I have a number of updates on my wiki to report.
I sent two additional emails to the consultant at Stantec, and posted them under the Greens promote link as subpages here and here.
In each case, I’m happy to report, I received a friendly email confirming my input, which did put a human face (or name) on the interaction.
I added a subpage in the same “Greens…” category, called Majora Carter – “Green is the new black”. This page points to TedBlog, which in its right-hand sidebar includes links to a number of TED Conference presenters. Majora Carter is a house on fire, and what an example!
From the same TedBlog, I made a page on the wiki called Visionaries, which points to the TedBlog page featuring the architect Joshua Prince-Ramus. I need to re-watch this presentation a couple of times: it’s quite amazing.
Incidentally, there are other videotaped presentations on TedBlog that are “must-sees,” including Ken Robinson (on creativity & education: watch this and think of John Taylor Gatto); and Al Gore (I had no idea he had such comedic skills!).
In addition, I created a Linkiography/ Bibliography: resources page. It’s incredibly higgledy-piggledy and reminds me of Donald Norman’s story in (I believe) Things That Make Us Smart, wherein he describes filing systems, including his and a colleague’s version of what he calls “piling cabinets.” That is, the venerable “pile of papers on the floor,” simply stacked, …er, piled, into an open frame bookcase…
Yes, my “resources” page is more like a pile right now, and may well stay that way. But even so, the items do include annotations, and the annotations made me think, when I watched Prince-Ramus, about: evolutionary psychology and the problem of attention (i.e., what do we give attention to, in our built environment, and why, and how does Prince-Ramus’s “hyper-rational” architectural strategy support or interfere with that? — see R. DeYoung’s article); and “irrational” aesthetic preferences (say, for refuge you don’t actually need, or peril or enticement, or prospect, or complexity — see William Saunders’s article): how do you deal with or account for them?
Also useful, at least for me, was the process of reading Elizabeth MacDonald’s paper, “Street-facing dwelling units and liveability,” very thoroughly and annotating it with an eye toward the implications of its Vancouver-based analyses with regard to Victoria. I have to conclude that for the most part, people in Victoria don’t know what they’re talking about when they worry and fret about supposedly accelerating development here.
I’m planning a “close reading” (sort of) of a particular building here in Victoria called The Corazon, which is probably my favourite new construction in town. I have an email from last weekend lying around in some …(virtual) pile wherein I started to lay out my reading of the building. Will expand later, but it was great to see “KidB” on SkyscraperPage Forum enthusiastically agree that it’s a gorgeous building, and he cites most of the same reasons, too. (No, I’m not a forum member, just a regular reader….)
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