The Great Blog Migration… threefourteendesign.com/blog

Go there cause there will be no more over here.  I have decided to move all of my blogging off the free wordpress.com site and am now hosting with my other provider.  I am still moving links, but the posts are already over there.

Here is the new blog…

Get your own parametric person for Revit!

A company called Andekan in San Francisco is making their way by creating Revit families for a price. If you check out their website they allow you to purchase “Credits” and then use these credits to pay for the families that they create for you. You tell them what you need and what it needs to do, and they tell you how many credits it will cost. Sounds like an ingenious business plan if you can get the clients and your content is solid.
Anyway- they supposedly have a free Revit family that you can download called “Andy” the parametric man. He is supposed to be positionable and such which would work great when doing studies for ADA access. Now I just need a parametric wheelchair.

http://www.andekan.com/

Our first brew… July

Setting up: Paul, Chris, Adam

Bear with me for such a historical post, but to tell you about what we are doing now, I must go back in history to tell you where we’ve been.

It was a hot day at the end of July and we were brewing our first beer.  3 weeks of work all lead up to this, getting the equipment, organizing our group, finding a recipe, and getting the ingredients.  Don’t for once think I was in charge.  We basically let the resident pharmacist tell us what we needed, how much, and when.  Granted we tried to pitch in where we could but it was painfully obvious that we were ALL beginners.  There are six of us in the group.  Adam, Paul, Tom, Jim, Chris, and me.  Its nice because it allows us to divide up the cost of materials and equipment, and make larger batches.  Who knows, maybe one day we will be competing with Schlafly and Boulevard!  Anyway- thats a long way off.  One of the first things we did was draw who was going to make what/ when.  Since there are six of us that meant we each get 2 turns during the year.

For the first beer, a red ale, we started with beer training wheels, otherwise known as (Extract Malt)  This one is easy- add the packages of syrupy stuff into the pot of boiling water.  Cook.  Add the hops when indicated in recipe.  and then you are done- kind of.  What is left is called the wort.  This then is cooled as quickly as possible from boiling down to 75/80 degrees through a “wort chiller”.  If you look in the photo its the coiled up thing under Adam’s armpit.  This coil goes into the wort before its done boiling to cook off any impurities (like patio dirt).  Its main job it to let water from the garden hose cool the wort down quickly.  Why?  I dunno the details.  I just do.  Maybe in the next post I will get into the technical aspects of wort chilling.  For now, assume that its gotta get cool.  Well, from all the research we know that the tap water wasn’t going to get it cool quick enough.  So, the final solution was to use a fountain/sump pump in a bucket of ice water to flow through the coil, recirculating back into the ice after it goes through the coils.  We had to let quite a bit run out onto the ground before we could recirculate it back into the ice bucket because of the temperature difference of water coming in, to water going out, but after about 15 minutes we were able to recirc fine.

Adam and Chris prepping the Extract

Cooking the Wort on the Turkey Fryer

The Wort w/ Chiller Inserted- Chris on the Temps

Chilling the Wort- Sparge cooler holding the ice/water (me in white shirt)

Beer... (must reuse bottles)

More Beer (and bottles!)

Once the wort was cooled, we had to pour it into the fermenter.  If you look in the photo, its that stainless steel thing with the cone at the bottom.  We also had to “pitch the yeast”.  The yeast was prepped ahead of time and tossed down into the fermenter.  The whole mixture was slowly stirred and then carried to be put into the basement in a cool dry place.  Here it sat for 4 weeks (about the length of time the wives give us before we can meet again), upon which time we add priming sugar (to help carbonate the beer) and then bottle it.

We try to get together once a month to do this.  We are bottling one, then go make the other for the next time.  If there is one thing I can impress upon you is cleanliness is next to godliness.  We had to sanitize everything!  Its important otherwise it could contaminate the wort.  Also- Festus has some really hard water.  Adam got this stuff that balances out the PH but there is still this thick layer of scum on the surface of the water after boiling.  So far though- its only on the sparge water and the water we use for sanitizing.  It seems to disappear when the wort is ready.

In the end- the Red Ale we made had good flavor, but it was a bit cloudy, and more brown than red.  Not too shabby for our first try.  I wound up giving some away at our holiday party.  I made labels.  The name came from when Adam got stung on the tongue after taking a drink of sweat bee laden beer.

I don’t have many photos from the subsequent two brew days.  I really wish I had taken more photos now, and documented better.  That will come next I think.  The second beer was a Hefeweisen (a wheat beer) which was also an extract.  Probably not my favorite of all the beers, but it was still OK.  I don’t have the palette to know if anything was wrong with the recipe, or if its just not my style.  The third however was a cream ale.  Talk about smooth and good!  Nice and light.  I think we will be making that one again.

This next meeting is on Feb 20 to brew our 5th beer.  This time its a chocolate Cherry Stout.  The guys at O’Fallon were nice enough to give us a vial of their chocolate extract!  I missed the tour but some of our group got to go on an early saturday tour of the O’Fallon brewery.  They had a great time and got to take some samples with them.  When we brew we also bottle.  We are supposed to be bottling  beer #4 which was my pick. I chose an Oatmeal Stout that we brewed when it was 5 degrees out.  The neighbors probably thought we were cooking meth with all the stainless pots, steam, and being in Festus and all.  I have been told that the beer is pretty thick.  I do love a beer you have to chew so I am looking forward to it.  The problem, Diane has a home based biz show that night and I will be home watching the kids.  Hopefully they let me partake in the beer.  I have 24 bottles ready to go down to Festus and return filled up.

Lebbeus Woods Blog…

(as inspired by @jamesclar-  Twitter user)

Can it be True?  Yes- the man has a blog.

Lebbeus Woods is bigger than his time.  I cannot tell you how many aspiring architects were inspired by his illustrations when I was in school.  His drawings typically revolve around some traditional rectilinear builings or urban view being affected by some alien organic machine-like chamber or construct.  Many times this was attached to the buildings or grew out of the space.  I loved the dichotomy of this organic form piercing  the everyday mundane architectural mass.

In school we had a project that dealt with a “machine for architectural space”  I felt that his works showed a machine like presence that injects itself into our world and in doing so creates this solid/void relationship with the interspace between the two being as interesting as the object in question.  Our challenge was to build a machine that creates architectural space.  It could not use electrical power, but had to perform some action that either during its work or after affected the space around it in some fashion.  Many students created boxes and structures that opened or flipped when a mass was dropped during the presentation.  I took a different tact.  I chose to use a machine within a machine.  the most obvious was a pendulum clock which used weights for its power.

I took the clock mechanism and mounted it face down in the top with the chains for the weight attached to pulleys that went over the backside and hung down vertical again.  I also removed the pendulum and modified it so when the weight was attached it would move about 3 hours time in 3 minutes.

While you cannot see the mechanism in the photo (architectural portfolio excerpt) you can see the “arms” of the clock.  These are the interior and exterior drums that consisted of basswood frame and miscellaneous sheets of material with different transparent and translucent properties as well as mesh pieces that when acting together would cast shadows on the exterior vellum drum and further into the space when the lights are off in the space.  the light source is a long cabinet bulb that allowed the light to be vertical in the cylinder.  During the presentations while others had dropped their weights to active their machine and then talk about it, mine was able to operate during the entire duration of my presentation.

I have always been a huge fan of Lebbeus woods and his work still today affects my thinking about architecture and the environment in which we live.  His hand in 13 monkeys was obvious and even though I am not a huge horror fan, I will probably rent Aliens 3 when it comes out on Blu-ray just so I can see the sets that he supposedly had a hand in designing.

Here are some related links if you would like to find out more information about Lebbeus Woods and his works:

lebbeuswoods.net

Lebbeus Woods Blog @ WordPress

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/design/25wood.html

Wikipedia on Lebbeus Woods

Check out my new Oculus Page…

I jsut finished putting some new images and a vintage Autodesk Revit video out there showing a little bit of what we do at Oculus.  If anyone knows how to click on the image and make it larger without it being just enormously huge let me know.

Oculus Reception Desk Revit Rendering (Circa 2004)

Oculus Inc. Page

Thanks!

BIM/CAD Poll- What are you using?

There are many different platforms out there for the architect to use to get their information across to the contractor.  With the proliferation of Building Information Modeling (BIM) into the marketplace I was interested to see what you are using to complete your projects.  Please pick one that you use predominantly in your office.  Thanks!

Venturi Designed “Lieb house” gets a new home

This Venturi house (circa1967) was slated to be demolished because some developer wanted to build a larger home on the property. This is only one of the many homes to be affected by the McMansion syndrome.  Thankfully Venturi’s son Jim, contacted his friends Debbie and Robert Sarnoff asking if he could move the cottage to their property.  They agree stating that the new use will be a guest house on their property.  Apparently however its not a done deal.  Glen Cove officials are still working out zoning issues before the home can be put on a barge and sent up the East River.  If you have any connections or ties to Glen Cove administrators please urge them to act swiftly as the home is currently sitting on a truck exposed to the elements until a descision can be made.

View the entire original article by Selim Algar @ New York Post HERE.

General Blog Fodder: Secret for blog success?- start with a good outline…

Typically when someone writes, creates, or designs they need a framework for which to do it in otherwise it has no reference.  Without boundaries we have no direction.  While I can’t say I am an expert, I would expect for a blog to be successful it must have some direction.

 

 

 

My direction for this blog should be evident in my links.  I am currently working on the links section filling it in with everything I have been passionate about.  From things to do in St. Louis, to social networking, work related sites, and real estate.  It will probably run the gambit.  Who knows- once I get into this I will probably find that its better to split these things up than to do them all in the same blog.  I apparently know people who have multiple blogs…. wow.  I am not sure I will even have time for one!  For now however if you find something interesting you will have to take the good with the bad.  Only care about BIM?  Too bad… you also get to hear about St. Louis.  I guess my hope is that you will see something interesting about one item, but stay for others.  I love helping others by being a sounding board for ideas, opinions, and input.  If you have something you think might fit well into one of my link categories for future blogging- feel free to let me know by adding a comment at the bottom of this post.  I encourage you to follow via RSS feed at the top of the page.  If the subject doesn’t mesh with your interests you can always delete.

Thanks for reading!

Jason Wagner

First Post…

Thanks to the staff at WordPress for fixing my issue. I apparently screwed up my primary blog link…