There are so many places to enjoy a Southwest sunrise. Located within the Tonto Basin of the Upper Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Tonto National Monument protects two well-preserved prehistoric cliff dwellings and helps tell the story, not just of the Salado people, but of several American Indian tribes. Many of these tribes still feel strong spiritual ties to the cliff dwellings, deeming them to be an ancestral home. Photo by C. Sadler, National Park Service.
Every new year welcomes new resolutions.
We probably all want the same thing — to achieve more and feel proud of what we have achieved. For example, Mark Zuckerberg’s is to visit and meet someone in every U.S. state and mine is to keep my website alive for as long as I am living.
If you are one of those passionate IT folks, technical nerds and computer enthusiasts who are still looking for a challenge this year, here may be one that will interest you: an open source project.
So, as you kick-start the new year aiming to achieve and share greatness, here are five easy-to-use tools that can help you.
John Resig, the creator of jQuery, once tweeted: “When it comes to hiring, I’ll take a Github commit log over a resume any day.” GitHub is undoubtedly the largest developer community in the world. Programmers like yourself go there when it comes to hosting your codes, and sharing and contributing to them.
GitBook is a simple online and desktop tool for building books. Like GitHub, it is seen as a tool for programmers. But it can be surprisingly useful even for non-tech writers – especially if you want to write your books or documents about your project. You can use Markdown to write, edit and style your content simultaneously. To publish, a simple git push is all you need.
In the question “What is the best programming text editor you are using?”, the answer is usually Sublime Text. It is a simple and sophisticated-looking text editor that comes with color schemes for your codes.
When you switch between different files or search, it is blazing fast, and stable. Not to mention it comes with the best Markdown experience you will ever find, as well as tons of packages like Pretty JSON that will make your use of this tool even richer.
While being a task management tool, Quire can play a part in your open source project too. If you prefer an interactive place for your milestones or features (which you probably entered in spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel and ZK Spreadsheet), tutorial or guide, or even a public forum, list them all out here.
With features like favorites and comments, you can see right away what topics are more popular, have a say in discussions, change the priority of your plan whenever you want, etc. Github commit links can even be found in the comments once you integrate with it.
See Also: 5 Essential Tools And Apps To Build Your Early Startup
Last but not least, where will your project be without design? Seen as a great alternative to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is a free (and open-source) vector graphic editor made for you to create illustrations, arts, logos, charts, and paintings. Some say it is way ahead of Illustrator for its better UI, same professionalism, and superior quality features. It has also got a massive community forum where you can show off your work, and contribute ideas to.
See Also: 20 Best Productivity Apps and Programs for 2017
The post 5 Awesome Tools To Help You Newbie Geeks With Your Open Source Project appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
“Between valleys and craters” (the name of the proposal) has sought since its first sketches to create a public space able to generate a continuous ground plane capable of saving the large difference in level that the work area presented (6.20 meters in the worst part). Usable by 100% of its surface and, thus recovering a residual space in the city that had juxtaposed a series of independent operations (parking, electric installation, huge ramp to upper housing block…)
Once the project was assigned, the architects did field work with the aim of collecting proposals and future users concerns for this project. Restaurateurs and other neighboring businesses proposed valuable approaches, above all, existing problems that had to be solved with the final proposal. Some solutions were relocated and greenery were added (at first, the whole proposal was a square defined by a concrete floor as the competition required). It also accomplishes the city councils demands, ensuring the safety of users and taking into account the economic maintenance for the future.
The project has been designed with a ground plane as a sculpted topography, getting with its formal solution, accessible routes to higher areas of the square avoiding ramps and handrails. To this purpose, a regulating plane has been designed to find the easiest solution in its geometry getting minimal slopes capable of fulfilling the standards of accessibility. This plan applies actions which will result in a zoning of the square as “craters” that organize activities and circulations. A visual connection is achieved between all parts of the whole, but allowing the particular development of each of the uses. These craters are materialized in many different ways depending on their use. Concrete floors for terrace areas (for existing businesses) with shrubbery in their slopes, rubber soils in the playground, grass or other one occupied by a stands-like installation.
Over the project, a pattern of 3×3 meters serves as a basis for organizing trees (Pyrus calleryana), streetlights and other urban furniture . This grid also defines the expansion joints that is part of the striped pattern of the concrete floor .
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has finally found a home. Following nearly a decade of searching, the museum’s board has announced that Los Angeles’ Exposition Park will serve as the site for the MAD Architects-designed building housing the life’s work and expansive art and media collection of one of history’s most celebrated filmmakers, George Lucas.
After proposals for the museum in San Francisco’s El Presidio district and Chicago were turned down by their respective communities, new competing schemes for Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Treasure Island were released in October of last year.
“While each location offers many unique and wonderful attributes, South Los Angeles’s Promise Zone best positions the museum to have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our goal of inspiring, engaging and educating a broad and diverse visitorship,” the museum board commented in a statement.
The museum will join several other cultural institutions located in the Exposition Park area, including Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the California Science Center, The University of Southern California main campus, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the main stadium of the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and the proposed site of the city’s bid for the 2024 Olympics.
The project will be self-funded by Lucas, who is expecting to spend over $1 billion on the building and programming.
More information on the selection can be found here.
News via LA Times, Lucas Museum.
In its latest installment of the Private View series, Nowness has released a short documentary by New-York based filmmaker Alexandra Liveris profiling Santiago Calatrava. In the film, Calatrava discusses his perspective as an artist and an architect, as well as his creative process, mainly within the scope of the World Trade Center Transit Hub.
“You see, the first goal in this place was to deliver something beautiful where such an ugliness was there before,” says Calatrava in the film. “To deliver something optimistic looking to the future where so much sadness and depression was there.”
Private View: Santiago Calatrava originally aired as a part of the DOCNYC film festival. Watch it above, or at Nowness.
News via Nowness.
Chicago – Illinois – USA (by Anne Marie Peterson)
💙 red roses on 500px by Gordon Bishop, Oxford, England☀ Canon… http://ift.tt/2bbL1NR
Throughout the 60-year career of Álvaro Siza, his work has continuously defied categorization–having variously been described as “critical regionalism” and “poetic modernism,” with neither quite capturing the true essence of Siza’s intuitive architecture. In this interview, the latest in Vladimir Belogolovsky’s “City of Ideas” series, Siza discusses those attempts to categorize his work, his design approach and the role of beauty in his designs.
Vladimir Belogolovsky: Your student, Eduardo Souto de Moura said, “Siza’s houses are just like cats sleeping in the sun.”
Álvaro Siza: [Laughs.] Yes, he meant that my buildings assume the most natural postures on the site. There is also a reference in that to the human body.
VB: Do you think it is important or even possible for an architect to explain his or her work and process in a conversation such as we are having now?
AS: I think so. Maybe in the wrong way [Laughs.] I like explaining my work. When I am asked to present a lecture, I always choose to talk about one particular project because I like to explain how ideas come about.
VB: I have seen a number of your projects in Portugal and Spain, and just yesterday, I went to see your Restaurant Boa Nova here in Porto, which is a kind of project that is impossible to understand through photographs. It is not about an image, but something else, which does not translate into pictures. What do you think that is?
AS: Well, that is true for most buildings, not just mine. Photographs can’t convey space.
VB: Except that most buildings look better in photos and with your work, the opposite is true.
AS: There is such a thing as a sensation of understanding and feeling space. I had this realization when I first visited Fallingwater by Wright. First, there is a density of the atmosphere there; then the scale can never be accurately understood. Wright’s house is actually much smaller than what you would expect from just looking at photos. He reduced such dimensions as parapets or ceiling heights.
VB: I want to talk about your architecture as an approach. Kenneth Frampton said that you are a part of the “Critical regionalist” movement. And by “Critical regionalism” he understands “an approach to architecture that strives to counter the placelessness and lack of identity of the International Style,” and an approach that “also rejects the whimsical individualism and ornamentation of Postmodern architecture.” What do you think about being placed into this category, “Critical regionalism?” Do you agree? Because you also have a very strong individualistic character, so it is a mixture of things.
AS: Yes, I agree with being categorized as such. When critics talk about critical regionalism the word that is overlooked is critical. What Frampton meant, I think, was not that architecture should go in the direction of closing its global discourse, but that such discourse should encourage continuity of local cultural traditions, as opposed to celebrating the International Style, which was becoming placeless.
VB: And so you see your work as a continuation of the local traditions.
AS: Yes. But don’t forget that all traditions either change and transform or they die.
VB: You said, “Tradition is important when it contains moments of change.”
AS: Yes, tradition does not mean closure, immobility. Quite the opposite, the value of traditions is in being open to innovations. Tradition is not the opposite of innovation, it is complementary.Tradition comes from successive interchanges. Isolated cultures that try to preserve their traditions without being open to new ideas collapse. Every traditional culture is influenced by outside cultures. When I was growing up there were very few centers of global culture – Paris, London, New York, and the rest was a periphery. Portugal was in the periphery and it was closed until the 1974 revolution, after which the country was rediscovered. Frampton was one of the first critics who came here and he traveled to other parts of Europe, including Spain, Greece, and Scandinavian countries. It was the time when architects were interested in rediscovering non-mainstream architecture. In this context, he was perhaps the first critic who insisted on the importance of identity.
VB: You often say, “Nothing is invented. There is a past for everything.” You are not interested in making something entirely new, right? Your work is based on what was done before. Could you talk about your position?
AS: It is impossible to make something entirely new. Look at the Villa Savoye in Poissy by Le Corbusier. When you see it, the sensation is that it is entirely new. It is clearly new architecture for a new kind of man. But the reality is that nothing is new but modified or transformed. There were horizontal “slit windows” in ancient structures in pre-Columbian America or in Portuguese vernacular; there are pilotis in the old market of Venice; you can even find examples of open plan in ancient structures where there was just a roof and perimeter walls with no interior partitions. The new only comes from new combinations and materials, but nothing is completely new. We, architects are constantly being influenced by what is around us. For example, I remember when my Bonjour Tristesse social housing was being built in Berlin. I was in that neighborhood and I saw a building that I thought was under construction; it had a similar roof profile as mine. So I told my contractor – look I haven’t finished my building yet and it is already being copied. Then the contractor said, “If anyone is copying that’s you because that building is being demolished.” [Laughs.] And the truth is that I probably saw it before I did my design and it influenced me subconsciously.
VB: Kenneth Frampton said: “Like Aalto’s, all of Siza’s buildings are delicately laid into the topography of their sites. His approach is patently tactile and tectonic, rather than visual and graphic. Even his smallest buildings are topographically structured.” At the same time you said, “Even before I have complete knowledge, or good knowledge of every single problem, I begin sketching possible solutions with the little information I have. I feel I need to begin immediately with an idea – although then it can be completely changed.” Could you talk about your process of drawing and design?
AS: I start drawing from the very beginning. I don’t worry about analyzing the problem, the site conditions, or even the program. Because if I first do all the analysis there would be too much information and little architecture… So first, I sketch, sometimes before I go to the site. This is because I immediately start working and searching for an idea, even if I only have a photo of the place. And most of the time the first sketches are good for nothing. But I use them to construct an idea that comes out of many sketches. Gradually, with more information, a real thing emerges. I always work with collaborators who feed me with information. I work with models directly and at some point, there’s a cross between rigor that comes from precise information and complete freedom of my intuition, they meet.
VB: You said that a drawing establishes a dialogue with the mind. You called a drawing hand not just thinking but provocative.
AS: It often happens that in the very beginning of a project it is not clear how to develop it. In those moments, I try to distract myself. I take a break, do many sketches and drawings, and suddenly a spark comes. So there is a relationship between the hand and the mind. One complements the other. Aalto too spoke of this.
VB: Your work is very intuitive. You said, “I don’t work within any theoretical framework nor do I offer a key as to how you should understand my work.” Your work is intuitive but also very particular and you have a very controlled repertoire. For example, most of your buildings are white, some have red brick. They are solid-looking, faceted or with curved profiles and convex and concave facades. Do you intentionally discipline yourself or is it about developing your particular and recognizable language?
AS: I don’t think I have a unified language. I worked in Portugal and Spain, in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, China… These are very different circumstances. Building techniques are different. Materials are different. Climatic conditions are different. Histories and cultures are different. The atmospheres are different. My decisions are based on what I observe and absorb. When I worked on the art museum in Santiago de Compostela, I did not want to use local granite (gris); I wanted to use white material in the interior. I chose Greek marble because at the time it was cheaper. I also wanted to use the same marble on the facades but that provoked opposition from the locals. I wanted the museum to be white for two reasons – to distinguish its civic importance and also because in the past, the whole city was painted white. Throughout history, Santiago was white. Only in recent times, stucco was removed to reveal stone and granite. So every building is a response to specific circumstance and I don’t have a strict theory. Of course, I do have a theory, otherwise how could I have a practice? But this theory does not limit my work.
VB: You once said, “Beauty does not interest me.” Yet, your work is very beautiful. What is the main intention then?
AS: Did I really say that?
VB: Do you think you were misquoted?
AS: I could only say that if I was drunk. [Laughs.] Of course, I am interested in beauty. Beauty is the peak of functionality! If something is beautiful, it is functional. I don’t separate beauty and functionality. Beauty is the key functionality for architects… I wonder how I could say that beauty was not of interest to me… Perhaps someone provoked me by saying that I am an aestheticist. I am not that. But a search for beauty should be the number one preoccupation of any architect.
VB: Nowadays many younger generation architects pride themselves on the fact that they don’t personally initiate projects with a sketch. They developed a team approach with multiple contributions. But I read that you like to design your projects alone sitting in a cafe. What do you think about the collaborative approach to architecture?
AS: This is partially true but it was years ago. I no longer draw in cafes. I used to do that to get out of the ambiance of my studio. This used to happen on daily basis. A coffee house in Porto was an institution. You could see students studying in cafes or meetings would take place there. Now coffee is something that you drink quickly and move on; it is no longer an authentic experience. I even saw a sign at one café that said, “No studying.” But I have another reason for not going to cafes. After certain projects, here in Portugal I became known, so when people see me they come to say hello and when they see that I am drawing they ask if I could draw something for them. So I had to resist. [Laughs.] Now I do sketches in the studio because my collaborators don’t demand sketches from me. [Laughs.]
VB: Nevertheless, you start projects with sketches and for a while, you stay one on one with the project, right?
AS: Yes, but at the same time I involve my team from the very beginning. Engineers, for example, start right away. What I don’t like now is when younger architects start working on projects immediately on the computer. This does not give them a chance to start the project freely with free thinking and freehand drawings. Fresh ideas come from thinking and drawing, not from the computer. Sketching is important for thinking.
VB: You also said, “I am a functionalist.” Then you added that “the form, spaces, and atmosphere don’t arise from solving functions. Every architect is forced to provide answers to functional problems. But architecture with a capital A begins when a project obtains freedom, free of all constraints, able to take flight and develop in other directions.” What does that mean for you – architecture with a capital A?
AS: Very difficult… Architecture is a service. When a client asks for something architects have an ethical responsibility to deliver a project that responds to a particular set of objectives as rigorously as possible. But we should still remember that architecture should remain free. Architecture should strive to become another thing, not just be a solution for pragmatics. As an architect, I don’t just want to be preoccupied with solving problems. There are other issues at stake. The real issue is to keep a good balance. Functionality should never suffer, but architecture should be much more than that and achieving beauty is the top priority of any architecture.
VB: “Architects do not invent anything, they just transform reality” is one of your favorite expressions. Kenneth Frampton said that this aphorism of yours should be engraved at the entrance of every architecture school. He also said that many of our leading architects can’t accept this idea even as a joke.
AS: Bad for them because this is true. [Laughs.]
VB: There is a very strong belief among leading architects in this notion that “here is my work” and “there is everyone else.”
AS: Well I would agree with that. My architecture is also different. But at the same time I know that I am not an inventor. I am the transformer. That’s all.
VB: You said, “Rationality is not enough. I want to go around the problem.”
AS: [Laughs.]
VB: I want to finish our conversation with another one of your phrases, “A good architect works slowly.”
AS: Computers made it possible to design and build architecture much quicker. But thinking still takes as much time. Architecture is about a debate and provocation; that can’t happen without thinking. Computers can enhance thinking, but architecture is a slow art.
VLADIMIR BELOGOLOVSKY is the founder of the New York-based non-profit Curatorial Project. Trained as an architect at Cooper Union in New York, he has written five books, including Conversations with Architects in the Age of Celebrity (DOM, 2015), Harry Seidler: LIFEWORK (Rizzoli, 2014), and Soviet Modernism: 1955-1985 (TATLIN, 2010). Among his numerous exhibitions: Anthony Ames: Object-Type Landscapes at Casa Curutchet, La Plata, Argentina (2015); Colombia: Transformed (American Tour, 2013-15); Harry Seidler: Painting Toward Architecture (world tour since 2012); and Chess Game for Russian Pavilion at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale (2008). Belogolovsky is the American correspondent for Berlin-based architectural journal SPEECH and he has lectured at universities and museums in more than 20 countries.
Belogolovsky’s column, City of Ideas, introduces ArchDaily’s readers to his latest and ongoing conversations with the most innovative architects from around the world. These intimate discussions are a part of the curator’s upcoming exhibition with the same title which premiered at the University of Sydney in June 2016. The City of Ideas exhibition will travel to venues around the world to explore ever-evolving content and design.
Sig Nordal 