D E S I G N /// ck

For some reason, this made me very happy last Saturday:


An old truck at the Farmer's Market selling Christmas wreaths, with bits of that morning's snow sticking to its hay bales. After that, I was officially ready for the holiday season.

Alice, the dogs, and I went hiking on part of the Fiery Gizzard Trail near Monteagle, TN on Saturday. We didn't see any gizzards, but we saw some lovely waterfalls. You can see a gallery of pics here.

Bonus Question: Can anyone else see the creepy face in the rocks above?

So, I like Flickr... but Yahoo sucks. I don't want to have to remember another login name and password and I want unlimited uploading. And I want a generic place where anyone can go, not just my Facebook friends. Then I remembered that I'm paying for this fancy .mac subscription, which has a pretty nice pic gallery component. So from now on I'll be uploading most of our photos here. You can also always just hit the 'photos' tab at the top. Most of the photos are there are old but I've uploaded a few never before seen ones- like Alice vastly enjoying her bubble tea at a random Chinese place in Nashville. Enjoy!

I thought this was an interesting insight into the logo graphic process:

Below is one of the best episodes this season. Check out the wasp nest scene at 2:50. "There could be something delicious in here that wasps DO make, and I want that."

IKEA Heights from DaveAOK on Vimeo.

Colleen King, Jimi Bonogofsky-I Think I Might Be from Huntington Digital Media Arts on Vimeo.

Colleen King and Cevin Thornbrugh-Shadow Birds from Huntington Digital Media Arts on Vimeo.

Colleen King and Cevin Thornbrugh-Motion Graphics Final from Huntington Digital Media Arts on Vimeo.

Colleen King-Frog Lip Sync from Huntington Digital Media Arts on Vimeo.

Riding High from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.

While I like the idea of fixed gear bikes, the reality of Tennessee hills has kept me geared. But my commuter bike (a solid early 90s Cannondale SR400) is an ongoing fixed gear-ish aesthetic project with lots of color. Next will be a new blue saddle (so this one can go back to the Klein) and blue tires. Note the new anodized gold riser bars! All in all, though, a great old bike for city riding. I love this thing. I'll try to keep the blog up to date as I customize.

If you want to know why I'm obsessed with this whole thing, this video may help explain:



Rad.

performs a hauntingly beautiful romantic song:



It's worth watching all the way through- the little details are awesome! Look for the moon. That Gorilla can play a mean synthesizer.

Homework: Has the post modern world reached its low / high in this video?

This a cool concept from industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa, utilizing the philosophy of hari in something as simple as a juice box. He creates a good tension between literalness and function, making something instantly understandable yet experientially new. It's intersting that hari emphasizes "tension" equally with "balance", as these two concepts are often opposed to each other in the Western dualistic mind.


"Fukasawa argues that we have an innate awareness – in his words, a ‘core awareness’ – of design, and in responding to this instinct he arrives at inevitable form."

An understanding of design common to all humans- stemming from our own common intelligent design?

[via D + R]

If you like typography as much as I do, this is an interesting read.

I didn't know what horchata was, but now I want some! Download the new Vampire Weekend mp3 here. Check it out!

So I made a cone for Ellie, 'cause the ones at Petsmart were $30! Mine cost $3.00 and about 10 minutes. The dents on the sides are because she has no peripheral vision and runs into things. She hates it, but at least the fur is starting to grow back on her butt.

This song came on shuffle this morning as I walked out on to my porch. It was the perfect soundtrack for riding my bike on a cool autumn morning. I love the bright guitar intro in this version. Perfectly happy and melancholy! I guess I'm into Norwegian acoustic acts lately. Enjoy.

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

I listened to this song on repeat for two hours this morning. I lurve it.

No beard?!!



My inane video posts continue. But I couldn't keep this from you guys.

This is a great simple idea.

I've always heard this was a cool city. Biking, book stores, farmer's markets, ocean, coffee, snowy mountains, concerts, good architecture...

We might've thought about moving there if it wasn't on the West Coast. Maybe we can visit, though.

This thing is the coolest! I love the way it makes landscapes look like tiny models. And you know I love [building] models.

Auto Tune the News!

This trailer has been out for a while, but I thought I'd post it here. What Sambo says at the end is true- once you've experienced it, you can't get away from Architecture's duty to the poor people of this earth.

Well, I haven't posted in a while, partly because I was burned out on blogging, partly because I've been busy:

I went up to West Virginia to build some stuff for my parents for a few weeks, basically rebuilding their front porch and building a new garage on the side of their house.


The existing porch.


We demolished the lower part of the porch (which was all rotten) and re-framed it complete with new concrete footers. I put in four columns instead of the original three- the porch beam had begun to sag in places. The new shorter pans corrected this.


We laid out the new footprint for the new garage.


To be able to dig the garage footers, we had to saw up and demolish the existing driveway slab. (that's Cevin, my sister's fiancee who helped me the whole time)


My Uncle Jeff came and dug out the footer trench one evening.


Meanwhile, framing continued on the porch. The subfloor went down and the column bases were built out.


We set our grade stakes with the laser transit and poured the concrete, but the truck chute wouldn't reach the far corner, so Cevin and I shoveled and raked a cubic yard of concrete back into it. We slept well that night!


The columns were wrapped in poplar with a craftsman-esque design and the skirt walls were framed in. Contrary to my earlier design, we like how the porch felt with open sides and decided to not put in the solid rails. However, we'll have to raise the dirt up to within 30 inches of the floor to meet code requirements. The big wrap around steps were the last thing we got finished.

A mason is coming to lay block on the footers and then in a few weeks I'll be back up to frame the garage in and finish the porch. But for now, I'm resting up!

It's cool to see past projects have a life of their own and how their presented artistically, in this case musically and visually on the web.



via the Square Room site.

See here.

This is the savviest video I've seen yet explaining a philosophy that has become a cornerstone of my personal and professional life:

I don't know if this will be as good. I don't know if I'll cry silent tears in a movie theater seat the way I cried in bed at 3:00 in the morning while I was reading it. I'm not sure how I like this "action" style trailer, but the little bit of the Coke scene makes me hope the movie exceeds this marketing. What I see here makes me realize that I'll be seeing this movie, for better or worse. Early review here.

p.s. No matter however the way the movie portrays it, I'll always see the father and son walking across the Henley Street Bridge in the ash, finding the mummified remains of the dead on the streets of Knoxville.

p.p.s. After watching it a half dozen times, I realize that this will definitely set Appalachia in a post-apocalyptic Deliverance light. But let's face it- when the world falls apart, it probably will be only West Virginians and East Tennesseeans left, eating each other.

A hair raising experience on the road this morning prompted me to do something I don't usually do- send an angry email. Luckily the culprit was well marked:

To: karen.estes@knoxcac.org

Ma’am,

I bicycle commute down Western Ave. everyday and typically have no problem with cars passing me in a lane. However, this morning one of your buses showed that they are apparently unaware how to safely share the road with bicycles. Bus No. 3172 passed me between 11th St. and Henley St. without giving the legally required 3 feet of buffer space, which wasn’t so bad, but they also accelerated extremely rapidly while doing so. Bus No. 3172 could have easily caused an accident this way. I understand that your driver has a schedule to keep, but such driving behavior is very dangerous for bicyclists on the road. While one might expect this from a common driver, seeing it from a public vehicle with a commercially licensed driver is startling.

I am trying to be polite here, but I have to say that it makes me very angry to see a professional driver so flagrantly disregard the rights of others on the road. I trust that this letter will reach whomever it needs to so that the driver of 3172 will be reprimanded for his/her actions this morning. If your drivers don't know how to properly accommodate bicycles on the road I fear that accidents may be inevitable, especially in the downtown area where there are hundreds of bicyclists everyday.

Thank you for you attention to this matter-

Regards,

Christopher King

Which was promptly responded to:

Mr. King,

Thank you for your email. I am sorry that this occurred. I will follow
up with the driver and also check into some Bicycle Awareness Education
for all staff.


Thank you.

Karen Estes
Senior Manager
Knox County CAC Transit

Hopefully this will lead to good things.

I'm more excited than I should be about the new Star Trek movie. I should know better. Last time I got excited about a movie all I got was a blue glowing penis.

After a flurry of blogging last month, it seems I've slowed down here at DESIGN///ck. I thought I'd give you a glimpse of what's going on. Right now I'm reading C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, currently on That Hideous Strength. I took a break from The Fountainhead, but I'll probably finish it up later this month. It's always a good reminder why I wanted to be an architect in the first place. Some friends that are on vacation lent us their Wii for a few weeks, so I've been busy getting my skill levels up to Pro on Wii Sports. See why I haven't been blogging? We've been landscaping our yard and putting out our garden. Alice has been ambitious, and I think we'll have tons of vegetables this summer. But we want to can a lot of them and save them for winter and save money on food. She also put in a beautiful flower bed around the tree in the front yard. I built the brick retaining wall in front and mulched it. Also, I bought a lawnmower on Craigslist and have mowed more than I ever have since I moved out of my parents' house. The joys of home ownership! We've been keeping Colleen's dog Callie this month and training her, but she'll be heading up to Indiana to rejoin them this weekend. We're going up to see Colleen and Cevin's final projects presentation, and to celebrate Mother's Day with Mom and the family. My company has reduced all of us down to 4 days a week and 4/5 pay, so I have more free time (three day weekends!) but less money to do anything (reading and Wii, see?). I'm starting to pick up odd jobs to make up the difference, the first of which is a small trim carpentry job I'm starting tonight. On a grander scale, it looks like I'll be taking a few weeks off and building a garage for the 'rents in WV. Tomorrow I'm looking at bidding a reroof for one of the pastors at my church. So God is good, and provides ways to make money to those who aren't afraid to work hard. Let me know if you guys have any projects for me! With Alice off school in two weeks, she may be able to help me on projects, which would be cool to spend more time with her. This spring has been hectic for our schedules. Hopefully summer will be slower and she can relax a little. One more thing, I'm starting to take on organizing and coordinating the building projects for the Friends of Fort Liberte nonprofit group in Haiti. I'm also master planning and designing the next phases for the orphanage down there. So more work in my free time, but it's definitely a labor of love. And it looks like I'll be getting back into the groove of going to Haiti every year, something I've missed. I'm set to go in December, and I hope Alice and I can go in May together. She really wants to get involved with really helping other people, and I think Haiti and her will be a good fit.

So that's the main stuff. Now you know about as much as I do about my life right now.

More from that infamous night at King Tut's. I like the above picture a lot. Maybe the photographer could frame it for me as a present?


I wish I could explain this picture. Moe can talk me into anything.

I don't know what I love more, the reporter's reaction or the close up of the dog sitting down. Or maybe that "Dixie" is playing in the background. There's too many good things here.

...of my daily office life. Sketching, drafting, printing, modeling... hopefully making good ideas into buildings.

I took a break from this crazy thing called blogging, maybe because the timeline (see below) made me step back and want to just live. That, and Colleen and Cevin were visiting this weekend and we were busy doing fun stuff. Here's a few pictures of a good weekend:

I found out yesterday that the mom of one of my best friends had died. I had known her mostly in my childhood- thinking about her triggered lots of memories from that era. When I found out, I was working on a architecture project timeline graphic. As I drew the timeline and thought about life (as death often makes you do) I wondered what my life would look like mapped out. Were there patterns? What would it look like in another thirty years? So here it is:


click image to enlarge for full effect.


If you can't tell, the graphics rising and falling have to do with bad times and good times. I noticed that after a major change that things got much better, with one notable exception. Also, with Alice my life has taken a more stable sine wave pattern instead of gradual rises with drastic falls. Looking back, I see I have much to be thankful for, not least of all the present.

Some of the highlights from the other weekend's trip to West Virginia for Duncan and Sarah's birthdays. More will be up on Facebook.





Yes, that dog has a diaper on.

Do you like rap mash ups and Sufjan Stevens, like me? Then you will also think this is awesome:


Sampled Sufjan with Blackalicious and Outkast raps! Tor has taken two disparate favorites of my music library and put them together! Listen to it for free here.

This is an old favorite of mine from PBF, who unfortunately isn't drawing comics anymore. I love Bip's outraged expression in the final panel.

This is a project I designed for over five years and was built last year. I stopped by (using the term loosely, it's nowhere near anything) Cowen, WV and took some interior shots for my firm's marketing materials. Thought I'd share them here.



The following are exterior pictures we had made professionally earlier this year:

Maybe in the future they'll term this my "Axonometric Cylinder Phase". The Raw Knox graphic led me to try a similar thing for my brother and sister-in-law's coffee shop. I really like slate/sky blues with deep browns. Perhaps it will eventually end up as part of their limited edition t shirt series. See my previous attempt here.

This was an offhand shot I took at a party at our house, but has slowly become a favorite of mine. It encapsulates how our house has become a home, how we've learned to have fun again, how we're trying to share in the lives of old and new friends. Having a true home has really opened a new door for us. Take what you what from that statement, but know that this winter was very good.

A graphic I cooked up (or didn't cook, as the case may be) today for a feature next week at the Wigshop. Ink sketch scanned and colored with Photoshop.