Light up your interiors with eco-friendly panels
Posted by admin in Art and Design, Eco Design on Temmuz 1st, 2009
3form and design
Imagine organic materials that are produced by indegenious artisans from all over the world and brought to our interiors. Bambu, wood, grass, pebbles, cotton, leaves, shells, all find form in 3form by HunterDouglas.
After their innovative solutions for window coverings, ceilings, sun control and façades, HunterDouglas has produced another brand name, 3form, where they carry on their environmental sensitivity in an explicitly profound way.
Artisan using bamboo
In 3form’s Full Circle Program raw organic materials are hand crafted in countries such as India, Columbia, China, Indonesia, Nepal and certain regions Africa by local artisans. The production of these materials is beneficial for the economies of these countries, and are totally organic. These materials are then pressed into eco-friendly ecoresin™ panels. Ecoresin™, a patented formula of HunterDouglas, provides materials to have high technical performance in fire protection, Uv protection, and impact strength. It also provides flexibility in shape and size, offers unlimited design options and is suitable to any budget with a wide price range, which makes a highly preferable material for interior designers.
Press technique with Ecoresin™
Besides ecoresin™ panels, 3form also has products of glass, laminated with organic materials, such as shells and leaf fosils.
3form also has a series called chroma™, where they use a patented colour infusion technology into solid panels. These products are again high in technical performance, renewable and eco-friendly.
With such a variety of shape, texture, colour and size 3form goes even further and offers customization of their products. You can create and purchase your own material design. Additionally, 3form has a variety of solutions for installing these materials into your interiors.
Green is not a color
Besides eco-friendly products, 3form has a material reclaim program, where they collect, reuse and recycle materials from installations. They renew used panels and provide them for new customers. Unusable materials are recycled and saved from going to landfills.
3form is in every way friendly; to the craftsman, to us, and to the environment. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if eco-friendlyness was not a special thing, but something every manufacturer took into consideration? With 3form HunterDouglas has taken an initiative, and I am sure that these products will set examples for many other new products to come.
Related Sites:
3form official website
3form @ hunterdouglas.com
HunterDouglas official website
Perspective Basics
Posted by admin in Perspective, Tutorials on Haziran 30th, 2009
Learning perspective is generally taken as a big deal. Here we are going to change that prejudice. How? First you have to get the basics, and fully understand how perspective works geometrically.
To be comfortable with perspective drawing you always have to keep in mind that there is a person watching a scene which consists of geometrical, or near to geometrical objects, with a specific angle. Now to get familiar with the language of perspective, let’s put it in a more technical way. Suppose you are taking a snapshot of a scene. What do we need? A camera (the eye – point of view), the object(s) (scene), and light (guide lines). And as a result we get a photograph (picture plane) in the end.
Perspective Basics
The most important parts in understanding perspective are the “point of view” (POV), rays of light that carry the vision to our eyes (guide lines), vanishing points, the ground level together with the axis of origin, and the picture plane.
Point of View: This is where we stand and look at the scene. This point is also where all the light rays gather, since these rays are received by the observer’s eye.
Axis of Origin: Remember maths class when we drew x,y graphs. We had an axis of origin, where x and y both had values of zero. It’s primarily the same thing. We construct our perspective on these axi just like the graphics in math. Actually it’s 3 dimensional and we place the center on the picture plane, so that the picture plane and ground are sliced in two. A third axis can be imagined parallel to the bottom line of the picture plane.
Perspective view
Picture Plane: This is a totally imaginary plane representing our drawing canvas. We use it to project our guide lines that come from the scene, as if we are taking a photograph. The picture plane actually catches a vision of the scene
Guide Lines: These lines represent light rays carrying information of colour and geometry to our eyes. We use these lines by intersecting with the picture plane. This way we get the projection of objects from the scene onto our canvas. They are also called ghost lines. We don’t see these lines in the final picture.
Eye Level: Imagine you’re xray man. Rays come out of your eyes, focused on your scene. The level of the rays would give you your eye level. If you look up or down, the rays coming out of your eyes would have an angle. In 1 and 2 point perspective the vanishing points are on this line.
Perspective from top view
Horizon Line: It’s the contour of the landscape at the depth of your scene. Although it is different than eye level it can be taken the same if we are looking straight ahead, parallel to the ground level. The horizon line is generally a little below the eye level.
Ground Level: This is the level our picture plane touches the ground. For this we have to assume the ground is horizontal, and even. If we have uneven ground, we either imagine a straight level, lets say that intersects the corner of an object on the picture plane, or, if there are steps we accept one of these levels as ground level.
Scene: The composition of objects that we intend to represent in our perspective drawing, which could be of organic or man made objects, it doesn’t matter. Keep in mind that we are going to abstractify the scene into geometrical shapes in order to easily depict on our canvas.
Perspective from side view
Vanishing Points: I was just about to forget these. Oops! Shame on me! These are the points that our geometry in the scene tend to be drawn towards. The truth is every set of parallel lines vanish towards a differnt vanising point. Because we generally have orthographic (box shaped geometry) scenes we get up to 2 vanishing points horizontally. If we had a geometry of well, let’s say a more complex scene of 4 sets of parallel lines, we would have had 4 vanishing points. Generally we abstractify the lines that don’t fit in our normal orthographic set of lines to our existing vanishing points, instead of complicating the scene with more vanishing points.
Now we know the main terms, before we start, a thing to always remember when dealing with perspective is to visualize the scene before depicting on paper.
Imagine in your mind’s eye what the scene would look like before you pick up your pencil. It will make things a lot easier. When imagining, don’t forget to think as if you were taking a snapshop of the scene, as I mentioned before.
When imagining the scene we have to visualize it from more than one viewpoint to be more accurate. I mentioned before that we project guidelines onto the picture plane.
We can see our scene from top and side views to visualize the projection of the guideline coming from each object. I will not go into detail here. What I have already explained is enough for this post. For now I can say that the point where the guideline intersects the picture plane gives us the location on our canvas, of the specific corner the guideline comes from.
We need to visualize the scene, I repeat, to make the scene conceivable. This is why we abstract what we see into geometrical objects, points and lines. Don’t forget that all these lines and points are imaginary, we do not really see the guide lines, horizon line, ground line, etc… . We need them to construct the perspective. These lines and points help us imagine and convey onto paper. If you are successful in visualising and drawing what you see, you might not even need to use these points and lines when depicting your scene on paper. However, it is always beneficial to know the basics of perspective, if you intend to draw.
On my next post on perspective I will be explaining “1 point perspective technique“. We will get more familiar with how to use the basics I have explained in this post.
The most important discovery of the last millenium: Perspective 2/2
Posted by admin in Art and Design, Perspective, Tutorials on Haziran 17th, 2009
The Ottoman Fleet Blockin... , by Nasuh Al-silahi
If you have read my previous post you know about how artists interpreted what they saw onto their canvas and how they created techniques to depict their scenes in the past. From figurative cave art to Hellenistic monumental structures with exaggerated 3 point perspective emphasis we have taken a short tour of art history, and we have come to the last millenium. Now we will continue our trip by firstly understanding the medeival era and the period prior Renaissance.
Up until the Renaissance artists had become aware of perspective due to their predecessors in history. However, although many methods were developed to translate vision onto painting, these methods were not fully successful: they were either too theoretical or unpractical to apply to painting.
Meanwhile many artists were painting in miniature style, as you can see in the symbolic map to the left. This style was commonly used by the Eastern civilizations as well as in medeival Europe prior to the Renaissance. These artworks resemble the axonometric drawing technique used to draw technical items. Paintings were drawn as if seen by the eyes of a giant. Of course perspective was not present in this style, therefore lines did not converge in the horizon but went parallel to each other. Even after the perspective technique was found artists continued to use this style, especially in the eastern civilizations.
Pietro Perugino's usage of perspective in this fresco at the Sistine Chapel (1481–82) helped bring the Renaissance to Rome.
Now if we return to what artists were upto in the Renaissance, we see that they have come very close to finding out the mystery they have been searching for centuries.
Filippo Brunelleschi was also in pursuit of correctly interpreting his work on the canvas. The famous Renaissance architect used a mirror to draw the baptistry from the incomplete Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Duomo), which he had designed and engineered. His technique with the mirror was theoretically right, but still impractical. The depth of the picture was calculated right, however, the heights of objects were graphically depicted.
Scene from Durer's "Cours..., by Albrecht Dürer
With Brunelleschi’s findings perspective became a fashionable way of painting, lines converged in the horizon, and the heights were graphically estimated. This method was better than none. A while after, in 1435 Leon Battista Alberti published his mathematical explanation of the perspective. He had solved the problem by using rays of light and similar triangles to calculate the heights of distant obects. This established the basis of the perspective drawing technique we use today.
Well, now you can ask; “So What? How does this make perspective the most important discovery of the last millenium?” Until now you must have thought that the title was a bogus to catch more traffic. I must admit it is a catchy title, but with the content of this post I am sincere with my thoughts that perspective really is that important in the history of art and science. How is that? Let’s see:
Vitruvian Man, c.1492, by Leonardo da Vinci
The discovery of the perspective drawing technique has also triggered things other than painting, drawing and art in general. Together with the later discovery of the continent of America, Galilei’s discovery of the world being a sphere and not flat; in the following century perspective has shown us that man is not an object of inspection by the heavens any more. This finding of the visual cone has shown the Renaissance man that he is not only at the center of his own vision, but he is also at the center of the universe. Thus, emerges the “universal man“.
The Universal Man concept of the time has created an urge for people to see, to reinvestigate their environments with a new, enlightened, open mind. Vision and intellect had become rational. Knowledge became a blessing.
Of course all of this was a movement of the time. We cannot connect it all to perspective. However, I can admit perspective was one of the most important things that altered the way people thought. The notion was that all the knowledge in the world was available to man, and that for a man to be perfect he should know about many things or let’s say everything. Da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Alberti … were masters of science and art, all universal men of their time.
Cell structure 3D image by Ivan Dinev
Perspective has been used to elaborate realistic paintings up until the invention of the camera and photograph. The date of this invention has yet again changed the way we perceive. Artists have changed their outlook on vision again. But this is the subject of another post I will be writing later on.
For over a decade now 3d design and rendering has taken the reign over from perspective hand drawings. No more do we need to understand the mystery of perception. Instead we need to learn digital interfaces of certain computing programs. Interpreting what we see is upto digital instruments, which create stations for us to distribute and receive knowledge. Vision has changed again. Man is still the center of his own universe, but the centralization has become dispersed and so has knowledge.
Where do we stand in our age? Where have we come to after the universal man? How do we perceive our worlds? The motto “What you see is what you get” no longer stands. The new version is “How you see is how you get.”
Well I guess we have come to a point where we understand that how we see alters us and the world around us. How do you see? Are you at the center of your universe?
Further Reading:
Perspective (graphical) @ wikipedia
Perspective in Mathematics and Art
Perspective history @ museum of graphical art
Drawing Techniques @ about.com
The most important discovery of the last millenium: Perspective 1/2
Posted by admin in Art and Design, Perspective, Tutorials on Haziran 9th, 2009
I’ve wanted to write about “the perspective” for some time now, and I think the time has come for me to mingle with this subject again. I say again because it has been quite a while since I have been teaching drawing with the perspective technique. I will be writing a series of posts, or should I say tutorials, about using this technique for your work. I’ll be explaining it thoroughly but with clear and easy instructions so you can easily adapt perspective drawing to your work. I know it seems difficult, but do not fear you don’t have to get that technical to use this technique right.
We will see to the perspective drawing technique later on. For now lets see where perspective comes from.
The artist’s intention has always been to convey his thoughts, ideas or creativity through his work. Sometimes the intention is to depict an important historical scene, so that it is documented for later generations. And sometimes the intention in the artwork is to be educational as well as figurative. Nonetheless the artist always wants to be understood. To be understood the artist uses the most suitable techniques at hand.
Cave paintings in Lascaux, France, circa 14,000 BC
If you observe paintings according to their drawing style you can easily see that the paintings before the discovery of the perspective technique are much different than the paintings produced after. The artist developed his technique through the ages to display his art more successfully and to be understood better.
The paintings or drawings pre-perspective are generally more 2-dimensional lacking the depiction of depth. For example if you observe cave drawings, although they are rich with colour, they are more figurative than realistic as depictions. Sometimes we see some use of shadow as in the cave paintings circa. 14,000 B.C., found in Lascaux, France. The horse’s belly as we see in the picture above has been painted in a darker tone to give us a sense of depth. However, since the drawing technique is flat, (in flat I mean near orthographic as in plan view or side view) the images only give us a symbolic depiction, not a visual depiction that we are used to in our time, such as in photography.
A wall painting from the tomb of an ancient Egyptian nobleman named Nebamun. The tomb was built circa. 1400 B.C. and is near Thebes.
When we observe Ancient Egyptian art we see a kind of different distorted technique used by the artist. This form of depiction is commonly found in the artworks of this era, and it is very interesting. What makes Ancient Egyptian art interestingly different is that we see different poses in one figure, as in the painting found on the walls on the tomb of the artist Nebamon, to the left. The portrayed figure is hunting for fowl, and as he takes action we see his torso and left hand from the front, while he is facing left, his feet are also displayed from side view. Even more interesting is the position of his right hand, we see this hand in a weird angle from the back. Why did the artists of Ancient Egypt display the human body in such fashion? What was the artists’ intent? We don’t know for sure. Did they see or want to see their figures like this? I doubt it. But I do know that their drawings and paintings were not implemented with the perspective technique. They most probably either were not aware of perspective, or they had not developed a technique. Instead, the artists of this period tried to tell us a story about an event, by showing us the figures through different angles at the same time, creating an enrichened painting with a kind of depth we see comic graphics nowadays.
Doric Order, Temple of Zeus, by J. Buhlmann
As significant as Ancient Egyptian art may be, the Egyptian artists were not the only ones who questioned the way we perceive. Later other civilizations continue to study and develop other techniques in the search of more realistic depictions. Moreover, In the Hellenistic period, the Ancient Greek were anxcious to display their architecture with more monumentality than the actual size permitted. So they went even further than depicting realistic scenes and used illusional tricks to give the impression that the building was larger than it actually was.
The Greeks designed their architecture with specific styles such as the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. The mostly used style of this period was the Doric style, which was thick in proportion; Whereas the Corinthian style developed later on, was the most lean of the three styles. With this thickness of proprtion of the Doric style, the columns especially, were slimmed towards the capital. This gave the illusion of a 3 point perspective, (which I will elaborate later on in my posts), which is the kind of view we see when we look up towards a high building. We notice that buildings get narrower towards the top. Since the columns were slimmer at the top the architecture seemed taller than it actually was. It was an artificial enhancement of the perspective effect.
The Parthenon, Acropolis,..., photo by Grayce Roessler
Entasis
This enhancement trick wasn’t enough for the sake of monumentality. The architects of the hellenistic period also gave a slight bulging curve to the colums profile. Thus we see an additional visual effect that we normally ignore, an optical illusion to correct the fact that we see straight columns as pinched and flat surfaces as curved. We see objects this way similar to the fish eye view, but the curvature in our vision is much more subtle.
The Ancient Greek were certainly aware of the perspective in the Hellenistic period. They were aware of many other things as well, as we learned from the use of entasis in the architecture of the period. They utilized a portion of perspective in monumentalizing architecture, however, they didn’t know how to implement the technique into painting and drawing. Although an important step towards discovering the mystery of perspective was taken, the general problem was not yet solved.
Ofcourse, you must be eager to know why perspective is the most important discovery of the millenium. To learn about the rest of how perspective was integrated into art, wait for my next post. I’ll be explaining it all, soon…
Towards a sustainable architecture
Posted by admin in Art and Design, Eco Design on Mayıs 27th, 2009
While designing a building, architects are generally driven too much towards studying and explaining what the overall cost of the building will be until the construction is complete and ready for opening. The investors are righteously concerned with how much a building will cost them until the property starts to return the preliminary investments. However, the fact that management costs are as much as important as the construction costs of the building escape most developers scope. It is surprising that a building’s management costs can, over time, exceed the initial construction costs. The architect’s duty is to continuously remind the client of the importance of management costs and sustainability of the finished building. What the management costs are, I will point to further on into my post. Firstly lets understand what sustainability is.
What is sustainability?
This is a very important question, where the answer can lead us to various remedies to many of the environmental problems we encounter every day. Air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, water scarcity, food shortage, biological extinctions of animals and plants … etc. are all environmental problems we face today although it may escape our attention. The air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat, the energy we consume to heat and cool our environments and to help us communicate and entertain are all factors we can’t live without. We need all of these in order to continue our lives. However, do we care of the quality of our lives? Some of us do and most of us don’t. Those of us who don’t care may actually not have the time to stop and care. This is another problem that is caused by living by modern standards, but we will not be dealing with that here. What I’m trying to say is that there is a developing understanding about sustainability, and the sooner the better everyone stops and gains a global vision of a better efficient unselfish lifestyle.
To live in healthy environments we need balance, balance of consumption. This means we consume more than we produce, or we produce more than we consume. To obtain the balance or sustainability of supplies we need to use more of the abundant energy supplies and produce less waste. We need balance.
To give an example, we can use more energy obtained from solar panels or wind turbines to benefit from the abundant energy on earth. And if we do it locally in our buildings the cost will decrease even more since we don’t have to have the energy transferred to our habitat. Providing vegetation in our environment absorbs excess radiation through our glazings, thus lowering the HVAC costs, and providing a both comfortable and healthy environment with more aesthetical value. There can be many more examples explained but we mustn’t escape the main point: sustainability is an important aspect of architecture that should always be considered, especially in our time of over-glazed high rise buildings and isolated suffocating environments, where we are exposed to over radiation, toxic air and synthethic materials.
There are many ways to maintain sustainability and economise our management costs in our buildings.
- Solar panels are one of the most known and widely used applications, they are cheap and easily constructed. You can see a lot of solar panels at sunny regions of the meditteranean especially used for water heating.
- Solar panels can also be used for electricity supplies, however it is a bit more expensive.
- Wind turbines are widely used on windy lands, if you live in such an area why not benefit from this abundant resource of energy.
- Organic and environmental materials, help your environments breath. Instead of using synthetic materials that produce excess radiation and volatile organic compounds why not use organic materials that absorb all that bad unwanted stuff? There are many materials out there, from paint to carpets & wood, for interior and exterior. Just explore, get it and apply it, if you want a healthy environment.
- Sustainable design, is an elementary feature for architecture. Why not use ventilation chimneys as both aesthetic and functional elements instead of mechanical ventilation gadgets? Why not implement solar panels as facade or roof finishings instead of sticking them onto the roof?
- Waste management, is essential since the amount of garbage every household produces put together is very frightening. Usage of waste disposal devices helps the problem. Recycling paper and glass are other important things that can be done. Use glass, wood or cellulose instead of synthetically produced materials such as plastic. A very simple thing we can do is to use shopping bags in the form of nets, they used to be very popular before the use of plastic bags. You can even knit them yourselves.
- Social sustainability, is essential to make your environment livable. Instead of making people use your environment by necessity, why not let them take pleasure in experiencing your building. Why shouldn’t we have enjoyable office spaces instead of over radiated aquariums? A mall full of greenery and sunlight is much more pleasing than a closed box with plastic plants and mechanical ventilation. Make it sustainable and enjoyable.
- Organic cultivation, is what many people are going for nowadays. The stuff we eat for food have gone weird and its hard to buy decent fruit and veg’s. Where have all those tasty tomatoes gone? Use your window panes or back and front yards for growing organic fruit and vegetables. Organize a lovely corner in your house for vegetation, it will help circulate the air and provide a lovely corner for relaxation.
- Building renovations also can contribute to urban and local sustainability. Turning an old building into a sustainable one can add much to both the environment and to its own value.
- Just the same, much should be done by local municipalities and administrations to provide urban sustainability. Waste management, local solutions for water and energy recycly are some of the things administrations can provide. Local administrations can also prepare regualtions to direct people to sustainable life styles.
Examples of sustainable architecture:
Sino-Italian Ecological Energy Efficient Building
Recycling historical buildings
Finca El Retorno, Ecological Refuge, Guatape
More and more people escape the big cities nowadays to live in a natural habitat away from all kinds of pollution and to grow their own crops, crops that they trust are organic and not chemically or genetically deformed. Together with the escape from the city we have a new form of tourism that provides a brief glipse of an unpolluted dreamlife, which is called eco-tourism. It is a commercial thing, eco – tourism, but when you think about it, it signifies how, many people yearn for this kind of life, but are trapped in their own self created toxic cages.
Sustainability shouldn’t only be considered as a means to decrease the amount of money we spend to provide water, air, electricity, internet, heating and cooling to our interiors, or about making people want to spend time in our man-made environments. It is only a local thing we can act out to participate in the global incentive. There are much larger global problems such as global warming, food and water scarcities, and the corruption of cultivation with insecticides and genetically “improved” fruit and vegetables.
Whether we like it or not, we have to take care of what we eat, drink, wear, touch and even breath. If you don’t care about yourself, who will?
Do you want a better – healthy life? Start contributing to your environment.
Further Reading:
CTBUH Sustainability Knowledge Base
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