At We Are the Mutants, editor-in-chief K.E. Roberts traces the history of the first Lord of the Rings paperbacks — and J.R.R. Tolkien’s resistance to them — and the establishment of fantasy as a popular genre.
Month: September 2016
Manufacturing in China as an American Designer — Discover
“China is not a scary place. It is many things, but scary is not one of them. If you are interested in doing business in China, just go…. Like entrepreneurship—and maneuvering through Chinese street traffic—it is a lot scarier to contemplate than to do.”
via Manufacturing in China as an American Designer — Discover
You Are Not So Smart — Discover
The weekly podcast with David McRaney explores the ways we develop an undeserved confidence in human perception, motivation, and behavior. “The central theme of You Are Not So Smart is that you are unaware of how unaware you are.”
@signordal
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Bowtie House / deMx architecture
© Tim Hursley
- Architects: deMx architecture
- Location: Fayetteville, AR, USA
- Area: 2756.0 ft2
- Project Year: 2007
- Photographs: Tim Hursley
- Landscape: Stewart Fulbright
- Structural: James Burke
- General Contractor : Ira Schwartzman
© Tim Hursley
Referencing local precedents, the Bowtie House fuses modernist ideals with vernacular strategies, making use of a linearly organized plan to respond to the Ozark context.
Sketch
Sketch
Located by Fayetteville in Arkansas, this house for a couple frequently visited by their family is near the Ozark Mountains. Situated on a heavily wooded site, the 23’ wide house is oriented with its 94’ length running roughly northwest to southeast. This orientation allows tree-filtered light into the house during the mornings and late afternoons.
© Tim Hursley
Sitting on a sloping terrain between two draws, the house’s program is distributed on three levels at the northwest end, with the main floor extending continuously to the southeast and minimizing the house’s foot print. The primary public spaces and the master bedroom are on the entry level to accommodate wheelchair access. The public program consists of the kitchen, dining and living areas. These areas operate as defined zones within one continuous space, opening vertically toward the southeast end of the structure where the living area seemingly continues to the outdoors as a porch. The living space is defined by the surrounding tree canopies rather than by the window walls, thus creating a rich ambiguity between inside and outside. In winter, the defoliated tree conditions allow filtered views of the distant Ozark Plateau horizon.
© Tim Hursley
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© Tim Hursley
The exterior is clad in a shell of standing seam Galvalume panels on a stucco and wood board and batten system over a native stone base. The interior is finished out with extensive maple floors, trim, and cabinetry, with large custom maple and cherry doors.
© Tim Hursley
Issey Miyake updates iconic Bao Bao bag with new shapes
Dezeen Mail issue 324 features this week’s best stories and discussions
A seating design aiming to tackle the problem of overcrowding on trains features in this week’s issue of Dezeen Mail, along with Moby’s criticism of a Zaha Hadid-designed hotel room and a zinc-clad home in a Wisconsin crop field (pictured).
Read Dezeen Mail issue 324 | Subscribe to Dezeen Mail
The 6 Architects Who Have Won MacArthur “Genius” Grants
Blur Building. Exposition Pavilion: Swiss Expo, Yverdon-Les-Bains, 2002. Architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Image © Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Today the MacArthur Foundation announced the 23 recipients of their 2016 MacArthur Fellowship Grants, which are awarded annually “to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” Each fellowship comes with a stipend of $625,000 for the recipients to use for individual pursuits, paid out in equal quarterly installments over a five year period. Fellows are selected based on 3 criteria: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.
This year’s fellows include artists, playwrights, geobiologists, poets, jewelrymakers, novelists and historians, but, for the fifth straight year, no architects. In the program’s 36 year history, just 6 recipients have come from architecture-related fields.
1981 – Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic and historian
By 1981, Huxtable was already well-known for her impassioned opinion and critical voice as the New York Times’ resident architecture critic, having won the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970. But it was being named a MacArthur fellow that solidified her role in bringing architectural criticism to the masses – after receiving the award, architectural criticism was picked up by all the biggest newspapers and regularly awarded with Pulitzer Prizes.
“Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue,” her successor at the Times, Paul Goldberger said in 1996.
1999 – Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, architects
Founding their practice in 1979, Diller and Scofidio’s early career focused largely on installations, performance pieces and unbuilt works that united design, performance and electronic media with architectural theory. Upon awarding the duo with the fellowship in 1999, the MacArthur Foundation noted, “Their work explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.”
During their fellowship period, Diller and Scofidio created some of their landmark built works, including the Blur Building at the Swiss Expo in 2002. Since then, the studio (along with Charles Renfro, who joined as partner in 2004) has grown into one of the most influential firms in practice today.
Rural Studio: Hale County Animal Shelter. Image © Timothy Hursley
2000 – Samuel Mockbee, architect
On awarding Mockbee a fellowship grant in 2000, the MacArthur Foundation referred to him as “an architect who erased the boundary between experimental design and social consciousness.”
As co-founder of Auburn University’s Rural Studio, Mockbee combined architectural education with public service, bringing students to one of the country’s poorest counties in Alabama to create revolutionary, budget-conscious buildings from non-traditional materials that could be used by real people in need.
Sadly, a year after becoming a fellow, Mockbee passed away following a long battle with leukemia. Mockbee was posthumously awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 2004.
2008 – John Ochsendorf, engineer and architectural historian
Ochsendorf is a structural engineer and historian who has used his background to explore alternative engineering solutions from traditional architects. His studies have included investigations into the hand-woven fiber suspension bridges of the Incan Empire, ancient rope-weaving techniques, suspensions and cable-stayed bridges in Japan, and identifying the causes of vault and buttress failures in French and Spanish Romanesque churches
Said the MacArthur Foundation, “While conducting structural assessments of historic monuments around the world, Ochsendorf develops new methods for establishing the stability of ancient buildings and draws important lessons from them that will guide the construction of more efficient architecture in the future.”
© Hedrich Blessing
2011 – Jeanne Gang, architect
Jeanne Gang was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2011, one year after finishing her most well-known project, Aqua Tower in Chicago.
“Always responsive to the specific geography, social and environmental context, and purpose of each project, Gang creates bold yet functional forms for residential, educational, and commercial buildings,” said the MacArthur Foundation on her nomination.
Now in the final year of her fellowship, her firm’s current and recent projects include Vista Tower in Chicago, the US Embassy in Brasilia and Polis Station, a prototype for a community inclusive police campus.
Read about the 2016 MacArthur Fellows, here, or visit the MacArthur Foundation website, here.
Use Smart Limitations To Remove Distractions And Get More Done
Your list of things to do is starting to feel heavy and there doesn’t seem to be enough time. Everything important seems like it’s being overshadowed by the little interferences. Facebook, Email, Reddit, News feeds – you name it.
It’s not that you don’t value the importance of your work, it’s just that distractions again and again seem to kill your momentum. If not that, then it’s the work interruptions that keep taking you away from what’s significant.
And so the remainder of your important work is being left until later…but by that time, you’re feeling lethargic and unmotivated. Especially since you’ve noticed your energy starts to drop just after lunch. Is there a way of breaking out of this pattern, so that you can finish important work early as early as possible?
Let’s find out.
The Paradox of Choice and why Site Blocking Extensions aren’t the answer
Conducting meaningful work nowadays is heavily based on using the web to our advantage. Yet, we face a multitude of choices when we open up our browser. It’s easy to get lost in a tangle and dabble with our work in-between short bouts of personal web surfing time, especially when we have a whole row of enticing bookmark links. With all this freedom can come: a net poorer quality of work, and a lower ROI on time spent.
Numerous tools to block out sites are available nowadays, but it’s very easy to disable them and get back to our old habits. Besides, they subtly popularize the idea of a black and white mindset. Either it’s a world of distraction, or a full-on productivity mindset with little to no leeway. Neither of these paths are sustainable in the long-run.
So, what can we do instead?
You need to set Smart Limitations to defend yourself
Do not underestimate the Internet. Most likely, you’ve been in a situation where, upon scanning all the pending emails, you got sucked in and five minutes later, forgot why you even checked your inbox in the first place!
Naturally, we want to carefully plan when and how often we check our inbox, social feeds, and bookmarks.
Examples of Smart Limitations:
- I hide my bookmark bar during the first half of the work day.
- I won’t check email in the first hour of the work-day.
- I will check Facebook once per day.
- I will limit myself to one hour blocks of work before taking a break.
“The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” ― Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
How Set-in-advance Limitations Improve Productivity
Smart limitations not only ensure you stick to what you’re working on, but they’re safeguards for your level of focus and happiness. Without them, it’s far easier to follow the whimsical fancies of your mind, before you click into a world that takes you away from accomplishing meaningful work. Yet, smart limitations also give you the freedom to purposefully check sites that aren’t necessarily related to your work, when necessary.
It’s hard to be fulfilled if you don’t accomplish what you set out to do on a given day. This perpetual cycle of self-loathing, annoyance, and guilt – is something we want to avoid. Smart limitations ensure those days come by less often; think of them as your little friends to focus and happiness.
Without set-in-advance limitations, we’ll run amok and follow the path of least resistance. Ironically, resistance to getting the work done is highest when we don’t have any set guidelines on how to get our work done. Going with the flow and being a free spirit with no time bounds has its perks. But not when it comes to getting meaningful work done, it fails miserably.
How to begin implementing Smart Limitations
Carefully think about how often you currently check all the websites and apps that have been distracting you. Make a list of them, and write down a rough estimate on the number of times you’re interrupted by each one daily. Your next step would then to be to write how many times ideally you would like to use those sites/services.
Then, keep a log for the first couple of days just to see if you do stick to your new intentions. You most likely won’t fulfill your new smart limitations right away. But with time, you’ll get better at avoiding distracting sites and apps, and the long term results for your productivity, happiness, and focus – will prove to be stratospheric.
The post Use Smart Limitations To Remove Distractions And Get More Done appeared first on Change your thoughts.
Knight Architects unveils design for Finland’s longest bridge
UK firm Knight Architects has revealed its plans for a bridge that will span over a kilometre across a bay in Helsinki, making it the longest bridge in Finland (+ slideshow). (more…)
Sig Nordal 