Architecture -- art or not?? (2006)

[Brant Gaede]

The house I live in is burnt adobe decent modern. I didn't design it. Unlike most Tucson homes it wasn't built as cheaply as possible. If you drive around town the fairly older homes, which exist in Tucson proper as opposed to the expanded metro area, you'll be struck that almost all of them have seven foot walls front and back with a peaked roof giving more inside headroom than provided by those short walls. Most were built 40 - 60 years ago with inside ducting for evaporated cooling usually upgraded to refrigeration. The homes built before WWII didn't because evaporated cooling only began to come unto its own in the late 1930s. People used to sleep on screened porches in the summer draped with wet sheets if they couldn't escape to Mt Lemmon's "Summerhaven."

I lived in a few of those old houses as a boy. Typically an evaporated cooler was stuck in the living room window and we'd go sit in front of it. Those houses are now gone, one now only a vacant lot torn down after an arson fire a decade or less ago, the others torn down for redevelopment near the University.

I had hay fever like six months a year when I was a kid. Mom should have sent me to live in New Jersey years before she did for that reason alone. Today it's okay. I think it's because people stopped growing Bermuda grass. This is not a lawn town. It costs too much expensive water to keep a lawn. I read once Tucson uses half the water Phoenix does per capita. Phoenix has three times the people which would mean it uses six times the water. (I cannot swear by these figures.)

Now, anybody who'd think Wright would embrace Jonathan's rendering--did he render it?--of a sterile monstrosity of a building, is out of his frickin' ignorant mind.

--Brant

[Jonathan]

I did not design the structure. I took existing plan and elevation drawings of a building which had never been built, and, using a computer program, I constructed a 3D model from them. I placed the model building into a generic prairie environment, then selected lighting for the scene, and finally "rendered" it (commanded the computer to output an almost-photorealistic image of the virtual scene).

J