Three-dimensional shapes are cut out from areas of this artist residence in Upstate New York by Steven Holl Architects, which claims the house can sleep five guests despite having “zero bedrooms”. Read more
Habits shape our lives in profound ways. They’re the things that take over when we get up in the morning, groggy-eyed and brain dead, and send us through our rote morning routine. They allow us to complete our everyday tasks at work, things we do over and over, without too much mental effort, so we can devote our precious mental bandwidth to more important tasks.
Good habits are wonderful things to cultivate. Some people are naturally in the habit of thinking positively, which is incredibly beneficial to one’s mental health. And some people are in the habit of warmly engaging with strangers and acquaintances, which opens the door to many enriching social and networking opportunities for that person.
But wherever there is good, an evil mirror-image lurks behind it. Bad habits are roadblocks on your way to a more positive life. They are as destructive to your personal growth as good habits are positive. While no one can be perfect, we should all strive every day to be better people—and a good starting place is to endeavor to break yourself of bad habits.
Below are four bad habits that stand in your way to a better life. If you suffer from any of these afflictions, I encourage you to begin to work on curing yourself of them.
You rely on only yourself to deal with the problems life throws at you. You don’t believe anyone else has ever dealt with a similar problem, or—worse yet—you believe you’re the smartest person who ever lived and no one else has advice worth your time. The problems you have are best kept to yourself, you think. It’s best if I just deal with this, I don’t want to worry anyone else.
You should start by learning to better communicate with your friends, coworkers, and loved ones. No one has ever benefited from keeping a secret problem all to yourself. Your friends and family might possess an insight about your personality that will help you solve your problem. At the very least, communicating with others about one of your struggles is a huge relief and will help you feel less stressed about your situation.
Another thing to consider is hiring a life coach. This might seem like a radical step to take, but a life coach can give you an invaluable outsider’s perspective on your life and habits. They’re trained to give you unbiased, unfiltered advice about the habits in your life that are holding you back.
You get out of the bed in the morning and the first thing you do is unlock your phone to start the slow drip of stimulation that will persist throughout the day. Before you begin work on your important projects at work, you get distracted by all your unread emails in your inbox—and you incessantly keep checking your inbox throughout the day. You open up your smartphone 200 times a day (the national average for Americans, scarily enough.) Before you shut your eyes before bed, the last thing you see is your smartphone’s screen.
This is a tough one. Smartphones and social media platforms were designed to steal away as much of our attentions as they can. While an iPhone is a powerful tool to help us organize our lives, it does a lot of harm by distracting us from the things we find most important.
The easiest way to begin breaking this terrible habit is by putting yourself in situations where you won’t be tempted to check your smartphone or refresh your inbox. Leave your smartphone at home while you go for a walk, or physically power it down when you need to complete an important task. You might also consider scheduling a block on your email during certain hours of the day (you’re able to do this in Microsoft Outlook and most email apps.) You won’t receive any emails during that time, so you can focus, distraction-free, on more important matters.
You go through your day with distracted thoughts flitting through your head. You are unmindful of your present moment. You believe you’re too busy to meditate during your daily schedule.
The benefits of meditation are beyond dispute. Study after study has shown how meditation makes you less stressed and generally happier. The crux of the matter is just finding the time in your schedule to start a regular meditation practice.
One thing I’ve found helpful is to meditate as soon as I wake up in the morning. I set out my meditation pillow next to my bed before I go to sleep, to remind myself of my intention to meditate that morning. I also set my alarm to go off 15 minutes earlier than I normally would, to ensure I have enough time to get ready in the morning.
You wake up feeling tired and groggy in the morning. You think to yourself, I shouldn’t have gone to bed so late last night. What was I thinking? You struggle to remain alert throughout the day, and resolve to go to bed early tonight. But when the evening rolls around, you stay up late in your bed watching Netflix well past the time when you should have gone to sleep.
There are a few components to good sleep that most sleep experts agree everyone should follow—what is now called “sleep hygiene”:
Make sure your bedroom is dark and quiet throughout the night
Get on a regular sleep schedule, so you’re not sleeping in until noon on weekends and waking up at 5am on weekdays. Your body just can’t adjust to that irregular of a schedule
Don’t look at your TV, laptop, or smartphone one hour before bed. The blue light of the screen can disrupt your circadian rhythms
If you’re getting poor sleep, you need to work on fixing these three things. To begin, you should focus on just one at a time. Get in the habit of going to bed at a regular time, then focus on not watching devices before bed, for instance. Pretty soon, you will have great sleep hygiene and feel well-rested throughout the day.
The post 4 Habits That Are Blocking Your Personal Growth – And How to Fix Them appeared first on Change your thoughts.
A team consisting of MVRDV, ALL + Giboire has won a competition for the project Ilot de l’Octroi, a new residential redevelopment in the city of Rennes, France that will transform the area into a socially adhesive green community along the Ille et Vilaine rivers.
The city of Rennes dates back to the 18th and is often considered one of the most attractive areas to live in France due to its diverse heritage. Recent growth has led to a recent focus on the city’s fringe districts, connected by the pedestrian street, Mail François Mitterrand. This population burst has also required changes to increase housing density and optimize transportation routes. MVRDV, ALL and Giboire respond directly to this deficiency by creating a sustainable housing community that will contribute to the expansion of the centre by “breathing new life and refocusing communities along the rivers.”
The 8,200 square meter (88,000 square foot) complex will contain a mix of 135 private residences and subsidized housing, each with outdoor spaces facing the waterfront, loggias and terraces. As they are positioned on split levels, no views go into units directly opposite. Trees and greenery visually connect the public square on the ground floor to the terraced private areas. At night, the top of the buildings are lit to create a new silhouette on the skyline.
“The project is intentionally very open. Open to the Vilaine, open to the city and open towards nature,” explains Nathalie de Vries, co-founder of MVRDV. “As part of the expansion of Rennes, we designed a dense urban area that offers more public access to nature, private greens and fantastic views. Densification only works when it comes with added qualities, and that is our ambition for these inhabitants.”
The development’s curving, terraced facade is clad in three different grey textures to create coloring and gradations that resemble natural rock formations. In this way, a variety of unit types can come together into a single defined volume that takes inspiration from the surrounding landscape.
Additionally, a rooftop garden on the second floor is accessible to all residents, and will contain a workshop and diverse botanical garden, while the complex’s public square will provide a setting for dining and socializing, as well as easy access to the riverbanks and the nearby floating garden, Jardin de Confluence.
The competition shortlist saw Aires Mateus, LIN, MVRDV, Vergely and Zucchi all compete for the design, with the team of MVRDV-ALL-Giboire chosen as the winners. Construction on the project will begin in 2018 and is expected to be completed in 2020.
News via MVRDV.
Cartoon representations of construction sites, a report on labour conditions and pioneering materials feature in an exhibition focusing on the development of the building site at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Read more
From the architect. The idea of ”modern barn” came up quite early in the sketching phase. A building typology that naturally connected to the village’s current scale and grammar. The materials and the details however was designed to give clear signals that this was built in our time. In this way a new “growth ring” could be added to the village’s long history of utility buildings.
The outstretched and narrow volume was ideal for the project’s spatial and functional program. And the traditional barn pitched roof shape gave good possibilities to create significant internal qualities.
Client’s requests for maintenance-free facades together with the advantages of fast installation of the building’s exterior walls led to the choice of precast concrete elements. The exact dimensions of elements was dictated by the maximum allowed transport dimensions. The gables that were cast in one piece thus had a maximum height of 4,2m. And the height of the long facades was due to doorway hight by 2.1m with overlying concrete beam.
Product Description.The UBAB precast concrete elements was one of the starting points for this project. Mainly for two reasons: the fast installation of the building exterior walls and maintenance-free facades in the future.
By designing the outside surface (as explained below) the facades even connected in a modern way to the traditional barn facades in the area.
The physical properties of glass are invaluable and unequaled when it comes to the architect’s material palette. From the time of the cathedrals and the the brilliantly colored stained glass that served a functional and didactic purpose, to the modernist liberation of the floor plan and the exquisitely-framed horizontal views provided by ample windows, architects have turned to glass to achieve not only aesthetic but performative conditions in their projects.
Today, Architects face an increasing array of choices in specifying and designing with glass for building facades, as glass manufacturers propose a greater variety of colors, textures and patterns than ever before. A wider range of coatings and treatments has also been developed, allowing for a finer selection of glass panes with a combination of light transmittance, reflectance and absorption to meet the needs of outstanding architectural projects. These options affect the aesthetics and energy performance of the glass, and therefore of the overall building.
Thanks to advanced calculation tools, energy performance can now be anticipated accurately, but the graphic representation of glass is still a challenge, and yet a crucial need for architects.
Traditionally, glazing would be chosen based on the perception architects get from a small glass mock-up. But the observation depends on the lighting and environmental conditions, and the process is neither fast nor efficient, as it is harnessed by production and logistics constraints. 3D modelling and computer generated renderings today complete the picture, allowing architects to make an educated guess about how the glass façade of a building will look.
But even in the best renderings, the depiction of glass remains quite inaccurate, as the rendering is not based on actual data about the lighting conditions on site or the type of glass suggested. Hence, this is not enough to choose the perfect glass for a project.
Physico-realistic rendering is completely changing this landscape, and Saint-Gobain is proud to be part of the revolution. The #1 European glass manufacturer has developed a unique new tool: the Glass Pro app.
GlassPro is an application for Apple iPad which enables the user to visualize virtually all SG Glass for Facade products, on a standard building façade.
This is not just about 3D images or photorealism. The big innovation is that Glass Pro app generates close to 4000 physico-realistic images, rendering the real color and physical properties – such as light transmission and reflection – of the selected glass. The visualization can be done under different angles, various lighting conditions (overcast or sunny), several interior design settings (with or without white/gray blinds), and urban or countryside environments. Additionally, the Glass Pro app allows you to compare the aesthetics and properties of two glass products, displaying them simultaneously on the screen.
And all this is done within seconds, on your iPad.
But how do we achieve this physico-realistic rendering?
The physical characteristics of glass products are first obtained by measuring real glass samples. Then, specific scenarios are built using 3D modelling software that employs computer graphic technics to represent the exact geometry of glazing units, to light the 3D scene, to define viewpoints and to apply the glass material definition. The information is finally processed by Indigo Renderer to produce digital images.
With an advanced physical camera model, a super-realistic materials system and the ability to simulate complex lighting situations through Metropolis Light Transport, the renderer is capable of producing the highest levels of realism demanded by architectural and product visualization.
This advanced technology makes Glass Pro a reliable decision-making assistant for glazing products throughout the different stages of a building construction. A first step towards visualizing the glazing of your building, before it’s even built…
Ferruginous Hawk, Curlew Allotment, BLM Idaho. Photo by Matt Fischer.
Students learn from BLM Colorado employees
Get outside on the Delta Wild and Scenic River in Alaska! Photo by Jeremy Matlock, BLM.
Foliage at John Jarvie Ranch in Utah. Photo by Bob Wick, BLM.
These are your lands, America! Celebrate 40 years of enjoying #YourPublicLands!
The Bureau of Land Management was established in 1946, but its roots go back to the years after America’s independence, when the young nation began acquiring additional lands. At first, these lands were used to encourage homesteading and westward migration. The General Land Office was created in 1812 to support this national goal.
Over time, values and attitudes regarding public lands shifted, and Congress merged the GLO and another agency, the U.S. Grazing Service, creating the BLM.
The BLM manages public lands and subsurface estate under its jurisdiction under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act or FLPMA, passed in 1976. Despite the rapidly changing environment in which we work, the BLM remains committed to its core mission mandated by FLPMA – a careful balancing of multiple use and sustained yield.
Our FLPMA Flickr album reflects the BLM’s multiple responsibilities as a federal land management agency, from our beginnings to the present.
Why am I still single?
Have you ever asked yourself this question? Are you still waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right to come into your life? You may think that you don’t have any control over the situation, but you actually play a large role in meeting the man or woman of your dreams.
Here are six possible reasons why you haven’t found them yet and why you’re still single.
There comes a time when dating largely becomes a numbers game. The more single people you meet, the more likely you are to land a date and eventually hit it off with someone. If you aren’t meeting new people very often—or ever—then your chances of staying single will be greater.
Fix this by expanding your social circle. Go out to happy hour with colleagues or attend that wedding stag. Try out a new Meetup group or speed dating through an online dating site. The more people you meet, the more chances you will have of landing some dates.
See Also: 5 Tips for Effective Online Dating
It’s just right to be choosy and selective when deciding to commit to a relationship. But, if someone asks you on a date—and they aren’t exactly your type—go anyway.
Dating a variety of individuals will expose you to different personalities and help you realize the qualities you most want in a future partner. You may find out that some traits are more important to you than you thought.
Dating will also help you get more confident and comfortable with the opposite sex. After one date, if you still aren’t feeling it, then you don’t have to go out with them again, but at least you gave it a shot and got some good experience.
You see your best friend with a great catch and are thrilled for him. You are so happy your sister finally found someone so wonderful. But it makes you think all the good men (or women) are taken and that there’s no one left for you.
There are millions of single people in this world and a lot of them are really great. Give people a chance to show you their awesomeness. Just because a few good fish are taken, doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty other ones in the sea.
Relationships require a lot of give and take from both parties. Don’t expect someone else to put all the effort in while you give nothing in return. If you are constantly thinking about your wants and needs, then maybe you aren’t ready to be in a relationship. Until you are prepared to care for someone else and put their needs above your own, live the single life.
Dating involves risk and rejection, and while it’s scary and can be painful to be vulnerable, it’s necessary to have a healthy, intimate relationship. Your future partner is not going to just show up at your front door one day. You have to talk with strangers and ask people out. You need to be approachable and friendly in order for people to want to date you.
Think about your body language when you are out with friends. Is it open and inviting? Or closed off to the world? Being aware of simple things and making changes will make you more approachable.
See Also: 10 Ways to Make a Good First Impression
Do you feel the need to win every argument? Are you always putting others down? Do you complain about every little thing at that restaurant you just went to?
People in general tend to like being with positive personalities. Misery loves company, but it will be a long time before someone loves you if you’re always negative. Try looking at the positive side of things, especially when out on a date. Smile often, compliment your date, relax and try to enjoy yourself.
There are few bigger turn offs than desperation. Be careful not to have your desire for a partner come across in a negative way. Some people make the mistake of getting too far ahead of themselves and are already planning the wedding before even having the first date.
Watch out for your baggage from past relationships and personal insecurities. Don’t let it sneak out and give you the wrong expectation of having this new interest fix all your problems. Keep your desperation in check and start off with just looking to become friends.
It’s not a bad thing to be single, but if you’re looking for love and it just hasn’t come your way, then hopefully one of the items on this list resonates with you. Some of them are simple fixes and will be easy enough to change. Others may require deeper soul-searching as you figure out what kind of person you are and who you want to attract.
The post 6 Reasons Why You’re Still Single appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Sig Nordal 