2023.0816 / DESIGNING A LIFE: DESIGNING THE BODY

One of my (seemingly countless) motivations for entering the design profession, and architecture specifically, is having the skills and know-how to shape the world as I see fit, informed by the things I value. Not unlike art, I see architecture, and design in general, as one of the highest forms of self-expression, maybe even next to entrepreneurship which I believe takes design to its ultimate conclusion. Whether through an industrial product, a work of art, or a building, understanding the world as something first imagined, then willed and created liberates individual ability and the soul. In the process of designing, I'm actively partaking in shaping the world visually, spatially, experientially and in some localized way determine its direction. The sense that I'm passively shaped by the world it loses its strength, and as it becomes easier to see through social and cultural trends by knowing I'm capable of creating my own, it also becomes easier to buck them.

The realization that one can, and should if he wants to truly live (flourish), design his life is the liberating realization of agency - the fact of one's freedom to actively make his path, not simply choose between prescribed paths or the paths of those who are nearest, as if his life was pre-determined by something beyond himself. Agency is as fundamental to the design of one's life, moreso in fact, as it is to the design of an iPhone or a Guggenheim. Knowing that we have agency, and we most certainly do, we know that we can create a path to shape our lives in the direction we want and create and curate the material things we think are personally valuable and beneficial.

Generally in design, there is no context without the inclusion of the human body, and ultimately each of us, individually, is the designer, author, and artist of his own life - from the minutiae of daily routines to the grand ambitions of the future we each desire. How we think, what we choose to do, and how we act are all up for design, and the more we address each aspect of our life as a design project in itself, with intentionality and awareness, the better we improve each of our conditions. One area that can be immediately improved (designed), is your physical condition, which many of us know by now has a significant effect on mental wellness. Designing your world, your life, necessarily includes the design of your own body. The domain of your physical condition is not a separate project - something you do unrelated to your career or your relationships, but one that fits into a whole, a totality of design, a total work of art that is your own life, that feeds into all the other areas of your life in both subtle and obvious ways. If you know you have ultimate control over who you are and what you want, you know you have control over what you want your body to look like, how you want to engineer it, how you want it to serve your mind, and how you want it to support other efforts in your life. I'm not so much interested in the non-wellness approach to body aesthetics or conditioning through the tattoo or piercing arts or biotech modification (though I find those interesting in themselves), rather I'm more interested in functional aesthetics through fitness and physical training. Improve your health and everything else will eventually fall into place, not magically, but by a casacde of effects catalyzed by intentional physical challenges. We can design the means to sit, but we can also design how we sit. Do we squat, slouch, hunch over, maintain a straight back? In what context? Are we capable of performing such actions in those contexts?

The health of the body in conjunction with the health of the mind is a foundation for flourishing. I admire, in particular, The Bioneer's work on exploring the unorthodox, the fringes of fitness. His idea of Superfunctional Training is one the most robust and interesting training philosophies/programs I've ever discovered, and aligns with the idea of the total design of an individual.

Some take-aways:

Life is the ultimate design project - pay attention to, scrutinize, and take seriously all the details, prioritize the ones that matter, redesign the details that don't work, refine and experiment at will - you have everything to gain.

2023.0612 / ONWARD!

Re-evaluating the usefulness of the previous design which consolidated all site content into a tight chronology and mixed all categories of work, research, journal/sketchbook, I've decided to revert back to a categorized structure that's not only better for navigation but more appropriately focuses user attention. The design brings back dedicated project pages (now "Operations"), a separate journal for sketches and writing, travel or urban exploration dispatches, and dedicated pages to ongoing special operations.

Over the next few months the site will undergo a much overdue cleanup in content and presentation, but no further substantial changes in overall concept this year. The aim for the second half of 2023 is to write more, practice more, research more, and continue with ongoing projects in the coming year, while closing out some old work that has been collecting dust.

Much is on the agenda for the remainder of the year in terms of design and life and much like the prior two years it has all thus far been productive in all the right ways, and therefore totally fulfilling. Looking forward to sharing more work.

 ON THE AMERICAN DREAM

21 years later and I still have vivid memories of that morning. 8th grade, just started our first class. We gathered in the science lab and the CRT TV was rolled into the room while we watched a live broadcast of the carnage. It felt distant in more ways than one - I was young and couldn't fully comprehend those events, and it occurred at (what I consider) the dawn of the first social media platforms and networks.

Walking down Lavergne Ave. on a sunny and clear Sunday afternoon this late summer, I see a man tending to his lawn, a young man watching me go by on his stoop, a man riding his bike down the alley gnawing on what looks like a long breadstick or a sausage, I nod and smile and he smiles back silently. I cross the street to pass the Greek woman who I used to have cut my hair working on a customer... It's tranquil and I think that these people certainly have their own problems and concerns about their own lives and maybe also about the country and its future. It's not the shared moment, the trivial smiles, that make me optimistic about this country and its people. They know they're living a good life implicitly, whether they actually are aware of it or not, in what they were doing when I just saw them, in the daily activities that are important to them individually, in the pursuit of their own individual goals. We don't see it, many of us fail to acknowledge it, but its obvious to me that what this country stands for is so alive and well in the daily activities that comprise our individual lives, no matter how trivial or significant some of those activities may be. The activities we can pursue provided by the country that allows for them - the activities we take for granted daily that others around the world with their own ideologies would kill for, are killing for, and are resentful to us because of our opportunity to pursue them.

Many people might think that the spirit of the country and what it stands for, its ideals and values, are something distinct from the daily activities of their lives where in fact their lives are a visible, tangible expression of the reality that the American Dream and Spirit is being lived out in the unique ways each individual is choosing to go about each of their lives. That is why I'm optimistic about the future.

What is a society but a group of individuals held together by formal and informal agreements? It is the individual human being, the smallest possible minority, not the group he belongs to that matters to the flourishing of a society. The ethnicity or race he belongs to is secondary. The groups he forms his own unique part of are only as influential or powerful as the individuals within that group allow. That is why I'm optimistic despite the nasty and deceiving political rhetoric across the entire political spectrum. We implicitly understand as Americans that it is not our politicians we should be following but rather the course of our own individual lives that will allow us to rediscover in our own hearts and minds the true meaning of the American Dream.

The American Dream is not the cheap association to the big house with the white picket fence and the fancy car. That's merely one possibility. The American Dream is the pursuit of whatever your mind can imagine - whatever you want to shape the world as you want to see it - as something to benefit yourself even while it benefits others. That is what is possible in the United States - opportunity to shape the world you wish to see. What makes such a strong economy even possible is this liberty to pursue your dreams by your own rules and standards. What makes such a strong economy even possible is the possibility for ideas to even become reality. The more that possibility is stifled, suffocated, often by the state's arbitrary whim and regulation, the less ideas flourish and the less properity is possible.

Contemporary mainstream politics is primarily reactionary - a kind of funhouse mirror that warps, distorts and is often an outright mockery of the reality of the culture. Some can see the reality behind the mirror while others accept the mirror as sole arbiter of reality, maybe even reality itself. Politics alone is inadequate to understand the state of a country. One has to look deeper, not to politics, but to the political economy, and to political philosophy, and examine on those bases the fundamental ideas that drive those with terrible politics and terrible policy.

In the end, the struggle for the true progress of the country is fundamentally a struggle for better ideas, and those come from the hearts and minds of every individual in the nation, aggregated and eventually expressed in culture, and politics later downstream. If we want to have better politics we need to influence culture. If we want culture to go a different direction, we need to not only air our ideas but put them into action in the ways each of us individually sees fit for our own individual lives. We set examples for other individuals and it is my belief that the truly good, life-affirming, life-sustaining ideas tend to win out in the long-run, but not always the short-run. The long arc of progress is long for a reason - progress is a negotiation between the forces of good and of evil. Some think of progress as taking two steps back to go forward, others see it as just moving forward. The historical tendency is the forward inefficiency of the former.

The spirit of America is partly founded on the notion of the good of the individual, and so long as that is present, even implicitly, even when people talk of a common good or a public good, they know it's the effort of each individual (whether they simply refuse to acknowledge it for fear of their being wrong or whether they really aren't aware), not the prioritization of the group, that drives human progress. The actions of individual human beings tends towards the good the majority of the time. That will only be proved false when humans no longer exist, in any evolutionary form, period. The struggle for survival (the defense of life itself) is one aspect of that work towards the good, but when survival is no longer a question, the struggle for freedom (the defense of an individual's specific way of life) is the other aspect of that work towards the good that allows for maximal choice and maximal prosperity for every individual.

It's the beautiful mind of man that can harness and subdue the sublime chaos of nature. I do believe harmony exists in the universe and we Americans, having so arduously built a beautiful infrastructure for freedom, the diversity of ideas, and prosperity to flourish, have historically expressed that best.

 MIDJOURNEY / MACHINE ART

Join Midjourney's Discord. Type whatever words you want. AI will generate interesting images, art, debatably. The renders of Chicago in the year 4022, in particular, have a certain 80's sci-fi/fantasy novel illustration lo-fi quality to them - like how those in the past expressed their visions of the future. There appears a general tendency toward a kind of retro-futurist/surrealist aesthetic quality that I've found curious.

The potential application for architectural rendering is intriguing. Imagine just entering keywords for your project in coordination with BIM data, and AI produces rendered images of a quality that's equal parts parametric but fluid and spotaneous. This could add a new dimension to project renders in a way that enhances the perception of the project itself.

Imagining Imagination

Surrealist Michael Jordan

Pomo Frank Lloyd Wright

Farnsworth House In Space

Chicago In 4022

North America 4022

Art Deco Neo Futurist Cloud City

GIFT WRAP

Sometimes I like to experiment with alternate gift wrapping designs and techniques. There's always some visual satisfaction in a nicely wrapped gift if one cares enough to notice, but it's often the case most people rush to open the gift without giving the wrapping a second thought. Fair enough, it's just wrapping, but what if part of the gift itself was the unique way in which it was wrapped - a bonus layer to the gift underneath? This wrap was something I cobbled together last minute with whatever materials I had lying around, but there are always ways to make wrap interesting - it's just a matter of how you think through and arrange the materials at your disposal. It's a matter of what you want your gift to say without revealing it (or perhaps what not to say while revealing some of it). I'm not talking about crafting a showstopper, but rather doing something that's a step beyond the traditional box wrap and bow typically chosen for basic convenience and familiarity. This is one of those cases where there's nothing wrong with tradition, but there's also nothing to lose by doing something new. Further, it's also a more explicit demonstration that you spent time and care on something you want for someone. Wrapping multiple gifts in unique ways can definitely be a chore if you don't enjoy such an activity, especially when it already is a chore to wrap them all in the same way. It is, however, a great way to exercise your own creativity by turning what could be a chore into an artistic or even a package design project, which is what I've attempted here. Design everything!

 LOCVS COMMVNIS

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Locvs Commvnis circa 2015

I've redesigned the site as a blog. The reason is twofold: first, to become an extension of Locvs Commvnis, my ongoing set of personal journals I've been keeping since 2008, and second, to leverage the blog format to assemble a clearer picture and progression of my own ideas about design, architecture, art and the various contexts in which they reside as well as what they mean to me. Projects are now more appropriately integrated into a personal and professional history instead of compartmentalized or categorized as isolated pages. The site will be first and foremost a note-taking medium and creative outlet while serving as a portfolio of work and ongoing design and artistic experimentation - an extended sketchbook and journal of sorts.

In this sense, the website is perpetually under construction, never really a finished product, and contingent on piecemeal and personal effects to constitute its most fulfilling development.

A study of drawings is not only the necessary basis of all scientific art criticism; it is the best training for the private sensibility. The distinctive mannerisms of the artist are most clearly revealed in his drawings, and this is particularly the case with the great Italian masters. Their drawings are leaves torn from their commonplace books, and in his commonplace-book a man writes (or did, until it became fashionable to publish them) only his intimate thoughts. He has no consciousness that the world is looking over his shoulder. He writes, or draws, to please himself, to explore the recesses of his own mind. We feel this to be true particularly of those great artists of the Renaissance whose minds were consumed by intellectual curiosity: of Leonardo, who was equally interested in a unicorn and a foetus, a cannon foundry and a wild flower, a human face and a fold of drapery: of Signorelli and Pollaiuolo, always trying to arrest the moving figure in some significant attitude; of Michelangelo, testing the solidity of some aspect of the visible world. So enticing is this art of drawing, that the danger is we may never turn to what is the primary work of the artist, his painting or his sculpture. That is why it is so important to realize that drawing is a distinct art, and that when we pass to painting or to sculpture it is to discover a different set of values.

My selection of architectural sketches and sketchbooks, published here in faithful reproductions, goes back to my fascination for the process of designing architecture. The quickest way to envisage an imagined idea is by hand. A drawing translates and visualizes thoughts with unique, inimitable immediacy. Eduardo Souto de Moura considers the sketchbook to be "an agenda" in which he records and plans his professional life. For Sou Fujimoto the act of sketching is like a dialogue with himself. With the contemplative concentration of a calligrapher, Wang Shu sketches out his buildings in meticulous detail. And for thirty years Steven Holl's watercolors have formed the nucleus of his architectural oeuvre. All of these architects, whose work I especially admire, live according to a credo very aptly formulated by Louis Kahn: "Drawing to find out." Eduardo Souto de Moura: Sketchbook No. 76

 HE CONQUERS WHO CONQUERS HIMSELF

I had the pleasure of designing The Strenuous Life Class 061 logo with the feedback and suggestions of fellow class members. After 30+ iterations over the course of a week we arrived at a consensus regarding its basic design elements. The following constitutes the final logo - a synthesis of the best of those iterations:

A cropped circle enclosing a lush mountain. A familiar, realist element symbolizing aspiration, ambitionm achievement and the challenges that follow as central to the Class 061 ethos.

A triangle, or pyramid, inscribed in a circle alludes to the symbol for alchemical transformation, The divine in the infinite - and the triangle itself embodies, among other things, strength, hearth, fire, home, the alchemical masculine, manifestation, and enlightenment. The triangle's gilding reflects refinement and enrichment.

Light contours, a cartographic touch, fill the triangle. They literally represeent terrain and elevation changes but metaphorically suggest exploration and the call to the adventure (of life) that forms the background for the development of skills and technical abilities.

"TSL LXI" forms a square of letters, abbreviating "The Strenuous Life" and converting 061 into Roman numerals.

The font is Times New Roman throughout in tribute to classic timelessness.

The class motto lines the bottom of the pyramid as the "foundation" upon which our class ambitions rest. Vincit qui se vincit: He conquers who conquers himself.

 LONGITUDES BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Before zero meridian at Greenwich
Galileo dreamt Dante on a ship
and his beloved Beatrice onshore,
both holding clocks, drifting apart.

His theory was right even if
he couldn't steady the ship
on rough seas beyond star charts
and otherworldly ports of call.

But the damn blessed boat
rocked, tossing sailors to and fro
like a chorus of sea hags
in throes of ecstasy.

My whole world unmoors
and slips into a tug of high tide.
A timepiece faces the harbor -
a fixed point in a glass box.

You're standing on the dock.
My dreams of you are oceanic,
and the Door of No Return
opens a galactic eye.

If a siren stations herself
between us, all the clocks
on her side, we'll find each other
sighing our night song in the fog.

I like this poem but can't really pin down the reason why. Maybe it's the way that it suggests a call to adventure, the pull of uncertainty, maybe of danger, the reward at the end, wrapped up in something like a dream. I think it speaks to my own pursuit of some (more certain) end on the sea of life. I often recite this mentally on walks as a meditation that might straighten the path when it seems to be deviating.

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Legend has it that on July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his journal nothing important happened today.

Some may be tempted with the sentiment that trashing your 2020 calendar and putting up that fresh 2021 calendar will somehow alleviate the issues surrounding everything and everyone around you. We naively expect the world to change for us, and barely expect anything of ourselves. How backward! Good news: the world won't change for you, as egotistically as we might be led to believe. You have to change it yourself through a better kind of, perhaps Randian, selfishness and a Jordan Peterson-esque discipline. When you turn that calendar page it's not the world that you should realize is turning, but the inner depths of your being. Those fundamental questions of who you are, what you are, how you are, why you are, of purpose, of destiny, of faith should rise to the surface. You, the real you, should emerge fully formed out of the abyss of the prior year, every year - that's the foundation from which you craft a true resolution.

In many ways we all tip-toed through 2020 on a balance beam. Some walked on eggshells for fear of being a supporter of this or that politic while others screamed in both fear and anger. We all acted out irrationally, reacting to some media outlet that banks off of our reactions while towing the party line. We all stayed silent, some threw caution to the wind as if there were no pandemic while others panicked to the point of near total fear. The scales are bobbing back and forth in reaction to our naivete, immaturity, petty behaviors in the face of adversity. If you're looking for someone to blame there is not one person to point to but yourself. You make the contribution in thought, word and deed to whether or not you want to improve the world by virtue of negation or by virtue of honor - to destroy or to create is each individual's choice every day. Some view the president as a king, others view him as a servant.

As far as I've been able to observe the social and political turmoil in the air in these amazing United States cannot be pinpointed neatly to a specific person, party or ideology. Driving all our anger, resentment, complacency, laziness, obedience, and gullibility, the reason for our lack of individual ambition and initiative, is the absence of purpose. We've created a spiritual void over the decade, and filled it with things like social justice, the will of the mob, or massive concepts that exist in abstract data sets like climate change (impossible for any single person to grasp). While there's nuggets of truth in all the aforementioned, they are fundamentally not truths. So we feel guilty, we feel rudderless, alone - so we gravitate to what we see everyone else doing, thus we forget about ourselves, who we are as individuals, citizens, Americans. We forgot what it means to be an American. It has nothing to do with party politics, it has everything to do with how you, as an individual, choose to live your life, and whether you choose to make the best of your situation no matter how your advantages or disadvantages. You can only blame society so much until ultimately you have yourself left to point the finger at.

Let's say nothing important will happen in 2021. For our purposes, nothing really will other than what is happening in our individual lives - not outside, but inside. 2021 prediction: PAIN. In addition to going as far as I can the next four years with GoRuck Tribe, I've become a lifetime member of The Strenuous Life and have undertaken the Train To Endure 100 daily push-up challenge for January. In return I get patches and challenge coins, skills and most of all a greater mastery of self. This year I'll be turning the corner on self-mastery and a mastery of temptation and discipline that began the day remote work became a norm for me back in March. If 2020 was about resilience, the phoenix, 2021 is about anti-fragility, a three-headed hydra. May your 2021 be an individually enlightening, productive and prosperous year and may you find purpose in your pursuit of unending self-improvement.

The question isn't who is going to let you, it is who is going to stop you?

 SERVITOR

 1221.2020

 PRE'SENCE

 0524.2020

 ARCH HISTORY I

 /\ \/

 0511.2020

 ROOM FOR GEORGI

A redesign concept for a teenager's bedroom and adjacent bathroom incorporates the softening features of arches and plywood and the spatial extensions of a built-in bed and mirrors. The bedroom's two larger walls are clad in mirrors to amplify the limited light coming in through the street-facing window and provide the illusion of lateral depth. The ceiling mirrors the incorporation of potted plants in the room with its own bright fern wallpaper. Instead of a TV, the wall adjacent to the door becomes a projection wall for video games and YouTube. A built-in bed under an arched plywood vault, an entirely new extension to the home, not only accommodates the client's requested bed size but also creates a cozy alcove for sleeping or hanging out. The bed overlooks the street through an operable arched window.

An arched entryway houses the bathroom shower's sliding glass doors. A black marble shower incorporates a neck-level window that offers privacy and a view of the street. The bathroom vanity is finished in the same black marble as the shower and a dual mirror that extends to the bathroom door itself.