It’s been a while since I wrote about our friendly product development happening right behind my desk. Matt’s been fast at work moving toward a pilot project here in downtown St Louis and tweaking last-minute details. Matt Snelling, along with Paul Wilhelms and Jim Fetterman are the brains behind the operation, but Matt has really been around since day 1, and thus, is the subject of this post.
Recently I fired off a bunch of questions to Matt (I mean really, why just turn around and talk to him when I can send a verbose email?) and I think some of his answers really get to the heart of this project. Stay tuned …
Rain’s in the forecast and so what better excuse do I have to post-pone that massive amount of yardwork I would love to be doing to bring you a bit more….Freno! Matt showed me the video he and Javier, another co-hort from Planning who also sits next to Matt, created showing the features of this product. I’ve embedded the video below, but for those of you more literary types, here’s the deal in print.
To touch on what we covered in the last post, Freno is what we call a segmental wall system, it’s basically a kit of 3 concrete parts that are precast just like building blocks in a variety of arrangements to accommodate any site’s installation …
In honor of the impending Earth Day, and to celebrate National Landscape Architecture Month, let’s talk rain gardens! I’ll pause for oohs and aahs.
Here in the Planning Group we’re always trying to come up with an ideal way to deal with rainwater on-site rather than piping it. We’ve tried infiltration fields, bioswales, rain gardens, etc etc. These all work when you have plenty of space, permeable surface, and the option to alter topography on sites. This, as you can imagine, gets a bit difficult when you’re in the middle of a city…in the middle of a street…
Urban rain …
I’ve posted before of my love of all things tetris-y/lego-y/videogame-y. When talking with fellow designers of about my age, I find that our early exposure to pixels in all sorts of venues is the great equalizer, the one thing we all seem to have in common.
It is with that in mind that I post the following video. C’mon, we’ve all looked at some buildings and thought “oh, I know exactly what pieces of tetris fun would fill that sucker in…”
I never can quite pinpoint exactly what it was in my childhood that has led me to my professional obsession with designy-type goodness.
Was it the constant coloring?
Was it Play-Doh overload (perhaps ingested one time too many)?
Was it the massive Lego collection we amassed as children that was only too eagerly egged on by my engineer of a father?
Or was it the hours I spent in front of a screen fitting oddly shaped blocks together as a muscial theme moves quicker and quicker in the background?
Okay, it was probably a combination of all three, but I’m still quite drawn to any of these things. It …
When I ask my friends, who are pretty much all architects, what they play with as a child, the answer that comes back most often is LEGOS.
So I guess it doesn’t come as a surprise that they are coming out with an architecture series with the Frank Lloyd Wright collection being the first. There are six planned sets, which includes the Guggenheim museum in New York and Fallingwater.
But it still does not beat the Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer… 
