Scratch over Assembly

What happened to the Neanderthal, to Homo Erectus, to Homo Habilis?
How did we (Homo Sapiens) survive longer than all the rest?  Multiple theories are debated, but one fact that is generally accepted, one key trait modern humans had that none of the others possessed was the curiosity and courage to cross open water.  Neanderthals were stronger, more disciplined, with far more experience and yet I believe it was our curiosity that enabled us to outlast them and dominate every other species since.

The drive to explore is a childhood instinct rooted in the human brain, a brain that develops unlike any other.  Only the human brain continues to grow almost four times its birth weight, allowing us to develop as much from our experiences exploring our environment as from survival instincts pre-wired in our inherited genes.  This necessitates a thirst to learn and a strong sense of observation, things every child does continuously.  In a world full of constant change, the ability to adapt is a decisive advantage and the human mind was made to do just that.   It's still apparent today - those that get ahead have the drive to improve themselves and the courage to take a chance charting unknown waters. 

I am not the type of person that shaves everyday, only the days I need to.  Occasionally I would have a beard started, only to be shaved off a day or two later.  One morning, my youngest son asked me to let my beard grow so I would look like Obi Wan.  I never pictured myself as a 'beard person', but it has now been over a year and I still have one.  Maybe it is OK though, one of my favorite architects had a beard - Antoni Gaudi.  He was certainly someone willing to explore new methods and unseen architecture.

Other architects of his time designed buildings by assembling variations on Euclidean geometric shapes... squares, rectangles, triangles.  Gaudi pushed further, exploring catenary curves by using weighted inverted models to derive building forms based on the fundamental principles of gravitation.  New methods and tools can reveal new ideas, but it is not a given.  A good example is the latest type of software embraced by the architectural community - Building Information Modeling (BIM).  Revolutionizing the power of Computer Aided Design (CAD), transforming line drawings into building components imbedded with construction and performance data, this new type of software has enabled a far more sophisticated method to analyze and predict the success of a future building.

But, it comes at a cost.  I host an annual design competition for high school students and the experience has taught me something unexpected about architectural software.  Reviewing the student submissions, with the varying levels of ability accounted for by using a large sampling of students from the same class, it becomes apparent the influence differing design software used by each school has on the end product.  What I have found is that students working with traditional software or even drawing by hand, come up with more creative solutions than those working with this next generation software.  The reason BIM stifles creativity, I believe, is in the way it operates.

When an architect wants a wall to have a window, the traditional software creates it from scratch by drawing lines or in the case of three dimensional modeling software, openings are carved out by extruding lines.  In contrast, BIM inserts a window by selecting one from a menu of manufactured products.  This may work well to know what is available in the marketplace, but it does nothing to move the marketplace forward discovering new window forms and by extension new building forms as a whole.  This is a critical point and a marked change in the design process, largely ignored by an industry focused on streamlining drawing time and boosting productivity on the backend once a design is determined and the building is ready to go to bid, constructed and maintained after occupied.  These efficiencies are important, but in my own practice, I am not willing to do so at the sacrifice of creativity on the front end of the process - the heart of what an architect once represented.

There is a change occurring in the architectural profession, a shift toward facilitator, away from creator.  Change is a fact of nature, just ask the Neanderthal what happens when you don't embrace it.  But, blindly following without an understanding of which direction you are heading or what is sacrificed can be equally fateful.   For me, exploring the unknown is in my DNA.  I create best with the vast open sea of a blank sheet of paper, not by assembling and rearranging a predetermined set of objects.  So I will continue to design from scratch (to borrow another metaphor from the stone age), it might take a little more time, but it makes full use of my most valuable tool - the highly evolved piece of engineering contained within our cranium.  Drawing a window by hand affords the time for my curiosity to explore uncharted possibilities, something lost by the rush of a click and drop method.

Stretching Childhood

I read a series of articles recently on the evolutionary divergence of humans from Neanderthals.  It seems we humans developed a much longer period for childhood, possibly the result of our sparse neural circuitry at birth requiring more time to grow.  Some anthropologists believe this fact is related to our propensity for storytelling, more specifically the stories told by a parent to a child.  The human shift from a strictly pre-wired genetic knowledge base to one supplemented by lessons learned from our elders, propelled humans ahead of Neanderthals in the race for survival and ultimately wide spread prosperity.

What resonated with me in these findings was the magic of storytelling to spark a child's imagination and sense of wonder, in addition to passing along a moral to be learned.  As a parent, I feel one of my greatest obligations to our children is a daily dose of prying open their minds in opposition to the onslaught of society closing them.  Anywhere I can find an opportunity to inspire, expand, challenge them to reach further, I seize it.

This past month, just such a thing presented itself.  We bought a used piano for our sons who had taken up music lessons.  And although it was very well built and the strings were in good condition, the price was a bargain because the exterior finish was sun beaten.  Rather than refinishing, my wife and I decided to let our sons paint it.  Assured by a piano technician it wouldn't affect the sound, we charged ahead, thinking the experience would give our sons a personal sense of ownership for the new piano along with a freedom of exploration rarely afforded children of such a precious object.

So, we began with a trip to the museum, to see a race car Andy Warhol painted in the 1970s, with hopes of planting a seed in their minds...

The following day drop cloths were laid, paints were brought out and the brushes started swirling.

The entire surface was soon covered, nothing was spared.

Vibrant colors following the lead of their creative hands and excited minds.

The paint is now dry and masking tape removed, all that's left for the piano is to play.  Fortunately, playing is a kid's specialty.  My job is simply to stretch the time out as long as I can, giving those neural circuits all the freedom in the world to branch out in a myriad of directions.

Paper Houses

Brick, concrete, steel... the materials of choice within the construction industry. No wonder, they have high strength and durability. But, composed of clay, sand, lime, stone and ore they are mined from the earth, at great expense and with finite quantity.

By contrast, the human population is growing at an exponential rate. The need for housing and all of the resources that go along with it is growing at the same rate. As humans overrun the landscape, the world is transitioning from a rural natural environment to a man made urban hardscape. Raw materials stripped from the terrain are depleting without thought of consequence. How long can this be sustained?

As if the problem is not difficult enough, consider the houses already built. Humans thrive on change, we are not content with anything. Permanence is an illusion. Using everything for a time, then discarding it when we grow tired and ready to move on.

It is not abnormal, nature is based on the same. The stacked stones we leave behind soon grow over. Unfortunately, the greatest drain on the planet's resources is our propensity for change, at a far greater burden than the original construction itself.

So why not be honest with ourselves and embrace our desire for perpetual new?

The future of architecture is paper houses. Materials that are lightweight, pliable, adaptive. With a cue from nature, homes will be grown (taking root in the ground, rather than mining it), a flexibility to accommodate changing families, tastes or household incomes.

No longer of the heavy, static brick and mortar with a tendency to decay and crack - the house of the future must be truly organic, living, breathing, growing naturally to keep pace with a being out of balance.

Quality over Quantity

Yesterday marked the launch of the iPad 3. In the promotional video Apple "believes technology is at its very best when it's invisible, when your conscious only of what your doing, not the device your doing it with and iPad is the perfect expression of that idea."

It began with the Apple mouse. One button, the antithesis to the multitude of buttons the rest of the industry was pursuing. Apple followed the modernist mantra 'less is more' and found simple, elegant, quality design trumps quantity every time.

The folding iPad cover demonstrates this perfectly. Not just a cover to protect the touchscreen, it also folds into multiple yoga-like poses for using/viewing the iPad. But the true beauty is how it wakes and puts the iPad to sleep. This simple act revolutionized use of the Internet for everyday tasks, like checking your email inbox or the weather forecast in the morning. By transforming the previous boot up and logging on to a quick and easy lift of a cover, Apple used design in a way that improves the experience, but more importantly motivated us to do so.

Good design in architecture is less common, but can be just as transformative. Builders of the typical suburban house take the 'bigger is better' approach, but a home designed well - like the iPad - can improve the experience with less. It is a subtle thing, often difficult to identify, but when it is missing there is no mistaking it. A house poorly designed is apparent, a source of frustration in daily life, an obstacle rather an enhancement. Take the time to improve the design of your home and once you have, you will wonder how the rest of the world lives without it.

LED saves energy, money and time.

What is one of the biggest things you can do to your home to save energy, money and your time?
Answer: Replace your lightbulbs with LED bulbs next time those old incandescents burn out.

For the past couple years I have been changing over the bulbs in our home. It is easy to do with the replacement bulbs I buy online from LEDwaves.com. They are designed for the same type socket and voltage as the old incandescent bulbs, so they fit right into your recessed fixtures, table lamps, etc. No need to deal with costly low voltage systems or their noisy and hot transformers.

The best part of the switch is what it saves you. LED bulbs use about an eighth the electricity as the old incandescent bulbs (about half the electricity as the so-called 'energy saver' compact fluorescent bulbs). And they last far longer, a typical replacement LED lasts about 40,000 hours, compared to the 2,000 hour lifespan of the old incandescent. Once you replace a bulb, you may never change it again (a great feature for those high ceiling, hard to reach lights).

The one downside is the initial cost of the bulb. Since I buy mine online before I need them, I am able to take advantage of occasional sales or bulk orders. It works out to about $25 per bulb, but since I have been changing the bulbs over in our house as they burn out, I am not hit with the huge cost of doing all of the lights in our house at once. Even with the big upfront cost though, it is still far less expensive over the life of the bulb, when you factor in the electricity savings.

Do the math:
For example, an 8 watt LED bulb that lasts 40,000 hours will use 320 kWh. Let's assume you are paying 10 cents per kWh, that would be $32 worth of electricity, plus the $25 for the cost of the bulb, for a total cost of $57 over the life of the bulb. Now compared to the old incandescent bulb, the same light output would be a 60 watt bulb over the same 40,000 hour period would use 2,400 kWh. That translates into $240 of electricity used - but wait, that is not even the worst part. Since the old incandescent bulbs only last about 2,000 hours (if your lucky and haven't bought a cheaply made one that burns out sooner or pops from a power surge when you turn it on), you will need to buy 20 lightbulbs AND change that lightbulb twenty times. That's a lot of work and a big hassle when they burn out at the most inappropriate times. So, to complete the thought on cost, 20 cheap bulbs at about $1 each, added to the electricity cost of $240 is a total of $260 over the same time period. That is over four times the cost of the LED bulbs, which will only get worse as electricity costs go up.

When you consider that lighting is typically the single biggest electricity drain in your house, changing over your lightbulbs can significantly reduce energy, money and your time. My house is almost completely switched over by now and my electric bills are 40% less than what they used to be. Start switching and you will be as pleased as me (and if you really want to reduce your lighting costs, pull back a few curtains on your windows - let some nature light in, you might even enjoy the view).