Splash of Color

Just found this colorful photo from last year's Nutcracker in Telluride, and thought I'd share with you (thought a splash of color might be nice after your white-out drive on Sunday!)
I love when a photograph feels like a painting - like the image was literally brushed with exposure and light.

Attention architectural bibliophiles...

Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books

Why Do Architects Wear Black?

Logo

Working on a logo. What does it say to you?

Organic Patterns

Jodie's gorgeous snowy fence photo made me think of how much I love finding patterns that grow organically and found repetition in the landscape... A running fence over rolling hills, opacity and layering in branches, a hint of a creek popping through deep, luscious snow...

It is a wintery post for today, but the sun rose on snow covered branches in Denver this morning and I love it!

Crested Butte, CO

Today's gorgeous snowy landscape reminded me of a fun fence photo I took on our last trip to Crested Butte. So many of my favorite elements...

The Inspired

God's Architects is a documentary that tells the stories of five divinely inspired artist-architects and their enigmatic creations.The film details how and why these oft-marginalized creators, with neither funding nor blueprints, construct their self-made environments. Photo from Emilie Taylor's and Zack Godshall's website. Look forward to watching these inspired artists' visions.

Translucency

Oh, yes! Light transmitting concrete - designing it into my next project... LitraCon.

N85 House by Morphogenesis

A little architectural food for thought coming to you from New Delhi tonight, from an architecture firm in India called Morphogenesis.

Granted the climate is a bit warmer than Telluride's, but I am intrigued by the blurring of indoor/outdoor spaces, and I absolutely love the overlapping spaces and the central, sculptural stair... and the photos are gorgeous, too!

The house has patterns and repetition, transparency, opacity, connection, lovely light and great texture. The description at the Contemporist website talks of the layering of spatial program given the complexity of intergenerational living and cultural demands of the Indian family, which I find enormously interesting. Plus, how cool is it that "there is an entire eco-system living and growing in the heart of the house"
I found the house on a great blog I found tonight (thank you, twitter!) called the Contemporist that if you don't already enjoy, check it out! 

(I wish I had photographed these, but alas, this Photography is by Amit Mehra, Andre Fanthome, and Edmund Sumner)

Fall

More Maps

Map drawn on a trip to the Eastern Block. Good food, great company and amazing scenery.

Great Streets

If you are into mapping, and hand sketched maps in particular, you must check out one of my all-time favorite books, Great Streets, by Alan Jacobs.  It is a stunning collection that I came across in, where else, a Mapping Class (in grad school) of hand sketched studies, and draws upon cities from all over the world.  Included are gorgeous drawings, from simple solid / void type maps, to sectional "maps" which study pedestrian / automobile / tree / building facade relationships across a street, and then beautiful perspective sketches to tie it all together.
It is a must see for sure!

Love Maps

The Hand Drawn Map Association has a goal to share found or created maps with the widest audience group possible. Check out all the maps.

Repetition

Repetition. So many of my sketch book pages are covered with fences. The rhythm is captivating, almost audible. The photograph was taken in Ganzi, China - thousands of prayer flags emphasize this idea of irregular, pleasing recurrence.

More Mining, Alta Lakes

Jo's last post reminded me of these photos from about a year ago on a trip up to Alta Lakes.

What is it about structure that is designed out of pure utility that leads to such pure design... patterns and layers are driven by function end up resulting in such unassuming, yet compelling forms.

Even ruins of such simple vernacular forms can make for fun studies in light, repetition, form and relationships.

Soudan Mine, MN

Love functional mining architecture: texture, layers and materials. This photograph captures those ideas for me; moreover, the imagery infuses new ideas.

Jodie's Font

By the way, if you are grooving on those two gorgeous handwritten fonts in our header, like I am, they were the first (of what I'm hoping will be many) of Jodie's font creations after I found this cool link where you can design and create your own TTF... seriously had Jodie written all over it!!  I can't wait to try my hand at a few, too...

Greetings!

Welcome to Jodie & Jen's world of design ideas, architectural musings, photographic explorations, general visual candy and (hopefully) fun or at least generally entertaining linguistic fodder! 

We are hoping this will become a creative forum for the sharing of ideas and the things that inspire us in the world of design, art and life.  How different are the those things, really??

Here's celebrating the changing season!  I am very excited to see where this next adventure takes us!!