A chair versus a skyscraper… how different could they be?

themichiganarchitect Leave a comment

I was at the Start Up Career Fair last Friday, talking with a few representatives of the furniture company Floyd, and my conversation with them struck my interest in the question: how different are architecture and furniture, really?
People say that architecture studies humanities to build spaces for humans to live their lives in. Sounds good. But when it comes to furniture, it’s almost as if nobody really cares about it; we take it for granted.
To me, my conversation with the Floyd team resonated with our beliefs that architecture and furniture design are really basically the same thing- the only difference is their sizing scale. This is our argument, which I’d love for any of you readers to comment on whether or not you agree!
1. Both architecture and furniture deal with societies and their habits.
2. Both architecture and furniture’s goals are for the design and aesthetics to be one and the same thing within itself.
3. Both architecture and furniture have the power to change our lifestyles.
4. Both architecture and furniture require stable engineering and general understanding of physics in order to function.
5. Both architecture and furniture fields have the power to influence one another throughout history.

Let me know what you think! I’d love to hear some thoughts!

Kylie Jenner and Relating to Celebrities

Ana Lucena Leave a comment

If you don’t follow celebrity news, you may (fortunately) be unaware that socialite Kylie Jenner gave birth and announced it on Super Bowl Sunday with the release of a touching video to her daughter. As someone who is mystified by the continued popularity and success of the Kardashian family despite the wide-spread disdain the average Joe seems to have towards them, I want to dissect my experience of seeing people actually care about this birth.

Kylie is 20 years old, making the announcement feel more personal to me as someone who is also 20. She is not the first person my age to get pregnant, with Facebook keeping me up to date on the surprising number of engagements and childbirths that have occurred in my graduating class since we left high school. But I am fascinated by how much difference class seems to make when assessing individual success.  While I struggle to finish essays to graduate, Kylie is already the proprietor of a lip kit line despite the backlash her latest ventures in cosmetics have received. Though the material success at such a young age is impressive to me even as a privileged middle-class college student, the fact Jenner’s family was already wealthy before she came of age due to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” makes the profits made on the lip kits less a story of individual triumph than corporate strategy. Following in her sisters’ footsteps, she has used her family’s overexposure on television to make lucrative business deals. Knowing how little social mobility there is in America, I am not surprised that the rich only find ways to get richer.

This makes the warm welcome and excited buzz for Jenner conflict me. On the one hand, I am of course happy to hear of a child being born healthy to an enthusiastic mother. This is evidenced by how Jenner managed to keep her entire pregnancy a secret despite being in the media spotlight and rumors being leaked and dismissed for the last few months. The way she did not prioritize making a profit off the attention her pregnancy would have generated is an encouraging sign she wants to put her baby first. However, I deeply question if a young, unmarried mother at 20 years old would have been met with such fanfare if she had been poor or Black. The stereotype of the “welfare queen” painted young, Black single mothers as a huge drain on government aid and was a tool of rhetoric in the public discussion about welfare throughout the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. What keeps us from calling Jenner irresponsible as opposed to some of the women most in need in our society — the money she is raking in now, or the financial stability we assume her upper-class status will guarantee her in the future?

I hope that Kylie will be a wonderful mother and has a happy future with her daughter. I hope that Travis Scott is a supportive father even after he will inevitably leave the picture, following what I’ve seen in Hollywood relationships. But what I hope more than this is more critical discussion of how we talk about the way race and class defines the way we talk about women’s agency. It’s clear that the media won’t.

The Original Digital

jbaz Leave a comment

Digits….Can I get yo’ digits; How many digits are significant; Composing digital screen play; We recognize digital in this context, but do you know the original meaning of “digital”?

Latin: “digiti” means “fingers”.

Spanish: “dedos” means “digits” which indicate “fingers”

Cartoonist Lynda Barry has a saying that “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits!” In the 2000s, digital has adopted a new meaning of being a projection through a device, but the truest, most organic form of digital comes from your own mind through your fingertips. This is where you access the purest form of creativity.

Author Austin Kleon in his book Steal Like an Artist capitalizes on this concept of losing yourself to a computer. He says that it robs us of the feeling that we are making things, and in addition to stealing this feeling, it also robs us of many of our ideas as the delete button is so easily accessible we don’t give ourselves a chance to give potential what initially seems like a useless idea. Oh but honey, every idea is worth something. It won’t be complete when it first strikes you. Follow me in this analogy:

Idea is to seed.

Thinking is to water.

Elaboration is to growth.

Product is to fruit. An idea seed isn’t a substantial diet for your entire creative capacity, but it is the core to a satisfying creative feast.

The artist Stanley Dogwood, who has designed every album artwork for Radiohead, believes that computers are alienating because they put a sheet of glass between you and whatever is happening;  it’s hard to feel connected to something when there is a screen between you and the product of the creativity.

A couple weekends ago, the Power Center hosted the Cadence Dance Co. put on an incredible demonstration of the original digital: a pure exhibition of the channeling of inner creativity through their own digital devices: their bodies. Activating every part of their body with  astounding strength yet notable grace, the dancers moved to twelve songs, each with its own story.

Encore, Rhythm, the Friars, and Funktion performed between songs by the Flux crew, also exhibiting their own digital creativity. The human body is a reservoir of digital potential. Very cool to see.

 

In Defense of Being Brutally Honest

vle Leave a comment

As the saying goes, honesty is the best policy. I have always been blunt and concise. Among my friends, I am known not to sugarcoat things, and to get straight to the point. If I’m having trouble with a paper, I’ll talk to my professor. If a friend asks me for my opinion, I will tell you what I truthfully think. Although it can be quite uncomfortable to be unabashedly honest, I believe that confrontation is sometimes necessary. For me, one of the worst feelings is having something to say and letting it bubble up inside of you. Plus, letting your friends and family know the truth is important.

Honesty with people builds stronger relationships. To let people know how you truly feel, and to let yourself be vulnerable is one of the most liberating experiences in life. I’ve broken up a relationship because of distance, and told my crush how I really felt about them. I could not keep mulling these thoughts over and over in my mind, to have them bottled up. This anxiety would lead to greater tension between us, in both instances. It was nerve-wracking, but relieving. Of course, the outcome is not always positive, but I feel that the best way to deal with such issues is to have both parties on the same page and not let honesty be obscured by secrets and lies.

I want people to be honest with me, and I’m honest with them. Sometimes, telling the straight truth is incredibly painful. Everyone wants to avoid awkwardness. But to get the most out of an authentic life, and to reach for what you really want, being brutally honest can be one of the best tools you have.

As William Shakespeare wrote in All’s Well that Ends Well, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.”

 

4 Reasons I Love the Step Up Series

mceste Leave a comment

Recently, Youtube released the newest installment of the decade-old franchise Step Up. Instead of the traditional movie format, this new online series is released in hour long installments like a television show and focuses on a large group of people instead of a main couple. Although many viewers have given the Step Up movies such acclaim as “cheesy” “predictable” and “awful,” all five (count them, five) movies and this new series are some of my favorite movies of all time. Here’s why:

  1. The original movie was the start of one of the greatest real-life couples ever, Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan. When I found out they were actually married, my brain exploded. Truly, the cutest love story ever.
  2. The representation of real dancers on the big screen. It’s always refreshing when dancers play dancers in television and movies—they’re not always the greatest actors, but their years of training and hard work always shine through.
  3. The introduction of so many amazing characters: Moose, Kido, Hair, Camille. Each one was so relatable and awe inspiring to a young dancer like me.
  4. This franchise gave me something to grow up with—with each stage of my growth as a person and dancer, there was a new Step Up movie to watch, one that never failed to wow me with virtuosic dancing.

Winter Olympics 2018: Curling, Speed Skating

Jordan Brown Leave a comment

The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea starts this Thursday.  The Winter Olympics has less sports than the Summer Olympics and with it a smaller audience.  The names of the sports of curling and speed skating are well known, yet their rules are not.

Curling is a team sport that is played on a sheet of ice.  Most people compare curling to shuffle board, only on the ice and with a team.  The teams of four players push a 40 pound granite rock down the ice and try to get it as close to a target as possible.  Two teams compete against each other, and the team who gets closest to the target wins.  One player throws the rock and the others sweep in front of it to try and help the rock keep straight and hit the target.  If no one swept in front of the rock then the rock would curl, or veer left and right.  The sweeping keeps the rock straight.  Each team throws sixteen rocks, with each player throwing twice.  Scoring the game is the team who has more rocks closer to the center than the other team.

When people hear the sport of speed skating  they think that it is pretty self explanatory.  Speed skating is essentially track on ice with players skating around the ice arena at different distances.  The races are separated between men and women with 7 different events, 5 individual, 1 team pursuit and 1 mass start.  The team pursuit is when three athletes start on opposite sides of the oval and skate six or eight laps.  The winning team is the team who has all three athletes cross first.  The winning team moves on to the next round and the losing team is eliminated.  The mass start event is a sixteen lap race where all 24 athletes race at once instead of only having two athletes racing in elimination style.  Mass starts also have sprint points which athletes can gain during laps four, eight, twelve, and sixteen.  In each of these laps the top three finishers get extra points.  These points are added to the points that the first, second, and third place athlete get.

The Winter 2018 Olympics are starting in less than a week and there are many sports to watch that are not always in the spotlight.  Curling and speed skating are two of them that will be in the spotlight over the next two weeks.