Training Log Archive: barb

David drew this design for a house on stilts, with a pool, in Google SketchUp:

school for parent teacher meeting, work, home.

Yesterday evening we went to a lecture at MIT by David Macaulay, author of The Way Things Work. It was titled "The Way David Macaulay Works", and aptly so, because the lecture was a breathtaking fly-through of how he develops ideas for his books. It was entertaining - he was really funny. We were treated to sketches for many of the drawings of his books, as well as ideas that he started to work on but did not finish. He showed us the sketches for Why the Chicken Crossed the Road while telling a brief version of the story. Same with Unbuilding, about deconstructing the Empire State building to send it to the middle east for a rich sheik. Weirdly, in that 1987 book he'd mentioned the twin towers of the World Trade Center - something about the oil baron being willing to pull them down too. After 9/11, he started working on the book Mosque, and showed us how he carefully researched it and built models (we got to see photos of these) and checked in with experts. He loves Rome for many reasons including the juxtaposition of old and new. He showed us several of his failed attempts to write a book about Rome and then a draft of the story he did end up publishing, Rome Antics. In that book, he has some nice visual devices to imply movement, and David was pretty interested in these. For Ship, he told us about learning to snorkel and dive, and how he drew underwater archaeologists as they worked, using a #2 pencil and mylar paper, floating above them with his snorkel. We got to see several other books as he worked on them, including Black and White. He talked a lot about his current project, on the human body, and mentioned his next two projects which I'm spacing on at the moment, but which sounded interesting. Oh, one will be about Earth.