drafting

[ritaxis]

Today I am doing an outline and first draft of a floor. I have a very miscellaneous stack of mostly-green tiles of many sizes, all rectangular (from 1x1 to 12x12 square, including all the stops between except for 5, 7, 9,10, and 11: and 3x6,3x8, 4x6, and 4x8), I have a tile saw, and I have a bare floor, 6-9x16-7. YesterdayI sorted the tiles by color and size, and today I am laying them out for pattern, meanwhile mixing up the color and size sort again. After I am sure I am doing something that works, I will stack the tiles by color, size, and quadrant of the room, sweep up the crud, and begin laying tile. I think I will get as far as the stacking today, maybe to the first stripe of the floor. Yes, though I will be staking tiles by quadrant, I will be laying tiles stripes, from the outside in (considering the side where the three! doors are to be the inside, along with the stripe at the center of the room). The center of the floor is the setting for a mosaic, which I am still planning as I look at what I have, but which will be vaguely representative of kelp. Kelp is the tree of life, really, whatever anybody else thinks.
So I was thinking about the way I draft things. The way I do an outline usually is to do a short treatment -- either a long short story length or a fragment -- it looks like a failed short story. When I see what I've got, then I can plan the real novel. THat's sort of what I've done with the tiles.

So I'm taking a break because the hand therapist says you really must, and I woke up with burning sensation from my fingertips up past my elbow this morning, presumably from stacking tiles yesterday.



They rushed into the biggest room of the golden house, which had tables running all the enormous length of it. Down the center of each long table there seemed to be a garden, a weedy, smelly, messy garden which dropped flower petals and seeds and leaves all over the tabletops. More and more of the odd small people -- and also many odd larger people, and some very large people too -- came in from doors all around the sides of the room and took their seats, some of which were tall and stilty so that small people could reach the table and some of which were low slung so that the larger people could fit there.

"Come on," said the Mustard Fairy, dragging Katie across the room by her elbow. At the other end of the room was a dais, which was bright green and decorated with weedy yellow flowers ("I know what those are," Katie thought. "Those are wild mustard flowers. I always thought they weren't really mustard, but if the Mustard Fairy has them on her dais, they must be!")

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The catalogs on that page were the best collections of pictures I could find. Unfortunately, there are few freely-redistributable photographs (and no freely-redistributable design drawings) of any modern architect's work--rights reside in the work itself, which means one can make only limited use of even one's own pictures and drawings. What I could find on the web is linked on that page. The NY-MOMA Between Humanism and Materialism exhibit site has a fairly good chronology of his career with pictures--click on "Timeline" and follow it through. The "Buildings" links on that page also have photographs--I've changed the Mt. Angel Abbey Library page to link directly to a photographs page.

You are right; Aalto was extremely influential. Aalto and the two Saarinens (Eliel and Eero, father and son) were the definitive Scandinavian modernists; their work has influence the Scandinavian modern design we see day-to-day. It's interesting you should say that the chairs look like the work of a man who would not want to put it into words; even in his own day Aalto's work was criticized as "irrational"--part of what made the canonical modernist designers Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier so influential is that they were able to write persuasive manifestoes in support of their formalist work. But Mies' formalism made his post-Bauhaus work very uncomfortable and Le Corbusier's later, more fluid work was also criticized as irrational. Overall I much prefer Aalto to the formalist modernism.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It looks to me as if Aalto's buildings are more human than Le Corbusier's -- even those later ones I saw that had that white, stark, modern sensibility looked like places human beings could actually move around in without feeling lost or depressed. Le Corbusier's stuff always seems to me, what I have seen of it, to be designed for a cold, lofty, untouchable species: the kind of entities that use white flooring and upholstery, and eat tiny, choreographed meals, and if they have a pet, it's a pedigreed thing with twenty genetic disabilties and thousands of dollars worth of grooming.

It's funny, though -- you go around the Sims fansites and it's mostly the modernists' furniture that the fans are making. If I were cycnical, I would say it's because the shapes are simple to reproduce in a 3d program when you don't really know what you're doing.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

This deserves a longer answer than I can give it in any reasonable time. I'll try to hit a few of the high points, here.

1. Aalto used a lot of white in his interiors because most of his buildings were north of the 54th parallel. In those long winters, every bit of daylight is precious. (This is also part of why Scandinavian modernists used light wood.) He had an extensive range of devices for distributing and smoothing daylight, most of which are hard to photograph. If you get a chance, visit the Mt. Angel Abbey Library in Oregon.
2. Corbu (the apprenticeship system in architecture leads to recent designers being called by the names their apprentices knew) was influenced by the light of the Mediterranean, and liked to use it to illuminate sharply definite forms. His purist phase only lasted 20 years and, even then, included some swoopy sculptural forms. Example: the Villa Savoye. His later work was much more sculptural and textural. Example: Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut series 1, series 2. His city plans, on the other hand, were heavily influenced by the ideal cities of 19th-cy French utopianism (Fourier and so on), and seem to me heartless; they are unfortunately widely influential.
3. Corbu and Mies were better than those people who focus on pure boxy forms make them.

Something on SimModernism tomorrow--it's getting late.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The Villa Savoye is actually the Corbusier building I was mostly thinking of. It's just frigid as a private human dwelling. I could see the same general style of architecture producing something cozier, but I think that the first thing that would have to happen is something about scale. The house is too big, and the spaces in it are too big too. There's too much space between the easy chairs -- and at least for photographs, that placement is necessitated by the vast empty space around them.

On the other hand, I am so glad you showed me that church. That's a hum-dandy church. It's whimsical: it's inviting: it's a place you could stand around with your fellow parishioners and gossip, probably mostly on what a joke the church is. That's not a sarcastic remark: I think that a substrantial number of public buildings ought to be funny.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

[old business]

The more I look at the photographs of the Villa Savoye, the more I think I have been getting it wrong. My first hint was the photograph of the remarkably sensuous bath. Then I realized that the building doesn't look occupied because it isn't occupied--the building is now maintained as a national monument. The original furnishings were destroyed by the Nazis, so there are probably not enough furnishings to properly fill the space. The flooring is all tile and wood; there is even some parquetry. And the thing has a roof garden; in fact, Le Corbusier intended that the cracks between the large concrete roof tiles be sown with grass. So I am left with the suspicion that the photographs I have seen are deceptive and that it was bad critics who sold the building as white boxy sterile perfection.

Returning to SimModernism, I suspect the reason that Sim fan furniture is very simple in geometry is a combination of working in too small a scale--I would think that 1' = 2" is a minimum--and perhaps without sufficient craft to create good furniture models. It is very difficult to model complex forms in any medium, physical or computer, and working too small can make it impossible. May I ask what form of digital data is used to describe SimFurniture? Do the programs want actual 3-D data, 2-D vector images, or are plan and elevation raster images sufficient?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The way Sims 1 graphics works is this: you get a view from an angle looking down on the scene. You have four views. So it's a kind of suggesting-3d situation, but actually 2d. Different Sims fans make items in different ways. Since each item has its own little program embedded in its file, as well as however many parts and states and the four views (though some items have two views and some have only one, it's quite a bit of information that it carries around with it. People prety much have to make new Sims objects right on top of old ones. There's a process called "cloning," where the file is opened up into its subfiles and exported so that a person can modify the pictures or even, if they are up to it, modify the programming. The object is renamed and reimported to the game as a new object.

Some people do the graphics in 3d programs, and use the correct (or sometimes not so correct!) views to import to the object. Some people make drawings or paintings and scan them in. Other people draw the p[ictures in Photoshop or Paintshop. Other people combine bits of graphics lifted from photographs or other sources in order to make the pictures. Still other people -- the majority -=- use the graphics made by others and just change the colors or layer graphic textures on to the objects.
Go here:

http://www.sims1.thesimsresource.com/items/sets.php

Scroll down.The sets made by Secret Sims are made with a 3d program. The sets made by Fairywitch I think are made in 2d. The set made by Steffieb is an example of recoloring. All of the objects in the set were made by changing the colors of existing pieces.

You can also see, by looking at these sets, the angle of the scene.

Go here:

http://www.strategyplanet.com/thesims/sas/

This is possibly the premier "retexturing" site. The proprietor, who goes by the name of Bunny Wuffles, takes photographs of old buildings and furnishings and works them onto objects from the game. And she writes about the history of architecture, too.

As for Savoie -- I don't think that bath looks sensuous, and I don't think that floor looks warm. It takes more than a curve and some wood to make a place cozy.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The Sims furniture does seem to suffer from process problems; one needs to have a source of complex forms as input to the process and they are very difficult to achieve from nothing at the drawing board. If I were doing furniture sets for the Sims, I would probably work from photographs and design drawings of actual furniture. I think I've figured out the projection, by the way.

As for the Villa Savoye, I am going to stop using it as a bad example until I've actually visited it!

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I know what the projection is, but the name for it has dropped out of my brain, and I can't find it. There are people who just go ahead and draw the items, especially when they are not furniture, but plants or something. You can usually tell someone who does it in 3d: their work is less realistic, full of weird bent tubes and strange doubled surfaces and glass where nobody would put glass and wood on shapes that would be silly to do in wood.

A lot of people do work from photographs and design drawings. Particularly since there are those people who put together sets of historically or otherwise thematically interesting items: Craftsman, or Renaissance, or Mexican, or Japanese (there's an especially attractive set of Japanese Art Nouveau pieces done by a very skilled and talented artist), or specific designers.