Places

Yuri's Night

I am going to be out of town on April 12, so I am sorry to miss Yuri's Night.  If you are in the Bay Area then, you should check it out. It is a techno party that runs from 2 pm to 2 am at the giant NASA hanger in Moffet Field.

Once a year in over a hundred places all over the world, Yuri's Night commemorates the anniversary of the launch of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the launch of the first Space Shuttle exactly twenty years later. Yuri's Night Bay Area taps into the San Francisco area's unique energy to bring together scientists, artists, technologists, musicians, and space enthusiasts in a fusion of celebration and education that is unlike anything else you've ever seen. In 2008 the event is growing to twice the size, bringing in more hot musicians, more brilliant scientists, more amazing artists, and the all-new Festival of Ideas.

Photo of 2007 gathering from Laughing Squid Flickr pool

Scheduled speakers this year: Will Wright (Spore), Saul Grffith (Squid Labs), and musicians and djs from around the world.

An Eternal Last Goodbye

Via Jad Abumrad, host of RadioLab, I came across a 18-minute loop of music commissioned by a very enlightend hospital morgue near Paris.  The composer's assignment was: "Please write us a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one."  The morgue wanted music for the bereaved that did not pump up emotional grief, but instead elevated the eternal aspect of all things.  Help slow the living down, to take the long view.

The resulting musical piece (Salles de Departs by David Lang) is lovely, with an ethereal but not too alien spirit. And the architecture of the place is cool.  It feels like the morgue has been there 10,000 years, has always been there, and will always be there.

Both the music and the design provokes you to think outside of time, which I what I hope our 10,000-year Clock does. 

Second thought: Seems like folks have gone nuts in outdoing each other in creative weddings? Wait till you see their funerals. Boring off-the-shelf traditional funerals are becoming as passe as traditional cookie-cutter birthday parties, graduations and weddings. These life-passage events are now opportunities for showing off your individuality. What bigger life passage is there than death? Coming up for the boomer generation and beyond: funerals with style.

How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand wrote a wonderful book called "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built" . It is a fabulous and useful manual, well worth reading and re-reading if you have any relationship with a building.

The book presents buildings as predictions. The architect or owner of a building has an idea in their mind of what they want a shelter to do, and they build the structure upon these expectations. They might begin with the idea of a family, and then design for what they think their family will do. Or they might design it for a company, or a church, or a community.

Trouble is, the future doesn't usually work out the way we expected. Our family may be bigger, or smaller than we expected. Our church may whither, or move, and the building bought by a grocery. Retail stores go through a parade of very different tenents. So buildings -- good buildings -- have to adapt to different uses over time. The best buildings are ones that are incredibly flexible for many different uses. This flexibility, this adaptability, Stewart calls "learning" and it permits a building to survive. The unadaptable ones are torn down. The result is that the classic buildings, the ones we call great because they are old and venerable, are actually the ones that are most adaptable. In other words those buildings learn the most.

Even small residential buildings, the ones that have no names, are often the most adaptable. The organic nature of changes made as buildings adapt to different families, new uses, and new technologies is what gives old cities and neighborhoods much of their charm. We tend to cover up these changes in expectations over time, so that buildings often pretend that they have not changed their minds (like some people).

But every now and then, there's a building that doesn't hide its journey through time.  When I saw this picture of a house in Cuba, my first thought was: This is how buildings learn!  This building has seen a lot. And despite getting some things "wrong" in the past, it's serving well in the present.  The main difference between this home and many others, is that no one has tried to erase its history.

The Way of Japan vs Any Way in China

James Fallow has been living in China, traveling in Japan. He noticed two different approaches to refueling the same small plane.

In Japan they do it this way. Note the uniform, safety outfits, and cushion to protect the plane's wing.



In, China, they just do  what has to be done, in any way they can.

As Fallow writes in his Atlantic blog:

With usual caveats against sweeping generalization, what this made me think was: Japan is all about the way of doing things. Practice, ritual, perfectionism, as much fanatical attention to the process as to the result. China is all about finding a way to do things. Improvisation, little interest in rules, putting up with whatever is necessary to attain the result.

(Yeah yeah yeah, there are exceptions: perfectionist operations in China, loosey-goosey ones in Japan. Still.)

At the moment, I am feeling positive toward both approaches. The emphasis on the right way of doing things is re-surprising on each encounter with Japan. And the determination to do things in China, no matter what, commands respect, despite the obvious complications and problems it creates.