Tonight.  Tonight.  I have been working for 2 days straight, I think.  I should just go home and sleep, but I decided I needed to redesign my website.  It’s almost time to be professional; so time to diagram.

Anyhow.  I accidentally drank too many glasses of wine and forgot about work, website, degree project, art/architecture installation and everything.  I just watched Stewart/Colbert and forgot that I didn’t have time to sleep or watch TV.

But speaking of art/architecture installations, I need 3000+ t-shirts (I’ll explain the idea later, just give them to me) so I am asking my readers to donate.  If you have t-shirts to spare, email me here and we can arrange to pick them up.   The opening is at the end of October (on a Friday but not sure of the date) and I will give you details as the date approaches.  But for now just give me your t-shirts and trust that I will make art out of them.

Stewart/Colbert are over and some ventriloquist is on.  Does anyone think this is funny?  I haven’t watched TV in years and it seems like everything has gone backward.  Arrested Development got canceled and people watch this bullshit and Mind of Mencia?

I’m drunk and confused.

Give me your T-shirts.  I really need them.

This is my first stab at creating a form from the Lorenz Attractor (Butterfly Effect) algorithm. I need to tweak a few numbers in the Maya script to get various sets of results. But I think it’s pretty beautiful already.

MEL Script:

//—————————————————————
int $i=0;

int $j=1;

int $max = 1000; //number of circles generated

float $myx0,$myy0,$myz0,$myx1,$myy1,$myz1;

float $myh = 0.01;

float $mya = 28; //a, b, and c are a set of commonly used

float $myb = 46.92; //constants to generate the Lorenz attractor
float $myc = 4;
$myx0 = 0.1;

$myy0 = 0;

$myz0 = 0;

for ($i=0;$i<$max;$i++)

{

circle -c $myx0 $myy0 $myz0 -r 0.5;

//differential equations

$myx1 = $myx0 + $myh * $mya * ($myy0 - $myx0);

$myy1 = $myy0 + $myh * ($myx0 * ($myb - $myz0) - $myy0);

$myz1 = $myz0 + $myh * ($myx0 * $myy0 - $myc * $myz0);

$myx0 = $myx1;

$myy0 = $myy1;

$myz0 = $myz1;

}
select -allDagObjects;

scale -r 0.05 0.05 0.05 ;

loft -ch 1;

select -allDagObjects;

select -d loftedSurface1;

delete;

Thanks a million to Fiona Mortimer for translating the original C source code to MEL.

The above image is the logo I have made for my degree project. I’ll explain it later. I’m too tired.

It’s been a month or two that my site has been free of narcissism.  That comes to an end today thanks to a photograph forwarded to me taken by Prof. P.S.  It’s Teo, his moustache, and I on our lovely campus.

Well, it’s 7:28 AM and after sitting at this desk for 27 straight hours I have finished another project.  The graphics took way longer than I had planned, but that’s what happens when a 10′ presentation board is a requirement.   I don’t think I have ever been happier with a project title than the one that you see above.  It makes me laugh every time I think it.  For my non-architectural readers, Le Corbusier wrote a seminal book called Towards A New Architecture, so that is what I am playing with.  I will upload images of the wall that LN and I built.  We are studying bone structure and finding a system by which we can build / design.  We built a very porous wall, and it looks pretty damn cool.

I’m having a Maximum Overdrive week.  All of my fucking machinery is rebelling against me.  Because of this, if you call me I won’t get it.  My phone died finally.  It has been dying slowly for the last few months, and now it has passed.  I have a new superphone&trade; coming from T-mobile, but it will be a few days so hold your horses.  Also (tambien.  learned that today at Mexican food) my desktop won’t boot, and I have learned on the internet that it is suffering from what is called Blue Screen of Death.  I don’t like that name, I don’t like anything “of death”.  It sounds so stupid.  But I have to buy a hard drive case of death and take my hard drive out because I have like 6 years of work on that computer, a lot of things that are rather important to me.

I am presenting my project in a little while on no sleep.  What’s new?  And then I am going to my Maya scripting group.  And then I have another project to research all night.

Etc.

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. I am trapped in studio finishing up my Berlin and China projects, as well as 2 essays and what feels like a million journal / sketchbook entries. And then I have a whole 3-day weekend to prepare for a new semester. Holy shit, I am burning out quickly.

Anyway, the above images are little interludes in my sketchbook. The top one is kinda obvious, but I imagine it to be on the press passes that are given out for the Olympics. A little reminder / warning for journalists to write only nice things. The next two are images of remaining Nazi buildings in Berlin that have been redefined and reused, but how do you really ever take the Hitler association out of the picture. It’s kind of a tough question, if they are perfectly functioning buildings (and in the case of the stadium, quite beautiful) should they just be re-appropriated and reused? I’m sure that was an issue for the Germans after the war, and it is their question to answer. And the final image of the Fonz standing on Karl Marx Allee (the former Stalinallee), shows that the street, and all its socialist grandeur, was really just a television set. The East Germans wanted to impress the worlds TV viewers with their quick, glorious rebuilding of Berlin, but it was all a facade. The fact that it is a cardboard cutout of Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli is meant to reiterate the layers of “deception / confusion / fantasy / television” within the street.

Looking up in the Jin Mao Tower on the Pudong. Shanghai, China.

Rooftop bar / restaurant on the Bund. Shanghai, China.

Looking down the Bund, across from the Pudong in Shanghai. I had to go for a drink here after Shanghai Shopping all day. Holy shit, I didn’t think it would happen, but I miss China.

Berlin Olympic Stadium. One of a few remaining Nazi buildings.

Inside the stadium.

Me with Le Corbusier’s modulor man at his Unite Berlin.

Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, Berlin.

Living at white heat has taken its toll on me.  I have about two more weeks in Berlin and I am struggling to make it.  I am having fun, of course, but I am a bit tired of living out of a suitcase, traveling in a herd, and thinking about architecture / urbanism.  I need some downtime soon.

But, Berlin is a great city.  We have rented bikes for the month and I have ridden more this month than in my entire life.  We rode the entire length of the Berlin Wall a few days ago (well, the part in the city center) and have seen so much here.  Berliners party like no one else in the world; club policy is they shut down “when the last patron has left” which usually happens around noon the next day.  I know this because our studio is on the 10th floor of an office building in East Berlin (off Alexanderplatz) and there is a club called “Weekend” on the 12th-15th floors.  We hear the bass from the club going through the night and into the next afternoon.  Then, Monday morning it returns to being a respectable office building; truly a strange transformation.

I am up to my eyeballs in numbers.  Our project consists of FARS’s, Lot Coverage, Migration trends, trash–>ethanol, Biomass, shrinking populations, growing single population, growing sectors of business, reuse of Plattenbauten, trash, trash and more trash….  all of that must control the design.  It’s very MVRDV, and it’s fun, but it’s a very dogmatic way to make decisions.  My project is, in a nutshell, based on trash generation and renewable energy, and I have titled it Eurotrash: Berlin.  I will upload the cover page soon, it’s pretty funny / good.

So, on August 1st, I fly to Texas for 10 days and then back to LA.  Alles Gut.  I just need a break and a lot more money, I don’t even want to tell you how much I have spent; financially, physically and emotionally.

Say word.