William Steig, CDB?

CDB? by the author, sculptor, cartoonist William Steig (1907 - 2003) is one of the best books i've seen since coming to school. In much of our work we are asked to 'design drawings' and try our best to understand the relationship between text and image. Like I've said before, the text gets much less attention than the images. CDB? has dozens of beautifully clear, entertaining examples of that relationship. While flipping through these pages I can feel my brain moving back and forth between the text - a series of letters used to convey words - and the illustrations. It's a great example of how much ink is actually needed to convey emotions and ideas. The subtle differences in faces, positions, movements and exclamations throughout the book are fun to pay attention to as you decipher the messages. 

Here are some of my favorites:

ktisma journal

KTISMA

κτίσμα

is:

    a publication edited by graduate students at the university of oregon's department of architecture.  

   a focused forum of discussion about environments; how they are created, imagined, interpreted, presented, and questioned. 

each issue of KTISMA is a platform for the conversations within the school to provoke a discourse at large. 

issue #1:  "you hold the gun!" 

" . . . he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able
to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous

flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers
until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with buildings
is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to
grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations . . . " -Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva

motivated by Bruno Latour's 2008 article "Give me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’S View Of Architecture." KTISMA asks for projects, of any printable media, that:

   - approach the environment as a "moving project"--beyond its imaging as something fixed and static

   - expand notions of communication (drawing, writing, photography, etc...) as an instrument of demonstration rather than representation 

   - resolve the breach between linear representation to complex manifestation
  - demonstrate the multi-faceted and dynamic culture of architectural proposals 

   - anticipate time-based properties of the built environment: decay, growth, modification, transformation, durations, and intervals 

submissions date:

6/2010

further information on 

submission specifications: 

ktismajournal.com

                               

publication date:

9/2010