Rosario Dawson and the soul

The human eyes are the windows to the soul. Well, I love that notion. So instead of taking photographs of my friends' portrait... I capture their souls' portraits. Yes, in a sense, I am a soul collector :)

This one here is the left eye of a REAL American. She is 1/3 Irish, Polish and German. Can you see them in her eyes?

She is a co-worker at the office, a great cook, blend her own coffee (that I really enjoy) and she is hoping for a grandson soon.

Another girl who has magnetic eyes... not colorful but magnetic eyes is Rosaria Dawson. Here are 3 pictures of her highness. I won't say she is extremely pretty, or extremely sexy and she is not ordinary,... I guess the only word worthy of describing her is, beautiful. Ya... she is beautiful.

Great shoes, Anne and the mirror mask

This is one of the greatest design on shoes ever. Especially for you who have more than one boyfriend at different sizes... vertically.

These shoes are part of the Kei Kagami contributions at the fashion show in Milan.


But if you are Anne Hathaway... well, it doesn't matter what shoes or t-shirt you wear... Fedup or not you rock my world!


Over the weekend, I finally got a replacement for my power-surged Onkyo receiver. It's another Onkyo... rewired all the stuffs and now got my game system on thunderous surround, and everything else hook up.

Played a really cool game till my left thumb blistered and watched a really cool movie, the Mirrormask. It's writtern by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. If you do not know who Neil Gaiman yet, you should click here. Check out sandman. This is a beautiful movie that will throw you off your daily reality from the get go... I mean from the title page!

It's not a Hollywood gig so, please do not expect to find car exploding after being kick at the bumper, or scantily claded girls, or who's that idiot... Tom... Tom Cruise here in this movie.

The movie is simple in plot and somewhat predictable. You go through a dream journey with this girl, into an imazingly beautiful world. Actually, I like the drawings on the wall the best. I actually rewatch it and pause it and take picture from the TV screen to take a closer look at it.

It's a nice movie that definately worth a look at, but remember that it's not mainstream.

If you want to be an architect...

If you want to be an architect… please reconsider… at least think about the followings:

Do you like sleeping?
If you do, well…then be an accountant or a librarian, architecture is not for you. I average about 5hrs of sleep a day… with a pen and a sketchbook on the night stand, in case I dreamt up (literally) a cool idea during the night (seriously).

Can you tolerate smoke filled fire escape?
When you are building models and draw on the computer around the clock, you tend to adopt a habit to smoke with your comrades, just so to break the painful monotonousness. (Personally I do not smoke, but I am a frequent second hand smoker in the fire escape, with my smoker friends)


How well do you take negative criticism?
Do you need to hear praises about your ideas all the time? Well, if you do, be a rich man or be that rich man’s wife. Architecture school is no place for you.
In architecture school, every praises and respects have to be earned. To earn that respect, you have to proof everything in your drawings, not just your mouth. Nothing personal you know, your great ideas might not be that great in the minds of others… good thing that after the critic sessions, everyone would go to O’Connell’s for a pint of beer and chill about it.

Are you pretty?
If you are, then for the sake of all mankind, be a TV anchor, a lawyer, a supermodel… hack even a nurse. In my years in architecture school, I have spotted about 30 pretty people in the architecture college. But by the end of the 5 years (yes, it’s a 5 year program), there’s only 2 pretty girls left. An Asian girl from New Mexico and a Caucasian girl from Oregon.
The Asian girl and I got pretty close but she married someone else. The Caucasian girl became my frequent project partner/best friend and we always win awards together… and yes, she married someone else as well… hmmm something is not right with these pictures.
The other 28 pretty girls looked tired and spent, after 5 years of sleeping about 5 hrs a day. Guys seem to age better in this field, I guess a few wrinkles makes you look more mature… great for architecture marketing.

Graduation rate and the bright side of it.
The architecture college I went to admitted about 140 freshmen every year. After 5 years of weeding them out through various techniques… 30 of us graduated as architects. Yes, all the other students move on to other disciplines.

Life after graduation.
Do you like a comfortable life?
Well, after you graduated as one of the 30 people that made it through the so call “boot camp”. You WILL land a job as an intern (much like doctors do. Doctors kill one person at a time when they screw up, but when one of our design failed, hundreds of people would die at the same time) and you will get a salary that’s consider lowest in any professional degrees. You will still sleep about 5 hrs a day and your work will still be criticized for your thoughts.
As for your “inferior” classmate (the other 110 “drop outs”) in architecture school, they will graduate in other fields. They became politician, entrepreneurs, lawyers, supermodels and nurses. In due time, they are the people that can afford to hire your boss’s firm to design their houses and offices. Can you live with that?

Other items not mentioned above are:

Do you like your body parts? (fingers are known to be lost in model shops)
Do you like your 20/20 eye sight? (you will be wearing glasses by the end of 5 years, I am the one exception)
And lastly,
Do you want to have a life in college? (in which we actually do. Architecture students actually really do know how to party, well, just below Frats and Liberal Arts)

Will I trade this life as an architect to be something else?
After all that… no, not a million years. There’s no better high than looking at your brainchild, singular, unique, in solid concrete and steel… knowing that it will be there even after I am gone. Yea, I am a nut… I sleep with a notebook next to me remember?

From World Press Photo Awards 2005

These are the most incredible image that captured the spirit of our struggle against nature and sadly… ourselves. World Press Photo of the Year Award.

Please click at the links to look at the reason behing the photographs. Famine in Niger, Sierra Leone and it's diamonds, the War on Terror and it's casulties... and closer Katrina + Rita that visited me not a few months back!! Click on the thumnail to see bigger version.


Canadian photographer Finbarr O'Reilly is the winner of the World Press Photo of the Year Award. His picture of a child's hand pressed against his mother's at an emergency feeding centre in Niger was described as having "beauty, horror and despair".


American photographer Todd Heisler's image shows the honouring of fallen US Marines as 2nd Lt. James Cathey's body arrives at Reno Airport.


Yannis Kontos, a Greek photographer working for Polaris Images took this picture of a boy helping his father to dress in Sierra Leone.


Other finalists included American photographer Michael Appleton, New York Daily News, who covered the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

To see all the photographs that won awards in the World Press Photo Awards 2005 please click here.

A camera can capture some wonderfully beautiful stuffs... unfortunately, we are living in a "pretty" ugly world.

Singular Canopy part II

This is the sketch I made this morning of the Canopy project I mention in the past posting (click on the picture to see a bigger one). It's a birdeyes view of the project, intended to show the relationship of the canopy to the rest of the surroundings.

This project is situated in one of the only two green park left in the Houston's Medical Center. I am hoping that the structure will hold it's ground and enchances the one little green space that people can relax and "enjoy" their stressful days.

I called it the seedling design. It is based on the metaphor of life and growth (well, it's at one of the entrance of a hospital).

The shape of the canopy, ties in the design of the existing landscape to the existing building. At the same time, it's symmetry, suggest formality. The canopy works as both a functional structure and as a sculpture in the garden.

Inspired.

Four Signs and the Steelers

Congratulation Steelers!
This is a shot from downtown Pittsburgh this morning during the Super Bowl Parade. Wow!


Well, now... enough serious stuffs... here's four signs that I really grateful to have the previledge to see today.

First of all... great signs. It's good to focus on what's important.


As always, signs tell us important thing that should not be taken lightly.


It's nice to have rock solid information on the Weather.

And finally... deep... very deep.

The Sky Court

As promised, these are some of the pictures of the MH Sky Court at the Toyota Center, the home of the Houston Rockets.

This project was a fun one. It's a project that I was given the chance to throw out everything that I have learned in Architecture school and do it the other way. I teamed up with a really exciting retail designer, R. A. Sorry I can't mention his name here because he is actually quite a private person... but I can give you some hints. He is the brain child behind all the Sprint stores, Pottery Barn stores, the NBA store... well, the list goes on and on. Working with him was a blast. We also hired a firm from N. Carolina to do some graphics work.

Oh! And another thing. A project is only as good as your client. Well, the two project coordinators that I have to work with were not only exceptionally smart, they always keep an open mind to new ideas... did I mention that they are both really pretty as well? (ya, sound like fiction... I know... but it's true)

Okay... our design is based on an imagined giant child playing with wood blocks. What would he do if he was to build a little playground for little NBA players. Well, click on the pictures below to get a better look.

The view from the hallway in relation to the real basketball court below (at the right). In the arena, the Sky Court glow like jewelry in contrast to the relative darkness of the space.


A space where Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady await your challenge. This is where you can match your physical attributes to Tracy's height and Yao's wing span. Don't ask me why it's not Tracy's wing span and Yao's height... you don't want to know. Trust me.


Now the last picture is... let me introduce you, Mr. Clutch the Rockets' Bear. He is on a mission to whack all the teams in the Western Conference in the NBA and guess what, he needs your help. Whack the West... it's great to vent, for children and adult alike.

Thanks Enzo.

Architecture Design: Singular Canopy

On sacred Super bowl Sunday Feb 5, 2006, here in Texas the football state, there’s only one person in this four stories office building. It’s yours truly. Ya, empty streets and all...

What can I do? As much as I love football (NFL), I have a deadline tomorrow to present a canopy proposal to a client. And since I was sick on Friday, I had to finish it up today and miss out on the “unofficial national holiday” in America.

Hopefully I will be able to finish the three 3D presentation boards today… not likely. But what the hack… the following is one of the renderings that will be part of the board.It is a canopy in a form remote from the existing hospital entrance. The entrance, which marked with a very nice informal garden, is now emphasized with the canopy as both a functional and sculptural piece.

People usually go to the hospital, when they are in bad shape and down, so I design a metaphoric seedling to imply growth and life. What do you think? Oh! From the top, it’s a mirror of two spade shapes.

Your thoughts about the design (positive or negative) are very welcome.

Camera 5: Canon G3 Digital Camera

I had a number in my mind, of when I would put my 35mm SLR in the display cabinet, and switch to digital camera. The number was 22 mega pixels. That’s the number of the average “pixels” per frame in a regular 35mm film.

Well, I keep up with the latest news and I waited and waited, and wait some more. But the pixel count of the digital camera was staying put at about 2 and 3.2 and then 4 after a few years. And my oldest kid is now growing up so quickly that if I waited, he would be 18 before I make the leap.

I finally bite hard on the lip the moment it reaches 4 mega pixels. At 4 mega pixels, photo quality 5x7 enlargements is possible, so I decided to acquire the “best” non digital SLR of the time. It was between the choice of Nikon Coolpix, Canon G3 and Sony (due to my fascination on infra-red landscape). Sony was quite far behind Nikon and Canon at the time, despite making most of the CCD chips for the major digital camera brands in the world. Nikon Coolpix was good but it did not look very nice (unlike their SLRs that look heavenly). And then there’s Canon G3, an “upgrade” to the acclaimed G2.

After extensive research, I decided to get the Canon G3… (even though I always secretly wanted to buy a Nikon… just like I do not know why, I have never bought a pair of Nike despite wanted a pair ever since… forever)

The idea was making the G3 a snapshot camera for everyday life and a backup for my Canon Elan 7… well, after using it for a few weeks. The Canon Elan 7 is getting more and more shelve time. After a couple months, the Elan 7 has it’s permanent place in the glass cabinet.

The Canon G3 was an amazing gem. It has a good lens with nice range (though I would prefer a better wide angle), very stable shutter that I constantly slowed the shutter down to 1/20sec, the bugger has a Neutral Density filter BUILT IN!, second curtain sync flash, remote control and a very useable video recorder.

I used it to shoot landscape, sports, portraits, black and white, details of the eyes, and even bought an adapter to mount it onto my Meade ETX telescope to shoot pictures of the planets (I will post some of those some day). It was a little camera that wants to go everywhere and ready at all time. With two 256 MB CF cards in the bag and I was confident of every situation that life can throw at me.

Well, that’s the story of my first digital Camera.