arkitrave log

arkitrave :: log

1/29/2005

People who live in glass houses…

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philip johnson's glass house, new canaan, connecticut

Goodbye, Philip Johnson.

He was a man I would love to have met, someone who not only was on the cutting edge of architecture for longer than many of us get to be on this earth, but who was also a fascinating human being, one with a deep understanding of the human condition, an amazing candor about the profession of architecture, and an appreciation of students and young architects as the future of the field.

He was born in 1906, just a few years after Frank Lloyd Wright built the Martin House complex and just near the end of the Victorian period of American architecture. He died on the 26th of January, at the age of 98.

Architectural Record article
The Late, Great, and Colorful Philip Johnson
Still the Bad Boy, Philip Johnson Looks Ahead at Age 95

And, an alternate viewpoint from Slate:
Lived in Glass Houses, Threw Stones

In response to the article at Slate, which essentially bemoans the wandering of Johnson into the terrain of Postmodernism, I have a few things to say.

I respect Johnson a great deal for his willingness to change and find the new. If art does not stay active and progressive, it stagnates, and Johnson realized this. The criticism from Slate that “in less capable hands, Postmodernism quickly degenerated into a facile and repetitive pastiche of old and new,” is certainly true; but this does not invalidate the work of those who were capable. For example, the American saltbox has been ripped off by developers in countless banal suburban tracts, but this does not take away from the power of the real thing anchored on the New England coast.

Johnson valued change. He valued the young. And while Postmodernism was not the greatest thing that ever happened to architecture, it probably needed to happen and was inevitable, and Johnson was fortunate to have lived long enough to see the next generation of architects after postmodernists such as Graves and Stern. He supported such young architects as Rem Koolhaas, for example. Koolhaas is one of the greatest architectural minds of our time, and his Seattle Public Library is the best building built since Bilbao, in my opinion. You must go. It is truly a stunning space.

Yes, valuing change is inherently risky. But it is only in this risk that exciting art occurs. Thanks, Philip Johnson, for continually pushing architecture forward and embracing change. The built environment is better for it. You knew you were not as good as Mies or Corbusier, but you found your strengths and capitalized on them, and in the process won the respect and friendship of much of the architectural world. You used the capital you earned to support and advance others who you believed in, and many owe their success to your faith in their abilities and ideas.

As much as you hated the idea of your mantle passing onto others, I truly hope that there will be those in the profession who will be as passionate as you were in embracing the young and supporting my generation as we seek to take architecture to a new place in the next thirty (or sixty, if we’re as fortunate as you were) years of our careers.

1/25/2005

Late-night mySQL fun

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Installing mySQL on Mac OS X is not the easy, quick process I thought it would be. In fact, I told my wife I’d be in bed by midnight, and here it is, nearly 3:00 am, and I am just finishing.

I’ve had a local Apache server installed for quite some time, and I use it for development on my 2-computer wireless network. I just decided tonight that I wanted to have database capability as well, as I’m working on developing a proposal for a potential client that uses some PHP/mySQL funtionality.

Suffice it to say that the latest release of mySQL (4.1) is not friendly to Mac OS 10.3, and I didn’t find this out until after I had installed it.

After two hours of Terminal/bash shell bliss, I’m happy to report that I obliterated the renegade version 4.1, killed all the affiliated processes, used sudo commands more times than I can count, and installed an older version, 4.0.23, which works splendidly. I already have a database and a WordPress install working, and I’m looking forward to being able to develop backend stuff locally.

1/22/2005

[01.2005]

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arkitrave rebrands its website for Buffalo Covenant Church. Changes are color and minor typography, bringing the look of the site in line with the look of the building and preparing for a print and banner campaign. Find out more.

[08.2004]

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arkitrave completes a new website for Nepo Strategies Group, a web and IT marketing firm in Buffalo. The site showcases Nepo’s work in a broad range of IT marketing projects. Read more.

[06.2004]

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Our first project as a strategic partner of Nepo Strategies is The Creekside Banquet Facility, a small site for a local wedding and business venue. The new site puts them ahead of their competition with an easy-to-navigate site and a sleek graphic treatment. Read more.

[05.2004]

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arkitrave announces its new partnership with Nepo Strategies, a subsidiary of Noein, Inc.. Our work will include graphic and web design for Nepo’s growing base of business clients. Noein was responsible for the e-commerce site of Dave’s Christmas World, and their application server handled some of the highest traffic on the web during the Christmas season. We are excited about this partnership, and look forward to creating usable, attractive front end design for an excellent programming and technical team.

[3.2004]

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We submitted a design to the CSS Zen Garden, a gallery exhibiting the potential and beauty of CSS-based web design, and the winner of “Best Developer’s Resource” at this year’s SXSW convention in Austin. Our work was selected as one of the “official” designs in the gallery. Check out the entry, named “tulipe”.

[1.2004]

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arkitrave recently completed a new site for the National Park Service of the US Department of the Interior. The Niagara Heritage Area Study will examine the area around Niagara Falls and determine whether to designate it as a National Heritage Area. Find out more.

1/15/2005

Wordpress or Bust

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This blog is now powered by Wordpress. I have been talking about making the move for nine months, but time has not permitted it. Finally, the difficulty of cleaning out comment spam, the slow speed of rebuilds, and my preference for PHP over Perl have all led me to make the switch. Not to mention the cost issue—I can’t afford Ben and Mena’s new pricing structure, and I don’t want to keep using an old version of a product just because it’s free.

I’ve been using Wordpress on my thesis blog and my new daughter Naia’s photo blog.

There are a few bugs to be worked out, I’m sure, but I have categorized all my old entries and done the CSS template work. I’m excited to work with Wordpress as I move forward with this site.