☆ 010 ; bold hype

Some pages from my sketchbook... notes and ideas from class as well as planning for my research portion of my internship, for which I'm focusing on Modernism and Loewenstein, working from larger concepts to smaller concepts. I've been casting my nets widely in the beginning, but pulling in more and more each day. As always, citations are key, and I've caught up in my readings in such books as The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch [this book is probably one of the most important books you can read as an undergraduate], Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment edited by Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf, and Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism by Anthony Vidler. I'm pulling in visual sources, of course, photos from all over [because I have yet to be so fortunate as to see all of these places I'm referencing, like Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, myself].

Since it's all about language to me I'm also trying to connect to my sociolinguistics class, getting at this overarching idea of standardization of a design language. What I mean by that, and I'll only expand briefly because I don't want to show all my cards, is that in explorations in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries, the first wave of Modernist designers had to define a language [perhaps at this point a variation on the previous language(s), as I don't think one can truly escape their histories], and as it spread throughout the world it then became a more accepted and standard way of speaking, design-wise.



Earlier I had wrote a little about my obsession with infographics and maps, and I happened to stumble upon the above image on a search for inspiration and precedence for what my completed research will look like. Linked to its source, an excerpt from Edward Tufte's section in Beautiful Evidence on links, casual arrows, and networks, I not only found the way in which this information was represented interesting [and beautiful] but amusingly pertinent to what I'm working on. It's about art, obviously, but connections can definitely be drawn to architecture in the same time periods. I wonder, then, where I would draw the circle to include Le Corbusier, Loewenstein on this timeline. What's their language?

While I'm on infographics I wanted to share the following images. Never wanting to design without getting a feel of what's come before me, and what are graphic standards that make for generally good design, I searched out other people's work to see how they represented information in non-boring ways. Below are my favorites [click to enlarge and find more information].



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On an unrelated note, I can't keep my excitement to myself. My favorite band is coming out with a new album at the end of March and the hype for it is unbelievable! There's a new website coming out soon too [here] and I can't wait for all the graphics. Should be awesome.

...and have one of my favorite songs right now [not from the aforementioned band]:

Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio