Foci

AN ARCHITECTURAL BLOG

DESIGN « CULTURE « LIFE

Oct 11, 2011

Buildings should be good neighbours - Paul Thiry

The city of St Catharines is hosting an open house at Market Square on Thursday (Oct 13th, 2011) to allow all interested in putting in their 2 cents into the future of our downtown core. the Urban Design Guidelines Open House will take place 11am to 7pm, with those responsible for the draft awaiting your input. It will be interesting to see whether these guidelines will push buildings up (seeing as there is little land left) or concentrate more on the streetscape. Stay tuned for details.

Oct 6, 2011

The world is divided into people who do things - and people who get the credit. - Dwight Morrow

More and more our work is showing up in publications. Renderings are of special concern in the architectural field, logos and copyrights are watermarked into intellectual property and continuously cropped out and inserted into publications. I don`t get it, am I missing something? The papers will write about our projects, about the but not about the ones responsible for creating the images and pre-cursors for selling their papers. Lets face it, architecture is boring to people until it is constructed, unless we show them a virtual concept, if not the article would be filler. There is either a wow factor or an abstract quality and provokes thought that a floor plan wouldn't.

add ironic citing here - Our Niagara Region, Sept 2011 
Now, other end of the spectrum, if a rendering is use by those guys doing the fancy art centre...what's their name again, oh that's right (the paper wont let you forget it) Diamond something...Schmitt? (if you don't believe me check the bold print on any front page) I understand it is a large project under the public eye, but if our own media would pay the same amount of attention to local firms, we could all have an identity in our local market. The media is projecting the stigma that you must go to Toronto to get good architecture - FALSE
Talent is here in Niagara, set proper priorities and promote local. 
Don't get me wrong I want them to publish our images but I'm a believer in giving credit where credit is due. I think of the agricultural pitch - Buy local - Grown Close to home, think of architecture the same way! Architecture Grown Here

Rant - over and out
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Do what you believe is great work - Steve Jobs

Nothing endures but change - Heraclitus

St. Catharines City Hall Has a new exhibit called Urban Metamorphosis. This exhibit documents the changing urban landscape of the city. Now till Dec 4. If anyone checks it out let me know.