Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects

My brush with greatness happened in the late 90s at some nameless start-up flush with pretend money. Our creative director knew Mr. O’Herlihy and invited him up to build out our offices. Sadly it never happened. But I’ve been a fan ever since.

NOTIFBUTWHEN #2: January 2009

Someone gave me The Prisoner TV series DVD box set long ago. Had no idea what to expect but was totally absorbed once I started watching. This was great TV. Obvious the care and thought that went into every aspect, from the dialog to the things hanging on the walls. Sadly #6 just passed away.

“[Her] thesis is that organizations have their own kind of invisible structure. In other words, what you see on the flowchart of a company isn’t necessarily how the work gets done,” Carabetta explains. Stephenson uses surveys, data analysis, and elaborate charts to map out networks of relations that are often hidden.

There’re the usual sorts of findings:

“Evolutionary anthropologists always talk about a line of sight. You stand up on the savannas and you’ve got to be able to see great distances,” she says. “It’s the same thing here in the work space. You’ve got to be able to see out to others and see where it is you work, why you’re working there, and who it is you can interconnect and collaborate with.”

Plus some a little bit different:

The result is a layout based on relationships rather than hierarchies, with a design meant to foster interaction at all levels

That’s interesting. Which goes stale faster: a relationship or hierarchy? Depends on the job, the business, etc. etc. I suppose. Also, could this be the start of social network inspired architecture? Sign of the times but when I read “relationship” I immediately thought social networks. How awful.

From A New Kind of Building?, Maurice Martel “was interested in generating architectural structures subject to spatial constraints (such as a given area in which they need to fit).” So he “settled on a project in which he would run 2D cellular automata on irregular grids determined by arbitrary polygons.” His ultimate goal was to design an actual 3D structure.

Using Mathematica he was able to go from this:

To this:

I think what’s interesting is just how benign the result of the Mathematica-assisted design process. Give certain architects free reign, no restrictions and no context and you could very well end up with more folly than form (or function.)

Googling around, you’ll find many articles & books
discussing (usually) the film’s architecture and set design. You can read about “Tativille“, the modern metropolis built outside Paris for the filming and famous for being a grand masterpiece of architecture so expensive as to have bankrupted Tati and the production company. But there’s so much more to it than that….

Everytime I watch Playtime I get something else out of it. This last viewing left me impressed with all the poor product & environmental design Tati manufactured.

Screen grabs of some of the better examples:

This scene has an office security guy using the building’s intercom to announce a visitor. It’s a great example of obscure buttons, meaningless feedback, and needless complexity.

This scene shows a demonstration of a broom with headlights. It’s a fun scene: the demonstrator loads the batteries at the top, screws on the end piece with this ridiculously long little springy contact thing and then switches it on with a flourish. Great sound design too.

Here’s what happens when you design something without any consideration for the actual audience. The kitchen pass-through doesn’t actually fit the various serving platters.

More design in a vacuum. Notice the hanging adornments behind the bar, right at head level. The bartender can’t see his customers without ducking.

I don’t know why I like this one so much. The maitre d’ is always banging into the column, perfectly placed to be in the way. Also the entry isn’t wide enough for both the maitre d’ and guests to walk through so it’s always an awkward interaction.

If you look closely you can see the imprint of the chairs on the backs of the men’s suits. Nowadays maybe a Nintendo or Nike could get away with that, call it a guerilla marketing campaign, walk around with a logo on your back—it’s edgy!

The green neon cross beams it’s unappetizing glow over the food display. Who can decide what to eat? It all looks inedible and gross.

Thumbs up from me!

[…] an illustrated manual on planning and designing for “good” density, and a catalog of more than 250 diverse neighborhoods across the country, noting density in housing units per acre for each site. Four photographs of each location are included—close-up, context, neighborhood, and plan views—to provide an impartial and comparative view of the many ways to design neighborhoods.

The website provides access too all those book images in a simple searchable database. Pick your region, your density and your setting and see what the density looks like. For instance, show me something from the West, low density and I don’t care about the setting. First two results are Beverly Hills and Hollister, CA. Compare and contrast Beverly Hills & Hollister with only 0.2 units/acre to San Francisco’s 222 units/acre. That’s a pretty profound demonstration of “density”:

So what, you have some interesting pictures to show folks. How do they help?

[…] many people have difficulty estimating density from visual cues or distinguishing quantitative (measured) and qualitative (perceived) density. We tend to overestimate the density of monotonous, amenity-poor developments and underestimate the density of well-designed, attractive projects, thereby reinforcing the negative stereotypes.

Some reality to counter the misperceptions in other words.

(As an aside: I’m very bullish on the use of visual explanations to educate these days and I’m not talking about the run of the mill business charts and junk like that. We have smart people putting together projects like Gapminder and Swivel, pushing the notion that data is best when it’s actually used to educate & debunk. Our tools for turning all this great data into visual answers are getting better too. Mathematica 6’s “integrated data sources” enable all sorts of crazy math mashups and symbolic programming visualizations. Might have to redefine what “math” is after Mathematica 6 gets done with it. Shame there’s only 24 hours in a day.)

Logic is the tool that is used to dig holes deeper and bigger, to make them altogether better holes. But if the hole is in the wrong place, then no amount of improvement is going to put it in the right place. No matter how obvious this may seem to every digger, it is still easier to go on digging in the same place than to start all over again in a new place. Vertical thinking is digging the same hole deeper; lateral thinking is trying again elsewhere.

Adria wasn’t content with just a restaurant serving mind boggling food. He’s built a multifaceted operation involving design at every level. From architecture (both the restaurant and his “secret” lab reflect a thoughtful eye), to manufacturing (the ravioli without the ravioli!), to tableware (buy a set of glass pine tree essence snifters from the Ferran Adria collection at Target?), to typography & signage (he has a very elaborate system of “glyphs” for communicating his flavors & methods) and on and on.

His website provides more detail and links to his various projects.

But from the digging different holes perspective, it seems Adria is off digging secret tunnels now.

Interactive City Summit on the 7th & 8th.

ISEA2006 from the 7th until the 13th.

Survival Research Labs on the evening of the 11th.

WWDC06 from the 7th until the 11th.

Going to go? Let me know.