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Author: polytekton
Four minutes and three seconds of practice by members of the Iowa State University Percussion Wind Ensemble recorded BEFORE the actual concert on 26 October, 2016 in Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall.
I love the randomness of each musician going through their lines as they do a last-minute practice session in public. No composer can write this, and I find it gorgeous, especially toward the end when all musicians fall silent to get to the tuning section.
The randomness of beauty; it warms the cockles of my heart!
The video is a slowmo recording of students walking across an intersection near Morrill Hall, without colliding, illustrating a similar level of organized chaos as the one heard in the audio.
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Walking from Studio to Car
File under Observation
From my fourth-year architecture studio, located currently in the Communications building north of the Armory on the Iowa State University campus, I’m walking at the end of the day past the construction site of the Student Innovation Center which is going up north of Hoover and south of Sweeney (for more info on the building going up see https://www.inside.iastate.edu/article/2017/01/12/center).
Now that we’re moving closer to the shortest day (December 21), my experience after studio happens as the sun has already set but the sky is still light toward the west.
For the photograph below I stopped, briefly, to capture the contrast between crane, the old water tower, and the already existing Hoover Hall. Then I moved on.
Waiting in the waiting room at McFarland Clinic for a routine consultation. A chair for large health care customers (I think that’s what hospitals call them…). Digital drawing.
Working on an updated cover for Ben Jacks’ forthcoming book A House and its Atmosphere via Culicidae Architectural Press with a blurb by David Leatherbarrow, Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
Project: Book Cover
Miriam Zach, the Charles and Mary Sukup Endowed Artist in Organ, tasked us with the design for a poster of a lecture/recital at which she presents music by Roman composers to students who plan to spend the Spring semester 2018 in the eternal city to study architecture. The event will take place on Monday, 11 September at 4:00pm in the Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall in the Music building at Iowa State University.
The project had a fast turnaround time, so we had to work intuitively. The only reference that came to mind was a 1953 painting by René Magritte titled Golconda (see below).
Final version of cover as published.
This summer we were tasked by Culicidae Press to design a cover for a forthcoming book by Rachel Odhner Longstaff called In the Shadow of the Dragon’s Back: A Young American Girl in South Africa During the Early Years of Apartheid. The book is a memoir about Longstaff growing up in Durban, on the east coast of KwaZulu Natal between 1948 and 1960, before returning to the US. The book’s title comes from the Drakensberg which is shaped not unlike the back of a dragon.
After a series of cover iterations using some of the photographs that appear in the book, we settled—with the author’s input—on a colorized version of a black-and-white photo taken by Longstaff’s brother Pehr Hemming Odhner, that shows her sister Kirstin on horseback facing the Dragon’s Back.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC and Rachel Odhner Longstaff
Timeline: two months
Culicidae Architectural Press is releasing a new English edition of Francesco Careri’s classic Walkscapes: Walking as An Aesthetic Practice this fall, and we were asked to design the interior and the cover. The book was republished in Spanish in 2012, and the original bilingual English/Spanish edition is no longer in print. The book is both text- and image-heavy, so we decided to use one of the interior images on the preliminary cover.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
This was a difficult cover to design. The author, Kristene E. Friday (pseudonym), whose book will be published through Culicidae Press, was sexually abused as a child but suppressed the memories until she was forty-nine years old and had a breakdown. In the text she describes her emotional state vividly, and based on some of the mental images I put together a collage of relevant photographs to create the cover.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC
Version 1
For Hog Press we were tasked to design a book cover for a book by Vermont-based author Joseph D. Reich’s intriguingly titled How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems, to be published this summer.
I prefer the red one but the author had his eye on the one with the drawing, no doubt in part because his son did the drawing;–) The third version shows one of the last Robert Taylor homes being destroyed in Chicago a few years ago while I was driving to Michigan with an old friend from Hyde Park.
Client: Hog Press and author Joseph D. Reich