Oh!

richardceccanti — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:26:24 +0000

piccolo

richardceccanti — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 01:44:30 +0000

sto qui, in questa piccola stanza, con le mie poche cose. ognuna con la sua funzione, e la tentazione di buttare qualsiasi cosa si renda inutile. potrei fare la lista e ci vorrebbe poco: macchina fotografica, scarpe, 2 libri, una copera, una stufa.
sto riducendo tutto quello di cui non ho (credo di non avere) bisogno, anche le persone, anche i rapporti.
è strano pensare come in questo momento in cui forse sarebbe facile riempirmi la vita di cose, io stia facendo di tutto per svuotarla.

vero?

richardceccanti — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:08:23 +0000

la verita’ non esiste. ci sono verita’ mediatiche, verita’ giornalistiche e verita’ personali. per un daltonico il cielo e’ verde. per rotondi madre teresa di calcutta chiamava anche lei le questure per far uscire i paria quando venivano arrestati.

esiste invece una lista veloce di cose dimostrate, e quindi almeno giuridicamente vere, per il quale qualcuno si dovrebbe dimettere.

-chiamare in una questura per far liberare qualcuno di cui non si sa nulla e’ da imbecilli. anche se lo si fa come gesto caritatevole. gli imbecilli, di solito, non fanno i presidenti del consiglio.

-essere un 72enne che organizza 45 feste in tre mesi alle quali partecipano dalle 10 alle 25 ragazze con un’eta’ media di circa un terzo di colui il quale organizza suddette feste, e’ moralmente dubbio, e in un paese “a forte connotazione cattolica” o anche “bacchettone” come l’italia, questa abitudine, una volta resa pubblica, dovrebbe far vergognare abbastanza chiunque da costringerlo a rassegnare le proprie dimissioni. se mio nonno facesse cosi, lo manderei in casa di cura.

-che il presidente del consiglio riempia la propria casa (resa per propria stessa decisione una sede istituzionale, quindi immaginate che lo stesse facendo a palazzo chigi) di persone a lui praticamente sconosciute che entrano ed escono senza controlli e’ una noncuranza incredibile, perche’ espone ad un grande rischo la piu’ alta carica dello stato, e con essa, la stabilita’ del paese stesso. metti che uan di queste e’ una terrorista con le tette grosse. boom, muore il presidente del consiglio. al di la del ludibrio di una parte di paese, immagini il casino?

-un presidente del consiglio che, pur possedendo gia’ tre televisioni, telefona in diretta a tre trasmissioni, due del servizio pubblico e una di un’emittente che a lui non appartiene, per urlare insulti, e’ probabilmente uno squilibrato. in un paese libero chiunque puo dire qualsiasi cosa di chiunque altro in qualsiasi momento, esistono idee diverse, ed esistono sedi competenti per chiedere compenso quando si crede che certe opinioni siano sbagliate. i politici di solito non chiamano in diretta per smerdare chi stra parlando contro di lor. uno non puo usare le televisioni come la sua bacheca di facebook.

-un presidente del consiglio o un qualsiasi esponente politico che viene indagato per reati, sopratutto se penali, ha il dovere di dimettersi o sospendere i propri poteri ed adoperarsi perche’ il processo giudiziario si svolga il piu’ velocemente possibile. a questo si puo controbattere dicendo che esiste un disegno eversivo della magistratura. se questo e ‘vero e circostanziato, i poteri dello stato devono intervenire e sanare la situazione, non limitarsi semplicemente a lanciare accuse in televisione. e non si tratta nemmeno di riformare il sistema LIMITANDO le capacita’ di indagine dei pm, ma di rimuovere, se esistono, le sacche di opposizione allo stato democratico all’interno del potere giudiziario (perche’, se fossero vere le accuse mosse ai giudici, di questo si tratterebbe, di eversione, roba da digos, per capirci)

-avere i propri avvocati come parlamentari e’ semplicemente inaccettabile, un conflitto di interessi di portata enorme del quale non si parla abbastanza.

-che la propria igenista dentale senza un passato politico possa diventare consigliere regionale, e’ altamente discutibile

-che un uomo di 72 anni chiami una volta al giorno una ragazza marocchina di 1 anni dal passato un filino torbido e’, a scelta: morboso, stalking, preoccupante, raccapricciante, o il segno che avevano lo “you and me”.

Secondo me tutto il resto dell’inchiesta e’ “crema”, superfluo, irrilevante per il paese e strettamente personale.

richardceccanti — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:16:06 +0000

so in the end we submitted a fully developed concept…times 4.
we were supposed to complete a massing studies, maybe a few facade system proposals, and in the end we still wrapped up 4 different, in depth, plans and sections and facade system and why not material palette designs.
Part of it was down to us getting carried away with it. the team was split in three main designers able to develop what they felt was right, and a base team of 3 helping with production. this allowed the designers to play long enough to sharpen the schemes and come up with three distinctive, yet resolved approaches.

but still you could see the shadow of panic in the eyes of the boss. he might have promised something he couldn’t deliver, the almighty all-solving parti diagram that gives the client his square meters and still turns into great architecture did not materialize on our pages.

so what then? the choice that was made here was to go at it full on, spending the last few hours before going to print in photoshopping different color options on the same renderings…
now, this is a commercial client, what will he see in this? will the images attract him enough to convince him to shed the necessary square meters to achieve a better building?
wouldn’t have been better to save ourselves some time, and gone with one option, one strong image, and that be it. we will see what the client says.

the new

richardceccanti — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:21:28 +0000

developers will be developers. 20% will be 15% which will then lead to 10% and once they nudge you on single figures then you will be surely but politely asked to “comply with the initial requests of the client”.
sometimes scaring them is the only option. just as you should always design for the worst case scenario.
In a post credit-crunch-call it what you will society, things have not really changed, but money has becoem an even stronger justification for denying freedom. Because if before the PRESENCE of money was the motivation, now it is the lack of money that drives the decisions. and since the lack of money is at the same time undeniable and intangible, it turns into an obstacle, a wall which you cannot climb. simply because it is not there.

house in mahallat

richardceccanti — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:34:35 +0000

interesting use of recycled stone for a building facade. by recovering off cut of stone from local manufacturers, and mixing them much like you would do with differently aged bricks, the architect achieve a quite interesting patterning and texture.
the article here

notes on developers

richardceccanti — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:49:04 +0000

during our first meeting, the client answered to our criticism of his requests (60.000 sqm on a 7.500 sqm site, no I haven’t forgotten any zero) by saying that he would be ready to lose up the 30% of the surface to obtain a better architectural product. the issue is that, in general, a developer will never give up on the chance of squeezing the last cm and the last cent out of a plot. the case history here speaks for itself: higher quality demands a higher price, and the market is not willing to absorb the premium. so a lesser final product at a price in line with the market will sell better that a premium product with a higher price. This is obviously based on the assumption that the developer will not give up a part of his profits. which begs a whole new series of questions on the system as a whole and the way it is regulated, but we will leave that for later.
so back to the story, the big boss shouted “30%!”. his assistants shrouded. within a week’s time the big boss was brought back to reason, and the 30% had become 20. Then 15. Then we started being asked to provide a proposal which would loose “as little as possible”. Which means “don’t lose anything. if you do, we will let you put it back come schematic design time, and fuck up your whole concept”.

As a rule of thumb, you can only deal with developers if you can challenge their requests WITHOUT cutting that final little number at the bottom of their business plan. two weeks to go. we will see.

big

richardceccanti — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:01:03 +0000

a quick consideration I made to myself about the work of bjarke ingels. he has mutuated a lot of the anti-aesthetic and “calcutta-detail” attitude of his master. yet, I still do not understand where the line between “form” and “generating shapes put of content” is in his work. there is a consistency in the “looks” of his buildings, that leads me to believe there is some kind of postrationalization in his work. or maybe is just the language he has developed to speak his mind, the arsenal of formal solutions he calls to when needed. but then again, this would mean he has a “limited” array of solutions…I don’t know, maybe all of the above are true. still his attitude and approach, together with the fact that his office is co-run by a business administrator, goes to show that he is one of the brightest young minds of the profession, and I believe that taking up a little bit of his approach could go a long way in helping architects in promoting both their position in society AND their businesses.
Alas, punkrock (of the westcoast kind, descendents et all) made it to architecture.

(really) high density

richardceccanti — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:54:51 +0000

high density has become an integral part of architecture since the bitrh of modernism. prior to that, density was spontaneous, in city centers confined by defense walls, with no planning and an exposure to shifts in population numbers. I believe density has, in modern cities, a threshold beyond which it only becomes detrimental to human life. In western cities, density is “prevented” from happening by regulations, usually by an index applied to the size of the site, generally around 0.5 to 0.6 as a multiplying factor to establish how much we can build.
The scheme at hand, in rabat, morocco, calls for 60.000 sqm over a plot just above 7000 qm in size. it means we could potentialli build one solid volume of 9 stories, 60 by 120 meters. there is not a single typology of building that could function in a structure like this. a car park, maybe.
unfortunately the client want to build flat. fortunately, we are allowed to build high enough to create a small courtyard.
the approach could be double: either work on maximum density and try to make the flats, and the elevations, as attractive as possible (in order to justify the final price tag the clint wants to put on the flats). OR we can try to work on the massing to enhance views, natural lighting, circulation. this might cost some square meters. but it might raise value, not just the architectural one.
at the moment we are coing through a series of massing studies, mainly in cad, because of the faster feedback on quantities, and aslo because the office is not equipped for model making.
I have the impression of where this will lead, but I have learned to not restrict myself to initial intuitions, and to continue, if times allows to hammer the supposedly “best option” untill it does all you want it to do. we’ll see.

morocco to seville

richardceccanti — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 17:39:40 +0000