My daily traffic tripled in two hours this morning; I checked my email and discovered that my submission to the CSS Zen Garden was accepted as an official design. Welcome to all visiting from the Garden!
I just posted images and text to my architecture portfolio. This was the last portfolio section I wanted to complete for now, and the most involved.
I don’t think I edited down the images quite enough, but believe me, there were many more I wanted to include. Let me know what you think, and if there are things I wrote that don’t make any sense at all. It’s tough to condense a semester-long project into a couple paragraphs that people can understand easily.
Is the first blog milestone having the number of comments surpass the number of entries?
ShaunInman.com // Commentary // Pirated for Breakfast
On the recent proliferation of pirated sites:
Compare the two images. One is the original, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin house in Buffalo. The other is an anonymous prairie-style rambler, also in Buffalo.
The copy has many of the same features as the original - low hipped roof, brick, one-level, etc. But it is not being preserved at a cost of $17 $23 million. It is only one of many knockoffs (50 years later) of Wright’s masterpiece.
We can’t copyright things like a low roof. It is too general. People will adapt and copy past elements or designs - to suggest otherwise is to adopt the arrogant attitude that we can truly design something completely original. We can’t. Even Wright drew on inspiration from many sources for his “original”.
Why does this matter? There are good designers and bad designers. Designers who rip off websites are bad designers, or still learning. If they are making money off of the process, it is despicable.
But the knockoff is never as good.
The problem is: the knockoffs, oftentimes, give the original a bad name. There are many who cannot appreciate Wright because they hate the blandness of the type of house photographed above. There are people who can’t appreciate Mies van der Rohe because of the proliferation of crappy functionalist boxes of the 50s and 60s.
What will the result be with web design? We can only wait to find out. Will Shaun Inman get a bad name because of vodkaforbreakfast.com?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Maybe this is why fashion moves in cycles. Original idea –> mass acceptance –> mass bad copying –> mass public hatred –> ignorance or disuse –> rediscovery.
Drop shadows, anyone?
Looking at these two pictures, you’d think the one on the bottom would be Mozilla, or another browser that supported .png transparency, and you’d assume the one on the top, with no transparency, was Internet Explorer, which, despite being reincarnated to version 6 years after .png became a standard image format, chose not to support it.
For the unitiated, a .png image allows you to set transparency of, say 75%, and shows, dimmed, what is underneath the image. .gif images and .jpg images do not allow this opacity change, seriously inhibiting what we can do with the web.
So, the University at Buffalo is using a proprietary Microsoft property to allow for transparency on their menus, while not allowing browsers such as Mozilla to see this transparency, despite the code and implementation being much easier.
See my recent submission to the CSS Zen Garden for another example of .png transparency in action (but it won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer…)
I cite this as just one example among many that leads to a common perception among the public that Internet Explorer is a better browser, because “stuff looks better in Internet Explorer.” In reality, IE is broken, but designers, such as the well-meaning folks at UB, choose to design specifically for Internet Explorer and leave users of other (better) browsers out in the cold.
We’re finally doing our taxes for 2003. The problem is we didn’t sit down once during all of 2003 to keep track of what we earned and spent. So we have the techno cranked and are tearing our collective hair out trying to find receipts and check copies. We play a lot of weddings, together and separately, and trying to track them all on top of the rest of our lives proves difficult every year.
The positive note is that I looked at last year’s return and the total we have paid this year in tax, and actually looks like we may get a bit of a refund.
“Where was that wedding?” “I don’t remember” “Look at the contract” “It’s not in the contract”…
Thank God for Mapquest driving directions (mileage is a nice deduction…) and online directory assistance (for the locations of various churches around Buffalo).
We’re on September now. Making progress.
This helpful message spotted at my unnamed web host (though if you squint you can probably make it out) when three of my sites, including this one, were down this morning for several hours.
I wish I could schedule my emergencies.
The exhibit is done. It opened last night, with important people from all over…the response seemed to be good. It will be up for another three weeks, and I can catch up with the rest of my life. Here are some shots of the shelves I built for the exhibit:
The brackets are welded steel, the shelves are 1/2″ oak plywood, and the pieces around the books are also steel, set into a routed groove. I’m off to Erie for Autumn’s concert (Erie Philharmonic, Brahms Requiem, she is sitting principal second for this concert…)
You only show your own narrowness when you elect to hate something because it doesn’t fit your definition of “art” or “architecture.” I just found this site ranting against “hated architecture.” Among the lucky recipients of this award are the Getty Center in LA, the Experience Music Project in Seattle (Gehry) and Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library (an amazing project, in my opinion). Some ranting about the human scale and context I guess. If these folks had their way, everything we build would have columns and be marble or brick, and the heck with an architect’s self-expression or right to be an artist. You don’t have to use the building, you don’t have to like the building, but don’t try to tell me it should be dismantled and sold for scrap metal simply because it doesn’t “fit in the city.” For the love of Imhotep, the city is a conglomeration. It is an organic entity. It doesn’t, and shouldn’t have a master plan guiding everything that is built. I have news for you - you don’t fit in the city. Your shoes are all wrong.
To be fair, they also decry Wal-Mart and developer houses, which contrary to the other works they are maligning, are not designed, are not created with a concept other than profit, and are stamped by architects who choose to sell themselves to the lowest bidder on the street corner. I applaud them for that, but can we differentiate between art you don’t care for personally and crap?
I guess I’m saying that architects are artists. We are not just builders. We are in this for self-expression, much like painters, musicians, or sculptors. We also have to satisfy clients, which the aforementioned projects do (Seattle is very happy with Koolhaas, from what I hear). What makes cities exciting is that people choose to break the mold and do something different.
I’m not saying every building should be something like Koolhaas’s library, but certainly a city as diverse and exciting as Seattle can have a few buildings that stand out from their context.
Go move to Celebration, Architecture Hate Page People.
Ok, so does the royal “we” in my page text make me sound more like a company, and more employable and professional, or is it just pretentious?
Discuss.