D E S I G N /// ck

We closed today. The house is ours. It's pretty tremendous.

We have been cleared to close the house, Ladies and Gentlemen. It should happen on Thursday! I'll write more about how I feel later, but for now here's the song I've had on repeat today and was listening to when I got the news:




Andrew Bird - Oh No [mp3]

Good Times!

News from a world with Dr. Manhattan. I love the attention to detail in fake archival footage, like the bad tracking on the bottom of the screen.

Well, this is the first post in a while from my own laptop. "Mac" (as he's affectionately if not inventively known) was resurrected from the dead today at the Apple store. He'd not wanted to boot up a few months ago, and with working on the house like a maniac I got too busy to take him in for some TLC. On top of that, the iPhone (affectionate name TBA) did almost everything I really needed on a day to day basis, which makes me think that my next computer will be a desktop. I think smart phones are going to make laptops less relevant.

We had a nice visit with Emily and Nash this weekend, who came up to check out the house on the way up to see Livvy:


Emily was exposed to the taste explosion that is known as Oh Boy at the Tomato Head, and generally dragged around town in a crash course of This is Christopher and Alice's Life. Unfortunately, Nash was getting sick and I think he left me a little goodbye present so I could know how he was feeling. I think I'll be heading to bed early tonight.

What a day.

I turned in the last documents to the mortgage company this morning, and even the dour faced lady there looked optimistic about closing soon. So things were looking good! They looked so good that I walked out into the sunshine feeling great and walked back to my office. ...and forgot that I had driven there and parked in a loading zone.

Fast forward two hours...

I walk out to go to a meeting. I look for my car in the garage. I look on every level. And I realize that it's still at the bank. Or is it?

It isn't. I walk down to the bank and its gone. I know where it is. Knoxville's Finest have put my car in jail. I walk back to the office, feeling not so good. I miss my meeting. Now I'm waiting for my wife to take me to the impound lot. What a day.

First up, Andrew Bird has a new album coming out (!) and you can preview it over at NPR, who have become the big Bird cheerleaders. We'll see how the Indie World's coolest classical violinist follows up my favorite album of 2007.

And now for something completely different:


If I had made a cult classic TV series that made uncool cool, next on my list would be to make a music video with the following:

1) creepy porn star mustache
2) roller skates
3) jumpsuit
3) 70s camper van

Seriously, if someone let me make a music video it would end up a lot like this one. And I would probably get Ron Williams in tight clothes to roller skate. Well done, Flight of the Conchords!

via the Flight of the Conchords free podcast, which I would highly recommend subscribing to on iTunes.

I've slowly accumulated a lot of blogs I like to check on, but clicking through tons of pages had gotten tedious. So took the plunge and put together an RSS feed reader through Google. Once you hook up all the feeds to it, the reader provides a central place that you check for updates on all your favorite blogs. It lets you know if anything new has come through, so no more wasting time going to a blog to only find out that there's nothing new (e.g. Cameron). I resisted the whole RSS thing, but it really makes sense. The only thing I don't like is that it merely relays content, the graphics and extra stuff like the sidebar can only be seen at the blog itself, which I think is a huge part of the blog experience. But now at least I'll be able to be more efficient traveling the blogosphere.

Back before Modern Guilt was released, I saw this cover on a blog that said it wouldn't be used. When I saw the cover that was used, I was surprised that guy with as much taste as Beck had dropped the ball on this one. This axonometric style (and the Lego style from The Information) baked in my head for months, and eventually came out of the oven as a fresh, new blog title, via FormZ Renderzone and Photoshop. Thanks Beck!

Cullin sent me this article in the New York Times Magazine about Mark Driscoll in Seattle and the concept of "New Calvinism". Worth reading, especially to see a secular view of the current state of the evangelical movement.

Well, I pushed and got the pest control company to come out today and do the termite treatment. I'm going to pick the forms the mortgage company needs and drop them off in a few minutes. Really, I can't be sure if the original contractor ever had a treatment ordered, so this is a prudent safeguarding of our investment (even if it does cost a lot of money when we don't have much). The fact that the contractor is long gone made this extremely difficult to get put together. If this doesn't work for the underwriters, then we may be packing up and moving out, 'cause I don't know what else to do. Most of the time I can deal with all the pressure, but there are times when I feel like a wave is crashing over my head and I can't breathe. This is the absolute worst time to get a mortgage in probably thirty years. Even the 'professionals' I'm working with are out of their element. So please pray that these are the last documents they require and that we can close very soon and put this behind us. Losing the house because of a few lame pencil-pushing bureaucrats would be heartbreaking. Having gotten to live in it for two great months makes it that much worse. So here we go...

I feel that I'm finally getting back in the groove with creative projects for the first time since finishing the house. They come in all shapes and sizes. Here's a t shirt design that Sarah asked me to do for their coffeehouse:


And here's another piece of the Tennessee School of Beauty I'm working on:

This is on repeat in my headphones right now:





Fleet Foxes - Mykonos [mp3]

And to spread the word on good music (or the good word with music) here is The Welcome Wagon, produced by Sufjan and sung by a guy named Vito who once had an ordination song written for him (and his wife, Monique):





The Welcome Wagon - Sold! To the Nice Rich Man [mp3]



The Welcome Wagon - But For You Who Fear My Name [mp3]



The Welcome Wagon - I Am A Stranger [mp3]

In the description, I like that they they couch their music in architectural terms (just as architects always tend to use musical terms):

Since that time they have been patiently recording an album of hymns, pop covers, and folksy originals with their friend and Brooklyn neighbor. But it was the nativity of that first song which established their pattern of work together: husband and wife write and arrange songs with the architecture of a country chapel, while Stevens (as latter-day Christopher Wren) designs and attaches flying buttresses, soaring spires and reliquaries, gargoyles, gryphons and cherubs dotting the façade. Somehow this unlikely partnership has produced a sublime addition to that genre called "church music".

This is the project I'm working on right now: A facelift for the Tennessee School of Beauty. They're located in a nondescript strip mall in West Knoxville, definitely the antithesis of beauty. So the owner has asked us to give the School a better presence on the exterior, calling attention to the sections of the strip mall that they reside in. A limited budget dictated that not much could be changed about the building itself, so I focused on an intervention that could be "clipped on." Taking cues from the from the colors of the client's logos and branding, I explored a geometric metaphor of strands of hair and created three faceted bands of tensioned fabric:


The "strands" are held to the facade by simple aluminum trusses. This is a relatively inexpensive re-imagining of what an "awning" can be. The bottom strand wraps toward the entry, continuing as a ceiling element in the lobby.

Any of you who are familiar with the so.zo coffeehouse will see that this is a continuation of that design thesis. I have a meeting with the client on Thursday, so I'll update you here as the project evolves.

Well, here we are. This year is hopefully going to be different than 2008, maybe more of a Sabbath year, some time to rest and get into a groove for the first time in a long time. I feel like the page has been firmly turned on my "post-college era" and some kind of new, completely adult era is being entered. Alice has a job and a routine (no more college!) and I am doing the same thing (architectin') I've been doing for four years. Luckily each new project is always a different challenge, so it hasn't gotten monotonous yet. We're both truckin' along now, getting experience and pursuing careers(!). The rest of the time we're just trying to find out how to live meaningful lives and making do in this crazy world.

So here's to 2009 and blogging about it. I'll be updating this week about all the house stuff and getting back to putting more thoughts here instead of just internet content. 2008 was the year I really got into putting my life out here on the interwebs, and I plan on continuing to do so in the coming year. So c'mon back!