Philly's drowning....

i didn't see any dead bodies--but it was really smelly anyways:














Looking North from the Chestnut Bridge

Raging River @ the waterworks

World Cup Fever!!!

Just to let you know how things are going here with the World Cup. Next Friday plays Germany vs Argentina in Berlin... it will be ten times what you see here.

more images comming soon...

the annex: summer fun part 1

no, megan and brad did not just return from a particularly humid day in the wissahickon. megan and brad did just come off a double- win in the co-ed-new england-regional wet t-shirt contest. so sorry no one was there to witness the decisive victory. as you can see, we are elated with our accomplishment!

rats, morphine, and design

Sometimes I wonder how much impact design can actually have on peoples lives. Here's an interesting excerpt from an article that will give you hope (if you're interested in that sort of thing)

(From NYTimes Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/magazine/25addiction.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087%0A&en=7468d600894cb46a&ex=1151467200)


"Alexander is among a vocal group of addiction researchers who argue that focusing on a pill to treat addicts fails to address the primary cause of becoming and staying hooked: our unhappy, disconnected lives. Beginning in the late 1970's, Alexander and his team of researchers at Simon Fraser set out to study the role of our environment on addictive behavior. Until that point, most scientists studying addiction put rats in small, individual cages and watched as they eagerly guzzled drug-laced solutions and ignored water and food, sometimes dying in the process. This phenomenon was noted — first by researchers, then drug czars, then parents trying to keep their children off drugs — as proof of the inherently addictive quality of drugs and of the inevitable addiction of any human who used them. This was false, of course. Most people who use drugs don't become addicted.

So what made all those lab rats lose their minds? Bruce Alexander and his research team had a rather simple hypothesis: The rats had awful lives. They were stressed, lonely, bored and looking to self-medicate. To prove it, Alexander created a lab-rat heaven he called Rat Park. The 200-square-foot residence featured bright balls and tin cans to play with, painted creeks and trees to look at and plenty of room for mating and socializing.

Alexander took 16 lucky rats and plopped them into Rat Park, where they were offered water or a sweet, morphine-based cocktail (rats love sweets). Alexander offered the same two drinks to the control group of rats he left isolated in cages. The results? The rat-parkers were apparently having too much fun to bother with artificial highs, because they hardly touched the morphine solution, no matter how sweet Alexander and his colleagues made it. The isolated and arguably depressed rats, on the other hand, eagerly got high, drinking more than a dozen times the amount of the morphine solution as the rats in paradise."

Once you live in a place,

it grows on you.
I stay in Freising.There is no description about Freising in lonely planet Germany.But I like this small city.
Following is from brouchure of the city.
Freising with its almost 50,000 inhabitants is lying some 30km downriver from Munich on the Isar.Freising is the old bishop's town of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising with renowned art, cultural and historical object of interest.Freising is home to Weihenstephan, the biggest university centre of "green" reserch and learning in the European Union.The name Weihenstephan is associated with the alleged oldest brewery in the world, the State Brewery Weihenstephan. The gardens of Weihenstephan are among the scientifically best run in Europe and are well worth a visit.Freising retains its Bavarian ambience in the modern world...

old town/new building of the college/perenial garden/beer garden in the woods/lovely Freisinger bears

Please come to visit Freising.

nothin' but luv

just wandering around, stealin' imagery and found this from the guys at orange32 / stockaid...

enjoy doug!

This is a toaster.

I just thought that I would share with you all the Rougemont technology within the house. While Doug is battling with computer beasts, I'm dealing with the woes of ancient toasters. I did not even know such an electrical appliance could still exist. Whenever I want to toast something, I actually have to sit and watch the toaster, flip the toast by hand, and continuing watching the toaster. I guess there isn't that much else to do in the morning, but I still miss the modern toaster.

Two Headed Beast

So what is a worse software program than AutoCAD? Microsoft Excel, you say? Ok, I'll give you that.

Well, how about an AutoCAD file that is importing an Excel file? That's right folks, I am officially in hell.

from the archives...

i i'm sure everyone has been unable to sleep in anticipation of these last pics from the road trip. my apologies for them being so tardy. also poasted is a pic from the first official day of summer, on a short detour in center city. i think it'd make a great album cover. now that i'm in bklyn, cali seems so far away!

random pics from the last month of school

Hey :) Here are some pictures from the last month of school ...






And then some more from the Beaux Arts Ball ....

sorry, this has nothing to do with anything

But i think it's sooooo frickin' cute!

sunny in san francisco :)

Shannon, I love this blog. It's awesome. It's one of the best ways to procrastinate.... just kidding :) ... well, I'm in SF along with the douch and mizz liz, and we're all hard at work at Hargreaves for the summer. We work in an old factory/warehouse brick building with some funky spiral staircase thing at the front entrance. The city is great, chill, and full of crazy people (Doug actually lives in crazy town - he will be a hippy by the time he gets back. If he pitches a tent outside of a store or starts pushing a shopping cart around, it's all b/c of the san fran influence...) But seriously, liz and I had some guy hop a fence to come talk to us while we were eating lunch in a park, and he was talking all sorts of crazy things...

Adam & Noah are in town, too... we all went out on wednesday and had good times ... wish I had had a camera, but I didn't... I'll put up some other pics soon... hope everyone is doing well :) I love hearing about all your adventures.

not exactly a desk job

i don't have a garden quite like amirah's... it's closer to an adventure playground with lots of power tools (and yes, tod, tons of epoxy).

anyways, some random sights at eastern state:


cell block 6?














old offices


















movie screening and sacrament services


what we're repairing, replacing, 'mothballing'





















yep- mr. bluebird's on my shoulder...

keep this in mind for 2008

i just got back from a weekend in chicago for my brother's college graduation. pictured here is the moon bounce, rented upon his request for his party ("all i want is a moon-bounce and an ice cream cake to celebrate the big day"). i'm thinking we need to acquire one of these for the fifth floor of meyerson hall...

Windmills, modernism, and beauty

Some reading for the bored monday intern...

What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms

just because...

i'm kinda bored and it's sunday and i've not done anything revolutionary in philly this weekend... so i got a lil' self reflexive on this whole blog thingy.

if you don't believe me, map it for yourself (but really who'd waste their time like that???)

http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Cowbell, Montagnes, and French People!

Today, I went for a hike to explore Rougemont and some surrounding villages. It was a very nice day, so I thought that I would go out and get some exercise, considering life in studio is pretty sedentary. What was supposed to be a three hour hike turned into almost 5 hours because i got lost...haha. I had a map with me, and I followed all of the signs, but I ended up in some cow pasture. From the map it looked like I was supposed to cross under the barbed wire cow fence and head down the hill to find the end of the path, which I could vaguely see in the distance. I proceeded to hurl my backpack under the fence and slide under the barbed wire, but there were some really mean cows awaiting me on the other side. I tried to proceed down the hill quietly, but this one cow kept following me and moo-ing up to the other cows on the hill while violently whipping his tail around. Not knowing the proper etiquette for socializing with cows, I quickly slid back under the fence where I had entered the cow territory and ran back to where the last sign was and tried a different route. I eventually made it down the steep hill back to Rougemont, but by the time I reached solid ground, my legs felt like they were ready to call it a day. I rewarded my self with some overpriced sorbet when I got back into the village, and decided that next time, I'll bring a friend with me on an hour long hike :).


This cow was a little more friendly when I was on my side of the fence...

I [heart] my plants

My first blog :) So i'm still in Philly working at the village that we visited on our last sally fieldtrip. Recent highlights have been picking cherries and raspberries, making a pumpkin patch, making big jail inmates shovel shit and push it around in wheel barrels all day, and my new obsession with my latest creation--a kick ass herb garden. Check out my new friends :



Here's a recent photo from a night out with Joe:

mas beer and folks festival

Hallohallo,

I really hesitated to put this picture but...In south germany and Austria, "Mass" means 1 litter beer jug.'ss' is 'ß'in the right.I went to Folks festival with some staffs from L+P.

Fun in Pink

Yes!! The pink thingys are real!!

Remanent of the pink inflatable playground objects designed for a State horticulture Show in Wolfsburg lay in Topotek 1 studio office, serving as elements for leisure during working hours. Here are some sample images that register this activity.

Enjoy!

field operations, memphis-style

alert stan allen: this is what a porous ambient field looks like in memphis, tn.

yes, those are tiny american flags. yes, someone planted their entire front yard with them for memorial day. yes, the terrorists have won.

Hippies! Dirty Hippies Everywhere!

Arrived in San Francisco today. Here are some impressions from the first 30 minutes:

My new digs

Two Yoga places and a taqueria within 100 feet of my building. Yep, I'm in San Francisco

Strange west coast trees

This is where I fake glaucoma to score high grade shit for Noah.