MIT Stata Center

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

A couple of weeks ago when I was browsing through Google Earth, I came across some photographs of the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, more commonly known as simply the Stata Center.

  • MIT Stata Center 1
  • MIT Stata Center 2
  • MIT Stata Center 3
  • MIT Stata Center 4

This building has always amazed me ever since the first time I stumbled upon it. It is quite an impressive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walking distance of this building. I didn’t realize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the building that several notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, including Noam Chomsky, Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman.

The funniest thing for me about the architecture of the building is that it has always given me a very visceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Every time I see the building I think that it looks like something Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reaction, because when I actually stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only highlight this fact:

There is also one lecture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to experience vertigo. Sound insulation is almost absent. The building has also been criticized as insensitive to the needs of its inhabitants, poorly designed for day-to-day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On October 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] architect Frank Gehry and the construction company, Skanska USA Building Inc., for “providing deficient design services and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emergency exits.[8] A Skanska spokesperson said that prior to construction Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company regarding flaws in his design of the amphitheater, and rejected a formal request from Skanska to modify the design.

This is most certainly not something that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s buildings actually have looked like? It is apparently a common speculation that Rand based Roark’s architecture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specifically denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descriptions of Roark’s architecture.

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Cardboard Sculptures by Chris Gilmour

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Artist Chris Gilmour has a whole bunch of photographs of his amazing life size cardboard sculptures. Here are two samples:

Chris Gilmour Lambretta 1
Chris Gilmour Labretta 2

Via Kottke.

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Coupon Ninja

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I just discovered the CouponNinja website and completely fell in love with the header images:

Coupon Ninja Screenshot

It makes me snicker every time I look at it.

Via Design Shack.

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Posted in Art & Design, Web Design | 3 Comments »

T Sign Kerning

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

A photograph of T Information Sign with bad Kerning

Is it just me or does this sign have some really bad kerning around that first ‘O’?

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Gallery of Doodles in Lightbox 2

Friday, April 4th, 2008

NerdStarGamer now has a new Gallery page that features my doodles:

Screenshot of Doodle Gallery

All of the images have been set up as a list of thumbnails which use Lightbox 2 to display large versions.

I spent a little extra time to set up Lightbox on this blog without using a plugin. I’ve been on a steady crusade to get rid of most of my plugins for quite some time. Setting up Lightbox in WordPress was fairly straightforward.

After downloading the Lightbox 2 files, I created a new directory in my template directory called lightbox and dropped all of the lightbox files into it. I then put a function call into the header.php file right before the line that reads <?php wp_head(); ?>.

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
    ...some other tags...

    <?php AKM_include_lightbox(); ?>
    <?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

The AKM_includ_lightbox(); function is just a short little function that I wrote and put in the functions.php file of my template. Here is the function:

function AKM_include_lightbox() {
    $lbDir = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . "/lightbox";

    // Echo out some file path variables for images used lightbox JS
    $output = '<script type="text/javascript">' . "\n";
    $output .= "\t" . 'var tplDir = "' . $lbDir . '";' . "\n";
    $output .= '</script>' . "\n";

    // Echo links to js and css for lightbox
    $output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/prototype.js"></script>' . "\n";
    $output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder"></script>' . "\n";
    $output .= '<script type="text/javascript" src="' . $lbDir . '/js/lightbox.js"></script>' . "\n";
    $output .= '<link rel="stylesheet" href="' . $lbDir . '/css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />' . "\n";

    echo $output;   
}

This first line of the function sets up a variable that includes the path to the Lightbox files inside my template directory. This is necessary because the lightbox.js file needs to reference the images included in the Lightbox folder. Without this part, the previous, next and close images will not show up because the link will be going to your WordPress uploads directory.

That second chunk of text in the function echos out a small bit of JavaScript into your header that simply declares the variable tplDir and sets it to the path to your LightBox installation. The last chunk of text inserts all of the necessary Lightbox JavaScript and CSS links into your header. I could have written all of this directly into the header.php file, of course, however I felt that my file was getting a bit messy and that this approach was much more clear.

We also need to make a small edit to the lightbox.js file which is going to use that tplDir variable we set. Find the line in the beginning of the file like this (around line 49):

fileLoadingImage:        'images/loading.gif',     
fileBottomNavCloseImage: 'images/closelabel.gif',

Simply change those two lines to this:

fileLoadingImage:        tplDir+'/images/loading.gif',     
fileBottomNavCloseImage: tplDir+'/images/closelabel.gif',

That completes the Lightbox 2 setup in WordPress without using a plugin. Now all you have to do is add the rel="lightbox" tag to any link you want to use Lightbox. For example, if you have a thumbnail image that links to a larger image like this:

<a href="images/full-size-image.jpg"><img src="images/thumbnail" /></a>

To add the Lightbox effect, just add in the attribute like this:

<a rel="lightbox" href="images/full-size-image.jpg"><img src="images/thumbnail" /></a>

Be sure to check out the Lightbox 2 page for more information on what you can do with it.

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Posted in Art & Design, Web Design | 1 Comment »