sunday, december 16, 2007
Round things on Etsy
I like how these look:
They reminded me of squared circles so I had to find some of those too:
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wednesday, december 05, 2007
Unlike the artificially coherent city of Santa Barbara
This is the De La Guerra dining commons at UCSB:
I like it because it’s one of the only new-ish buildings on campus that has an exterior style like the older buildings on campus. The lower right corner of the picture shows a little bit of this sandy stone/concrete pattern that you find on some of the older buildings, like the library:
Those brown textured walls and lots of windows are what a friend pointed out to me as making up the UCSB style. Nerdy amazement! I used to be faintly annoyed by the mixed-up randomness of UCSB architecture, but when he said that obvious thing, I realized I could develop extensive naive theories about why I got faintly annoyed by the architecture. Anyway, this is the style I like for my Southern California beach campus because it helps the buildings live comfortably in their surroundings:
But a lot of the newer buildings on campus have been built in a bland neutral postmodern style with lots of orange and yellow and red, and it doesn’t look good in context:
If you look closer at that one though, it references the older style:
I don’t know why the newest developments — the ones built in the past ten years and currently being built — forgot about all that in favor of pastel lameness:
A good example of the difference between the styles is these pictures showing off the old and new Engineering buildings, on one of the department websites:
The old building has that nice sandy style with vegetation and visual variety; the new one is flat and boring with no local character.
The interiors of the old buildings aren’t so great though, with their own ugly orange stuff. That’s why I like the pretty De La Guerra dining commons so much. Also because of its unlimited cookies and horchata.
