The hospital soundscape

Sitting with my son who's now light of one leaking appendix, I'm in a dense environment of sounds. The vast majority of these sounds are artificial, created by the beeping, whirring, and squelching of the technology around us. The physical architecture of the hospital is only one component to the total 'design.'

But it seems like the soundscape could be endlessly improved ( as I lie awake at 3:00 in the morning listening to it all). Many of the sounds are informational cues for the attending staff- warning about low heart rates, empty IV bags, feeding times, etc, and across a ward of 20 rooms and 30 patients. The sounds are each distinctive enough, but it seems to me that with some coordination or even 'orchestration', they could work together so well that a nurse could be blind. You could listen to a ward the way a bird watchers hears a forest. You could tune the gaggle of technology to be distinctively different enough that a trained nurse would know what's happening without looking at a computer monitor.

FLW and the Theory of Everything

I had the great pleasure of visiting Frank Lloyd Wright's Kraus House in St. Louis, recently restored to its full glory. Uniquely, this house still has all of the original FLW furniture, fittings, lights, and fabrics giving you the total Usonian experience.

The design of the house was based upon a 4' x 4' trapazoid, which became the planning and thematic grid for the house, much in the same way the Wright used triangles, hexagons, circles and other determinist geometry to organically 'grow' a building. The trapazoid here is expressed throughout, leading to the most extreme expression of a trapazoidal double bed which either shows a high level of creative mastery, or an absurd obsessiveness.

I'm wondering about the validity or ethic of forcing everything in the house to obey an

arbitrary design theme? Obviously it's been a favorite of modernists using grids (Mies) or tartan patterns or what have you, and applauded for their un-wavering adherence to their self-

inflicted order. This 'Theory of Everything' has not been unique to architects as the utopian tendencies of religion, physics, and all reason would like the idea that we can explain everything with one unifying group of ideas. Wright forced everything in this house into the same trapazoid, making every design question answerable with the same set of solutions. Is design stronger when it's forced into this artifice or is this just another excuse to pretend that humans have all the answers?

Architectural Maelstroms

The publication of a great temporary building/sculpture in Buenos Aries has brought back memories of spiral buildings. This tower of Babel is wrapped in used books in every language of the world. The stair is a simple bird-cage scaffolding stair up the middle, with the books suspended in chicken wire. People are invited to take the books, slowly eroding the building. We once did a cloak-room for the British Museum in a competition when it too was a skeletal structure, and then only obtained volume as visitors coats filled the walls.

Other obvious spiral buildings, like the Guggenheim, are examples of how directly the circulation inside clearly expresses itself in the external form of the building. Maybe the next Guggenheim could show the paintings outside as well as in. And maybe visitors could leave with some of the artwork as well.....

New definitions of beauty in a world or fakery

I was at an architectural products show the other week in SF with the same old stands of windows, paver, doors, lights, cladding, roofing, etc. The thing that hit me the most was how fake and tawdry everything looked. Every roof tile seemed to be a cartoon-version of medieval Tuscany formed out of cement-based Ryevita. Every paver some Martian-dust material divorced from any stone ever found. All pretty depressing. The building industry has converged with the food industry by mimicking the way Cargill and others take low-value corn products and mold them into endless morsels that almost pass for dinner.

And of course my caring credentials go down the drain if I were to 'like' any natural stone from some unsustained source, or favor a timber that doesn't have growth-rings smaller than my thumb.

But of all the mush-together products, I am in awe of Parallam. Several timber manufacturers have created composite timber beams that glue together small thinings of wood into strucutral beams. They're usually used as beams and lintels, hidden in the strucutral of the building, but I love them as they are. Their cross-section is something like Mousaka/lasagna, they're not attempting to be something they're not, they wear their green-credentials on their surface.

Lot's of designers have enjoyed Parallam's qualities too, making stair treads, furniture, woodcarvings, etc. from the beam stock. Let's hope we don't find later that the glue is toxic or the beams fail after ten years......

Sacred and Profane

Bayfront Park juts into the salt ponds of the San Francisco Bay on the eastern edge of Menlo Park. It's popular with bird watchers, dog walkers, slow runners, model plane flyers, etc. It's a nice spot, but it's all reclaimed land built over a huge trash heap.

The fact that inches below your california native grasses is the sum-total of post-consumer cast-offs is either wonderful (fantastic reclamation and an example of making something beautiful from a dump) or strangely unsettling. I've spoken to several people who don't go to the park 'in principle.' Not that they openly have objections to the park, but their preference suggests that they're not happy with walking across a rubbish tip.

We talk about 'sacred' and 'profane' places/spaces as architects. Is a park over a dump by definition a 'profane' space for many people. Does this go for battlefields? Notorious historic sites? Does the Feng Shui master or the Indian dream-spirit-master-whatever agree? If you attempt to live in the present, live in the moment, then you can take the park as it is, regardless of it's past life.

But if a measure of respect for a place is whether or not dog owners clean up their poop or not, the park still seems to be held in contempt.

accidental memories

I endlessly seem to come across bits of mature trees left when pruning left too long finally happens. Fences and overhead cables host these 'lost limbs' which have grown around the fixed object. Do people see these in the same light as the pairs of shoes slung over telephone lines?

I try to imagine what the missing tree might have been, like an archeologist imagining an entire pot, city, or culture by just finding one shard.

What if once we were dead and gone, we all left one piece of ourselves still attached to where we lived. An amputated hand permanently attached a handrail at the library; a foot on one pedal of a used bike being sold on; an elbow glued to the armrest of a used car.

Chris Jordan Photos

Chris Jordan's photos of dead albatross carcasses found on Midway Island have been doing the rounds of museums throughout the US. Needless to say, they're beautiful/horrible images. That understanding of how you will be outlived by your Happy Meal toy hit me immediately.

'And I will show you fear in a handful of........plastic?'

(apologies to TS Eliot)