Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee

Carved Book Landscapes by Guy Laramee

Milar Lagos Book Igloo

Milar Lagos Book Igloo

I realize that this is a bit of a stretch but I immediately thought about the connection between young children’s block play (construction) and the development of literacy. The impulse to take modular forms and stack them or make patterns is common among young children as well as many adult artists. Parallel with this form-making impulse is the desire to construct narratives with these forms.  There is a bit of both in the works of Milar Lagos and Guy Laramee. Following up on this theme, I will be adding an image in my next blog that I will entitle “Revenge of the Mouse.” I recently discovered my precious first edition copy of Stuart Little by E.B. White tenderly chewed on the lower-right hand corner by a resident mouse in my house in East Corinth, Vermont. Perhaps it was Stuart’s illiterate but artistic country cousin.

Melvin the Mini Machine from HEYHEYHEY on Vimeo.

Companies like GM are using Legos to visualize production problems.

“We discussed … our frustrations with some of our reports not showing us what we really needed to see,” Dennis Pastor writes Co.Design.  We came to the conclusion that our processes were 3-dimensional but our reports were only 2-dimensional. We needed to see them 3-D; hand sketches were exchanged over the weekend and within the following week, GM had the first LEGO prototype in use. But beyond their transparency, there may be a bigger advantage to Legos: they’re also fun. By mapping real world problems to an icon of our youth, each challenge must be approached with an inherent playfulness. And because Legos are, by their very nature, expected to be rebuilt, patterns don’t appear stuck in stone–or just as bad–printed in ink. Now, if only we could get the Lego pirate ship or a lunar rover in the mix, we’d really have something.”

This is the second article that talks about the use of Legos as a tool/toy for adults to represent ideas in a three-dimensional form and, to have “fun” in the process. We know that children use all blocks in the same way – to visualize, test and retest ideas since the flexibility of blocks allows them to knock them down and rebuild again. It is curious that Pastor wants to add the Lego pirate ship or the lunar rover which seems to be the opposite idea of the non-representational, open-ended, and therefore, flexible nature of the Lego brick and, of blocks in general.

In a similar imaginative act, these Lego design ads use non-representational
forms to create a character. They have taken one or two salient features of
these cartoon characters and through a choice of a specific color or size
relationship, they have represented them with Lego bricks.

Ad Campaign for Lego by German Advertising Agency Jung von Matt

“It’s a series of minimalist Lego designs based upon some of our most
beloved cartoon characters. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to The
Smurfs, to The Simpsons, to the kids from South Park…
Through the simplest of visual cues, the ads find the perfect balance of
implying so the viewer can infer.”

This rendering of this proposed five star underground hotel could provoke some curious ideas for building an underground structure in the sandbox or on the edge of a puddle or pond.

His often quoted remarks have always resonated in my design and education work.

“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.”
_{Speaking about restraint in design, the New York Herald Tribune, 28 Jun 1959.}

“Less is more.”
_{Speaking about restraint in design, the New York Herald Tribune, 28 Jun 1959.}

Women in Architecture Info-graphic

We often hear about the block building “gender gap” both at homes and in schools. Perhaps these images will further inspire young girls to build with blocks and join the next generation of female architects. In 2011, women made up 21% of US architects.

Jeanne Gang Architect, 2011 MacArthur Fellow

“The first place was awarded to Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song from China for their project “Himalaya Water Tower”. The proposal is a skyscraper located high in the Himalayan mountain range that stores water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains’ natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use.

“The “Himalaya Water Tower” is a skyscraper located high in the mountain range that serves to store water and helps regulate its dispersal to the land below as the mountains’ natural supplies dry up. The skyscraper, which can be replicated en masse, will collect water in the rainy season, purify it, freeze it into ice and store it for future use. The water distribution schedule will evolve with the needs of residents below; while it can be used to help in times of current drought, it’s also meant to store plentiful water for future generations.”

The second place was awarded to Yiting Shen, Nanjue Wang, Ji Xia, and Zihan Wang from China for their project “Mountain Band-Aid”, a design that seeks to simultaneously return the displaced Hmong mountain people to their homes and work as it restores the ecology of the Yunnan mountain range.

The skyscraper is constructed in the traditional Chinese Southern building style known as Chuan Dou. Small residential blocks are used as the framework: The blocks are freely organized as they were in the original village, but the framework controls this organization of blocks into different floors, acting as the contour line in traditional Hmong village.

The recipient of the third place is Lin Yu-Ta from the Taiwan for a “Vertical Landfill” to be located in the largest cities around the globe, both as a reminder of the outrageous amount of garbage that we produce and as a power plant that harvests energy from waste decomposition.”