New SFO Terminal, Books, Music

We've been occupied, you see, with doing this and doing that.

Have a couple desktop images made for the titanium g4.

Matt would like you to know: "money hole."

The new SFO international terminal is amazing. It's vast, bright, quiet, and not all that shabby looking. Bamboo has been planted in the arrivals area and it shoots through the ceiling and up into the departures hall. The information displays are all LCDs, which is pretty typical these days, but what surprised me is that I didn't even notice. I entered the space, checked the time of the flight I was waiting for, and went about my business without ever thinking twice about the fact that I was looking at a thin piece of plastic instead of a bulky CRT. If LCD is this exciting, I cant wait to see LEP, light emitting plastics, that will once again revolutionize the way we interact with digital information. LEP will free information from the constraits of presentation devices. That is, anything constructed with LEP will (have the potential to) be a display.

This is similar to my experience with owning a video projector. With the ability to project an image onto basically any surface I started looking at things like the cardboard box that my computer shipped in completely differently. (How's that for awkward sentence structure?) The point is: when anything can be surface, everything is surface, and it forces you to look at things differently.

This is in contrast to a very grave lesson passed along by Matt of Black Belt Jones. An architecture prof asked a student to come to the board and draw a line. The student approached and started to draw out the sort of feathery line that's so typical in art schools, a sketchy line. "What are you doing?!" the prof exclaimed. "When you draw a line, draw it. There are no sketches in architecture, every line you draw is a wall that goes up, a worker who spends another hour, a project over budget..."

This has not left my mind. Every line you draw, every line of spec you write, every word you say in a meeting is going to mean one more chunk of work to do. The moral is simple and familiar, but it didn't click until I imagined a crew of bricklayers laying down a hundred tiny walls to reproduce the sketches of a negligent architect.

Tomorrow I leave for another 36 hour trip to New York. Saturday I will be attending my first ever fashion show with the likes of Katie and, potentially, Featuring Steve. Three things that I love about New York:

The way the World Trade Center casts shadows on itself
The noise
Mercer Kitchen

I'm excited about seeing the Gursky photos at the MOMA and the Visionaire retrospective at FIT. The more I get to know Gursky's work, the more it strikes me as an interesting parallel to Armin Linke's photographs. Perhaps it's just the idea of someone traveling the world with a camera that links them both. Perhaps I'm just jealous.

May I recommend that you read Mutations? Some of it is stuff you've heard before, and other parts are new and interesting. The book itself is beautiful, especially the statistics. It's sort of Zone 6 meets S,M,L,XL.

In parting I offer you this Music for robots: Braindance Coincidence & Discovery (ben's right that track 4 is the best, but the rest are good too).

--Posted 04/12/01 06:20PM