ACT XXI

Too much geek for one architecture student.

Last night was the first night that I have taken advantage of living in L.A.; well, close to L.A. anyway. I went with a group of kids from school to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, as the locals/art geeks call it, a group of which I am now a proud member) to listen to a panel discussion between Richard Marquis, Clifford Rainey, and Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter moderated by curator Howard N. Fox on "glass artists and artists who work with glass" - apparently two very different things.

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter was by far the most interesting of the three designers, in my opinion anyway, probably because she is not only an architect, but the assistant Dean of the architecture department at Woodbury. (Yeah, I'm biased.) She just redesigned the Corning Museum of Art using lots of plate glass as a structural building material, something which most architects and engineers are terrified to do because not only is glass a physically fragile material but it is also visually unsettling to see heavy loads supported by glass and is therefore not a very popular building material. She did some pretty amazing things with it, though:


She showed better pictures at the lecture, but none of them are coming up in Google Images, so take my word for it.

I don't have any particular interest in working primarily with glass, but it was a fascinating lecture regardless.

posted by Jess @ 8:20 PM 0 Comments

Confessions and the Watercube

I am a bad blogger. As my days are becoming fuller and the nights shorter, I find myself "too busy" to keep this blog going, which is contradictory to the reason that I started writing. I figure I should do one of two things: either stop blogging altogether or start writing more, because more than a month inbetween blogging is pretty ridiculous, especially when I answer "yes" when people ask me if I have a blog. So my September 18th resolution is to blog at least once a week. I would write more often than that, but most of the things I would write about are architecture-geeky, so my targeted audience would shrink considerably. I wouldn't want to lose my two readers.

I want to get away from the "on Monday, I did this" blog format because I don't want my blog to read as a diary. I want it to showcase my thoughts and inspirations and things I find interesting in my day, not what I had for lunch or how I got to sleep in so late today.

This is what I find interesting today:


The Australian architectural firm PTW designed this building, the Watercube, for the Bejing Olympic center for the 2008 Olympic Games. Quite obviously, the inspiration for the building is a soap bubble which is only relevant to the purpose of the building in the presence of water, since the swimmers are obviously not taking a bath, but the concept of a bubble applied in architectural form is pretty amazing.

posted by Jess @ 8:33 PM 0 Comments