@krisidious said:

I don't understand any bad reviews as I did not notice any...

Oh no, no-one has (yet) made any specific negative comments about my work or any of the other nine projects. Here and by email I've only received compliments.

That last link I posted was just the on-line equivalent of a letters-to-the-editor forum/blog.

http://blog.aia.org/aiarchitect/2007/07/the_magical_mystery_tour.html

Apparently, when they made the call for entries in early June, some AIA members were upset enough with the whole topic of a "fantasy architecture" issue that they wrote the editor of AIArchitect to express their displeasure before the issue even went out. I'll have to keep watching that blog to see what happens now that issue is available...usually only one or two people will write in to comment on any given article or topic. I'm tempted to write in there myself with a response to those preemptive negative comments noting the unbuilt "fantasy" projects that led me into architecture...projects by some rather serious architects like Mies, Le Corbusier, Sant'Elia, Piranesi, Lebbeus Woods, etc.

But since my project was one of those selected for the issue it would probably be best it I keep out of the fray.

Thanks again for the kind words, everyone.

--Lewis

Thanks, everyone. As I sit here going over the AIA classified ads and worrying over my resume, it's good to hear some positive feedback. I certainly feel quite a bit less melancholy than when I first sat down at my computer this morning.

--Lewis

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my deconstructed-neolithic pavilion project appeared in AIArchitect today, which means that every member of the AIA in the U.S. who bothers to check his email could conceivably see it.

http://www.aia.org/aiarchitect/thisweek ... 0727ot.cfm

The full issue begins here:

Page not found

The AIA is the voice of the architectural profession and a resource for its members in service to society.

The American Institute of Architects (www.aia.org)

There was a thread devoted to my project a few weeks ago in the gallery forum...if the moderators think it would make more sense to put this post in with that earlier thread, it would be fine with me.

Considering I quit my job as a draftsman Monday after months of frustration, it's nice to get a bit of recognition for something, even if I am not sure that my project measures up to some of the others chosen for the special issue of the online magazine (check them out! Especially the space-based project!).

I wonder if this sort of thing will have any impact on my search for further employment in architecture. (I still have my teaching job at an architecture school, but that's not quite the same thing.) There were some really hostile statements against this topic even before the issue hit the Web.

http://blog.aia.org/aiarchitect/2007/07 ... _tour.html

(Ironically, I was once offered a job at WDG...notice what their principal thought of this. Boy am I glad I didn't take their offer.)

--Lewis

@unknownuser said:

Another fun one is to go to someone's computer while they are away, minimize their open programs and do a screen capture of their desktop.
Open paint and save the screenshot as an image.
Change their taskbar to autohide (if it is not already).
Hide their desktop icons.
Set the new screenshot image to their background and wait for the cussing

You can improve on this one by using Photoshop to rotate the screenshot image 180 degrees before making it their background. No one trusts me around their computers now.

Congratulations to your wife, Paul, for the recognition for her work. A great honor (or rather, honour...I suppose I should use the British English spelling, given the occasion)!

--Lewis

I'm an architect and sometimes a sculptor...as far as I know (since I am or was in a small way a classical scholar), I don't get a muse.

(These being nine inspirational demi-goddesses, daughters of Apollo.)

• Calliope (Chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry--this was Homer's muse. Orpheus was her son by Morpheus.)
• Clio (muse of history)
• Erato (muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics, and marriage songs)
• Euterpe (muse of music and lyric poetry)
• Melpomene (muse of tragedy)
• Polyhymnia or Polymnia (muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing and rhetoric)
• Terpsichore (muse of choral song and dance)
• Thalia (muse of comedy and bucolic poetry)
• Urania (muse of astronomy)

With my luck, I'll only ever get a lamia...similar function in a way, but they suck your blood while making you a wonderful artist. But in the meantime, I'll settle for caffeine and science fiction novels.

For some reason or another I find this little video to be immensely effective as medicine for melancholy.

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/66216/detail/

Keepon is apparently the product of some serious research, besides being the star of a rock video now.

http://univ.nict.go.jp/people/xkozima/infanoid/robot-eng.html#keepon

Connecticut? I suppose you could go to New Haven and see how they are re-habbing my personal Piranesian hell-hole, the Paul Rudolph-designed Arts & Architecture Building at Yale. See it now before the students torch it again, as they did in 1969. (Yes, most of the time I do wish I'd gone somewhere else for my M.Arch.)

Bad title - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

The Louis Kahn museums, practically across the street from the A&A, are worth a bit more consideration.

On a lighter note, why don't you see if you can get a tour of Philip Johnson's estate in New Canaan, Conn.? It's run by our National Trust: http://www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org/

Be sure to call ahead and make reservations and whatnot.

Besides the Glass House, there's quite a lot of other interesting trinket-like architecture dotting Phil's old place.

If you decide to run up to Boston (about two hours by car, three or so by train), drop me a PM.

Happy Birthday, Eric.

--Lewis

I really like this guy's work.

I'm not sure I would use the terminology that the man uses, though...at first glance this looks much like a very creative revival of the old "ferroconcrete" idea of light rebar armature surrounded by multiple layers of very light wire mesh (like "chicken-wire" fencing material), which is packed with fine- or no-aggregate Portland concrete and ultimately smoothed over with yet more Portland. And he blends the system with the idea of fiber-reinforced concrete mixes, something I have experimented with myself. The hybrid technique is more of an additive form of sculpture than typical concrete casting, and there is minimal formwork...just much hand-troweling and smoothing.

In this part of the world, ferroconcrete was used for boat hulls for a while, although it seems to have fallen out of favor.

--Lewis

I've had a chance to play with it a little more since I originally posted the QCAD link. It is a decent little CAD program...I ended up buying a license for both my PC and my Linux machines. It seems like it bogs down faster than AutoCAD, though...not yet suitable for the kind of large project my firm does, but sufficient for ordinary domestic architecture or simpler work (in my opinion). The most annoying aspect of the program, for an AutoCAD user, is that you can't grab individual vertices...you just have to use the Stretch command very selectively. But there is a nice "auto" snap feature that is somewhat like SketchUp's inferences, except that it also wants to snap to the underlying grid...to make it not do so, you have to make the grid some insanely large size.

I'll take a look at those links you posted, RegH. Thanks.

Another "accessory" program that I have been evaluating:

For those of you who don't need something as robust and expensive as AutoCAD or its ilk, here's a fairly decent 2D-only, lightweight CAD program. It reads and writes DXF 2004 now, so it's fairly compatible with the wider world of CAD and modeling. Finally, it's more or less free in a slightly-stripped-down version for Linux (and anyone else who wants to compile source code) and is relatively inexpensive for Windows and Mac users (24 euros or $33).

http://www.qcad.org/qcad.html

Although it looks a bit like AutoCAD, the commands don't always correspond exactly (for example, the ACAD "move" and "array" concepts are both covered by "move" in QCAD, rather as they are in SketchUp), so it's worth reading the brief manual and finding a quick online tutorial

(like this: http://linuxfocus.org/English/January20 ... e132.shtml )

I like QCAD's straightforward plotting interface, but the command line in QCAD is very limited and balky, at least in my brief experience...best to turn it off and operate QCAD with hotkeys (like SketchUp).

--Lewis

Institutional and university laboratories, federal courthouses, the rehabilitation of historic monuments, residential towers. Oh, and we did the Monsanto House of the Future at Disneyland in California in 1957-59. I have a model (bought at the Disney Store) sitting on my desk.

I'm not actually supposed to associate the firm with anything I write on-line, but if you want more information I can send you the website link by PM.

I have another part-time job, at least during the school year, teaching 3D Modeling and Illustration at the Boston Architectural College.

http://courses.the-bac.edu/Spring07/VS650F/vs650f_syllabus.html

--Lewis

I really like these Kris. They appeal to the fantasist in me. Have they been built, or will they be built?

Thanks, Jackson.

I've received a lot of kind comments on this, for both the project and the renderings, since it appeared in AIArchitect in late July. Some people have suggested that I could parlay this into an independent practice of my own, in fact. Haven't quite figured out how to do that yet, but it is a nice thought.

--Lewis

Thanks, Mike. The blue of the sky in the last rendering seems to be causing my printer problems, though. I've decided the best thing to do, for the printed version, is to make the image sepia-toned. Electronic versions can keep the original color.

Thanks much, Dan.

I look forward to seeing your work.

I had to make one more rendering of this project for the cover of my portfolio and a little advertising item on which I have been working. It's still essentially a paint-by-Photoshop production, except that I changed the idiom slightly, and I used a no-texture GI rendering from VRay as the starting point for the shadows:

Thanks, guys. As I wrote above, these last two images were my least favorite of the five, although I couldn't think of any other way to completely tell "the story" about the project. It occurred to me last night, belatedly, that the combo "interior roof" and map view might be less compelling than a bird's eye view, literally looking down on the hillside and the pavilion, perhaps with a few birds painted in for good measure. But my training as an architect forces me to always insist on at least one non-perspective image, with a scale for distance...

I might just go ahead and do a birds-eye view tonight anyway, for my portfolio (another compulsion of architects)...it will only take about four hours or so of Photoshop work, assuming I don't have to make any changes to the SketchUp model.

--Lewis

P.S. Thanks to Eric, I've tracked down copies of the first three Myst titles, so I'll get to find out soon if I should have gone into game design as opposed to architecture! Maybe I can get my older daughter to help me play them...she's very much into fantasy and science fiction.

@cheffey said:

Bravo Lewis! absolutely beautiful, would love to see more imagery from this project... is there a part two??

There are only two more fully worked-up images for this, Cheffey (attached below)...the fantasy architecture competition had a limit of five images. I'm not quite as happy with these last two, and in fact I haven't been able to resist tweaking the site map (so what you see is a little different from what I originally sent out).

I may do some more work on this, or perhaps put some additional structures in the "Lewis" world...there are several geometries from Stout's book that I would like to play with, and SketchUp, without forcing it to make organic shapes with rubies or abusing the Sandbox tools to make non-Euclidean forms, inherently provides a pretty decent set of cognates for the planar and cubic geometric bases of so many ordinary construction materials. (God knows I'll never get a chance to do this in the real world! Just the fact that I have these as wallpaper on my monitor at work has been freaking out my project team.) And some more items from the Neolithic architectural repertoire will undoubtedly also trickle into my exercises.

I will continue to post updates in this gallery. Thanks again for all your interest.

Oh, and Eric...it looks like Ubisoft is no longer shipping that Myst set you recommended...I just bounce around their site without ever finding a price. But I'm going to try to find the thing through one of the big retailers like Amazon, or failing that, someone is probably listing it on Ebay.

--Lewis