My English Class Blog

Let's twist again

2008-07-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

It’s not hard to get impressed with this new building. Imagine if the sight you have in your apartment changed every hour. Also the building possibilities are great; just place the central tube and add the floors that are already made. This concept can improve the constructing speed to every new building, just adding the floors, it should be used everywhere.
Other important fact is the energy generation. Nowadays the lack of oil and prices of electricity plus the global warming effect make this kind of construction necessary for the future of energy generation. When every floor start to spin, it generates part of the energy it already uses as it was a wind turbine , so it would be a big step forward if next generation buildings help to make part of his energy consumption. This kind of green buildings is what we need for the future.

Favourite designer: Luigi Colani

2008-07-06T11:41:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to say who’s the best designer ever because every famous designer has a philosophy behind his creations, so it’s only a matter of tastes. In my opinion, one very important designer (even if he is not famous as other ones) is Luigi Colani. He is a German designer born in Berlin. He studied industrial design in Germany and then moved to Paris to study aerodynamics. I like him as a designer because of his point of view about what means to design and how he translates the shapes of nature to objects that are simple and full of beauty. He says that the world is round shaped, everything in nature has curves so why does he has to use straight lines. He designed everything, cars, furniture, planes, boats, etc. The core of his work are cars and everything that has something to do with aerodynamics. He don’t use the normal shapes we are used to see in cars and planes, instead he creates animal shaped objects. He says nature has much more efficient designs than man, so he takes that to make some speed record cars, or efficient fuel savers trucks.
The concept of his work is called “Biodynamic” it means to take the nature as a source of inspiration and work.
Luigi Colani tries to picture future trough design. He also designed models of planes and trains for near future. He started to work in levitation trains even before they were invented, and also in planes that can carry more than 4 thousand people.
He was also invited to help in the creation of space shuttle cockpits due to his knowledge in ergonomics.

OH MY BLOG!

2008-07-02T15:10:00.000-07:00

Even though I was familiar with blogs and i used to read many of them i actually never tried to make my own one. Nowadays almost the whole Internet is based on the blog structure where one can publish content in a very easy way, without having to redesign the whole website again so it was good to start my own blog so I can learn about the blogging experience. The nice thing about blogging is visiting others people blogs. It can be found a lot of different opinions and points of view in about almost everything you wan to read of. I use blogs to read about technology news and often about design and designers around the world and is a fast way to know what’s happening in other places, things that you never see on the local media.
About my blogs, it was helpful to write in English again, since i haven’t used English since I finished school and there aren’t many English native speakers to talk with. So my only English exercise was watching movies.

It helped me to remember a lot of words and expressions that I already knew but I completely forgot because of the lack of practice and now that I come to the class I notice a little improvement in my English. Now when I’m watching a TV show I change the language to English and I can understand much more than when I started the year. It showed me how a little practice can be so useful.
The blogging part of the class also helps to relax and read new things outside the FAU and forget about models, blueprints and things that usually overwhelm us. The only thing that I miss is to know if our writing was good or not, just to know what things can we improve or what are we failing at.

Brassed Off

2008-05-22T17:41:00.000-07:00

The film is set in “Grimley”, a poor mining village where everyone works in the coal mine, a mine that is facing an upcoming closing because of the government’s decision. The film tells the story of the hopeless miners who can’t fight against the company because they’ve lost all illusion and strength and the only thing left is the colliery brass band.

The film basically shows how the lives of the colliery band members gradually deteriorates because of the lack of money, lack of hope and the consequences that brings to their families and how Danny, the director of the band tries to keep them together.

One of the strongest parts of the movie for me was when Phil as a clown (I had to looked it on the internet) says about god “What's He doing? He can take John Lennon. He can take those three young lads down at Ainsley Pit. He's even thinking of taking my old man. And Margaret bloody Thatcher lives! What's He sodding playing at, eh?” That perfectly reflects the anger and desperation that the miners had.

Even though music is the central axis of the film, the director makes it to tell a black comedy that shows a real fact where everything is so sad and miserable that the only thing you can do is laugh.

BBC Learning English

2008-04-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

The Learning English section of the BBC webpage is quite a good site to listen actual conversations, not like the school kids stories that I often had to listen a couple of years ago.
I listened to “6 minutes English”. A 6 minutes length podcast where two persons talk about one word and its uses within a context. In this case they talked about the word Manage, its origin and where do you use it. It’s not so hard to understand them and the way they explain everything makes it funnier.
After that I “Faced Up to Phrasal” It’s kind of a TV soup that you can listen at and then learn some vocabulary used on it that is written below.
After listening a couple of podcast I tried to play a little word quiz that made it all a little funnier.
“Learning English” was a good site, I think I’m gonna keep visiting it.

Design Boom!

2008-04-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

I can’t say I have one very favorite site, but amongst the tons of game-sites, technology blogs, design blogs, and of course video based web pages like You Tube or Meta Café, where I pent a lot of time playing online games or watching funny videos, there’s a very special one that helps me keep in touch with design trends around the world. I’m talking about DesignBoom (www.designboom.com). I met this site when a teacher recommended it to us. When entered for the first time I immediately like it. This site it’s a kind of blog about design and architecture news, they show vanguard projects from everywhere, also some really important events like the Milan Design week. This is very useful sometimes to take some ideas of or simply to read some interesting articles.
In this site you can also find famous designers’ interviews and design competitions being realized in USA or in Japan with very creative solutions.
Also it has some history of common objects and their evolution over time.
I use to visit this page at least twice a week.
PS. When I’m really bored I visit www.porlaputa.com to watch some funny and stupid videos :).

Victory City

2008-04-02T14:45:00.000-07:00

Victory City is not a futuristic idea of how people should live nor a utopia but an old-fashioned premonition of future. It makes me remember about 50’s films or Big Brother book where they showed us the future, where man acted like robots following one man’s desire.
May be, people at first would like this new way of life, being safe from crime, living in a clean environment and close to their jobs, but it wouldn’t take so long for people to get kind of stressed, bored with their day-to-day lives and start to complain and asking for more freedom to do what they want to and not follow a schedule that tells them what to do, what to eat, where to live, etc.
Actually what we hate becomes what we love. We may not like crowded places but we love going out and meet different people or we don’t like everyday’s disorder but a life without it would become exhausting. In urbanistic or in enviroment terms the Victory City would work efficiently, but is the human behaviour what Mr Orville has forgotten.

Cheers!!

2008-03-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my English class blog. Just let's enjoy the British way of life, cheer folks.