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So how does one design a building where people actually use the stairs? There are three key features.
1) Fewer turns between the stairs and the closest entrance.
2) Stairs with large surface areas (not too narrow and steep).
3) Create a view, either up, down, or across, from the stairwell. No one wants to walk up a tiny, white box.
The Booth School of Business staircases meet all of these requirements (perhaps it’s no surprise the building won a major design award last year). For those who can’t build new stairwells, there are a few other nudges to try. Displaying motivational signs in the lobby and throughout the building, and playing music in the stairwell can increase stair use. Together, these two nudges can increase usage by as much as 9 percent. Hanging artwork on the stairwell walls, closing elevators occasionally, and offering incentives like fruit are also known to work.
Nate
: ?Last year I helped my friend Rob with the artist's statement to cover his then-latest gallery show, called "Pronk," an old Dutch word used to describe, among other things, a certain sort of exuberant, luxuruious still-life painting popular in the 17th century Netherlands (pronken being a verb that means "to strut"; ontbitje, "little breakfast," is generally food-related still life subcategory). It's been a great joy to have a personal front-row seat to Rob's continual vibrant exploration of the surprising intersection between old Dutch masters and contemporary pop and visual culture. Back in the day, Andy and I used one of Rob's early paintings for the very popular cover of re:generation quarterly's "Evangelism" issue, linked here via the portfolio of our then-art directors (and designers of this very website), Yee Design.?
Andy
: ?I've expressed my admiration before for John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design. But I think my admiration just went up another notch, upon the discovery that he carries this 18-year-old academic paper (literally, on paper) by Pixar's John Lasseter with him wherever he goes. The excerpts from the paper he links to are well worth reading. And I love the photo, with a sheet of paper in the background containing, over and over, the handwritten words, "raison d'être." Three cheers.?
I have carried a reprint of John Lasseter’s seminal paper on computer animation, “Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation,” for the last 18 years. This hardcopy document has been to Japan, both coasts of the US, and has really been near/dear to me and is yellowed from age and embarassingly food-stained and so forth. It occurred to me today that maybe this paper might be available online, and I just found it in excerpted form here. I’m not sure what to call it … but maybe I had a kind of myopia when it came to this one document in my life. I felt that unless I held onto it in print, that I would never be able to handily access the information. Discovering that the content is available online right now seems truly freeing to me. And yet oddly enough, I am still hesitant to place my tattered reprint into my recycling box before I leave to my next engagement this evening.
There’s always the “just in case” when it comes to any information around you. Even in this digital era we know it’s easy to lose information forever. Nothing is truly permanent. But I’ve carried this paper around for 18 years — hmmmm, as old as an RISD freshman. Ah. The power of perspective. Looks like this paper will be sticking around me for many more years to come. Dilemma resolved. Paper wins.
]]>Nate
: ?A blog reader sent me this link: "A collection of artworks inspired by the animated film My Neighbour Totoro, celebrating reverence for nature. The artworks were auctioned off to help preserve the ancient Japanese forest that, in turn, inspired the movie." Most of the art from the site wears its Anime inspirations quite prominently, but I found this paper cut out illustration, by a young illustrator who works at Pixar, to be particularly evocative. I think it gets at the delicate tension between nature and culture—the city and the garden, both with their own needs for creative cultivation.?
Nate
: ?I've seen this article cited in a number of blogs this past week; generally the take-away seems to be what Gladwell starts with, that some artists (or writers, or whatever) do their best work seemingly right out of the blocks, while others are comparably late bloomers. What's perhaps most interesting in terms of culture-making, though, is the article's later sections, which deal with just what sort of necessary conditions allow for the emergence of a late bloomer. Such success is, indeed, "highly contingent," which I think you can take two ways: on the one hand, to despair a bit about the difficulty of any artistic or cultural greatness to ever get off the ground; but on the other, to rejoice that for every Cezanne who we know about, there must be scores we never will, going about their business in our midst.?But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.
This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others.
Andy
: ?Beautiful reflections by the artist Makoto Fujimura on N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope and (after the portion excerpted below) the work of American artist Jasper Johns.?Especially in evangelical circles, many will argue that earth is to be burnt up in the Judgment fire of God, and everything will be destroyed anyhow, so why worry about culture at all. Wright walks through this issue carefully in his book [Surprised by Hope], noting and clarifying many theological nuances deftly, correcting the knee-jerk anti-culture stance of the “Left Behind” theology. Even if you do not fully agree with all of his theological conclusions, his arguments are worth exploring.
I’ve always wondered why, for instance, in 2 Peter 3:10, it is not the earth that is burned up, but heaven. (“The heavens will disappear with a roar.”) And why 1 Corinthians 3 gives a resounding nod to the remarkable idea that even our works, and not only our souls, will remain after the Judgment. Further, as another theologian, Richard Mouw, points out in his wonderful book, When the Kings Come Marching in: Isaiah and the New Jerusalem, Isaiah 60 and Revelation seem to point to the final celebration of the coming of this new Reality, would have pagan Kings and secular ships sailing into the edges of New Jerusalem. In other words, cultural influencers of all types, whether classified as Christians or not, seem to end up joining the parade in some way. . . .
Culture shaping is not an escapist activity from our current woes: instead it is breathing life into the very ashes from our present and our past, and finding, with T.S. Eliot, “the still point of the turning world.” Generative creativity flows out of not just Eden, but out of this reality of “Life after Life after Death.” We can begin to deposit our efforts into the future, rather than hope to escape into our Edenic past. Our earth, no matter how bleak, is full of promise on this side of Easter. Heaven can invade into our art of life, right in the midst of our ground zeros.
And if the earth acts as a conduit of heaven, then this yeast-like hope can be worked into the dough of culture. Naturally, as I pondered Wright’s comments, I began to ask what if art is infused with heaven, what would that art look like? If true understanding of heaven is not mere escapism, but the physical manifestation of the “substance of things hoped for,” (Hebrews 11:1) then art needs to echo this promise into tangible reality. If Wright is correct, then even ephemeral expressions done in faith will remain etched in eternal reality, and somehow earth, all of earth, is fair game for heaven’s invasion. And every act, done in faith, will count.
Andy
: ?The artist Nina Katchadourian has built her career on works that probe the boundaries between nature and culture, the random and the constructed. It's all worth exploring on her Web site, but I love this project in particular: books taken off of shelves at libraries and private collections and sorted into sly, meaningful sequences. The result is lovely not just for the poetry but for the physicality of the books themselves.?
Nate
: ?From the artist's description: "This gene is involved in color vision. Part of its DNA sequence is encoded in the triangle blocks, which are then quilted in a double helix design. The base sequence and location of the gene are quilted into the border." Along with genome quilts, Beverly St. Clair also makes beautiful liturgical quilts and stoles for her congregational church in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.?
Andy
: ?John Maeda has just left a professorship at the prestigious MIT Media Lab to become president of the Rhode Island School of Design. As he says at the end of this fascinating and important interview, "I've already been digital. I want to focus on being human."?A RISD education is classical and rigorous; first-year students are required to practice the fundamentals of drawing and sculpture. Foundation Studies are taught in rooms filled to the ceilings with thousands of skeletons, taxidermy, minerals, reptiles, birds. (A sign warns “The doves are out so please close the door.”) Other departments cover everything from photography to ceramics. The curriculum is so conservative as to be radical.
Some of RISD’s studios probably haven’t changed in a hundred years. The stuff of art and design is everywhere, in the charcoal dust, the heaps of wet clay, the scraps of wood. A RISD education focuses on what you can do with your hands; an architecture student is expected to be able to draw, a print-maker to use a press. . . .
“A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together,” says Mr. Maeda, cocking his head, widening his eyes, moving his hands as if he were shaping a pot. Mr. Maeda considers himself post-digital; he has outgrown his fascination with hardware and is driven by ideas. “I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them. Everyone asks me, ‘Are you bringing technology to RISD?’ I tell them, no, I’m bringing RISD to technology.” He describes a visit to the campus by an executive from Yahoo. Mr. Maeda took him to see the visual resources center in the new library. Hundreds of thousands of drawings, photographs and news clippings, and images of art, architecture and decorative arts—on slides—are cataloged and stored in old-fashioned metal and wood file cabinets. The Yahoo executive was stunned. “This is a real live Google!” Better, says Mr. Maeda.
Alissa was one of the early readers and reviewers of Culture Making, and I’ve been grateful for her intelligent enthusiasm for the book, and more importantly for her discerning eye for signs of hope and opportunities to cultivate and create. Best wishes, Alissa and team!
Nate
: ?I like the tension between destroying the book and revealing its contents -- it's fun to think of all the images hidden in so many books on my own shelves.?
Nate
: ?One of six colored-glass panels at the Freeman Street Station in the Bronx. The medium is a sturdier version of stained glass, with inch-thick colored segments joined together with epoxy. I love, obviously, the vibrancy of the panels, and the fact that they're a celebration of, basically, the neighborhood just below the station (which you can glimpse through that gap below the partition) -- saying, in effect, this isn't just a way-station on your journey to somewhere else, but a Place in itself.?
Nate
: ?The best way to change culture is by making more of it. So, beset by continual graffiti on their Highland Park, LA storefront, the Antonio family hired a crew of muralists to decorate their market with something the taggers might respect. The end result, as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez reports, wasn't quite what they had in mind, but the taggers stayed away ... that is, until the city cited the business for excessive signage and had the mural covered over with dull beige paint. Presented with a blank canvas, the taggers soon returned.?
Nate
: ?Lawrence Weschler writes far better than I could about this painting in his book Everything that Rises: "how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon, the two strands of thread pulled taut in her hands, the locus of all her labors. This painting is about concentration: gradually, spiralingly, we come to concentrate on the very thing the girl herself is concentrating on (everything else receding to the periphery of our awareness), like nothing so much as a painter lavishing his entire attention on his subject (or else, perhaps, like what happens as we ourselves subsequently pause, dumbstruck, before his canvas in the midst of our museum walk). Are we perhaps exaggerating here? Look more closely at the threads themselves, how they arrange themselves into a crisp V, couched in the M-like cast of shade and light playing upon the hand and fingers behind them. The girl, godlike, momentarily focues all her attention onto VM, the very author of his existance."?
