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.
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
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.
I did this interview with David Gissen a few years ago, with Sarai Huaman as a co-interviewer. it got rejected so we never published it! But I still think it’s a pretty good interview, so I’m sharing it here.
Yves Alain Bois on the image:
“The essential gap between Mattisse’s conception of art and that of Renaissance masters had to do with his rejection of any form of projection (and enlargement is perhaps the barest form of projection). Why so? Because projection always implied a clear separation, not to say hierarchization, between conception and realization. Historically when projection was applied this meant that color became a servant of drawing, coming after the fact. For the Renaissance artist, the idea is what counts most, as Irwin Panofsky brilliantly demonstrated close to a century ago. For them the idea remains the same, no matter the size of the miniaturization. In fact, many Renaissance artists used a long stick, but unlike Matisse, they used it as a mechanical projective tool with no incidence on their designs. Vasari does briefly mention a long rod with charcoal as the best way to transfer with charcoal a cartoon to a wall, but no Renaissance artist is found posing with such a device, which would have been seen as the tool manual labor from which they sought to distance themselves.”
Discussion questions for a scale figure library
From around this time last year: Notes on Translation
Was at Walden Pond today with Caroline, who found this model of a lake with ropes representing various depths. I thought it was a clever tactile. Also a great birding by ear session with Jerry Nadier.
Recently listened to this synthetic spoken manifesto produced by the Metabolist architect Toshi Ishiyanagi in the Loeb Library archives. As someone who uses a lot of synthetic speech for reading, etc., this really moved me to try to think more creatively about what that medium is capable of.