Fear, Laziness and Life Drawing

So....some blog inactivity going on here, eh? I don't have a good excuse, but I did realize tonight that I was getting into a nasty habit of making things with the full intention of displaying them publicly. This makes me not enjoy making things. I have found that I need to give myself the option to not show my work to anyone in order to really enjoy making it "for myself."

I was thinking about the tortoise and the hare. "Slow and steady wins the race," right? I can't remember if it was ever explained to me why the hare was running in the first place--was he just showing off? If so, why do people show off? It's because they're scared of being assessed as crappy, I think. The traditional moral of the tortoise and the hare is totally unsatisfactory; I think the real lesson is that you gotta just do your own thing; stop showing off and stop worrying about being slow or dull. At least for me it is.

I started taking life drawing classes with Karl Gnass this past Friday at the American Animation Institute in Hollywood (actually just a bunch of classes they offer at the Animation Guild). He's definitely the fanciest quick-sketch life-drawing dude I've ever seen. It's a seven hour class, so if nothing else, I'll have a bunch of life drawings to post throughout the summer. I'm also taking classes at Santa Monica College, which is a community college that, oddly, has a well-funded "Entertainment Technology" program. I'm taking Color Theory and Perspective, both taught by amazing teachers. The Perspective teacher also teaches the same class at CalArts, and he draws killer camera angles with a dry-erase marker on a whiteboard throughout the four-hour class. Here's the first assignment from my color class (or part of it, at least): make a three-character lineup and color them "cool." Part "B" is "warm," naturally. To come.

No Concept, Model 2

Frustration. The palm idea is effectively dead, apparently I don't have enough whispy gray hair to pull weight at the table. The tower design is now being pushed as a pair of "bookends" connected by a core. My reactionary design is pictured below, in the site model (see the glass tower in the middle). Our site is the center of a man-made peninsula, with 50-60 story towers close to the shore, and a "donut" signature hotel at the end. Ridiculous? Yes, but it beats the hell out of what's on my computer screen in the image above.


Notice how the building would minimize its ground impact, while splaying outward in 2 directions to maximize light, passive shading, and views out to the city/ocean. Still a lot more to be done.

Concept Model No.1

The balconies twist from top to bottom, from tight to loose. This maximizes passive shading where sunlight/latent heat would be most intense. The circular form was only chosen for ease of model making, ideally it would be an elliptical floor plate. I want to study other patterns to this concept...or the possibility of an outer skin that is carved away to reveal this spiraling stratification. Thoughts? Yay? Nay? Pos-si-blay?

Dubai Tower Design

For the next couple of weeks, my office is working on an after hours competition for a residential development in Dubai. I have worked on projects there in the past (that I have shown most of you), mainly in the city planning - man-made palm island realm. This project focuses specifically on a peninsula of development, with six towers and their adjoining open space to be designed. I was intrigued by the design of the tower(s) conceptually as a palm tree. The team really liked the idea, but I'd love to get your reactions to my preliminary sketches.