Signal Flags

I made a full set of signal flags last year.  Here are their meanings:

Oyster Run 2014

two years ago, I inadvertently ended up part of the Oyster Run to Anacortes Washington.  My friend and I had not intended to join the festivities in Anacortes,.  We were just out for a day long great motorcycle ride.  We ended up cutting the day short when I was rear-ended by a beautiful Harley with a couple riding.  My bike was still serviceable but required extensive repairs.  I think I'll lay low this year.

Lots of bikers in Anacortes, Washington

Whale Rescue

"Architalk"

I thought I would have some fun and post this essay by Witold Rybczynski.  He was a student in planning when I was a lowly 3rd year architectural student at McGill University.  This essay captures the problem quite nicely:

A Discourse on Emerging Tectonic Visualization and the Effects of Materiality on Praxis

Or an essay on the ridiculous way architects talk.

By Witold Rybczynski

 

Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe buildings in 1972

Although Ted Mosby, the architect character in How I Met Your Mother, has suitably tousled hair and his (client-less) firm has a trendy name—Mosbuis Designs—he doesn't seem to have mastered the lingo of his trade, for architects, like all professionals, have their own jargon, while Ted speaks like an ordinary guy. A brief history is in order. Architecture is a relatively young profession—the American Institute of Architects was not founded until 1857. Seeking to distinguish themselves from lowly builders and carpenters, architects adopted a specialized vocabulary, often substituting complicated Latin-based words for their simpler Anglo-Saxon equivalents, for example, fenestration for window, entrance for door, chamber for room, trabeation for beam, planar for flat. Then there were the mysteries of Ionic columns and egg-and-dart moldings.

When Modernist architects revolutionized the art of building in the 1920s, they scrubbed classical decoration—and classical terms. In the process of simplification that followed, language, too, was stripped down, and the pronouncements of architects such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier were lucid and to the point. After all, if a house was a machine for living in, then the house-maker should speak the straightforward language of the engineer.

This changed in the 1970s, on March 16, 1972, to be exact, the day the federal government dynamited the first of 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis. The destruction of the utopian "towers in a park" signaled the demise of heroic Modernism and its idealistic foray into social engineering. It also rattled the profession. What were architects to do? A few, such as I.M. Pei, soldiered on, seeking inspiration in a more monumental and stylish version of minimal Modernism. Some adopted Postmodernism, which turned out to be a short-lived fad. A few turned back to Classicism, while some, like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, redefined architecture as an advanced technological craft.
 

Other architects, especially those teaching in universities, reacted to the collapse of Modernism by attempting to reinvent the field as a theoretical discipline. The theories did not come from the evidence of the practice of architecture, as one might expect (that was left to Christopher Alexander), but from arcane historical tracts and the writings of French literary critics in hermeneutics, poetics, and semiology. Thus began a new phase in professional jargon.
 

Discourse: What architects talk about when they talk about architecture.

Academy: Usually the Academy. Where underemployed architects like Ted Mosby work.

Praxis: How theory is implemented, which in architecture means building buildings.

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Tectonic: Also from the ancient Greek. Nothing to do with geology, it signifies, as far as I understand it, anything to do with building.

Assemblage: From the French, meaning putting things together.

Gesamtkunstwerk: From the German. The total work of art, meaning the architect designs everything, soup to nuts.

Materiality: What buildings are made of. Sounds more impressive than bricks and sticks.

Potentiality, spatiality, conditionality, functionality, modernity: When in doubt, add "-ity." Or "-ology." "Ology" means the study of something, but in architecture methodology and typology just mean method and type.

Visualization or representation: Architectural sketches and drawings.

Instantiation: I had to look this one up. It means representing something by giving an example. A term borrowed from philosophy.

Emerging: Trends in architecture that are just around the corner—maybe.

Metamorphosis: Change, as in, "Metamorphosis of space is a flexible correspondence of space to its situation, caused by certain external actions."

Morphosis: The name of an architecture firm in Los Angeles.

Ennead: The name of an architecture firm in New York.

Oculus: The name of an architecture firm in Chongqing.

The Urban Dictionary defines Archispeak as: "Large, made-up words that architects and designers use to make themselves sound smarter than you (you being the client or the confused observer of design). It does nothing to inform or enlighten the consumer of architecture and mostly serves to numb them into obedience or self doubt." That sounds about right.


And I totally agree.

Wandering Dolphin

Beautiful Post by Becca aboard Wandering Dolphin inbound to Washington State from Hawaii.

"This morning as I sit in the cockpit with my coffee and the sun shining (finally), a blue sky as far as my eye can see, and a smile on my face, I remembered what it was like for me almost nine years ago when we first set sail from Florida and I decided to write to everyone who is at that point in their sailing adventure.  This morning I am writing to all of you who wonder if you have what it takes just to live aboard or do you wonder if offshore passages or even overnight passages are something you can handle or if you find yourself with an adventure in your heart a willingness to adapt and learn a new lifestyle (being just a smidgen crazy helps too).  If that's where you are right now I believe you are ready to throw off the dock lines and get the water moving under your kneel.

I find myself writing this to you over 1000 miles from the nearest land after sailing almost 8000 nautical miles in the past four months after living aboard and sailing the East Coast of the USA and the Caribbean for the past nine years.  I thought I might share my experiences, as a mom about what works for me and hasn't worked for me.

The only way to find out if living aboard works for you is just to do it.  You can read, read & read some more about what others say and what they do.  But the truth is that every boat is different and every family is different.  Some people hate electronics and think we are crazy to have an Xbox, Gameboys and iPads on board, others who sail heavy displacement boats scoff at my Captains ideas about ground tackle and jerry jugs and his obsession with keeping the boat light.  So for us, after many hours of reading, trials, and wasted money we have found what works best for us.  The only way you will ever find what works for you is to get out there (here) and do it.

One of our areas of struggle when we started is that I am not an organized soul, so chaos would be rampant aboard WD without our Captain.  Ok, if I could live in my fantasy world, it would be a perfectly organized one, but I could never make that happen.  Everything should have its place onboard, really it should, every single thing should have a storage spot where it always rests and that's what our Captain does for us.  The night we were motoring across the channel between Hawaii and Maui the fuel Racor filter started to sputter, he shut off the engine went right to the spot under Benny's bed where he KNEW the spares were, fixed the filter and we were underway in less than five minutes.  He is my Master of organization, Master of all drawers & storage.  Except for my closet, boys closet & Em's closet.  He even straightens up my costume locker.  (Yes, I have costumes...)

So do you have what it takes?  Are you willing to cast off the lines and head out?  I remember hearing Tofer's answer to my question.  "Bec, let's sail around the world with the kids before it's too late."  I am not sure if I even paused before I asked, "How do we make that happen?"  The excitement of Internet boat shopping consumed hours of our life for 2 years.  Of course I was always trying to push for a bigger vessel, while Tofer had his list of wants.  I had two things I needed, an indoor shower and the other one I have actually forgotten.  I have used the indoor shower a handful of times in 9 years.  I shower in the cockpit which is much easier for sure (I think cockpit showers are out for the stay in the Pacific Northwest).  So, before you buy your boat spend some time really thinking about what you need or think you need on board and remember, those things will change as you experience life on board.

So, to wrap this up, ten short years ago we lived on a prairie in Montana raising our babies in a huge farm house.  We all had "our" space.  Plenty of room to roam, to clean, to collect stuff in, plus three bathrooms!  I had everything a busy mom could want for her family of seven.  I also had a huge fear of the water and couldn't swim from one end of a pool to the other if I had to.  Yep, that's right, I moved aboard WD with my babies and with a fear of the water and lack of swimming ability.  What I did have was the spirit of adventure, the ability to adapt and the willingness to try something new.  With much prayer I moved  my young family onto WD.  It wasn't easy, everything was so stressful and difficult because of my fears.  Without the patience of Tofer and helpful spirits of other cruisers I am not sure how things would have turned out.

So here we are right in the middle of one of our longest passages ever.  I am proud to say, I can swim now and that my fear has turned into an awareness of the water and to make sure safety come first.  I know now that long passages are just about sailing, living, and enjoying where you are at that point.  Also, if I had been thrown into the seas we have sailed in over the last few months at the beginning it would have stopped my sailing dead in the water.  Pace yourselves, take it easy, don't push each other.   Make sure everyone aboard is comfortable with the up and coming passage.

On WD we have those who love to sail, those who love to travel, and those for whom it is now their whole lifestyle.  It takes all of us to make our home on WD work.  One of the things that helped me early on was that I chose to make WD our home.  In my mind she is not just a boat she is first our home.  It just happens that our Captain can make her move around the planet.

So do you have what it takes?  I can't answer that for you, all I can say is if you are longing for the sea under your kneel give it a go.  Start small, with a smart weather window and add to the difficulty as you become more comfortable and capable.  On WD we have an agreement that when one person is done sailing then as a family we look for the next adventure.  Family first, adventure second is our motto.

Wishing you the very best on whatever adventure you choose.  Becca"

A Sad Commentary On My Profession

Christine Outram. "Why I Left the Architecture Profession" 21 Oct 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 28 Jul 2014.

Dear architects,


You’re outdated. I know this because I once was one of you. But now I’ve moved on. I moved on because despite your love of a great curve, and your experimentation with form, you don’t understand people.


I correct myself. You don’t listen to people.



In legal terms, an architect is the all seeing, all knowing, building professional. You are liable for anything that goes wrong with a building but if someone just hates the spaces you design? If someone feels uncomfortable, or cold, or scared? Well there’s no lawsuit for that.


I used to think it was impossible for you to respond to an audience in the way that tech startups do. These startups can build a product, release it over the Internet and adjust it based on the feedback they get. It’s an iterative process. Architecture, I thought, was too permanent for that. There was too much at stake, there was only one chance to get it right, there were too many variables. Blah blah blah.


But the truth is, most of you don’t try. You rely on rules of thumb and pattern books, but you rarely do in-depth ethnographic research. You might sit at the building site for an hour and watch people “use space” but do you speak to them? Do you find out their motivations? Do your attempts really make their way into your design process?


The world is changing. You have all these new tools at your fingertips. New tools that I don’t see you using and quite a few old techniques that you could get a lot better at.


This really hit home for me when I read a recent article on the design of Starbucks stores. Now you might hate Starbucks. You might believe they are a soulless commercial entity with no architectural merit at all, but do you know what they are good at? Responding to people’s needs and desires.
The article reads:

Starbucks interviewed hundreds of coffee drinkers, seeking what it was that they wanted out of a coffee shop. The overwhelming consensus actually had nothing to do with coffee; what consumers sought was a place of relaxation, a place of belonging.

My dear architects. This is why Starbucks designed round tables in their stores. They were strategically created “in an effort to protect self-esteem for those coffee drinkers flying solo”. They were not round because the architect felt it looked better that way, they were not round because they were cheaper, they were round because as the article concludes“there are no empty seats at a round table”.

Starbucks interviewed hundreds of coffee drinkers before determining that round tables would be the best solution for people. Image Courtesy of Medium.com

The round tables at Starbucks were the result of asking the question how do we want people to feel before considering what do we want them to do. 
Form follows feeling.


Now I’m not saying that all architects are dumb in this regard. Residential architects are often quite successful when it comes to building livable spaces. And then there’s Gehl Architects. They’re particularly known and respected for their ethnographic techniques — though these days they seem to focus on master plans and urban regeneration and I don’t think they really do architecture. Do they? And even then, I would have to assume that these architects employ old school methods of observation with limited sample sizes.


You have not, it seems, embraced the opportunities that the Internet has given to us. Opportunities like: polling a vast number of people using online tools or modeling the likelihood that a retail space will actually get foot traffic. No one wants an empty row of shops. It makes for a sad neighborhood. You could use and develop tools that help you understand if this will happen. But you don’t.
And as for the rest of the profession. Let’s face it, most commercial buildings, hospitals, and police stations are underwhelming. And even when they are pleasing to the eye, it doesn’t mean they are built to address human needs: if you don’t believe me, read this New York Times’ review of Santiago Calatrava’s buildings.


No wonder architecture has become a niche vocation. You don’t connect with people any more.
The problem is that architects seem to pray at the feet of the latest hyped-up formal language. I dare you. Flip through an architectural magazine today. Find any people in the photographs? I didn’t think so. Find plenty of pictures that worship obscure angles and the place where two materials meet? You betcha.


Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the profession grew up while I wasn’t watching and started throwing more than a cursory glance to the people who would inhabit their buildings. But what really drives it home is that the majority of you never perform post occupancy evaluations! (That one I can’t get over).
So if I’m wrong, prove it. For now I remain humbly disappointed.




Christine Outram is a human-centered #smartcity and #bigdata strategist, music lover, and designer of the Copenhagen Wheel. She started her career practicing architecture and urban design in Australia. Since moving to the US, she’s been a research fellow at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, founded the think tank City Innovation Group, and is currently the Senior Inventionist at Deutsch LA.

Living Aboard

When we sold our house and moved aboard Terratima, we put everything we had that was not part of the house into storage.. We have made the decision that the boat is our home and everything in storage except for a few items with an emotional attatchment will go to an estate sale. What does not sell will go to charity or recycling. We miss nothing that has been in storage.  You too can live aboard.  Just lose your attatchment to things.