Compline in Austin Part 1

Every Sunday evening, I sing with a choir that offers the ancient monastic office of compline at St. David's Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. We meet at 7 PM in the choir practice room for rehearsal. The beginning of rehearsal is always a game of "What can we sing today given who shows up?" Our director for the evening (most often David Stevens, but sometimes Barbara Manson or Howard Burkett) determines what anthems, motets, hymns, or nunc dimittis we are to sing that evening based on what voice parts and how many of each voice part is available. The choir is a volunteer choir that is largely composed of active members of the Austin music community. Due our intimate numbers, we are quite significantly affected if one or a bunch of us happens to be touring outside of Austin with our band, be called to play violin for an oratorio, or be required to lead our section in a special offering of evensong in our church ofemployment. Thankfully, the treasury of a cappella renaissance music from the Latin and English traditions are generously vast not only in the number of liturgically-appropriate texts and settings, but also the voicings of the various pieces, be it the transparent SATB of Palestrina, the sonorous TTBB TTBB of Gallus, or the quintessentially English SSATBB of Byrd. While we have a core repertoire to which we turn if our numbers for a given Sunday evening do not favor more adventurous voicings, a great of the music we sing is encountered for the first time by most of us within the two-hour rehearsal preceding the office. Since we only have one or two voices per part, there is the joy of sight-singing to be had every Sunday evening.


Joel has a question.

David has an answer.

St. Petri Church by Sigurd Lewerentz, Klippan, Sweden

Discovered in the course of doing digital slide quality control for the University of Texas School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arnout-fonck/2537476484/

The tectonic clarity of the brick vaults resting on steel members particularly stood out to me: an undulating textured surface meeting a system of clean lines. 

Doodle for Google

Here are the entries that garnered my votes:

I Wish

I wish for more hope, hope for the future. I wish there was more love. Love for the environment and people. I wish for more joy. I wish for peace, a movement for it. I wish for more trees. I wish for gay rights, now.

Name: Meaghan Parker

Age: 17

School: SPAULDING HIGH SCHOOL

City, State: Rochester, NH

Significant Others

My wish for the world is that people will help endangered animals from going extinct. I wish this because I don't think any animal, no matter how insignificant we think it is, should be allowed to die out. They all play a part in the ecosystem of our planet.

Name: Deldar Golchehren

Age: 13

School: CAMDEN ROCKPORT MIDDLE SCHOOL

City, State: Camden, ME

Lets Heal the Planet

What I wish for the world is that we could all put aside our differences and come together to heal the earth. I wish we could all unite as residents of the planet to help end global warming, eliminate pollution and strive for earth friendly energy sources.

Name: Zoe Brants

Age: 12

School: LAURA INGALLS WILDER ELEMENTARY

City, State: Woodinville, WA

One World One God

I wish religious harmony for the world. We all are equal under one God! Our world will be a better place, if we love and respect each other irrespective of our religion. With respectful coexistence of different religions, peace will prevail in the world.

Name: Sameek Das

Age: 8

School: HIGH PEAKS ELEMENTARY

City, State: Boulder, CO

Sumer is Icumen in

Blond beer and fair chocolate.
Chicago approximates Warsaw.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain save Ireland, with France and the German States, Texas denied.
Appalachian Spring?

I want to celebrate the Fourth in the Philippines.
May the next Twelfth bring together mutual finding.

Austin Raptor Center First Renderings

Glorious Architectural Learnings

I ripped this off Vince's lecture slides as I was investigating truss height-depth ratios and ideal beam shapes as I come up with my final answer for Tuesday night's not-so-literal but literal pencils down. I would appreciate it if anyone can help me identify this building.

There's a speck in my screen. I think it's embedded underneath the glossy surface. I can't just wipe it off.

Anyway.

I like how the inverted king post truss is supporting the structural glass. It also comforts me to see that those are in turn supported by steel members that sort of work like a truss with tension members underneath, but are not fully triangulated. It resembles a solution I am considering to the problem I am facing with spanning 60 feet in the most economical and graceful manner, which is imperative, given that the span supports nothing but an architectural idea. Larry told me not to give up the architectural idea yesterday as I hurried to catch my bus to the airport. He said to screw code. I brought up blind people. He said for them to walk more slowly. The simple diagonals that barely touch the ground are graceful. I ramble.

I really have to get to analyzing Kahn so that I can e-mail Liam my preliminary paper and analytical diagrams tonight for feedback before Sunday, but I really want to resolve the main idea of my studio project so I can concentrate.

Random things in my head right now:

1. How I must not blow this weekend and this week.
   
2. Iceland in June.
3. The roadtrip to the American Southwest in a couple of weeks.
4. How wonderful it was to see and hug Thomas again. He still looks and feels the same, beyond leaving correspondences dangling. The first will always be the first. :)
   
5. Going back into the 80s groove. I miss Patrick's shirts. I also strangely miss his dear friend/roommate/lover? looking right through me.
   
6. Trusses... I actually am beginning to find pleasure in their contemplation.
   
7. Keeping connections constant, but the members vary according to their span.
8. Iceland.
9. Iceland.
10. Iceland.

I am not even done processing and posting my New Zealand photos. Meep.

There go the kids... methinks.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... (by Courage Campaign w/ Regina Spektor)

Gay Marriage Is

Culture jamming final project for Housing America: An Ideological Critique of the American Dream, a course taught by Stephen L. Ross at the University of Texas School of Architecture.
All photographs shot in Austin, Texas, on November 26th, 2008.

Concept, photography, and presentation: Saul J E San Juan.
Music: Parce Mihi Domine by Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500 - 1553), performed by Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble.

Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of Management: Initial Notes

I am taking an architecture theory seminar course taught by Liam O'Brien entitled "Contemporary Formalisms". Every couple weeks are so, we are asked to analyze a piece of art, music, and architecture. For our final analysis, I picked Louis Kahn's Indian Institute of management. I had analyzed the building earlier in the semester as a case study precedent for the housing facility for foster care graduates that we were designing in studio. In that quick analysis, I found potential for further investigation, even in simply looking at the plan that has been reproduced with reverence by the likes of Francis Ching in his catalog of all architecture truth. As I have started to investigate the building further, I find more points of departure for both diagrammatic and textual analysis:

1. How does the plan translate into the actual experience of being in the building?
2. How does it translate in section and elevation?
3. How is material employed to further the idea?
4. How generative was Kahn's approach? Is it more akin to the wholeness of classicism or the contemporary formalisms we engaged in class?

I need not have looked further than the Wikipedia article on the Indian Institute of Management to find out that an annex has been built. I quickly found a book on the subject of the annex through Google Books, which thankfully is available in our library for check-out. Here is the plan of both the annex and the original building found in the Google Books preview:


Among the several claims that the books makes about Kahn's buildings that stood out to me was the notion that Kahn's building was not intended to be generative of itself, that is, that Kahn designed the building as a complete whole. (We shall see about that.) It also makes mention of sectional variation that was not apparent to me in looking at the plan in a cursory manner, as a contrast to the deliberate flatness of the annex. The material treatment is another point discussed in the book that adds another layer to my analytical undertaking, as a connection is made between the decision of the new architect to employ smooth concrete and Kahn's use of brick as a homogenizing material. The book points out the fact that Kahn employed smooth concrete in his seminal building, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

I was hoping to continue working here at Progress Coffee in East Austin across I-35 from Downtown until it is time for me to go to compline choir practice at 7 PM. I will now attempt to finish all my section drawings for studio before I head back to campus to pick up the book at the Architecture Library. The soy white chocolate mocha I have just consumed in tandem with a green-apple-and-brie sandwich was surprisingly nourishing, giving me the impetus to crank out a lot of work this afternoon.