GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Month: October 2012

  • A quiet dinner

    Just had a quiet dinner with my girlfriend at home tonight. We had some random music in the background and were just drinking some soup and eating a steamed bun. The dining table as usual was a mess. The ceiling fan was running. The rabbits were hanging out in their cage. Nothing special.

    It was just one of those quiet moments where you might find a director lingering a bit too long in some artsy indie flick. But somehow, like in many of those such films, the quiet moments are the memorable moments. Something strangely rich about something mundane happening. Even though all the quiet moments blend together over time, the add up to something more than another dinner at a fancy restaurant.

  • Where the architecture don’t matter

    One of my fondest memories in Berkeley was at a party hanging out with a bunch of artists. The building was utterly non-descript, but the crowd was great fun. Maybe because we all knew each other, maybe because they were a bunch of free spirits, almost certainly the autumn weather played a part, but in the middle of the event a group of us coalesced and started dancing around the fire pit, playacting random mundane activities like mowing the lawn, cutting vegetables, etc, etc.

    It was a night all about the crowd and the mood. It could have been almost any old apartment complex, but without the fire pit that moment would have never come.

  • Home and car….from three years ago!

    DSC_6806

    Maybe I posted this three years ago…maybe I didn’t. And maybe I wrote up a couple posts earlier this week that I can’t find now. Well digging around my draft box, I found this post which apparently never got published…so does that balance things out?

    It was pretty deflating to lose a couple posts. But then again, I’m not writing long form essays here! The thoughts will come back if they are any good. And if don’t come back to mind, then y’all missed out on nothing. After three weeks at this I suspect that if this blog continues for an extended period, it will be have a core group of ideas that will be repeated and repackaged and reworded and revisited again and again.

    By the way 2009 feels like yesterday, how on earth did it get to be 2012 already!?!

  • Some things ain’t worth fighting

    We just sold one of our coffee tables, thus freeing up our other coffee table that had been sitting on the original coffee table. We’ve had it for a while, it used to hide in the bedroom of our old apartment, but now it sits in the bunnies’ living room.

    So as soon we let them out, Peppercorn came out to inspect the “new” table. Of course the full process includes a few nips a the new piece of furniture. I feel bad for the table, but what can you do?

  • Stillness

    Stillness is something that is easily missed in this society. Honestly, I’m not too good at it – I’m so easily distracted I’ve lost interest in devoting an hour and a half to watch even simple action movies.

    The shame of quiet architecture of some renown is that they usually attract tourists who don’t have much time to soak in the stillness.

  • Does sustainability have anything to do with saving the earth?

    I mean it is supposedly all about sustaining this planet. But I just wonder. I think sustainability is about the feeling that you are doing something to save the earth.

    I know that’s why the projects we’re working on have a green certification. I suspect deep down inside the powers that be don’t give a flying bleep about saving the earth. But they do know their future tenants like the idea of living in a place that supposedly was built according to ways that may have helped prevent some harm planet.

    So now, its not about doing anything per se, but checking that box.

  • Hard and soft

    In Chinese martial arts the different styles are categorized as hard to soft (external to internal). So something like Shaolin Kung Fu would be hard while Tai Chi would be soft. In the end any martial practice will encompass both ends, but the path getting there is different. This as come to the fore in my experience as I started taking Kung Fu classes after studying Tai Chi for the past year and a half.

    I was wondering if there was an analog in architecture, the hard and soft arts meeting towards the same goal. Unfortunately I doubt it. Martial arts have the benefit of aiming towards one ultimate goal, physically beating your enemy into submission. Architecture doesn’t seem to have nearly this singleness in focus. Unlike what they try to drill into your mind in school, this stuff isn’t life nor death…well technically it is, but lets leave the IBC out of it.

  • Five Worker’s Morris, Justus Pang, 2012

    This is an abstract game with two boards. The Action Board is a 2 by 2 square grid with four action spaces (Place (x2), Move, Remove). The Network Board is also a 2 by 2 square grid with the pieces are placed on the 9 vertices of the grid.

    Each player has five workers to take actions and/or place on the network board. Each turn a player has two actions per turn (except for the first player who only has one action on their first turn). To take an action a player takes one of their workers from their supply and places it in an empty space on the Action Board and resolve the action accordingly. Instead of taking an action they may they may pass and must remove one of their workers from the Action Board (if they have any).

    The three types of action on the Action Boards are:
    Place one of the activating workers in the Network Board. Take the worker from either the General Supply or the “Place” Space just activated.
    Move either player’s worker on the Network Board to an adjacent vertice or move either player’s worker on the Action Board to an adjacent space (do not activate the action under the moved worker).
    Remove either player’s worker from either the Network Board or the Action Board. That worker is returned to the player’s general supply.

    The game ends immediately when a player has three workers in a row on the Network Board.

  • On Shopping and Design

    One of my favorite hobbies is boardgaming. And actually since I don’t get to play boardgames too much, its actually shopping for boardgames. Its easy to forget that imagining yourself in a situation playing with this or that boardgame is not actually playing the boardgame in real life. This is a minor issue for a hobby, if I’m getting entertainment one way or the other its really not big deal.

    But in design that is a problem. Not so much in the professional world, but it was the one piece of valuable education I got from my time in graduate school. For all the benefits of the rigorous program in Berkeley, there was a tendency to allow students to wallow in conceptual design. My first couple professors at Rice, David Guthrie and Doug Oliver, taught me to get past that phase. Shopping for the right idea to jumpstart your design is a necessary task, but after that comes the hard part of design. Its easy to be stuck in the world of ideas, but there is so much more to be done if you just drill down a little more.

  • Practice!

    Last year I started taking Tai Chi classes at a local school. It was a long process of learning and training the body. Through the process I slowly learned the traditional Yang-style long form over the course of a year. Aside from the long term health benefits which I hope to reap if I continue to practice, I think the most valuable lesson was learning how regular repetition of a simple task can pay off over time. During this process I had to have faith that my daily stumblings would pay off. I had to have faith in very small incremental improvements over a long period of time.

    For better or worse, our American educational system, especially in architecture, is on a project by project basis. Its a lot more exciting than doing rote repetition, but I think it makes you sometimes forget the long term value of mundane practice – maybe that’s why so many of us bail out so soon after entering the practice of professional architecture.