Draft Text-Oscar Niemeyer

Introduction

Oscar Niemeyer was born on December 15th 1907 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With his career he has been considered one of the most important names in international modern architecture. He has also been known for his extensive work with reinforced concrete, pioneering the formal possibilities solely for their aesthetic impact.

Niemeyer has often been ridiculed by critics being called a "sculptor of monuments" and being said to be naive, frivolous and not even worthy of the title, "architect." Although, others praise him for his unique design and ability to create buildings by mixing volumes and empty space to create unconventional patterns.

Early Life

Oscar Niemeyer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1907. He spent his youth as a typical "Carioca" of the time. He was relatively unconcerned with his future. He finished his secondary education at the age of 21 and in the same year married Annita Baldo. The marriage gave him a sense of responsibility, so he decided to enroll in a university.

He started to work in his father's typography house and later graduated from Escola de Belas Artes as a engineer architect in 1934.He started working in the architecture studio of Lucio Costa and Carlos Leao. He had always felt dissatisfied with the architecture that he saw and believed he could change it by finding a career there. Niemeyer began to build a reputation and decided to join the Brazilian Communist Party. He had grew up during the time of the Russian Revolution as well as the Second World War making him become a young idealist. Although, his decision to join the communist party cost him much during his life. During the military dictatorship of Brazil his office was raided and he was forced into exile in Europe. This enabled Niemeyer to meet with diverse socialist leaders which eventually led into many friendships.

Born to run.

When a spontaneous project presents itself to us, we usually panic doubting our creativity and ability to be innovative in a short period of time.Instead of wasting time second guessing your abilities, Seth Godin has a new plan for you. What he suggests is to attack the project and don't allow any of your internal dialogue to trip you along the way. From his own experiences, he's learned that this plan DOES work.

"I went to my office space the next 20 hours rewriting every word of text, redesigning every package, rebuilding every schedule and inventing a new promotional strategy. It was probably 6 weeks of work for a motivated committee, and I did it in one swoop. Like lifting a car off an infant, it was impossible, and I have no recollection at all of the project now.....when we sprint, all the internal dialogue falls away and we just go as fast as we possibly can. When you're sprinting you don't feel the sore knee and you don't worry that the ground isn't perfectly level. You just run. You can't sprint forever. That's what makes it sprinting. The brevity of the event is a key part of why it works."

Not to be fooled.

Forget the maps that you once used in your 7th grade geography course. Consider them dated. The newest form of design for maps these days is something that surpasses their old 2-D ways. The Dymaxion Map is a 3-D map that is specially designed to set people's perspectives back to the right way of looking at things when it comes to understanding the globe. For so long, 2-D maps have been slowly distorting the spatial relationship between earth's contents. 

"Although maps are often portrayed as an objective spatial basis on which 'map' data, they are always about perspective and the change of it:which country is in the center, where does most projection-distortion occur, which colors are used,...As tools of communication, they can easily become tools of manipulation, allowing one to lie with maps as easily as with statistics. Yet, put in a positive sense they can convey and enhance complex messages in a powerful visual way and shift people's perspective on even abstract developments through spatial contextualization."

Buckminster Fuller is the designer of the Dymaxion Map.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Dymaxion_2003_animation_small1.gif

Class Notes

Many fonts exist in the graphic design world, but really, only a select few are used regularly. 

Times New Roman is one of the oldest fonts used.

QUARK

File--> New Project-->Choose the horizontal configuration. 

-Drag the mouse from the side, to the middle of the layout (5' 1/2").

-Create a picture box: Choose the icon with the x in the box from the toolbar.

-Drag the picture box across the entire cover page.

("Content Tool" moves text and pictures throughout the space.)

(To preview fonts use, "Suitcase Fusion", on the dock.)

Oscar Niemeyer

Step it up a notch, 2-D!

"Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet."

Just when you thought film was nearly obsolete, could even 2-D photography,in general, be as well? Photosynth is the newest program that is able to take your summer Bahamas vacation and make it yet again a reality in even in the dead of winter. Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos. Photosynth was inspired by the breakthrough research on Photo Tourism from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. This work pioneered the use of photogrammetry to power a cinematic and immersive experience

Building Happiness

"How do we construct happiness? What components make for a happy building or space? How do we measure and quantify this response? is it possible? Who is responsible for it? Can it be built in?”

"Building Happiness"--something that I thought was really cool and that, also, made a lot of sense. The book talks about human's relationship with architecture and the way things are designed around them that have an affect on their emotional state. The book studies how we measure and define our happiness and how the spaces around us dictate the psychological impact on these evaluations. Are our emotional states simply personal feelings, or could it be also the things around us that influence our moods?

The book includes work from contemporary architects, artists, writers and commentators that are able to showcase their hypotheses in both short commentaries and long essays.

CLASS NOTES

Scanning Images:

1. File

2. Import

3. Choose Scanner

4. Select part of image desired

5. Scan

To smooth an image's surface of a pattern:

1. Filter

2. Blur

3. Blur

Rotating Images:

1. Image

2. Rotate

3. Arbitrary

4. Type in amount and direction

Saving Scanned Images for printing:

1. Choose "EPS", meaning, "Encapsulated Post Script"