Plans / Van Eyck
Fabrication / Driessens & Verstappen
Cubes / Piet Blom

Title: Benoit Mandelbrot.

Interventions: Thomas Demand/Olafur Eliasson.

Title: David Gissen, Subnature [read].

(a repetition reduced to two)

Minimal paths, pneumatics / Frei Otto
Cantenary Bifurcations / Thomas Wong
Artesanal Voronoi / Seven Six Five
Complex City / Lee Jang Sub
Three 3 / Kat Masback
Vector Fields / Biothing

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling.

The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbour. The neighbour is in Old English the neahgebur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller.

Building and thinking are, each in their own way, inescapable for dwelling.

Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.

- Martin Heidegger

Sennett's Corrosion of Character and Heidegger's Building, Dwelling, Thinking interacting on the site of SANAA's Moriyama House, Tokyo, which is arranged as a set of distinct housing components forming a network of compact structures[1][2]. Aside from its modularity (and flexibility) and play on house/garden public/private polarities, I'm drawn in particular to the proportions of the site. How the dimensions of both street and house are strictly related to the human body, despite it being a suburban location, how this kind of scale makes it seem all the more dwellable.

Photographs by Takashi Homma & Iwan Baan, from the books Tokyo and Single Story Urbanism.

Paris with H, 8/04-12/04

drawings / Claude Parent
horizons / Jan Dibbets
volumes / Charles-Édouard Jeanneret
cubes / Sol LeWitt

Philip Beesley's talk on living architectures, one of several highlights of mine at Sonic Acts XIII, along with J.P. Sonntag's low frequency standing waves and BJ Nilsen's multi-channel storm in a church.

Top: Habitat '67 (Montreal Expo). Bottom: OMA interlace city, Singapore

Supersurface A1-A21 is a series of abstract graphical works produced as a study into volume, rhythm and surface; a kind of visual thinking. The generative graphics are composed of a field of lines subject to deformations through the placement of attractors at different points in space. They're partly based on the reaction-diffusion dynamics evident in morphogenesis.

More info and the complete web gallery available via stdio.

At the moment I'm wondering how to begin. Here's how other people begin.

HAROLD PINTER

I start all my plays by naming my characters a, b and c.

BERNARD PARMEGIANI

When I start a piece, I create a sound bank; I include new sounds, never used before, that might fit my intention and reworked old sounds. I listen to them and create detailed inventories... For example, for De Natura Sonorum, I made lists of sounds classified by shape, subject, colour, etc, according to the TOM (Treaty of Musical Objects) typology.

AMY HEMPEL

When I begin a story I know it's set to go. I always begin with the first and last lines. That never changes. Some writers work on a story to see where it will go, what will happen to the characters, but I always know everything about the story before I begin writing it.

OWE SVENSSON

Generally I set out with a rather naive attitude because I never really know when my work is actually started. It is not that I think it is difficult - I know what has to be done - but somehow I have to start and then realize: "This will turn into something. We can build upon this" But I could never begin by saying "This is really good - this is the way to do it". I have to put things into motion and then start working.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

If you want to renew something you must show that you can do what has been done. You can't begin by innovation. You can't begin by free verse for example. You should attempt a sonnet, or any other set stanza, and then go on to the new things.

TADAO ANDO

The level of detail and craft is something that’s inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.

JEAN-LUC GODARD

There was a desire to start again after the end of a certain idea of Europe, which corresponded to my life, or to my intellectual trajectory. Is there a possible start point that might allow us to begin again? As far as cinema goes, it hasn't been found and one wonders whether it's possible since we don't appear to be capable of speaking or filming differently. It's more like an end for the moment.

ROBERT BRESSON

I begin by improvising, but when I see that money is running out, I shoot whatever stage we have arrived at.

WOLFGANG VOIGT

As a working basis I often deliberately start from wrong assumptions, in order to be able to open new spaces.

I've been reading Michael Hensel & Achim Menges' excellent documentation of their architectural research at the AA, Morpho-Ecologies. The ME approach can be broadly characterised by the design & fabrication of generative structures rooted in biological form, often based on cellular and plant growth models, as a means of improving the performance, intelligence and sustainability of architectural constructions. Erwin Hauer's wall for Knoll's showroom, a cellular Hydrostone surface that modulates light in sophisticated ways, is one example. See also the work of Alisa Andrasek's studio, Biothing (book), TheVeryMany, this gallery of compiled works or Bruce Sterling's documentation of generative architecture prototypes from AAST in Tokyo — some, if not all, of these examples display an ME approach.

The term morphology was coined by Goethe and ecology by Haeckel, worthy intellectual forefathers to any movement. If electron microscopy provides us with the contemporary equivalent to Haeckel's extraordinary work (see France Bourely, whose book is excellent), then the digital models produced by ME research at least induce some of the same responses; aesthetically complex, exploratory, biological, foreign designs that reveal new conceptions of form. They signal a future architecture rooted in biochemistry; Hengel & Menges are essentially trying to retool architects to think in terms of organism and environment. Speculations on membranes, synthetic life structures & evolutionary design are all to be found in ME practice.

ME surfaces can at times resemble diatoms, with gradual variation over many cells produced by adaptation to local environmental variables. I would broadly define these ME surfaces as supersurfaces, as a way of expressing the synthetic nature of their growth models; they are in a way looking to supersede the natural, not merely emulate/simulate. One such supersurface was exhibited as part of the London Design Festival by Amanda Levete Architects.

Superstudio brought the word supersurface into architectural discourse in the 70s as a vision of a homogenised, unified landscape, both an ironic counter to the spatial logic of tele-communication grids (Castell's space of flows) and a radical re-appraisal of boundary in the built landscape [1],[2]. In this new guise the supersurface is an emergent, contiguous form produced by simulated forces acting on interrelating components modelled using parametric design techniques, made real via the complex fabrication of many similar but often subtly varying components that interconnect in the final surface. The morpho-genetic growth is simulated in software, the fabricated surface simply a snapshot of the emergent form.

I'm interested in the idea of sonic supersurfaces, partially because a practice of ME in sound is timely given our algorithmic tools, but also because it's an inherently generative way to work (Tropisms was a step in this direction). Sound has the obvious advantage of being able to capture the dynamics of growth. It was Goethe himself who said,

I call architecture frozen music. Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.

So, sonic supersurfaces. A work in progress.

Abraham Cruzvillegas was brought up in the self-built district of Mexico City, Colonia Ajusco. His parents built their own house (here), as did the rest of their community. Infrastructure and resources were all produced or sourced informally. Here's the DIY scene Cruzvillegas sets in his book,

Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going.

Cruzvillegas has documented the evolution of his self-built barrio, producing photographs and a range of testimonies from the residents, recounting the relationship between the population & building materials — they often built from the natural volcanic rock on the site — as well as discussing the social, political & cultural formations that arose, imparting a great sense of what it must have been like to participate in the construction of what Mexicans call the ciudades perdidas (lost cities). His personal story is a kind of entry point for grappling with the roots, mechanics & repercussions of spontaneous organization in informal urban areas.

Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle - it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport.

There were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish-always a source of excellent building materials.

Cruzvillegas has gone on to explore the aesthetics of this kind of construction, basing his art practice on notions of auto-construcción,

Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.

Here's the complete Auto-Construcción booklet (pdf, 4.2MB). Thanks to Marcela for pointing me in this direction.

The Rest is Silence is a project published as a booklet by Jeff Kinkle and Emanuel Almborg. As Jeff explains over at Dossier,

In the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney in East London began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighborhood and continued building until this January. The story of the project’s origins are shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. Third, the building would never be completed in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years until last autumn when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January.

The book is published by andperseand. You can pick it up at Artwords on Rivington St.

Patrick Blanc's vertical garden wall outside Herzog & De Meuron's Caixa Forum in Madrid (full size). Calls to mind Hundertwasser's rooftops (1, 2) – speaking of which, you can get lurid socks in his name – or Edouard Francois' work (1, 2, 3).

All of which has been mistagged 'green' architecture.

The unprecedented history which has been sketched in the previous chapters, can be summed up in two ways: either as the final liberation of architecture from the ballast of structure, or its total subservience to the goads of mechanical service. Both interpretations of the situation are current, largely because of the infantile fallacy that architecture is necessarily divisible into function and form, and that the mechanical and cultural parts of art are in essential opposition. The division also typifies the split between the generations of architects - now and right back through the twentieth century, the sign that an architect was achieving 'maturity' and success was that he had tacitly, or noisily, abandoned the attempt to extract symbolic values and cultural performance from the application of advanced technology.

- The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, Reyner Banham (also check his TV piece from 1972, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles)

Microcoasts by Vicente Guallard. Also check his firm's book, Geography, Information, Architecture.

First City: 2000-ton City

Even and perfect, the city lies amid green lawns, sunny hills and wooded mountains; slim, tall sheets of continuous buildings intersect in a rigorous, square mesh, one league apart. The buildings, or rather the single, uninterrupted building consists of cubic cells 5 cubits each way; these cells are placed one on top of another in a single vertical stack, reaching a height of a third of a league above sea-level, so that the relative height of the building varies in relation to the level of the ground on which it rises. Each cell has two external walls. Cell walls are of opaque material, porous to air, rigid but light. The wall facing north is capable of emitting 3D images, sounds and smells. Against the opposite wall is a seat capable of moulding perfectly to the human body, even of enclosing it completely. Incorporated in this seat is an apparatus for satisfying all physiological needs. When not in use, this membrane and all apparatus withdraw and the wall reforms. The floor is a simulator, and can evoke all sensations of living things. The ceiling is a brain-impulse-receiver.

In each cell is an individual whose brain impulses are continually transmitted to an electronic analyser set at the top of the building, beneath a continuous semi-cylindrical vault. The analyser selects, compares and interprets the desires of each individual, programming the life of the entire city moment by moment. All citizens are in a state of perfect equality.

Death no longer exists. Sometimes someone indulges in absurd thoughts of rebellion against the perfect and eternal life granted to him. At first the analyser ignores the crime; but if it is repeated, the man who has shown himself unworthy is rejected. The ceiling panel descends with a force of two thousand tons until it reaches the floor.

At this point, in this marvelous economy, another life is initiated. The panel returns to its original height, and all the individuals living in cells within a disance of a quarter of a league from the empty cell donate an ovum or a group of spermatozoa, which are transported in channels created for this purpose in a mad race to the now-empty seat. Here, an ovum is fertilized and the seat is transformed into a uterus, protecting the new son of the city for nine months, until his happy dawn.

Second City: Temporal Cochlea City
...

- Life Without Objects, Superstudio

Our towns and buildings are all made of patterns. The patterns of our time, like all other patterns in the built environment, come from the pattern languages which people use.

For instance, freeways are built from handbooks, which contain, more or less exactly in the form of patterns, rules which prescribe the optimum spacing of exits at different densities, the best configurations for the exits under different conditions, the proper curvature and inclination of the petals of a cloverleaf...

Consider, for example, the language which generated my office at school. It is an ugly place, terrible, dark and dead. It is one of many similar offices, and these are generated by the following language:

* LONG AND NARROW
* DAYLIGHT AT ONE END ONLY
* WINDOW THE FULL WIDTH OF THE WALL
* CONCRETE WAFFLE CEILING, 5' GRID
* FLOURESCENT LIGHTS AT 10' CENTERS
* FLAT CONCRETE WALL
* UNPAINTED CONCRETE CEILING SURFACE
* STEEL WINDOW
* PLYWOOD WALL SURFACE

This terrible language has generated hundreds of offices.

Patterns always come from languages. Of course, patterns do not come only from the work of architects or planners. Architects are responsible for no more than perhaps 5% of all the buildings in the world.

Every person has a pattern language in his mind.

The fact is, that the creation of a town, and the creation of the individual buildings of a town, is fundamentally a genetic process. This conclusion, simple though it is, calls for a shattering revision of our attitude to architecture and planning. We may conclude that the central task of "architecture" is the creation of a single, shared, evolving, pattern language, which everyone contributes to, and everyone can use.

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? ...The fact that human growth is exponential implies that the past will at some point become too "small" to be inhabited and shared by those alive. We ourselves exhaust it.

The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket of identity. Some continents, like Asia, aspire to the Generic City; others are ashamed by it. In the Generic City individual "moments" are spaced far apart to create a trance of almost unnoticeable aesthetic experiences: the color variations in the flourescent lighting of an office building just before sunset, the subtleties of the slightly different whites of an illuminated sign at night. Like Japanese food, the sensations can be reconstituted and intensified in the mind, or not - they may simply be ignored. This pervasive lack of urgency and insistence acts like a potent drug: it induces a hallucination of the normal.

The Generic City is fractal, an endeless repetition of the same simple structural module; it is possible to reconstruct it from the smallest entity.

The Generic City, Rem Koolhaas

Architectural Project #1 by Dick Higgins

is performed by
- taking some gigantic concrete blocks to the top of a hill
- rolling them down one at a time against each other
- connecting them where they fall
- hollowing them out to taste
- living in the resulting structure

Vostell/Higgins/Cage/Fuller/Schwitters/Bueys/Oppenheim et al, Fantastic Architecture

We prefer Bach to Wagner, and the spirit which inspired the Parthenon to that which created the cathedral... This modern sentiment is a spirit of geometry, a spirit of construction and synthesis. Exactitude and order are its essential condition... Our trend is towards higher and more impartial gratifications, by reason of the mathematical spirit which inspires us; we can create in a detached and pure manner. Such are the epochs which we call classical.

- Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow And Its Planning

The cosmic General Assembly, Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier

On this last trip to India I took some time out to wander North, to Chandigarh, the Punjabi capital. It's a 50's modernist urban planning experiment commissioned by Nehru on the dawn of the partition, as a psychological replacement for Lahore, offered as the state capital to the displaced Hindus and Sikhs. My family were largely displaced from Lahore and the surrounding areas, and some of them ended up in Chandigarh.

An Indian garden city inspired by the Chicago school of urban planners, Chandigarh was conceived and executed by a number of Europeans and Americans, finally (and most famously) by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre, who, together with a number of Indian architects, worked on a completely integrated design solution for the modern Indian city, from bus stop to manhole design to theatres & cinemas, administrative buildings, residential blocks, commercial complexes and transport infrastructure. This is planning from scratch, on an overwhelming scale.

Top: The Secratariat façade, Middle: General Assembly detail, Bottom: Original tape showing the 'modulor' measurement scale

I was surprised to find Corb's writings to show a deep contemplation of proportion - he talks of building Chandigarh "in human proportions" and applies this to everything from road length to window dividers, tree height to about 10 different scales and qualities of housing. He used his own measurement scale ('modulor') based on the golden ratio, devised a set of traffic categorisation principles to be used in road layouts and oversaw the construction of an artificial lake and landscaped areas of the city. I've generally regarded Corb's inability to execute a usable, human architecture problematic but in this project he evidently injected a lot of useful ideas alongside his sheer intellectual energy. His cousin worked on Chandigarh until his death (long after Corb had returned to Europe) and is probably the unsung hero of the project.

Top: The city pavilion, Middle: Corb on Sukhna Lake, Bottom: Sukhna Lake today

I came away thinking of Chandigarh as a quiet triumph, in that it largely delivers and functions; utopian visions giving way to pleasant, usable spaces. The overriding aesthetic of unmaintained cubes of concrete is stunning, the landscaped areas put to good use by the residents, the traffic and housing density incredibly low by Indian standards, the noise pollution well contained. Astonishingly, much modern private residential housing in the city seems to have absorbed the modernist aesthetic (Corb's trademark strip windows are a particular favourite), as if the immersion in the lines, façades, materials & forms of the original architects has somehow overcome the place, gripping it despite the decades that have passed.

As you wander around, you are slowly overcome with a quiet sense of well-being that I can only attribute to a consistent design vision carried out on an unprecedented scale. If nothing else, it's an affirmation of the central role of design in all aspects of everyday life.

Top: Corbusier's 'Open Hand' logo for the city, Middle: High Court building, Bottom: A commercial block in the pedestrianised city center

There is consciously very little sensitivity to Indian tradition in the design of Chandigarh - Corb built a cosmic general assembly building that takes inspiration from Mughal endeavours past, but other than that, the city was from day one to be a "new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past" (Nehru). This place of 800K inhabitants, which was conceived on a completely empty plot of land in 1949, despite its grubby look and feel, still seems ahead of its time in today's smog-ridden, noise-polluted, poorly zoned urban India.

Interestingly, Chandigarh has been listed as a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, something which I imagine would have appalled Corbusier; a spirit ever in favour of creation over preservation.

- Oasis No. 7, by Haus-Rucker

Jan (Microstoria, Mouse on Mars) created an artificial listening site at the Cubitt Gallery in Angel, known simply as the 'noise room'. You could sit and listen to 8 hours of sound created especially for the 5.1 sound system. The full program includes folks like Keith Fullerton Whitman, Kevin Blechdom, Lee Ranaldo and David Grubbs. I visited it yesterday (final day) and it was pretty great.

I'm hoping the full program will be published in some kind of format too.

If a building is allowed to fail small, early and often, and be corrected, the building as a whole can succeed

- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1995)

I'd heard of Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn before, but didn't know there was an accompanying TV series (with music by Brian Eno). The TV series is available in full online (episodes 1-6). By focusing on what happens to buildings after they're built, Brand articulates lots of principles that we use in software today. Brand's own notes even refer to it:

Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people.

It's interesting to see so many insights that tie together the two kindred fields of architecture and software design in one place. The fact is architects still struggle with the seeming permanence of their design decisions - even big memes of recent years like parametric design haven't laid the path for conscious design of adaptive buildings yet. And as Brand points out, it's not neccessarily a technological question, simply a re-definition of the architect's role and attitude.

We, on the other hand, have got it easy, working in a fairly pliable medium of pixels on screens, with tight feedback loops and the opportunity to evolve our design over time both available at a low cost.

Unstudio's inspirational little house, VilLa NM, was destroyed by fire in February this year. Just found out. Sadface.

Q: what are you afraid of regarding the future? A: I'm afraid that people don't want the future to happen.

- Interview with Tadao Ando, boxer turned architect

"Physics-Sun" Scientific Production Union in Parkent, Uzbekistan (photo by pluvialis)

- Josef Albers, Fugue (about 1925)

- Henri Nouveau, plastic representation of the Fugue in E Flat Minor by JS Bach, 1928

I'm consistently drawn to expressions of music in other media. Here's two expressions of the structural properties of the Fugue from the Bauhaus period.

I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview on bldgblg, Comparative Planetology

Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay... the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.

Mike Davis, 'Planet of Slums'

Also check Neuwirth's TED Talk on what the World Bank called "the most significant problem of the next century" in 1990.

I have a long dream to build my own house in a very energy-efficient approach. That's going to be very soon. It uses the right kind of wood that serves as a heater and as an air conditioner, combined with some other techniques in how the wood is assembled to operate energy life pressure. You don't have to add energy into a house after you build it. I love that concept. It's like the way I used to make computers. I want to build it myself.

Steve Wozniak, 'Wozniak's New Goal is energy efficient housing'

Probably the most important British architectural undertaking of the post-war period, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood's (never realised) Fun Palace would have changed the complexion of East London, at least for a decade (Price didn't believe in 'permanent' architecture) but I suspect far longer.

Essentially a re-programmable cultural space built on the principle of work as 'play', Fun Palace was 20-30 years ahead of its time, displaying an attitude towards technology that has since faded from a lot of architectural practice.

Fun Palace was composed essentially of a scaffolding housing massive rotatable walkways and movable wall components (two cranes presided over the building). Cybernetic regulation systems were planned (perhaps naively) to control everything from scheduling to programming to flow of people.

All images are from the Architecture Association.

Ironically, one of the sites earmarked for the Fun Palace in 1964 is now part of the Olympic Masterplan in the Lea Valley - an aquatic center will sit on the site. A plan whose 'cultural legacy' promises seem both vague and lacking in conviction.

Fun Palace, for all its utopian principles, was a project pursued with conviction and designed in detail. Its legacy lives on in various Fun Palaces since realized, including the Pompidou and Toyo Ito's Sendai Media Center (video torrent).

Above: Olympic Planning Authority's Hackney resident consultation document (I'm a homeowner here) alongside the new publication 'From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price'

Tadao Ando, Hyogo Chapel & Ayabe Community Center (more)

Taivallahti Church, Helsinki

Walked from Regent's Canal (Hackney end) through Hertford Union Canal down to the River Lea, ending up at Bromley-By-Bow. An interesting slice of East London. The Lea Valley is scheduled for re-development for the Olympics in 2012; it's largely an industrial wasteland right now. Photos here.

Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much information we create in a year - 92% of it is stored on magnetic media. It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.

As Deputy Chairman at ARUP, Balmond's approach to large scale projects has single-handedly shifted the role of engineering in the architectural process. The principled miscibility of design and structural engineering he encourages is inspirational and refreshing. It serves to break down the perception of engineer as dry, technical doer and promotes the idea of creative engineering and intertwined design/build phase. It's a great parallel to certain agile approaches to software engineering. Pick up Informal for more.

role: model.