Graduate shows 2016: Royal College of Art graduate Micaella Pedros has repurposed discarded plastic bottles into joints that can be used to hold wooden furniture together (+ movie). (more…)
The residence belonging to famed Postmodernist architect Michael Graves will be sold to Kean University, home to the new Michael Graves College for architecture and design, after receiving approval from its board of trustees. Following Graves’s death last year, the architect’s will stipulated that the residence, his studio, another property were to be donated to Princeton University, Graves’s neighbor and longtime employer. But Princeton University felt the buildings would be better served in another capacity and rejected the gift, allowing Kean to step in.
“We were grateful to be able to consider the possibility of accepting Michael Graves’s properties, but concluded that we could not meet the terms and conditions associated with the gift,” Princeton said in a statement.
The sale to Kean University, located 30 miles north of Princeton in Union, New Jersey, will be made for just $20. But the terms and conditions outlined by the Graves Estate, including preserving the buildings and renovating them for educational use, will cost an estimated $300,000, along with annual maintenance costs of $30,000 to $40,000.
The will had stated that if rejected by Princeton, the property would be offered to another non-profit institution. Graves’s firm approached Kean earlier this year about acquiring the property under those terms. Kean was already quite familiar with the Grave’s estate, as the architect had spent the final years of his life working with the university to create its new architecture school, which welcomed its inaugural class this past fall.
Kean intends to preserve the function and aesthetic of the residence and studio, known as the Warehouse. Graves had already treated the home like a museum and meeting space, and the Warehouse will continue as a residence and studio. Despite Princeton University passing on the complex, the buildings will be open to students from the nearby campus.
News via the New York Times.
💙 Golden light on 500px by Christian Rey, France☀ Canon EOS 5D… http://ift.tt/298qbS8
You’re reading The Psychology of Confidence: 5 Hidden Qualities of Bold Individuals, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Have you ever wondered what lies behind true confidence?
Sometimes it seems like there is a magic potion that separates highly confident individuals who act in the face of fear and everyone else who feel like they’re often going around in circles.
What psychologists will tell you is that there isn’t anything special behind these individuals, they’ve simply accumulated a series of habits and beliefs over time, either intentionally or by good fortune.
But before looking at these habits and beliefs, we need to go back and ask the question; what is confidence?
Confidence is simply the degree to which you believe that your actions will result in a positive outcome.
This is not the same as self-esteem.
Self-esteem is a more general feeling you have about yourself, where as confidence is the belief you have in your skills in a given situation. When most people say they want to be more confident, what they mean is that they want more self-esteem.
Unsurprisingly however, the more areas you become confident in, the more you are likely to naturally develop self-esteem.
Why do we want confidence?
Confidence is an evolutionary advantage that can help you approach whatever task is in front of you without hesitation or anxiety. It can allow us to do what we really want to do with our lives.
The problem is that most of the time the advice we get about how to be more confident can be a little generic.
“Fake it till you make it,” “Talk louder” or “Dress the part.”
To be fair, this isn’t terrible advice, it can actually have a positive impact on how you feel, but it doesn’t really instill you with the kind of deep confidence that results in real change.
Here are 5 hidden qualities of confident people.
Confident people don’t worry about the outcome of a situation. Their attention is focused on the action or activity as opposed to the external result.
In the event that they fail, they see it as a learning experience as opposed to a reflection of who they are as a person or even how much they’re worth.
This might seem counter-intuitive, but to develop true confidence you need to have a little bit of brutal self-honesty.
If you have unrealistic expectations about your capabilities, you’re likely to get shocked and disheartened when things don’t go as you expected. On the other hand if you have an objective assessment of your skills, this is less likely to be the case.
Another important thing to consider here is that they are able to accept constructive criticism from others without getting defensive. The attention of confident people isn’t focused on whether others perceive them as competent but on how they can improve for the future.
Ours brains have a difficult time distinguishing real memories and constructed ones. Self-assured people use this to their advantage by visualizing their competence in a certain area until their neural networks have been rewired for success.
One study revealed that weightlifters that practiced positive visualization found the practice almost as effective as the physical practice itself for performance enhancement.
You can’t be the best at everything and self-assured people know this. Instead they stick to what they known is going to make them confident.
For example, if they want to be a confident swimmer they might spend a lot of time running, because some of the skills are complimentary. But they’re not going to spend hours writing creative stories, because the overlap between the two activities is less significant.
Sometimes it’s simple enough to realize that if you want to feel confident, you should spend time just doing things your confident in.
This might not be what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. If you want to develop self-esteem, you need to need to push your comfort zone in a number of areas, but it is slow growth over time that will lead to deeper, long lasting confidence.
To feel more confident you need to better yourself in the area you want to feel confident in, and the only way to do so is practice.
Again, this is pretty obvious, but it means being able to focus on one area for a sustained period of time until you’re competent, instead of letting your attention drift all over the place and getting what is known as ‘shiny objective syndrome.’
As Dale Carnegie said:
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
Attention Pick the Brain Readers!
Do you want to start your mornings off with habits that generate true confidence?
Then grab a free copy of our new eBook: MORNING MASTERY: The Simple 20 Minute Routine For Long Lasting Energy, Laser-Sharp Focus, and Stress Free Living.
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Ben is a freelance writer, and the co-creator of Project Monkey Mind—a blog that helps you learn practical ways to live a productive, fulfilling and world-changing life in the digital age.
You’ve read The Psychology of Confidence: 5 Hidden Qualities of Bold Individuals, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
“In an increasingly disconnected and attention-deficient world, sketching the veins on a leaf or the mountains out the living room window can help ground us in place and time…” Isaac Yuen explores the work of field ecologist Lyn Baldwin.
via Finding Place through Art and Science: The Field Journals of Lyn Baldwin — Discover
From the architect. Upon retirement after 40 years of teaching Fibre-Arts and Interior Design at Texas State University (formerly Southwest Texas State University), the Lamans desired a gallery and studio to compliment their modest 1970’s era modern home, taken from Heritage Homes plan books originally started by Henry D. Norris AIA. Clad in white stucco, the 1800 sq. ft. residence is characterized by a tripartite plan arrangement of two shed roof’s flanking a central core.
The Lamans expertly sited the house amongst a dense canopy of live oak and cedar elm trees on a 1 acre, hill country lot in San Marcos, Texas. Over the past 30 years, they have carved out a series of outdoor rooms, a secret garden and sculpture courts around their home leaving only one logical area for an addition – the front yard. While in most situations an addition would supplement the operation of an existing structure, this situation presented an opportunity for the addition to supplant the home – completely transforming it’s identity and creating a new entry.
The program called for an exhibition gallery, a painting studio, a library and a new master suite. Taking queues from the parti of the existing home’s massing, the addition is comprised of paired towers (gallery and studio) flanking a foyer and upper level library. The addition is located in a bowl-like depression at the head of a dry creek bed and so must be accessed via a series of bridges which allowing natural water runoff to flow around and between the existing and new structures.
The atmosphere in the towers is animated through two distinct lighting strategies. Ambient light is filtered by the North facing translucent walls while carefully placed skylights project pools of light through a series of ceiling baffles throughout the day. Depending upon the location of the sun, the color temperature of the natural light provides a diverse reading to the Lamans’ art.
The library is defined by shelves which cantilever into the voluminous modified-gambrel roof forms of the towers – linking the spaces through section. Perched atop the entry, views to the surrounding canopy of trees create an intimate gathering space for conversation and contemplation for the Lamans and their guests.
The Lamans’ appreciation for outdoor living is realized with the addition of a new sculpture garden and bocce court off of the gallery, ideal for large showings or family gatherings. While in a more intimate setting, the master bedroom and bathroom open directly into a private Zen garden.
The master suite was reconfigured through a sensitive addition of a bathing and dressing room while shifting the existing bedroom out, forming a linear gallery hall which bisects the existing house and new addition. Movement along this corridor not only makes the user aware of old and new but has framed views to the new outdoor rooms as well.
London Festival of Architecture 2016: architects Tomaso Boano and Jonas Prišmontas have created a small pop-up studio to raise awareness of how London‘s unaffordable rents and education is crippling its creative industries (+ slideshow). (more…)
The 2016 Venice Biennale has highlighted that dealing with natural disasters may become one of the main preoccupations of architecture in the future. But nature has its destructive ways, and volcanic eruptions are among the most extreme case in point. On the Island of Fogo (Cape Verde), the Natural Park Venue designed by OTO – and elected Best Building of the Year 2015 by Archdaily readers – was destroyed by molten lava flow only one year after its opening in 2013. The building, which combined a cultural center and administrative activities, helped to activate the economy in the island’s most remote area. Following the disaster, Adrian Kasperski, a student at Krakow University, devoted his master’s thesis to the redevelopment of this area, by proposing the expansion of the existing roads and hiking trails and designing facilities to improve alternative tourism offerings.
Kasperski first noticed that the northern part of the island lacked road access. Extending the existing road to the north would contribute to the island’s economic development and help reduce the traffic in the south. The project also suggests improved access to the caldera via hiking trails. Whereas OTO’s project lay in the caldera next to a village, Kasperski decided to relocate activities on the edge of the volcano to protect it from eruptions. In his proposal, the cultural center and former village are placed north of the caldera, and an extra hotel and winery are proposed on the south part of the road.
The cultural center is perhaps the most interesting part of the project. As with the former OTO design, the facility was developed by taking advantage of the local topography. Placed at the border of two very different landscapes, “the building seems invisible from a distance,” explains Kasperski, “only when one approaches closer, a slight cut in the caldera starts to emerge.” Just as in Dominique Perrault’s Ewha Womans University, the building features a public plaza, staircases and seating area at its center. The glass facades along the plaza bring natural light into the building that lies mostly underground. Moreover, the elongated plaza frames a view of the volcano, which is complemented by the use of slotted roofs.
For his winery and hotel, Kasperski also placed local topography at the core of his design. This time, the structure was not entirely underground. The building features a low rise structure – which is, as OTO already proved, very suitable to the existing landscape. The form raises slightly above the ground to form a horizontal block on one side, and the shape follows the slope of the rocky Caldera on the other.
On the northern side of the volcano, the village aims to relocate the people that lived in the caldera before the eruption. The village is placed in the island’s most remote area to preserve a sense of community. The project includes public facilities – a school, a market and a church, as well as a network of alleys, irrigation canals and theme pavilions. Kasperski uses topography lines to define the streets, and serial housing accordingly raises along the hillside.
The emphasis on the ground and analysis of topography lines follow a recurrent theme in contemporary architecture, as initiated by parametricist architect Zaha Hadid. With his cultural center, Kasperski illustrates what historian Andrea Ruby calls “inflated ground.” “Instead of depositing the program as an object on the ground,” Ruby explains, “it is injected like a liquid,” and “raises the surface of the ground to the ceiling, in the process creating an artificial topography.”[1]
But, one might wonder whether the necessary materials and construction techniques would be available on the island. For their Natural Park Venue, OTO used black masonry block made of cement and ashes of the volcano. Ashes also covered the roofs, thus blending the building with its surrounding. Indeed, in such a poor region it seems obvious that using available resources is a necessity. Instead, Kasperski doesn’t specify any use of local materials. The cultural center with its artificial topography, and the winery and hotel with its unconventional form would both rely on high-technology techniques. The village’s public infrastructure and housing seem similarly far from the island’s economic reality. Proposals to strengthen the island’s economy and recover from natural disaster are welcome; however, while Kasperski offers an interesting narrative that can make us dream his vision, and any similar ideas for Fogo Island, will likely remain hypothetical for the time being.
[1] Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Groundscapes: The rediscovery of the ground in contemporary architecture (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2006), pp. 22-24.
Brexit crisis: the Creative Industries Federation is organising a series of emergency sessions to prepare the sector for Brexit, saying “if it is going to happen, we need to mitigate the consequences”. (more…)
Sig Nordal 