official Inaugural volume- Monday Feb 8

image by gvain johns

Atlanta Neighborhood Survey

I am currently in my 8^th year of living in Atlanta, and I thought I knew the city pretty well. I went to college at Emory, lived in Druid Hills, read Creative Loafing, attended openings at Beep Beep, bought all my presents at Young Blood and never, ever drank Pepsi. Yes, I knew all there was to know about Atlanta. Then my boyfriend decided he might buy a house, and I decided to help him look.

I had no idea. For example, did you know that there are things on the west side of 75/85? Other than Georgia Tech? And to the south – there’s like a whole other city down there! A laundry list of neighborhoods I had never heard of, let alone been to.  In theory, I understood that there were things outside the snug comfort of my lower northeast enclave, but I never really considered it. Now I have begun to wonder – what are people up to over there? How can I have no clue what 3/4^ths of Atlanta is like and still be a good Atlanta citizen, let alone a good Atlanta architect?

This will be a regularly occurring column where I take the opportunity to educate myself and anyone else who might be interested on Atlanta neighborhoods that I don’t already know about. Which is apparently a lot. Every other week I will investigate and profile a different Atlanta neighborhood. Midtown will not be one of them. Or will it?

Next issue: Vine City

remarks on colors : grey

The quintessence of neutrality, GREY can represent either mediocrity or moderation.  Serenely lodged dead center on the color wheel, and falling midway on the value scale from black to white, grey can sometimes appear to occupy no position at all.

In our observations of the sky, dark clouds and light mists form the nebulous limits of grey.  Dawn and twilight each describe a fleeting passage.  But a grey day can seem an eternal limbo.  Grey weather can feel tedious and dull compared to the uncanny brilliance of snow and ice or the crackling drama of a summer thunderstorm.  Depending upon temperament and circumstances, the asylum of grey will either soothe or irritate our anxious souls.

Despite our best efforts with henna and hydrogen peroxide, the effects of aging on human hair has not escaped notice.  Enough at least for grey to be associated in popular culture with the geriatric set — from éminence grise to the Gray Panthers.  Since those of advancing years are generally held to take fewer risks, and since the color itself hews to a middle ground, grey has also come to be affiliated with bureaucracy and bourgeois conservatism — from “The Gray Lady”, hoary moniker for The New York Times, to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a fifties novel about an average businessman in postwar America.

Read the rest of this entry »

faces | voices | merica may

voice heard here | http://www.vimeo.com/graymatters

merica may | ballet dancer 2007

merica may in seattle 2009

painting by jenny saville

section of a lotus seed pod, variation and repitition

V-day: gloATL Mall Performance

Flux Projects is sponsoring Lauri Stallings and her gloATL troupe of dancers and multimedia artists for three performances of “Bloom,” a new site-specific performance at Lenox Square mall over Valentine’s weekend. gloATL will be joined by spoken word artist and hip-hop producer Big Rube, as well as Tom Sherwood and Brad Ritchie, musicians include both the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Sonic Generator.

Go see innovative dance in one of architecture’s greatest conundrums. Let the love story begin.

SOM Burj Dubai

A few weeks ago, the SOM designed Burj Khalifa (formerly called the Burj Dubai) opened. A few stats and thoughts about the tallest building in the world below.

I have to admit, that as an architecture student, I have been keeping my eye on this project for some time now. Even before I saw the construction documents and projections, just the idea of a building soaring a half mile into the air, observatories from 124 stories up, seemed fascinating.

A few statistics:
Total Height- 2,717 ft.
Building Cost- $1.5 billion USD
Complex Cost (Downtown Dubai)- $20 billion
Floor Count- 160

The statistics keep going, too: the Armani Hotel, located about midway in the structure, was selling for $3500 per square foot. The construction employed people from over 100 countries. Even with the custom made robots that assist in window washing, it will take 36 window washers 3 full months to clean the outside of the building. And on… and on…
As the LA Times noted, however, the Burj Khalifa is “the latest… in [a] string of architectural vacancy.” What does the building really represent? If one looks at the development of Dubai, you would see that there literally was nothing there. It was a desert. Now the oil kings in Dubai have turned it into what surely will become an empty Disneyland, an image of a bank account that once was impressive, but now has been deflated. The money ran out, and so did the glamour of Dubai. What was meant to be a tourism spot is a nightmare to navigate, as a friend of mine from Bahrain says. He said from two miles out of the city, the cabbies were begging him not to ask for a ride to downtown, because they knew that the already terrible traffic was going to be so bad coming both in and out of the city, that his would probably be the only fare that the cabbie would get that night. The scarier question: what is going to happen to all that glass and steel in Dubai?

Hotkeys in Rhino

Tired of typing? Then you need to set up hotkeys in Rhino. Its super easy. First go to file, properties, then keyboard. You can create a personal hotkey for each of the keys listed. For example here I have F1 set as polyline, F2 as copy, F3 as rotate, etc..  Notice that you have to add a “!_” before the usual string you type into the command line. Hotkeys follow your COA user profile- working on every computer after you set them up.  Setting up hotkeys will help you work much quicker, especially if you are doing a set of repetitive commands.

Check back in 2 weeks to see some of the tricks I’ve learned for making GIS topo lines ready for drawing and laser cutting.