#God’s Hardware Store

Inspired By… SunRay Kelley from Shwood Eyewear on Vimeo.

I found this guy today, and I am fascinated. His buildings all look like Hobbit homes, very whimsical and organic. As a construction guy, I have all these questions about stability and weatherproofing and maintenance, but as a designer, I’m taken by the creativity.

In the video, he talks about how a lot of what he does are ways of building that have been around for hundreds of years. To move forward, he says, you have to look back. Nothing we’re doing has not been done before, and usually the way it was done before was more elegant and durable.

I imagine I’ll be posting more about this guy in the future; I just found his facebook page, and that might keep me occupied for a while.

#The Past in Lights

I first saw this project last year, and was immediately taken by it. Designed by the Dutch firm Okra, it is a great example of “the new old” that I talked about in my design philosophy post.

The city of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, is built on top of an ancient Roman castellum, or watchtower. As the city has built up, the walls of the castellum have steadily been covered over, to the point where they are now 12 feet underground. The firm decided to pull the buried walls back into the present.

A subtle, lighted trench follows the castellum walls, shining a green light into the air at night to depict the outline of the Roman building in the present-day city. They even left a gap at the gates! The effect is elegant and eye-catching. Though physical invasion is minimal, it forcefully exposes the history of the city to passers-by.

I love how it uses the ancient history of the city as the foundation of the design, while using modern lighting and a very clean aesthetic to place it firmly in the now. The project clearly adds to the sense of place in Utrecht, making visitors and citizens more aware of the city’s past and incorporating it into the present urban fabric.

#Grass is Dumb

I posted this on Facebook a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t help posting it on here as well. I especially love the discussion about the “status quo bias” as the only reason we would ever think that it makes sense to have a lawn. 

Bonus Rant: Pennies are dumb, too. Also, nickels.

#Dumb Fans 101

I must post this everywhere:

Rebel 101 from Ole Miss Rebels on Vimeo.

#A Better Tents4Tickets

So, I think Tents4Tickets was a good initial idea. When I heard about it, I liked it. But, being out there today, it seemed like it never got past the initial-idea stage. The main problems were access/line control (skipping) and the bottleneck of only having one distribution point.

Skipping in line was a huge problem. I’m thankful most everyone got tickets that wanted them today, but we have quite a few unscrupulous Bulldogs amongst us. Starting at 6 am, someone should have been working back from the beginning handing out a different color wrist band for those already in line, to keep people from showing up late and jumping in. This must be monitored at the point of service, as well. Giving out wristbands and then not checking them is lazy and stupid, and it betrays the trust of the students that followed the rules.

Also, the way it was promoted instilled some pretty unnecessary fear in the student body that they would not get a ticket. Camping out is fine, and a lot of fun, but it should not be forced upon the whole student body. We’re not a large enough school for that yet, and hopefully with the new expansion to the stadium it will stay that way for a while. Here’s my solution:

1. Tents4Tickets was good, and it should be kept. Shrink it to 300 tents and 3,000 tickets, though. This way students aren’t motivated by the fear of not getting a ticket. They’re there to have a good time and make some memories. Smaller size makes it a little more manageable, as well.
2. Start selling tickets to the students at Tents4Tickets at 6am Saturday morning at the M-Club.
3. This leaves 8,000 tickets left to sell. Hold 1,000 to sell on Monday at the Bryan Building.
4. The remaining 7,000 tickets will be sold starting at 8am (possibly a bit later for the M-Club) between 7 distribution points on campus (for example):
   • The Hump
   • Newell-Grissom
   • The Union (queue in the Ballroom, with people coming in the door on the Drill Field side and going up the stairs. This leaves the foodcourt open for people eating breakfast and people that don’t care about tickets.)
   • The Palmeiro Center
   • The M-Club
   • The Bryan Building
   • The Templeton Center

This way each place has 1,000 tickets that can be distributed in under an hour. Less wait, less frustration, easier to crowd-control.

MSU is only going to grow, and (hopefully) the football team will continue its winning ways. Distributing the entire allotment from a single point is just bad logistics, and frankly, I’m surprised the MSU administration didn’t recognize this was going to be a problem. The athletic department and the Student Association has done a great job getting the student body pumped for this semester, however, and I applaud them for making an effort to start a new tradition.

#Federal Contracting, or Why the Government Can’t Do Anything Right

I ran across this post tonight from Matt Yglesias, and since it addresses something near and dear to my heart, I thought I would post my thoughts about it.

Mostly it’s about the incredible boom in federal contracting, or jobs that the government contracts out to private firms. At first blush this might sound like a great idea. In some places this probably saves money, but in others it doesn’t.

So, the government has a job to do. It bids it out to, say, a landscape architecture firm. The lowest bid wins (problem 1). More often than not, this firm is either inept (low bid = bad estimate), or slimy (low bid = plan to make the profit on change orders/whining), which leads to a poor product (problem 2). The government contact is either a landscape architect who sucks/frustrated with their job and doesn’t care, or a bureaucrat who minds the contract but has no concept of what a good and correct job looks like (problem 3). This leads to a poor end result, taxpayers mad at government because it is inept and wastes money, and a contractor well-compensated and ready to screw the taxpayers again but more than willing to spread the word about the idiot they worked with on that government job.

Why do we think this is a good system?

Edit: Also interesting in the post is this graph of government employees:

Look at the time frame of 1982ish to 1990. Who presided over an increase in federal employment by over 300,000 workers, higher than any level since? Why, that would be the patron saint of small government himself, Ronald Reagan. I’m going to poke holes in that fairy tale whenever I get the chance.