sandr037

I did perspective layouts by hand in the early part of my career. When 3D modeling came along I jumped on board eagerly. So… in regard to this blog I have to ask myself… Does anyone need to know how to do layouts by hand? If you are relatively young, and only know computer modeling, you might view hand layouts as anachronistic and useless. Indeed, when dealing with basic renderings they ARE useless. But if you want your rendering to stand out from the crowd you have to know when to step outside the CAD “box”. And, when you step outside the box you’ll find it handy to have a basic understanding of perspective.   So, yes, I’m going to publish a number of posts on laying out perspectives. Following are examples from my files where knowledge of perspective came in handy. Placing a modeled structure into an existing aerial photograph takes a good eye, and a sense of vertical convergence; as in this rendering of the observation tower at Niagara Falls. … Or in this proposal for Olympic v...

(Note: this post has nothing to do with art or architecture, but is instead an escape into another side of me.) Historically, there has been a debate among intellectuals about the source of violence in humans. Some have believed that humans are animals, “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it; or as Thomas Hobbes had it, life outside civilization was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Others have believed that civilization, especially individual ownership of property, made humans more violent, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views. One side saw violence as inherent in human nature; the other saw the noble savage living in Eden. One side thought we could find salvation only in an afterlife; the other thought we could “get ourselves back to the garden.”    The Rousseauian view is still alive and well in politics and the culture, but in the sciences specifically dealing with the problem, the natural violence of humans is largely accepted. The debate has moved on ...