed of all metaphysical and superstitious cloudiness. Such was the scale of the venture. ... Via a fully orchestrated appeal to reason and to experimental philosophy, via rejection of received and apparently arbitrary authority, it was surely possible that society and the human condition could be remade and become subject to laws quite as infallible as those of physics. Then -and soon- it would no longer be necessary for the ideal city to be simply a city of the mind.
For, if the working of society were ever to be placed upon a basis of firm establishement, it was surely necessary that, just as the exponenets of what amounted to scientific revolution had scrutinized simply nature, so the exponents of social renovation should scrutinize 'natural' society. And 'natural' society as the paradigm of 'rational' society could only lead to the examination of 'natural' man.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

COLLAGE CITY -- 12/22/2004

INTRODUCTION
Man has a prejudice against himself; anything which is a product of his mind seems to him to be unreal or comparatively insignificant. We are satisfied only when we fancy ourselves surrounded by objects and laws independent of our nature.
-- GEORGE SANTAYANA
But what is nature? Why is custom not natural? I greatly fear that this nature is itself only a first cutom as custom is a second nature.
-- BLAISE PASCAL
For the constellation of attitudes and emotions which are gathered together under the general notion of modern architecture and which then overflow, in one form or another, into the inseparably related field of planning, begin - in the end - to seem altogether too contradictiory, too confused and too feebly unsophisticated to allow for any but the most minor productive results.
But, if such is one important and academically enshrined thesis, then, alongside it, there is to be recongnized a no less respectable one; the proposition that modern architecture is the instrument of philanthropy, liberalism, the 'larger hope' and the 'greater good'.
For if the combination of fantasies about science -with its objectivity- and fantasies about freedom -with its humanity- comprised one of the most appealing and pathetic of late nineteenth century doctrines, then the decisive twentieth century embodiment of these themes in the form of building could not fail to stimulate; and, the more it excited the imagination, the more the conception of a scientific, progressive and historically relevent architecture could only serve as a focus for a still further concentration of fantasy. The new architecture was rationally determinable; the new architecture was historically predestined; the new architecture represented the overcoming of history; the new architecture was responsive to the spirit of the age; but -perhaps above all- the new architecture meant the end to deception, dissimulation, vanity, subterfuge and imposition.
For this was a city in which all authority was to be dissolved, all convention superseded; in which change was to be continuous and order, simultaneously, complete; in which the public realm, without further reason to excuse itself, was to disappear and where the private realm, without further reason to excuse itself, was to emerge undisguised by the protection of facade. And now, even though the weight of the idea persists, it is a city which has shrunk to very little -to the impoverished banalities of public housing which stand around like the undernourished symbols of a new world which refused to be born.
..., the former city of deliverance, is every day found increasinly inadequte, apparently its very expediency guarantees its adulterated and all-devouring growth. So much so, that it might be believed that what here presents itself is a spectacle of spontaneous generation, a never-to-be-imagined nightmare and a wholly mindless version of Daniel Burnham's 'a noble diagram which once registered will never die'.
..., more important is that we are here once more in the presence of Santayana's 'the human mind has a prejudice against itself' and, alongside this deep-seated prejudice, we confront the corresponding determination to pretend that human artifacts can be other than what they are.
Nature is pure, custom corrupt; and the obligation to transcend custom is not to be evaded.
..., then there the situation rests, almost as it rested nearly one hundred years ago. Which is, very largely, a notion of the architect as a sort of human ouija-board or planchette, as a sensitive antenna who receives and transmutes the logical messages of destiny.
'It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just as far as the nature of the subject admits.'
There remains the old and enticing advice that, if rape is inevitalbe, then get with it and enjoy; but, if this central creed of Futurism -let us celebrate force majeure- is unacceptable to the moral consciousness, then we are obliged to think again. Which is what the present essay is all aobut. A proposal for constructive dis-illusion, it is simultaneously an appeal for order and disorder, for the simple and the complex, for the joint existence of permanent reference and random happening, of the private and the public, of innovation and tradition, of both the retrospective and the prophetic gesture. To us the occasional virtures of the modern city seem to be patent and the problem reamins how, while allowing for the need of a modern' declamation, to render these virtues responsive to ciucumstance.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Parallax - CHEMISTRY OF MATTER

The essences of material, smell, texture, temperature, and touch vitalize everyday existence.
Phenomenology is a discipline that puts essences into experience.
Synthetic (and sometimes toxic) interiors of typical lodgings scattered in polluted landscapes characterize today's throw-away environment.
Materials may be altered through a variety of new means, which may even enhance their natural properties.
Bending glass
Cast glass
Sandblasted glass
Materials that bear the marks of aging carry the messages of time.
Liquid obeys the laws of gravity, yet in its lack of form it has phenomenal properties of rippling and reflection.
The surface has texture, consistency, viscosity, and color, Inside there is a separate world, a miniature cosmos of organic and complex properties of molecular structure. Void of outer form, this inner world -- like an inside longing for an outside -- is an unstable but powerful stimulus.
micro & macro
"Nature comes up with possibilities that no science fiction writer would dare suggest."
Creative energy counters entropy.

Parallax - ENMESHED EXPERIENCE

The experience of architecture transcends that of the cinema.
Enmeshed experience, or the merging of object and field, is an elemental force of architecture.
"in-between reality"
The architectural synthesis of foreground, middle ground, and distant view, together with all the subjective qualities of material and light, form the basis of complete perception.
space, light, color, geometry, detail, and material

Parallax - CRISS-CROSSING

"For a building to be motionless is the exception: our pleasure comes from moving about so as to make the building move in turn, while we enjoy all these combinations of its parts. As they vary, the column turns, depths recede, galleries glide: a thousand visions escape."
-- Paul Valery, The Method of Leonardo
Space is the essential medium of architecutre.
the voids in architecture, the sapce around architecture, the vast space of landscape and city space, intergalactic spaces of the universe.
Parallax -- the change in the arrangement of surfaces that define space as a result of the change in the position of a viewer -- is transformed when movement axes leave the horizontal dimension.
Vertical and oblique slippages are key to new spatial perceptions.
The movement of the body as it crosses through overlapping perspectives formed within spaces is the elemental connection between ourselves and architecture.
The turn and twist of the body engaging a long and then a short perspective, and up-and-down movement, an open-and-closed or dark-and-light rhythm of geometries -- these are the core of the spatial score of architecture.
The spatial definitions of the city interlock in a web of movement, parallax, and light.
We play in unqualified delight with our eyes open, our legs moving, our arms and torso engaged.
"ineffable space"
Only the criss-crossing of the body through space -- like connecting electric currents -- joins space, body, eye, and mind.
The criss-crossing of the building concept and an intertwining of the landscape, light, and the city mark many routes through the museum that involve turns of the body and the parallax of unfolding spaces.
a dynamic unfolding phenomena.

Parallax - ELASTIC HORIZONS

Neil Armstrong's 1969 walk on the moon.
Evolution brings fractal, contingent, interactive, and combinative forms and methods. As a new template to understand space, our recharged perception offers new ideas to the spatial imagination.
We experience and think differently, therefore we feel differently. How elastic are our minds? How far can we stretch them?
Perception and Cognition balance the volumetrics of architectural spaces with the understanding of time itself.
Light has a new prolific dimension today as a means of measurement and communication.
In the mist of the metropolis at night, sapce dissolves before our eyes, only to take shape again within seconds.
The outer limit of a black hole, the realm of no escape for matter and light, is called the "event horizon".
Horizons of thought -- ever larger, more expanded, incorporating rotations and energies -- seek to reconcile the microscopic and the ecological dimensions contracting an earth-bound crisis.
In the face of immeasurable transformations in thought, our values at every scale stand to be redefined.

12/17/2004 My Blog & My Architectural Space

I wish to share my experience with my friends.
In this way, I will own a personal & public space for others and me.