Tag Archives: architecture

Gingerbread Hexayurt

Hexayurts are structures made out of rigid insulation panels. They’re quite popular at Burning Man because they’re easy to transport and keep out the heat & dust better than anything else. I plan on making an H12 size hexayurt for my first Burn next year. I made a model using gingerbread.

I made dough according to this gingerbread recipe and bought fresh royal icing from the bakery at Thrifty Foods.
I rolled 2/3rds of the dough between wax paper to pretty damn thin and baked it on parchment paper until the bread didn’t take imprints, which was much longer than 10 minutes and ended up being brittle around the edges. The bread ended up being 1/8″ after baking.
I cut the bread into twelve 2 × 4″ panels with a serrated knife.
I cut six of the panels in half from corner to corner – next time I’ll cut half of them the opposite way so I have the same side facing out on all pieces.
I iced each pair of half panels into an isosceles triangle, as per the hexayurt design, and left them to set on a piece of wax paper.
I iced the walls into a standing hexagon by icing them onto a piece of parchment paper and to each other. Note that a regular hexagon has 120° angles and with 2 × 4″ panels, parallel walls are 6.75″ apart – I sketched the footprint on the parchment paper before erecting.
Based on my friend Clamb’s suggestion, I made a cardboard frame for the roof and left it to try overnight. Note that it’s important to put icing on the full panel edge and press them together rather than trying to push icing into the gap after they’ve been assembled.
I put icing on top of all the walls and dropped the roof into place.
I was too cheap to buy silver leaf, so I mixed white and grey sprinkles to simulate reflective insulation panels. The advice I got from a cake store was to stick them to the walls using warm corn syrup, but the sprinkles dissolved into it. Also, it was very difficult to get good coverage on the sides since I was hesitant to tip the hexayurt – there must be a better way to decorate, but I’m not sure what it is.

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Best Of Unhappy Hipsters

As I mentioned in my post on the rise of Tumblr humour, Alison and Stewart introduced me to this blog that doesn’t really have that much to do with hipsters as I’d describe them. It’s photos taken from interior design magazines like Wallpaper* and Dwell with bitingly-satirical captions. They’ve gotten particularly funny lately, so I thought I’d turn some of my favourites into image macros and share them:

* The asterisk stands for pretentious!

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Review: Dance Days in The Atrium

I went to a dance performance in the new The Atrium building as part of Victoria’s Dance Days festival. The Atrium is a private building with a big courtyard with restaurants and shops bordering on it – basically a contemporary, upscale take on a mall, although I’m sure the architect would hate to hear me say that.

The dancers were three women and a man, wearing street clothes with some face makeup. Their style was contemporary: afterward one of them told me that the spatial and emotional structure of the piece was planned but the individual moves were improvised. There was a sign on an easel by the main entrance that just said “Dance Days brought to you by YAM magazine” – there was no spoken introduction. A camera person filmed the performance with a hand-held camera and there was a photographer at the start. There was no music, just ambient noise from a coffee shop.

dancers lying
dancers with trees

There were at most a dozen audience members who seemed to know what was going on, everyone else were just passing through or sitting in an adjacent restaurant. For me, the piece raised some critical questions:

What separates the dancers from normal people and from crazy people? How do we know that those people are dancing and other people aren’t? Their sign, makeup, camera person, training, schedule and audience are what make them official, not anything inherent in their actions. (As you can see in my photos, I was a bit obsessed with the sign.)

It felt like the sort of thing you might watch in a public square or a park – how is it significant that The Atrium is private space that feels public? What would happen if me and my friends were to try the same thing? I’m sure the public amenity of The Atrium’s courtyard figured into the development permit, so is this just a case of government outsourcing the creation of public space?

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Victoria’s New Bridge

The City of Victoria has floated three designs for the new Johnson Street Bridge. They’re all bascule bridges, meaning they swing up with a counterweight, because that’s the simplest energy-efficient way to build a movable bridge.

Reverse bascule: The copy says this is inspired by van Gogh’s Drawbridge with Carriage, except that bridge is a double regular bascule, not a single reverse bascule. The inspiration is that, unlike 20th century bascules like the current Strauss bridge, the counterweight is a panel instead of a cement block. It’s hard to make out in the distance sketches, but the way it works is the horizontal panel hinges to vertical when the bridge opens. I can’t find a picture of an open reverse bascule, so I think they must be uncommon.
Rolling bascule: As far as I can tell, the Canary Wharf area has a bunch of bridges and proposed bridges: one of them is a rolling bascule.* According to the city of Victoria’s director of engineering, the Canary Wharf bridge has the rolling mechanism below the deck with a walkway passing through it: the Victoria version has the rolling mechanism above deck to be more visually striking.

I believe the Te Wero Bridge being built in Auckland is a rolling bascule bridge; I wish Victoria’s bridge could be so cool:
Cable-stayed bascule: You get to choose your tower shape and angle, as well as how the cables are connected but these bridges all basically look the same:

Writers to the Times Colonist have suggested a replica of the current bridge or of London’s Tower Bridge.

I voted for the rolling bascule because I think it has the best combination of industrial girders to reference the working harbor and stupid modernist curves to reference tourism.

* The City’s website stole the photo from WikiMedia, violating copyright.

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The Architecture of Oppression

The Times Colonist recently ran a series of articles on the poor state of reserve housing in BC. In my reading, they primarily blamed the development process: that chose lowest-bid developers and then didn’t include any quality inspection or performance measures to ensure the developers completed the contract. They also spoke frequently of the physical wear created by overcrowding, although always implying insufficient housing stock, not an attempt to implement extended-family culture in European-style homes.

One issue handled carefully by the journalists was poor maintenance standards: they did not want to suggest that those people were bad tenants. But most recommendations for improvement included, in the small print, training for tenants in housing maintenance. The argument was made that many of the conditions, including poor maintenance, are widespread in ghettos all over the world (no matter what ethnic group is ghettoized). And I would add that making home ownership illegal probably doesn’t help.

I’m not sure why it’s taboo to say that most natives don’t know how to maintain a Western home? Why would they? Reservation schools were successful at dismantling past cultural practices without being successful at assimilation, which would include house-culture. Even if traditional native culture were intact, what relevance would it have to Western homes?

They traditionally haven’t had the experience of building upkeep, and they didn’t need to. If the building returned to the forest, that was what it was supposed to do.

Review: Caffè Artigiano/Victoria

I’m mostly excited about having an Artigiano in Victoria because it has a better location and hopefully better hours than Victoria’s other 1st-tier coffee shops. I don’t expect better coffee, because Discovery, 2% Jazz, and Habit are, by all accounts, competitive with the best in Cascadia. In fact, I find Artigiano’s espresso to be a little bitter.

I’m sitting in Artigiano/Victoria for the first time. I’ve been in Artigiano/Hornby a few times in the last month, so this is a perfect time to contrast the locations.

Artigiano/Victoria is in a two-story-high hotel lobby, strictly partitioned from the hotel by a human-height wood and glass wall. I would have made the wall all-wood because the coffee shop is not so small that it would become claustrophobic without the glass and seeing the hotel is odd. Hanging from the soaring ceilings are huge, round lamps with soft light: they’re interesting, but a far cry from the cozy, fake-stone, lowered ceilings of Artigiano/Hornby. Overall, I’d be less likely to sit in this location than a Mirage or Habit – it feels more like a place to get coffee to go (which ruins the experience of a high-end espresso).

The coffee, however, is better than Artigiano/Hornby’s: more smooth and with a better flavor balance. It’s a shame Artigiano couldn’t get a better location for their first store in Victoria, but I’ll be back for the coffee.

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Two Meanings of “Postmodern”

Artists and architects (or at least academics and historians thereof) have an insatiable need to label minute trends in their disciplines. As a result, the “postmodern period” in art took place during the summer of 1978 or something like that. In contrast, in philosophy and the social sciences, postmodernism started with/after Kant and is still slowly gathering steam. The (otherwise unremarkable) pop-architecture book The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities has a nice line about the difference:

Postmodernism has now been given a rather different implication and weight by sociologists and geographers, who are concerned with the way categories of knowledge develop within late capitalist society in harness with power and privilege.

This is a Foucaultian view in its emphasis on the study of power-relations. I have only recently come across the idea that postmodernism is an ontological pursuit (what exists?) compared to modernism as an epistemological pursuit (what can we know?), so I can’t say more about that.