current: syrian refugees in jordan.

the gaza strip.

the (political) tension of permanence.

slovenia military complex.

learning.to.love.you.more

70. Say goodbye.

69. Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view.

68. Feel the news.

67. Repair something.

66. Make a field guide to your yard.

65. Perform the phone call someone else wished they could have.

64. Teach us an exercise.

63. Make an encouraging banner.

62. Make an educational public plaque.

61. Describe your ideal government.

60. Write a press release about an everyday event.

59. Interview someone who has experienced war.

58. Record the sound that is keeping you awake.

57. Lipsync to shy neighbor's Garth Brooks cover.

56. Make a portrait of your friend's desires.

55. Photograph a significant outfit.

54. Draw the news.

53. Give advice to yourself in the past.

52. Write the phone call you wish you could have.

51. Describe what to do with your body when you die.

50. Take a flash photo under your bed.

49. Draw a picture of your friend's friend.

48. Make the saddest song.

47. Re-enact a scene from a movie that made someone else cry.

46. Draw Raymond Carver's Cathedral.

45. Reread your favorite book from fifth grade.

44. Make a "LTLYM assignment".

43. Make an exhibition of the art in your parent's house.

42. List five events from 1984.

41. Document your bald spot.

40. Heal yourself.

39. Take a picture of your parents kissing.

38. Act out someone else's argument.

37. Write down a recent argument.

36. Grow a garden in an unexpected spot.

35. Ask your family to describe what you do.

34. Make a protest sign and protest.

33. Braid someone's hair.

32. Draw a scene from a movie that made you cry.

31. Spend time with a dying person.

30. Take a picture of strangers holding hands.

29. Make an audio recording of a choir.

28. Edit a photo album page.

27. Take a picture of the sun.

26. Design an article of clothing for Mona to crochet.

25. Make a video of someone dancing.

24. Cover the song"Don't Dream It's Over".

23. Recreate this snapshot.

22. Recreate a scene from Laura Lark's life story.

21. Sculpt a bust of Steve.

20. Take a family portrait of two families.

19. Illustrate a scene or make an object from Paul Arensmeyer's life story.

18. Recreate a poster you had as a teenager.

17. Record your own guided meditation.

16. Make a paper replica of your bed.

15. Hang a windchime on a tree in a parking lot.

14. Write your life story in less than a day.

13. Recreate the moment after a crime.

12. Get a temporary tattoo of one of Morgan Rozacky's neighbors.

11. Photograph a scar and write about it.

10. Make a flier of your day.

9. Draw a constellation from someone's freckles.

8. Curate an artist's retrospective in a public place.

7. Recreate 3 minutes of a Fresh Air interview.

6. Make a poster of shadows.

5. Recreate an object from someone's past.

4. Start a lecture series.

3. Make a documentary video about a small child.

2. Make a neighborhood field recording.

1. Make a child's outfit in an adult size.

city.growers

jessie.mazar

burlington.school.food.project

x.clinic

environmental.health.clinic

technology as nature.

technology as an evolutionary strategy. 

"don't be a virgin."

I believe that everyone has their own way of conserving. For some it may be pure recycling, for some it may be getting the most eco-friendly, sustainable project. The example that comes to mind is with cars. It is a debate I have often had. Should you upgrade to the Prius or continuing using your 1995 Pathfinder and keeping it from being one more unused metal in a dump? They are arguments to be said for one day, but reuse is the conservation I keep coming back to. In all areas, personally and in my career, I see reuse as the most effective conservation. In architecture, that is repurposing old buildings. While this is not always the situation, it seems absurd to build a LEED certified building out of virgin materials rather than making due with the materials that have already been "commissioned," whatever level of "green-ness" can be reached. My motto has become "don't be a virgin," i.e. don't use any virgin materials (or at least as few as is possible).  

An organization that completely follow this reuse policy is Pop Up Repair. According to their mission statement:

Pop Up Repair is an intervention in the cycle of use-and-discard consumerism. For four weeks in June 2013, a group of theater artists activated a storefront repair shop, fixing household objects brought in by members of the community. The pop-up shop is the experimental first step in a larger research project investigating our relationships with the objects we use every day: what they mean, what they’re worth, and why we repair and reuse instead of buying new.

Essentially, its a brainstorm of skills, a charrette for the everyday. The work on a "pop-up" basis, so keep up with their website, and if you live in New York or Philly, use and reuse them! 

making intricate complexity legible.

intricacy/complexity/ornament?
design finesse

totalizing ambience.

atmospheric. ferda. rococo.

pushing the field...riding the frontier.

It has been a recurring theme recently that the reflection of a successful artist/architect/designer is to use the technology of their time to do what has never been done before. For Ferda Kolatan, this defines design finesse. For Gaetano Pesce, that meant using the materials of your time. He famously said, "When someone expresses himself in a certain time, he does so with the tools and materials being discovered then. Stone or wood are from another moment." As I spoke about earlier with art, I believe that it is up to everyone within their field to not only question what defines their field, but to push the boundaries of what that field encompasses. This process so clearly happened in art in the 20th century, but it has happened to varying degrees in other fields. It seems to me it happens less in fields dependent on consumerism. This frontier experimentation with architecture almost exclusively happens in the realm of competitions and the speculative. I see it even less in Industrial Design, a field that is more focused on product design and has a tighter relationship with the consumer in general. Art has been blessed with this distinction that is pursued for its own sake, that it stands separate from the commodity world, and when it does engage it, it has two levels of consumerism: the extravagant auction market that few of us can participate in and the free visual consumption that exists for the majority. Within my field, I have only gained marked respect for those who push the frontier of architecture and make it mean more than it does as of yet. We are taught so often to perfect presentation, to be good at what is already understood and to stand out in that way, but I do not find that any of us can stand out unless we experiment. 

what is art?

what is art?

* hegel: “art, according to its own concept, can have no other calling than to give sensuously adequate presence to a content that is already complete in itself; and the philosophy o fart must therefore make it is chief business to offer a thoughfully comprehensive account of what art truly is in its fullness of content as well as in its beautiful mode of appearance.”

*marcel Duchamp: appropriating images…nothing is original.

*andy Warhol: ‘i don’t make the art.’ this is really what has been going on for centuries. There have been apprentices since michaelangelo. so who is the artist?

*cindy Sherman: you are still the artist if you are in charge of the expression…the literal expression.

* jeff koons: art is what happens in the viewer.
"what people want to do most in life the most they avoid the most. and so the job of the artist is to make a gesture and really show people what their potential is, and through that people will live to their potential. they realize it's not about that object, it's not about that image, it's what is happening inside the viewer. that is where the art happens. the images are absolutely valueless. what happens inside the viewer--that's where the value is. it's about where they can go from that moment to achieve their desires."
-jeff koons- 

* Robert morris: art is where you are. Art is space specific. It is tied to the exact space that it occurs (earthworks, cristo and jeanne-claude)

* performance art: carolee sheeman…art is an action.

what is art now??? what are the current trends?

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
W. Somerset Maugham 
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“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” 
― James Baldwin

Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. (Fernando Botero)

The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired. (Gustave Courbet)

“The magic question is, ‘What for?’ But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.” — Young-ha Kim

“Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.” — Antony Gormley

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde 
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In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 
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Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana 
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To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy 
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Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.
Frank Lloyd Wright 
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“Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.” 
― Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. (Leo Tolstoy)

The task of art is enormous... Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. (Leo Tolstoy)

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life. (Leo Tolstoy)

“If we are in a general way permitted to regard human activity in the realm of the beautiful as a liberation of the soul, as a release from constraint and restriction, in short to consider that art does actually alleviate the most overpowering and tragic catastrophes by means of the creations it offers to our contemplation and enjoyment, it is the art of music which conducts us to the final summit of that ascent to freedom.” 
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, On the Arts: Selections from G.W.F. Hegel's Aesthetics, or the Philosophy of Fine Art

A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere in order to exist as Idea.
Philosophy of Right (1821)

 Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle 
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“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

John F. Kennedy

·       If there is some end in the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the chief good. Knowing this will have a great influence on how we live our lives.

ARIST. Nico. I.2.

The quality of life is determined by its activities. (Aristotle)

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends. (Aristotle)

The energy of the mind is the essence of life. (Aristotle)

goethe on spirit.

the.future.of.urbanization

At present, slums are the most pressing issue that I feel I can address with my career. According to Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, “95% of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation.” 2 Urbanization has resulted in “slum-ification.” “Since 1970, slum growth everywhere in the South has outpaced urbanization per se.” 17 At this rate, ‘we will have only slums and no cities’ `Gautam Chatterjee 18 These areas constitute the majority of the global population. “Residents of slums, while only 6 percent of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2 perent of urbanites in the least-developed countries: this equals fully a third of the global urban population.” 23 The housing that inhabits these areas are primarily informal. “ “ILO researcher has estimated that the formal housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock, so out of necessity, people to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks.” 17 “Thus, cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.” 19 Most important to remember is that “the slum was not the inevitable urban future,” nor does it have to remain so. 61

I personally am interested in slum pro-development (no redevelopment nor initial development) because it is the essence of combining the skills of architecture and urban planning. Physical housing must be rebuilt in an adequate way, but because of the mass horizontal monotony, it is essential that urban planning be deeply considered. To me, urban slum renewal addresses both the improvement of individual lives as well as the improvement on the macro-scale.

WHERE TO WORK

Highest percentage of slum-dwellings

            Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bombay, Mexico City/Dhaka, Lagos/Cairo/Karachi/Kinshasa/Sao Paulo/Shangai/Delhi

Largest slums by numbers

            China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Phillippines, Turkey, Mexico, South Korea, Peru, USA, Egypt, Argentina, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sudan, Vietnam

Poorest urban populations

            Luanda, Maputo, Kinshasa, Cochabamba (Bolivia)

Etc

Angola, Bulgaria, Albania, Colombia, Malaysia, Zambia, Cambodia, Mongolia, ex-Soviet

the last human right.