Months after listening I am still thinking about this interview with Kenneth Frampton. I’ve never heard him mention disability, but I think like it contains all the pieces needed to move from an architecture that merely comes from blindness to a politicized blind architecture.

This week’s notes on the conceptual framwork for the house

Charlotte’s two drawings for a house at Perkins. Still some guts and service missing and some changes coming but we are very feeling a lot of excitement and momentum, which is great. So appreciate her as a collaborator :-)

A floor plan of the house at Perkins. It has a straight interior hallway that leads past a guest bedroom, studio, kitchen, living space, and bathroom. Throughout the house are different types of windows that filter light and sound. A diagram overlaid on the plan showing the sound of the dam and the sun.

Two exterior wall sections for a house near Perkins

Two wall sections. Not sure how to describe them, maybe this descriptoin of the overall house will help: To design the house, we created the following “kit-of-parts.” It may be useful to think of the house in two categories of elements: First, the normal enclosure, which keep a New England house warm, dry, airtight, and durable. And second are what can broadly be called “sensory aperture elements” or things that selectively let in sound, filtered light, vibration, weather information, and external presence. These apertures effectively produce a “listening house” which can be tuned by the inhabitant.

Quick diagram of metric (top) vs. imperial (bottom) standard architectural scales. Was interested in understanding how these scales are determined in order to develop an architectural scale set for tactile plans, which in my experience need to be much bigger to be legible with the same level of detail.

Two white rendered chairs are being scaled down in metric and imperial units, showing the different stopping points these "standard" scales use.

Old drawing from 2016, and some notes on it

This is an old drawing I did called "Bird Town" which is basicallly a chaotic town with a lot of birds. For your sanity and mine I'm not going to describe all of it. It's a very complex image. But suffice to say, it is a very compplicated image with a lot of birds doing a lot of different things. Detail from the image which depicts a bird and a balloon and lots of lines that are hard to understand. They read kind of like marks on a page more than drawings of anything in particular when you are this zoomed inThis is another detail shot and shows some of the birds on the ground

And then also connecting to artists like SOPHIE, (if you’re not familiar, a trans artist who used a synthetic hyper edited voice with great expressive range.) Link1, Link2, Link3

I’m still so obsessed with the synthetic speech and gregorian chant in Toshi Ishiyanagi’s Music for Living Space, and its implications for the artful use of screen readers and synthetic speech.

A list of a few things that I’ve been interested in recently.

  • Met Marco Salsiccia and found his BlindSVG generator and lots of other cool materials on his website
  • Andrew Stone showed me KnowHow Shop’s ceramics studio for the blind ceramicist Don Katz, which used 1:1 prototypes of construction details as the primary design method
  • In that vein, I enjoyed Abraham Cruz Villegas Art21 short on Autoconstrucción, a direct construction practice based on self-built architecture in Mexico City
  • One of my favorite artists, Lenka Clayton, was in the recent Human Nature episode of Art21
  • Have been designing wall sections for the hosue at Perkins, and thus revisiting Andrea Deplazes
  • Some of the work of Rael San Fratello has some tactile interest
  • Have loved picking through the reading list on Life, Nature, Time, Community & Happiness at the end of Samin Nosrat’s cookbook Good Things, and oppositely, have just started Misery Meals
  • A conversation with Lavendar Darcangelo has me revisiting plain language, and thinking about the tension in Crip Authorship between Mel Y. Chen’s “to hell with accessible writing” piece and Kelsey Acton’s plain language manifesto
  • Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant has been interesting
  • Have almost finished Paul Fry’s open course on Literary Theory. It’s almost fifteen years old, but the final four lectures have been immensely helpful in grounding some ambivalence I’ve been feeling around disability as identity

Have also divested from a few things:

  • Have replaced google search with Kagi (weird politics, horrible accessibility backslide, and nonconsensual AI is getting to be too much.) You’re next GMail!
  • Also shifting out of Adobe into free and open source programs like GIMP, Krita, and Typest.
  • Still love Rhino, and vibe-coding actually lets me bypass huge parts of the visual interface, have been talking with their developer team about making it more blind-friendly. May be pretty close to a totally nonvisual 3D modeling workflow there.
  • I’m waiting for the Microsoft divestments to feel possible. Maybe I should just jump ship and start using EMacSpeak? The surveillance technology in Gaza is sickening.
  • Have not boycotted OpenAI, like everyone else in academia seems to be doing these days, but there’s definitely a lot of ambivalence there. More in this in the future.

Origami sailboat from a blindfolded origami workshop. My table neighbor said the backside of the paper felt shiny. To me it also felt waxy, like there was sealant on the boat, vs the rough papery sails.

Four fingers touching a paper origami sailboat made with origami paper that has a red glossy coating on one side and nothing on the other, creating very different textures between the front and back.

Bead architecture plan

A tactile board with black pegs, featuring red and yellow pieces arranged in an architectural plan

First totally blind isometric drawing

A geometric drawing on brown paper depicts a 3D cube outline formed by intersecting straight lines. It is drawn on a sensational blackboard

Page from Andrea Deplazes

As a blind designer, I don’t always feel that there is a clear and direct relationship between tools that provide blind access to design (i.e. tactile drawing) and better buidling for blind people. I wrong about negotiating that in this journal entry.

Roof structure at the Menil Collection

A modern art gallery features minimalist architecture with high ceilings and a walkway leading to a large window, where a person sits on a couch in the foreground. The buidling is the Menil Collection main building by Renzo Piano.

With value + detail

A window with a curve frame. This time light is passing through the frame, represented by a 5 step value scaleA detail of the same drawing, showing the stepping of the value scale more closely

+Photo of the sundial I took at Jantar Mantar a few years ago

A large, weathered pillar is surrounded by a series of evenly spaced radial beams in a circular architectural structure. The structure is made of stone.

Diagram of two beams of light at different angles bouncing on a semi-reflective surface, and a drawing of a window behind a cylindrical fanning screen

Two beams of light bouncing off of a semi-reflective surface. They are at two angles so the one that bounces less is losing less brightness and the one that is bouncing more is losing brightness more quickly.A window with a screen in front of it. The screen is a half-cylinder shape and all the pieces are fanning out in front of the window. You can see some light peeking through the screen.

Thinking about two quotes on color today. The first is from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The second is from Matisse. Both demonstrate ways of talking about color through taste, temperature, and touch.

“And talking about dark! You think dark is just one color, but it ain’t. There’re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don’t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”

“To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves. My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter.”

Sharing another interview today, with Hannah Wong. This is a slightly different version than was published on Architectural Writing Workshop a few years ago, as it follows my original edits.