This photograph was taken with a Nikon D7000 and Nikkor 18-200mm lens; no tripods or telescopes were involved. While leaning against the side of my house, I took a series of hand-held shots. This one was the steadiest of the group; it must have been shot between heartbeats. Minimal post-processing was done in Photoshop. Galileo [...] Read more – ‘Photographing Jupiter’s Galilean Moons’.
The main inference of Andrés Duany’s Heterodoxia Architectonica is that Classicists and Modernists equally contribute to one, continually evolving strain of Classicism. While I do see the benefits of this claim, at this point my experience and understanding of the subject forces me to disagree. Classicists and Modernists are diametrically opposed to one another and [...] Read more – ‘Classicists, Modernists, and Synthesists’.
This article is another venture in holiday-themed discussions of urbanism by myself and Kevin Clark. Enjoy! *** For centuries, Santa Claus has been successfully delivering gifts on time and in budget to every good boy and girl. But today, at a meeting of the United Nations in New York, Santa made a surprising announcement: “Christmas [...] Read more – ‘A Holiday Message From Santa: “No More Suburbs!”’.
This post is an update to the one I published back in July titled Architecture Photographs in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Since then I have done a bit more traveling and, therefore, a bit more work in Adobe Lightroom. Following are before and after photographs with some notes on the process. Note: Click on any [...] Read more – ‘Architecture Photographs in Lightroom: Round Two’.
When I was back in the rural holler of the Georgia mountains a couple weeks ago I made a visit to Pinedale, my old family estate. I had not been there in probably 15 years. Pinedale’s story goes: Sometime in the middle 1800′s my great-great-grandfather hopped on a wagon in Michigan with his wife and [...] Read more – ‘Stone Gables: My Great-Grandfather’s House’.
Hazel Borys and Emily Talen just released their Codes Study for November. This study tabulates the use of form-based codes (FBC) across the country in order to see where they are happening. How do the US states rank? And what is the best way to measure the influence of FBCs? Let’s see… Using the data [...] Read more – ‘Measuring the Prevalence of Form-Based Codes’.
Note: The article below was a cooperative effort between myself and Kevin Clark. Traditional neighborhood design promotes a number of positive attributes for a higher quality of life including physical health, economic and social opportunities, and more candy. That’s right, traditional neighborhood design is also better for trick-or-treating. For those looking to score big on [...] Read more – ‘Maximize Your Halloween with New Urbanism’.
If you are reading this, chances are you are already familiar with the drama surrounding the design of the Eisenhower Memorial. For the uninitiated you can catch up on everything at www.EisenhowerMemorial.net. While I have not engaged in the discussion on the memorial up to this point, a few weekends ago I decided to charrette [...] Read more – ‘Architecture, Urbanism, and the Eisenhower Memorial’.
Architectures is a documentary series by Richard Copans and Stan Neumann. It was produced by the European public television channel ARTE. For more information: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/ Quoting from the website: Architectures presents a privileged and unprecedented look at the work of superstar architects and some of their most brilliant creations. Co-produced by the European public television [...] Read more – ‘Architectures: Documentary Series’.
I take a lot of photographs; when I go on a trip I average about 200 per day. Thank goodness I live in the digital era. Most people might say that the majority of my photographs are boring. Well, those people just don’t appreciate sill details or brick corbels like I do. But every now [...] Read more – ‘Architecture Photographs in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom’.
This plate took 8 months. Only 15 hours of that was actual drawing time while the rest was spent worrying about how in the world I was going to actually do it. There is layer after layer of overlapping details that fit together like puzzle pieces. Keeping up with it all was barely possible on [...] Read more – ‘Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament: Plate 4’.
Flocking is a relatively simple enhancement by which one lines the inner tube of a telescope with a light-absorbing felt. By preventing stray light from scattering and making its way to the eyepiece, visual and photographic observations can be drastically improved. Below are before and after photos of my 8″ SCT. Notice in the after [...] Read more – ‘Flocking’.
Plate 3 continues the morphology theme. As Sullivan refers to “sub-centers of energy” and “sub-axes” as “extending outward and inward indefinitely” in my mind he is referring directly to fractals. I read somewhere that Sullivan would draw the exact same amount of detail for a 15-foot circular window surround as he would a 1.5″ medal–to [...] Read more – ‘Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament: Plate 3’.
Plate 2 came close to kicking my ass, but I finally realized that the “base drawings” for these things are very loose and ill-defined and act more as a reference frame than anything else. Any sign of detail comes at the end with a heavy 2B pencil. Also, strict symmetry is not one of Sullivan’s [...] Read more – ‘Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament: Plate 2’.
One day I decided to go on a hunt to find adequate representations of Louis Sullivan’s “System of Architectural Ornament”–an elegant 20 plates describing Sullivan’s design methodology. I failed. The original book’s printing process was atrocious having rendered Sullivan’s beautifully subtle shades of grey pencil into a cold dot-matrix of pure black and white. The [...] Read more – ‘Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament’.
