Pattern is all around us. Whether embedded within every speck of the cosmos, or simply a derivative of our subconscious desire to understand the chaos of experience, suffice it to say that a system of order(s) binds all things together. From the immediate relationships of locality emerges the tapestry of a tightly coupled existence…. To begin the current project the students were all given a standard “pattern map” that consisted of a square inscribed with a complex system of orthogonal lines, angles and radial arcs derived from …

Ana and I met today to talk about the next part of the assignment for the students. We want to continue the tile project, but move briefly into the digital realm and use some of their mad Photoshop skills we have been hearing so much about. Photoshop has several tools that make creating tiling patterns easy – the one we are going to use is the “Offset” Filter. This technique is really handy for making textures for backgrounds, or for 3-D models and the like. In a …

Today is the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday. There are tons of blog posts out there talking about the significance of the day, but I thought it might be enough to simply point out that we have 3 Rural Studio students working diligently on significant renovation to the Greensboro Safe House Black History Museum. The museum occupies a house used often by Dr. King during his organization of peaceful resistance protests of segregation in Alabama during the 1960s, including his hiding from the KKK only days …

Yesterday I went out to the Rural Studio to meet with Andrew Freear to talk about all kinds of beginning semester stuff. In amongst the wide-ranging conversation we started to talk about where ideas come from, and how the Rural Studio manages to get work done. For me the thing that I am always taken with in the process of design deals with the “art of the possible,” or rather focusing our energies on what we can do, instead of what we can’t. I think on campus …