Critique Wall.com

I recently had the opportunity to visit California to present a workshop on usability for the Global Internet Evangilism Forum. The workshop was well received, and I hope it made a positive impact. One of the topics that was hot in this year's discussion was mobile technology. In places where the wired infrastructure is not in place, Internet access is exploding via mobile technology. We need to know a lot about design for mobile technology and quick.

While on the West Coast I was also able to visit two architecturally interesting places. The Getty Center and the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The Getty Center was designed by Richard Meir. After the architecture guide explained Meir's grid system I was amazed how meticulous he was in sticking to it and still creating organic spaces. The entire complex is laid out on two 30 inch based grids. The grids followed the two ridge lines that the complex is sitting on. You can follow a grid line from a wall of one building down to the sidewalk across the plaza and into and up a wall in the next building. Yes, few words ago I said he used two layer grids. The second grid oriented about 35 or 40 degrees off of the first. If a building or a wall needed to be placed at an angle, it sat on the 2nd grid and made sense. I believe this is one way this modernist complex achieved an organic feel. It followed the natural grids of the environment it is occupying.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall described in the Wall Street Journal as "inspired by crumpled aluminum foil" did not seem to share any grid other than the city block that it occupied. Frank Gehry has said his work is inspired by fish and I think these fish were in a fight. It was a fascinating visit. We were only able to visit the lobby inside, but the juxtaposition of a wood interior with a metal exterior was interesting. The rest of our visit involved walking around the exterior, through the garden area and the Aerial Pathway climbing around high above street level.