I got back from NYC last night - that city will always be my true home. More on that later.

I did see the waterfalls - hard to love these things, as they’re so far away that their scale works against them. They just sit out on the horizon and seem small compared to the major landmarks nearby. Driving on the FDR gives the only decent view of the largest one, the one off the Brooklyn bridge - and even then it’s somehow underwhelming. The Brooklyn bridge holds more than its own, and its hard to be impressed by a line of water falling from the bridge deck.

To make up for it, a friend sent me this series of drawings about two kids obsessed with the NYC subway.

As an adult obsessed with subways, I loved it.

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I watched a great episode of PBS’s Nova the other night about the design of the Parthenon. Heard lots of surprises of interest to designers and creators. It’s another example of how many innovations from history we take for granted without even understanding what they are.

What’s also amazing is how many different uses the building has had over 2500 years. It was a temple for Athena, a Christian church, a mosque, and an ammunition depot. It was bombed in several different wars, was stripped of marble and artwork by both the Turks and the British, and was seriously damaged by the first attempts to restore it in the 1890s.

• They cheated on symmetry. Their understanding of aesthetics was so good they realized at the scale of the building several non-symetrical elements had to be added to make it look symmetrical. The middle section of the ground level is curved, and is six inches higher than the sides. Also the columns are tapered and few elements actually use the golden ratio.
• We can’t replicate their quality of work. A $100 million renovation project is underway to repair 2000 years of damage, but they’re struggling to replicate the precision of craftsmanship. What took the Greeks ~9 years to build has already taken more than 30 years to repair, and is not finished yet. Without a computer or electric power, the Greeks had many clever innovations that were lost and are being rediscovered.

You can watch the video online and I highly recommend it if you’re into design history, architecture as technology, and the history of innovation.

Posted in Design, architecture (real), history | 3 Comments »

Rather than torture y’all with my first foray into liveblogging, I’m writing live comments, insights, and brlliant notes on each and every session.

Check it out here: Ideaconference blog.

Tags: idea2006

Posted in Design, On Tour, Web 2.0 / social software, architecture (real) | No Comments »

Slate has a nice slide show by the famed architecture critic Witold_Rybczynski about major works of architecture that were big failures. It’s a good runthrough of some large scale works, with Cliff’s notes like commentary from Rybczynski on where things went wrong.

I don’t agree with his opinions on some (I’ve been to half of them): EMP is ugly, but still breathtaking. The Montreal stadium is a functional failure, but has amazing aesthetics, and the Getty museum rocks a free escape from the USA, a magic otherworldly garden up on a huge hill, looking down on LA.

I wonder what a slide show of greatest software duds might include? And what would we say about each one?

Posted in Design, architecture (real) | 2 Comments »

There’s a great little article on Metropolis all about the design and architecture of the Google campus.

The authors of Peopleware and Joel Spolsky have long written about the importance of workspaces in productivity and human performance, but there’s no better example of a major company investing in environment. I know many small companies that do it right, but it seems once they hit the 200 or 500 person mark, many of those perks go out the window (har har).

I’ve been to the Google campus a few times - it’s the creative spaces and strong use of color that charmed me. The ceilings are high. The spaces are non rectilinear. And I never had the quick sense of repetition that dominates most offices everywhere (Office, office, office, hall. Office, office, office, hall) Even the training and lecture rooms have character and dimensions that generate some kind of response.

At the right of the essay is an index of photos, giving a great sense of their approach to office design. Not for everybody, but sure gets you thinking about your environment.

Note: For those old enough to remember, the Google buildings were originally the home of SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) The first time I was on campus I kept thinking I’d been there before and eventually figured out why.

Posted in Design, Management, architecture (real) | 2 Comments »

As part of the GEL 2006 conference I ran an architectural tour through NYC, focusing on sacred places. What’s a sacred place? Well, I left that up to the people on the tour. Half of the stops had some religious affiliation, but the other half were secular (A park, a train station and a square). Since the goal of the tour was to explore these powerful places as designers, I wanted a wide definition for what a sacred place is.

Questions we asked:

• What feelings did the architects want people to have when inside? When entering? When leaving?
• How does the design achieve those effects?
• What is the visual focal point of the space? How is it supported?
• How are rhythm and symmetry used?
• What senses are activated by how the space is designed?
• What are the sacred places in your home? How do you use and honor them?

In my studies of architecture, especially sacred architecture, I realized that churches, shrines, and temples are all designed by people. There are no blueprints, and few descriptions, for them in most bibles or holy texts - so what you see in them is an expression of design imagination and talent, as much as anything else. I’m confident that most people can appreciate these buildings and designs in a non-religious way, if they choose to.

Where we went

We only had half a day, and NYC has several hundred sacred places. Here’s the list of stops we made:

1. St Vincent Ferrer
2. Christ Church
3. Central Park
4. Strawberry Fields
5. Times Square
6. Grand Central Station
7. Central Synagogue
8. St. Thomas Church
9. St Patrick’s Cathedral

We also took time for a few impromtu stops at interesting buildings on Park Avenue, W44th and elsewhere. There are so many interesting buildings and I wanted to make some side stops along the way based on what the people in the group seemed interested in.

Sacred brouchures and paying attention

To help set the mood and get people’s attention, I worked with designer Jill Stutzman (my wife) to design a brochure for the tour. We made something simple, functional, but that presented itself as a sacred thing. We wrapped it in vellum, and sealed it with wax: two things that signify a gift or something personal that should be handled carefully.

But we didn’t want to go too far: after all this handout was supposed to support them on the tour, and it should feel ok to put it in a back pocket (note the 3.5″ width) or write some notes on the inside. One trap all designers can fall into is making things too pretty, which can kill the comfort level people have with actually using the thing for its intended purpose.

What we did

I confess that I hate guided tours. They treat you like children, lecture you to death, and bury the pleasure of discovery and learning under the weight of itinerary. I think anti-tour tours are the best possible experience. And since this was a group of designers, people who know how to look at things, I planned to provide some context, teach a few architectural concepts, but mostly get out of their way and maximize people’s time exploring on their own.

The brochure gave background info on each place for those than wanted it, and I pointed cool things to look for and brief explanations of architectural theory (positive/negative space, form, flow, etc.) to round the experience out.

Tour design challenges

To get all meta on you, I found the challenge of tour design echoed all the common issues designers face: tradeoffs, compromises, logistics. The challenges of moving 16 people around NYC forced me to concentrate the locations we picked.

I had to dry-run each location and make sure they were open (churches have services, receptions, etc.) and, in the case of secular places, had spots suitable for a large group to stop and talk together (see photo).

If you look at the map above we hovered around midtown. I had wanted to hit more contrasts, and visit a Mosque (The Islamic center at Lex/96th is awesome), a Synagogue, and a Buddhist temple, but the most interesting buildings were too far apart to fit a half day.

Then there was the question of lunch: turns out there is a pizza place built out of an old church near the Village, but that would have meant another cab or subway trip, costing us valuable time. Instead we chose the relatively ordinary City Pie on 72nd.

I found it much more fun to talk and look at design you can step inside - it’s a more powerful way to explore design concepts than the flat 2d screens software and website provide.

If things work out for GEL ‘07 and I do the tour again, I’m sure I’ll try another combination of places. Like all designed things there’s always another, hopefully better way, to make things work.

(Thanks to Kevin Fox and Kareem Mayan for the photos)

Posted in Design, architecture (real) | 5 Comments »

As part of the Gothamist empire of city blogs, Seattlest covers all that’s happening in the greater Seattle area. I’m psyched to report I’ll be writing short pieces for them on local design and architecture.

First up: the amazing Skyspace, one of Seattle’s hidden gems.

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I’ve been to tons of conferences and often left disapointed. They’re often so similiar and despite the high prices, make it hard to have a good, interesting time. Design or experience related events are often more disapointing: they fail to make the conference itself a well designed experience for attendies.

With that in mind I strongly recommend GEL 2006. It’s a small two day conference focused on good experiences and how to make them. The speakers are diverse and the day is paced well and highly interactive. I attended in 2003, the first year, and have been trying to get back ever since.

You can read all about last year’s conference and see how diverse and interesting the pool of speakers and sessions are.

GEL 2006: Thu & Fri May 4-5th 2006. 2006 Speaker list.

The conference rates are heavily discounted until Dec: 12th. For both days it’s $900 now, $1200 after Dec. 13, and $1500 on April 1st 2006.

In related news: I’ve been lobbying Mark Hurst, the conference organizer, to let me speak there for years - and have failed every time :) But this year I finally got somewhere - Day one of the event is a set of tours of user experiences in NYC. I’ll be running one called The experience of sacred places. We’ll be roaming around Manhattan breaking down how churches, temples, parks and other special places are designed to have the effects they do.

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