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The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown. - Carl Jung

This is Paley Park in New York City. This was during a class trip my first year of grad school in the Fall of 2009. Kodak 400 TMX medium format (120) on a Mamiya 645.

L > Vija, Jason, Catherine, Ric, Kareem, Aryne > R

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The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice - Carl Jung

I really can't escape the fact that I have an innate need to build things. Design is feckless without the tangible aspect of the feedback loop, so I've started putting together what will eventually be a wood/metal workshop.

I didn't realize until typing this out, but this is the first time I've never had access to a workshop. We torn down my family's while I was in grad school and during that time I had access to IIT's shop.

I went to an auction for a cabinet maker that was going out of business (Bolhuis Woodworking Co.) and bought a bunch of hardwood and old industrial woodworking machines. More pictures and details to come. It'll certainly be interesting.

My friend Kevin (pictured) and Derek helped me load up the roughly 1,500 BF of maple, white oak, mahogany, etc., and some old Delta Rockwell machines into a truck on the coldest day of the winter.

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This was the coach of my paintball team. He and the head photographer from P8NT Magazine ended up in fairly high-up positions in the Obama campaign. Just before the election, maybe two weeks or so, I had a few beers with both of them and some of their co-workers; all of who just happened to be the heads of their departments. My coach is an epic story teller. Not so much because his oratory skills are great but more because he can piece together the truly significant parts of a story that typically escapes others. He's also not prone to embellishment like most, so you know that everything he's saying is, if anything, understated.

Anyways, I show up late and basically get the best introduction ever as he has recently told them the story of our paintball team (apparently one guy has dibs on the movie rights). They were impressed, which is unique for me because it's usually hard to get past even mentioning paintball before the giggles and misunderstanding begins. It spans about seven years and involves the same core group of kids, being broke, going from decent novices to pro, long road trips, eccentric personalities, and plenty or moral dilemma. Sometimes I forget how all that felt, but this passage from Lao Tzu reminds me of what it was like to be that age and have those experiences.

In the pursuit of knowledge:
everyday something is added.
In the pursuit of enlightenment:
everyday something is dropped.

Photo by Dan Mouradian on a Mamiya 6x7. This was a Polaroid test shot. It was taken for a P8NT Magazine gear guide in my parent's basement... moonshine and sharpies ensued.

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This is a quote from Conan O'Brien when he was on The Nerdist Podcast.

...if you have a creative mind. I've described it sometimes as a very powerful lawnmower. It can do all this great stuff but every now and then it turns around and it rolls over you and chews you up.

When I heard that I felt an odd sense of relief. During school I would get that all the time. I'd have so many ideas and be doing so much research that I'd hardly produce anything. Information can be stifling like that. If you really consider the consequences our your actions, good or bad, inaction at times seems inevitable.

This is a reused liquid CO2 storage tank. The walls are 1" thick steel (I've cut lots of them with an oxyacetylene torch), the insulation surrounding the tank is about 4" of closed cell rigid foam, and the covering is fiberglass. They're actually fairly inexpensive. My dad uses them for hot water storage for the steam systems we build. This way we can spec a much smaller boiler and let it run overnight. Also, when you heat up water it drops all its solids, so by doing the heating in a separate tank we keep our boilers cleaner. Plus these are easier to clean out. We install the pipes which becomes the closed loop for the steam. Over a week the 180 degree water may drop just a few degrees in the dead of winter.

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"I want money in order to buy the time to get the things that money will not buy." - Carl Sandburg

This is my friend Derek on my roof a few months back. The buildings from left to right are Lake Point Tower, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Building, the Aon center, Two Prudential Plaza, Trump Tower, and the IBM Tower (333 North Wabash) - in case you were curious...

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I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. - John Adams

I got a job. It's part time and with school it's already getting hectic, but in this market it's hard to say no -- especially to one of if not the best engineering firms in the city, dbHMS. They're a design build engineering firm. One of the principles was my professor last year for a class called Mec-Elec (mechanical and electrical systems design). Their work includes Aqua by Jeanne Gang; the Poetry Foundation by John Ronan; and everything in the last several years at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Chicago Public Schools.

My design build team visited his office to do some drawings for our building. At some point he joked at how bad our systems drawings were to which I asked if that was a job offer; I started a few days later.

I felt awkward taking photos so it was a bit rushed, but these are my digs.

Looking north from my desk down the Brown Line tracks of the L.

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Dear Mother, 

I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't think there's anything left for me but to be an author. 

Nathaniel [Hawthorne]

A square in Berlin near the Altes Museum. The sign you can only kind of see on the right is Weihenstephaner - my favorite brewery.

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"The gods are of no sect; they side with no man. When I imagine that Nature inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls, and specially existed for them, I go to see an obscure individual who lives under the hill, letting both gods and men alone, and find that strawberries and tomatoes grow for him too in his garden there, and the sun lodges kindly under his hillside, and am compelled to acknowledge the unbribable charity of the gods." - Thoreau  Journal entry April, 15 age 23

My sister in law, Gaja, picking blueberries. This photo was made with a Diana+ using 120 B&W film.

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This is for the rats from yesterday.

"Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down - toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth." - Carl Sagan

This is the power and steam plant next to the Materials and Minerals Building (M&M, the wood shop) on IIT's campus. M&M was the first building (1939) Mies built in the US. It's also where I make all my furniture.

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“My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.” - Bohumil Hrabal

Travel is much the same. This photo was taken on my first trip to continental Europe. My travels; especially Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany; will undoubtedly influence my designs far more than any studio I've ever had or book I've ever read.

Cemetery in Chur, Switzerland

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"Become who you are." - Nietzsche

I took some photos of my friend Derek a while ago for a project he's been working on for a little over half a decade now. He basically grows out his facial hair and then trims it into some style and documents it with photos. For his final photo he just grew out a gnarly beard.

Anyways, the first photo is a digital photo edited in Photoshop while the second is  4"x5" color slide film. I may have said this before on here, but I have a theory on film/digital photography. Digital photography tries to duplicate reality and does it very well - film does not. Film is a chemical process that was refined for roughly the last 100 years. The object was not to look real; it was to please the photographer, and to that end each manufacturer makes several types of color film that produce slightly different hues. My personal favorite is Fuji RDPIII (Provia). What's interesting to me is that digital photographers spend a lot of time in Photoshop making their digital photos look like film (think of all the iPhone apps that do this) not because they want it to necessarily to look like film, that may be what they're going for, but in reality they're just trying to make Reality (with a capital "r")  look more pleasing; which is what film does. Film is a tangible interpretation of what humans find aesthetically pleasing.

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"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." - Sigmund Freud

Not a huge fan of Freud but that one reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Hagakure:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: 'Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.' Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the times comes is what this is all about. To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark. However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, 'Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,' as your own basis for action." - Hagakure (27)

This is my friend Garret Santora playing at the Streetside Bar in Chicago.

This is a random unedited video of them playing that night:

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"I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is, we haven't enough good leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers--surgeons, engineers, economists; men who deserve a great following--and have heard the crowd cheer me instead. I'm proud of my profession. I like to play baseball. I like fans, too, but I think they yelled too loudly for the wrong man." - Babe Ruth

Propane tank converted to grill pulled by a dune buggy made by the driver, Carlos. That's my dad sitting shotgun. This is the first photo he ever sent me via email - it's a new medium for him.

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Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

-Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

With the killing of Osama Bin Laden there were a lot of misattributed MLK quotes floating around. I thought this one was pretty much amazing.

I recently submitted a few photos about steam engines for publication for a new journal at IIT. They only printed my black and white stuff so I thought I'd post the color photos that were left out. This is one continuous strip of film I shot in a concrete plant in Mokena, IL during my winter break the first year of grad school. This is my brother working on a scotch marine boiler.

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"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything." - Yamamoto Tsunetomo in Hagakure, 38

I found this photo while I was looking for photos of the actual lathe that the legs came from in the post below. It's my older brother and father standing in our now demolished warehouse.

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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Teachers unions and getting rid of terrible teachers; cops and the drug war - judges too; populist politicians who spew idiocy, racism, and anti-science rhetoric so that they can garner the support from voters who hold similar opinions; the mega-rich in America and issues of fairness/taxes (see: Koch brothers); home contractors and using truly new materials, technology, and ideas to build responsible homes; etc. The further I go in school the more I realize how difficult true change is to accomplish - especially as the area of interest gains prominence. We had a lawyer that specializes in litigating claims related to architecture speak to us. His message over and over was that lawyers and judges, given opposing opportunities, will make legal decisions based on which allows them to stay busy and make more money. It was a way of predicting the outcome of any given trial that proved quite accurate.

So now the constructive part - how do you incentivize people to change their deleterious but self-preserving actions for the benefit of all?

Just a dreary shot of Chicago from the roof of Vetro.

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"How can extreme forms of nationalism survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective - as a single, small globe against stars?" - Arthur C. Clarke

This is my uncle Kent in Naples, FL riding an appaloosa.

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"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living." - Buckminster Fuller, New York Magazine 1970

Fuller believed that work was largely obsolete - and by extension so were many full time jobs. His notion was rather that of projects. People would assemble for projects, bring their expertise, and disband when they were completed. Of course, this is how most architecture firms and how every construction site I've ever been to has operated. Interestingly though the trades embrace this and have a system for dealing with it whereas the (large) architecture firm must go through periods of cyclical hiring and firing. It's very similar to monogamy in our culture.

That is, humans tend to be slightly polygynous (men tend to have more than one wife/lover when they can afford it) but yet this is unacceptable to just come out and say. How do men get around this? By being serially monogamous - getting married and divorced repeatedly (women rarely do this especially when the marriage involves children). In much the same way many employers must go through the process of essentially pretending they want an employee for a long period of time. The reality is that this is untrue and both parties would be better off if both sides were honest and acted accordingly. I'd expect the work situation to change before male/female relations as monogamy tends to be in the best interest of men.

Fisher Studio Houses at 1209 N State Street in Chicago.

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"The work ethic is not lost; work is largely obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller

I made this portrait of an Algerian protester in front of the Opera Bastille (Carlos Ott) in May this year. They were protesting citywide for fair pay and job opportunities that resulted in a clash with police later in the day. Regardless of what the French claim they are deeply protective of their culture and it manifests itself in this case in the form of prejudice. The irony is that for many of these workers French is their first language and under French law they are French citizens. Colonialism is a bitch.

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"When the single masterpiece is struck down, the act is attributed to a madman, but when the coherence of an entire society is vandalized, the destruction is viewed with proud arrogance as evidence of progress." - Frederick Sommer speaking at Richard Nickel's funeral. The quote refers to of the smashing of the Pieta, which had just occurred, and the destruction of Louis Sullivan's buildings to make way for a new urban landscape.

The entrance to Dachau near Munich, Germany.