Visualizing New Paradigms

As a final post to your blog, review our starting point with the Lunch essay,Energetic Organizations and the Final Lecture and develop diagrams, or combination of diagrams and images, that capture the qualities of the Ecological/Web city described on the final pages. The diagrams should address the four scales shown, the globe, the city/local landscape, the building/urban precinct and the body. Use the representation of these scales to show an understanding of the ideas that we have been developing about emerging forms of architecture and infrastructure, relationships between site processes and inhabited space, perception and environmental flows. Either construct new images or draw on those from readings, lectures (all on collab) or other sources that you have found in your research for this or other classes. If this leads you to have ideas about the other diagrams in the essay or alternative approaches, perhaps capturing the cumulative nature that I discussed, feel free to expand the scope. This assignment is to be posted by 5:00 on Thursday December 9.

As a reminder, please complete the online course evaluations for this and all your classes. I welcome ideas for developing the course for next year. I tried a number of new approaches this year and would appreciate your feedback.

Charlottesville Climate data

Jeremy Chinnis has assembled climate data for Charlottesville (from measurements at the airport) that can be helpful for your design of a microclimate/meeting/bus stop/bike share place. The darker color indicates greater frequency of occurrence in the first (blue) diagrams, lower humidity in the second (green) diagrams, and the third runs the spectrum related to temperature.

Charlottesville Wind Frequency, Strength and Direction by Month
Charlottesville Wind Humidity, Strength and Direction by Month
Charlottesville Wind Temperature, Strength and Direction by Month

Bay Game Completed

Sundial Pool Update

Here it is – Charles Sparkman was the winner at 4:35 on the 28th – missed by 18 minutes – check his blog in the 6232 list for how he got there, Regina Davis second at September 30. Kudos also to Kyle for making the first mark in so accurate a profile.

It appears that we are getting close, ahead of when many had predicted- possibly around 4:00 today if the sun is out.

Exercise Sept. 21 – 300 Sites on Water in Comments

As an example of the capacity of a networked research ecosystem (in an analog to the networked city) and to expand our range of examples of urban watershed design, we will do a brief research exercise to locate examples of the design of urban or rural water strategies. Each person is to come up with three links to sites that show innovative solutions to urban or rural storm water runoff. Post them as a response to this post. In order to get beyond the first page of google or the top layer in a site that you find, there will be rewards for those who come up with three links that no one else arrives at. This post will then contain approximately 300 links to sites on the web dealing with water. The links may be to articles, case studies, scientific or design studies.

Using the Blogs

Since I have shifted one of the primary modes of evaluation in the course from a final exam to the development of the blogs, I wanted to provide a few suggestions and ideas for how you might use them during the course of the semester. This is not something that you can cram for at the end of each month, but will work if you are making regular posts to your site and comments on others. Think of it like the dialog that takes place all the time in the studio, where ideas are shared and the capacity for development is open-ended. A few ideas that come from observations by me and the TA’s:

Pick a few points that resonated with you from the lectures and readings each week and develop a short essay, include diagrams, link to related resources and reflect on the relationship to your design work or other studies.

Some have been taking notes in the lectures using their Notepad program and posting directly into blogs as they go. This provides an outline or a record of specific issues that you may want to develop or comment on.

If there is a slide in the lecture that is particularly interesting to you, paste it onto your blog and comment on it, diagram over it in Illustrator or Photoshop, or compare it to another.

Connect the course material to other work – paste a diagram of you studio design onto the blog and diagram its connections to other systems or start a conversation by inviting others to contribute ideas

Look at a couple of other student blogs every day – post a comment and/or develop a thought that it inspires in your own blog (there are three categories of response – “no, I disagree”, “yes, but…”, “yes, and…” – I would encourage the third here – build on other perspectives and see where they go before you deny an idea – often good ones are fragile and not well formed at first, are easily knocked down, but can gain real strength over time. Build on each other’s reflections.

Sundial Pool

Over the weekend, someone made a comment on the sundial wall that the red spot would never get to the the drawn location, provoking a response that it would get there.  Post your guess through a comment response for the date and time that it will will most closely fill that shape (if ever) and the person who is closest will win a prize (to be determined). Post your guess as a comment before the end of the week and I will publish them all on Friday.