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Architecture of the human experience

How do you speak of your talent?

Stern's book also show a way to see one's talent. As Stern writes, it becomes clear that he is aware that he has world class talent; exceptional talent. I think most people either shy away from acknowledging this talent, if they have it; or go too far the other way and use their talent as a force to clear others out of their way.

Stern seems to have found the balance.
"The cantor of the temple was a man named Rubin Rinder. He was a very good cantor of the old school, and he loved music. One day there was some occasion when I played the violin in the temple. Cantor Rinder chanced to hear me and suddenly realized that he was hearing talent. He knew my family had no money for lessons: there was hardly any money then for us to live on. And so he spoke about me to a certain maiden lady." [p. 11]

The cantor was hearing talent. It's the perfect way for Stern to say that he blew the cantor away. It is also important that the statement comes in the stride of a the paragraph.Stern has achieved the perfect balance of pride in himself and the awareness that talent is a gift.

And so he is aware of it and neither abandons it nor use it to beat up others.

How do you view your talent?

How do you view your talent? What is the proper angle?

I like this quote I just read in Issac Stern's "My First 79 Years". Stern is speaking,
"I have another photograph of Mr. Pollack [one of Stern's first teachers], this one of him alone, dated 1930, on which these words appear over his signature: 'to my beloved pupil Isaac Stern - May he watch every day over the treasure nature has given him.' "

Your talent is given to you by nature.
Your talent is a treasure from nature to you, which you must vigilantly watch over every day- to protect it, to grow it.

A Better Modern in Philadelphia: Crate & Barrel's KOP Store.

Anchored at the far South West Corner of the King of Prussia Mall, Crate & Barrel's KOP location could be the nicest piece of modern architecture in Philadelphia.


It is easy to not consider a Crate & Barrel store as fine architecture. Especially this one since it floats amongst the cars of a [hiss] Mall [further hissing], but its form is abstract and dynamic while at the same time having a human scale that draws me in.


The second floor balcony immediately helps me understand the scale of this building and suggests that is it is a place for people. This is important. Many modern buildings fail to achieve an affect that allows me to understand how big they really are and how they fit my body. This building makes that all clear.


The interior quickly supports the impression that this is a building for people (I have more pictures of the interior but will save them for another post).


To return to the exterior, I find it hard to think of many other modern buildings in the Philadelphia area that are as well done as this one.

Pattern Text

We need to move from the meaning of a thing being in the signs on its surface to our experience of it...

From literary theory to experience.

From print to interactive.

From ideas flowing from account managers and creative directors to ideas moving from the entire team involved in the making of the thing.

From semiotics to the meaning in an experience.

So now I get to the title of this post. When I was 24 I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the meaning we get out of the experience of architecture. I had spent 4 years studying semiotics as part of the telecommunications and film major (technically a BA in Speech with an emphasis in TcF) that I was completing. To write the thesis I took many of the tools that I learned from the semioticians and pointed them at architecture - as if it were mass media. It resulted in this thought:

That experience - architecture or anything else - could be broken into a collection of patterns. Each pattern has a meaning within it. That meaning is the "pattern text".

Blogs are Essays, Dang It.

I deleted all of my posts so far in 2009. I had not taken the time to articulate my ideas clearly in those posts. This blog (the whole idea of blogs to be honest) keeps saying, "Hey! Go ahead and post your thoughts whatever they may be! It's the web! It's two point oh!!! It's OK that they are only half baked!"

But it's not.

A blog is an essay.

Just as homeowners who find a designer on Craigslist still expect the services of a professional architect even though they aren't willing to pay for one, so do I expect a fully tuned essay from a blog.

Contemporary Furniture in Mt Airy, Philadelphia.

I lucked into some very nice modern furniture in Philadelphia today at the 2nd Annual Mount Airy furniture show. Held for only 3 days at the Sedgwick Theater (a surreal space) the show held work by several Philadelphia furniture designers working in a variety of styles. After meeting with the affable Charles Todd at the door who gave me an overview of the show, I made the rounds. Wren and Cooper's work was the highlight for me.

Mariah Wren and Mark Cooper with their work.

Driven by Mariah Wren with Mark Cooper helping to put the wheels under the effort, their contemporary furniture features elegant hand screened fabrics on wood frames cut to delicate modern lines.

Their work also covers accessories.

The Center City Lounge Chair W/ Ottoman.

Modern furniture design in Philadelphia has a good future Wren and Cooper's work is any indication.

Need: To see the whole and its boundaries

A Basic Need: People need to see something in its entirety. The need to see its extents and what fills those boundaries in one motion.
In Architecture: People be able to take in the entirety of a facade at one time.

For example: with a large building on a narrow street it may be kind to break the building into multiple facades so that it can be taken in in steps.

"A large building in a narrow street tends to be overwhelming, and it can never be seen as a whole. The solution adopted by the architect of 28 rue des Saints Peres in Paris was to divide his design into five narrow, distinct sections, held together compositionally by horizontal lines and a consistent formal vocabulary."

From P. 127 of Jean-Francois Gabriel's "Classical Architecture for the Twenty-First Century"

Architecture Theory

It is not enough to make architecture that is about ideas.

There are not enough ideas about architecture.

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We are stuck. The status quo is choking us: architecture as literature.

No water is getting to the roots.


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