R o b e r t · D a vi s · A r c h i t e c t25 Dec 09practicingcommercial, industrial, and occasionally residential architecturein the Gulf-coast region since 1980...licensed in TX and registered with the NCARB.
Take a look:
the  virtual
restoration of small-town synagogues in TX
(tjhs) and WI, a selection of brief essays below on topics of professional and
personal interest, and a few  salesman's
samples.
Whose
Design Is It Anyway?...When does the architect's artistic
license expire?...The architect's job and the client's privilege
of shaping and directing the work are usually terminated by occupation
of the building...When building ownership changes hands, all
the architect's effort to please the client goes up in smoke.
Professional prizes notwithstanding, if a building's design prevents
adjustment to altered use, if its decoration becomes an embarrassment
difficult to remove, if the roof or walls leak, if omething big
breaks, the users will condemn the building as a bad job.
Memory...looking
beyond the bricks and mortar to a building's hidden decoration...Every
town has a visible pattern of streets and buildings and an invisible
one of memories clinging to them. No one sees all of them, but
everyone who lives there sees some. As a stranger, you see nothing.You
are, upon arrival, interrupting a stream of consciousness without
knowing till much later where you came in.
Comfort...In
the long run what wears best: good looks or good temper?...
The composition may be artful, the colors match, and the iconography
too clever by half, but the place may be drafty, noisy, smelly,
or just plain uncomfortable. ..Comfort has no equivalent mathematical
expression, no units, no standard onstituents, no single sensory
correlate. It can't be seen so it can't be drawn; and may be
more important than anything that can.
Decay...There
is no fooling Mother Nature...Decay represents a kind of wisdom--the
pattern of wear and exposure an accumulated history of use. There
is as much to read in the accidental dents as there is in the
rot of decomposition or the breakage of parts. Abandonment tells
a more complicated story--was the failure intrinsic to the thing
or does it have an altogether different and unrelated cause?
One wonders at the source of energy and optimism needed to build
the now-desolate wrecks of towns on the Dakota plain.
Ordinary
Architecture...It is a gift to be simple...There are plenty
of "important architectural statements" that have fooled
some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people
all the time. Eventually they fall out of fashion and it becomes
obvious that fashion was all they had to offer. Unable to change
clothes, they live out what's left of their less-than-useful
life as faded frumps.
CAD:
Is What you See ALL You Get? ...When out of sight is out
of mind...The basic CAD task has been the simulation of appearance.
First, in the two dimensions of the picture plane, and then in
the three dimensions of the model. In