Babies see colour differently than adults researchers have found, babies brains process colour information in pre-linguistic parts of the brain, but adults process colour in linguiostic parts of the brain, which means adults see colour filtered through language. It also means at some point there is a change over in our perceptions of colour. (via)
“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color.
John Hill of A Daily Dose of Architecture Tagged me with this meme;
1. Pick up the nearset book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book on page 123.
3. Find the Fifth Sentance.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
Due to my daughters age and strong hands, all books which I used to leave in (not so) neat piles around the house when not in their proper place on the bookshelf are precariously on the shelf in the living room, waiting only for an addition like S, M, L, XL to wrench the shelf off its brackets. The nearest three piles you see in the photo are all being read by me at the moment. They are The Winter Book by Tove Jansson , White Death by Robert Edwards, and Mart Stam’s Trousers by Crimson edited by Michael Speaks and Gerard Hadders published by 010.
So to keep to Architecture my usual blog topic the quote from Mart Stam’s Trousers follows;
Everybody knows what everybody else was doing. It was an extremely small community of architects contaminating one another. Eventually you get an outbreak like the 1927 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart.
I’m not actually really reading this book at the moment but got it out because of the threat of demolition of the Smithsons seminal Robin Hood Gardens. There is an interview made for this book with Peter Smithson and I wanted to reread and see if he mentioned Robin Hood Gardens (he doesn’t). The quote interetingly is from that conversation and is actually Peter Smithson speaking about the birth of modernism, however, out of context it could serve as a description of the Architecture blogging community if you know what I mean.
Tagged by me are;
Jukka, darren, Sarno, Igor, Christoph
February 29, 2008 – 12:52 pm
36 9 today, thanks to everyone that has sent a card or sms especially the friends with whom I haven’t been in touch with recently.
February 28, 2008 – 9:11 pm
Live transport on google maps, so far I know of Helsinki, Swiss Train system (via), Dublin. It’s pretty obvious this will be ubiquitous in the very near future.
February 26, 2008 – 10:16 pm
The first world seed ‘doomsday’ vault opens in Svalbard Norway to protect biodiversity (see previous post). There are about 1500 seed vaults worldwide but this is the only one buried under a polar glacier.
February 26, 2008 – 9:19 pm
Dutch graphic artist Frank Dresmé has made a series of psychogeographic collages of routes through Amsterdam. They are quite stunning images by themselves but also interesting as they present the city as a kind of unified whole, somehow for me capturing the quality of the city in a way that single images or map for example can’t, and that seems unique to me. Franks work is really fresh and I should also note I found this through Serial Consign, a site well worth checking out.
February 24, 2008 – 7:18 pm
Peter and Alison Smithson’s brutalist masterpiece Robin Hood Gardens looks set to be Demolished. But BD has launched a last minute attempt to save it. Go here to sign the online petition but you only have until march 7th to sign. I posted last summer about another brutalist masterpiece that is now demolished, they may be mostly unloved, but they are often dedicated attempts at real social housing, and they can be made to work properly if looked after, for example the Trellic tower also in London.
Update: I looked at the petition this morning to see how big it was already, and I was interested to note a few of the names already down; Hugh Pearman, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Louisa Hutton, Carme Pinós, Alain de Botton were just a few of the more notable names, interestingly they form a diverse set of viewpoints but all call for the saving of Robin Hood Gardens. I noted a few bloggers names down too.
February 21, 2008 – 7:19 pm
The office of Zwarts and Jansma came up with an intriguing idea. To build a new underground Amsterdam under the the existing one. The structural solution is what makes uit interesting and unique;
Amsterdam has a 30m layer of waterproof clay which will be used together with concrete and sand to make new walls. We will then be able to work underneath them and pour the water back into the canals. It’s an easy technique and it doesn’t create issues with drilling noises on the streets.
I guess it makes for a pretty much totally seperate structure too. Having lived in Amsterdam I am at once thrillled and appalled by this idea. Maybe they should jsut make it a big road and carpark and then they could take all the cars from the centre of Amsterdam and leave it to the bikes and the pedestrians.
(All images from Swart&Jansma) Originally seen at bd but also them posted at bldgblog.
February 20, 2008 – 8:09 pm
Efficiencity by Greepeace shows how we can make our cities and infrastructure more ecological with the technology we already have now. Well worth a walk through.
February 19, 2008 – 7:26 pm
I started reading this article in the Guradian without realising the profundity of it until some way through. It is actually a fascinating piece about a music critic Nick Coleman who had a sudden total hearing loss in one ear, and what happened after that. Particularly interesting was the fact that before he lost his hearing he experienced music as architecture;
I don’t know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear “buildings”… three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not “see” these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had “floors”, “walls”, “roofs”, “windows”, “cellars”.
This is what happened to him after his hearing loss;
What I hear now when I listen to music is a flat, two-dimensional representation. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show, but I don’t get the actual structure: I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive its inner spaces. I’ve never got much of an emotional hit from technical drawings. Here is what really hurts: I no longer respond to music emotionally.
He then met Oliver Sacks the famous neuroscientist who had personally lost his ability of stereoscopy something he has treasured all his life. Both these losses made these people experience forms of space in mono….. monospace.
It proves to me the link that I’ve always felt between the experience of space and music, and that as an Architect and fan of music I find their pleasures somehow equivalent. While not hearing building I definetly sense space, and in Architecture while not experiencing tunes I definetly think of space as being somehow musical. The article is also touching to me as perhaps I am on the brink of loosing this feeling to, that my right ear hears at about 50% of normal I’ve felt that my brain somehow makes up for that when I listen to my ipod forinstance, but for how long?
February 18, 2008 – 7:01 pm
Archinect has a great reading list for 2008, and dysturb has a good post on 010’s upcoming publications of 2008. 010 really has been one of the great Architectural Publishing houses over the last few years, and it looks like 2008 will be no exception.
February 16, 2008 – 3:25 pm
Houses in Japan typically last for 30 years and are never sold before they are demolished. This article in the economist explains the economic reasons behind this but I instantly remembered that at least some Japanese temples like the Ise Shrine are remade every few years. The ideas of time, ageing and solidity seem tantalisingly different in Japan.
