Slow Clouds

Portland 1st Annual Tweed Ride 2010 from Peaker on Vimeo.

Portland’s 1st Anual Tweed Ride took place January 30th, 2010 was well attended with over 100 cyclists clad in their finest tweed and wool knickers, skirts, vests and caps. The pack caravanned through most of the Northwest, Northeast and Southeast neighborhoods, stopping for tea at Overlook Park, cheering for a fashion show and finally settling down for a picnic.

The best part for me was watching peoples faces as they idled at stoplights or scurried down their front steps to the street. There were lots of smiles, gawking, pointing of fingers, and one woman even happily yelled while carrying a cardboard box to her car, “Who are you? Why are you doing this?” It was a most curious sight I’m sure, but one that made people smile. One gentlemen jumped out of his idling car with camcorder in hand and started filming while waiting for the mob of cyclists to pass. (See video above :30 second mark.)

Overall the ride was really fun and a great promotional tool for encouraging bicycle advocacy within the city. There we’re a few people talking about Portland’s 2030 Bicycle Plan, which was unanimously voted into action by Portland’s City Council on February 11th, 2010.

I hope that Olympia will consider a similar bicycle plan for our little city.

My niece and nephew both have birthdays in the beginning of February. For the last two years it been difficult getting them gifts, so this year I just made them something.  Recently, I have been influenced by Mark Weaver and Making Something Cool Every Day. Choosing to make things by hand, I created the simple pieces below. They took about 1-2 hours each.

Moo-Man Walks On Birthday

The piece above I created for my nephew Nicholas. Acrylic paint, pencil and pen mixed together with scraps of an old 2003 Strength skateboard magazine featuring Russ Pope. The bull is Russ Pope’s work.

Below is another collage piece from a number of different magazines, but the main image of the woman is from a recent Anthropologie catalog. Grid systems and the use of “activators” to enhance negative space interests me. In this piece I am using the light mint circle to create a point of interest between the circle and the two short horizontal bars.

I hope you like the flowers.

JFAK- Kings House

Alice Kimm of JFAK (John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects) came up from Los Angeles this week to give a lecture at the White Stag building in Portland. I have been in the habit of going to a lecture at least once a week and it has been a fascinating thread to learn how each architect’s career has developed. Alice Kimm’s story demonstrates this eclectic range; she got her start in Korea, where she and her partner did a number of projects while developing connections and attempting to break into the Los Angelos scene. She talked about how her firm sees the spirit of LA and how their work embodies and is rooted in this unique locale. Other qualities of design that define their work are a focus on social space (even in private projects), research into materiality (performative and emotional), the fluid nature of space, the importance of site, and the need to create identity for clients. I would also add the way they are combining digital media with materials and fabrication techniques, because it makes their firm and a number of their projects standout.

One of the things I really liked about their work is the use of various levels of transparency with screens, semi-translucent plastics and even painted boards that are woven to ‘dematerialize mass’ (see above image). In their private residences they often break away corners to open up the residence to the social spaces, whether those be the neighborhood or outdoor gardens. Alice was able to connect the development of these design elements all the way back to their first project in LA, a nightclub called Club Sugar. I think it is interesting that despite the fact that architects don’t always have control over the clients and projects they receive, it is still possible to develop a language that is unique and work on developing that over the span of a career. I think it is just this quality that makes their work special and the reason they have been such a recognized firm.