Russell Coutts on AC72 short courses

In case you are wondering how the America’s Cup is going to fit the AC72 cats into San Francisco Bay, here is a 16 Jan 2012 Daily Sail interview with Russell Coutts:

(…) “You have to recognize that these 72s, they are probably only going to be on a tack or a jibe for two and a half minutes, maybe three, so it is not like the old format where you had boats straight lining for 10 or 15 minutes. And maneuvering will be critical because if the boat is doing 35 knots and you slow down to say 15 knots in a jibe, obviously you had better make sure it is a good jibe because [if not] the other boat will be gaining a lot on you very fast.”

A 2.5 minute leg at 35kn is about 1.5nm or 1.73 miles or 2.8km. Roughly the distance from the SF city front to Treasure Island. The pictured course layout above is not from an official source – but it does give you an idea of how the bay could be utilized for racing that is highly visible from land viewing points.

More on America’s Cup San Francisco.

MOFO: The Big Paella, Gilmour Ensemble

Today 19 January at MOFO began with The Big Paella cooking demo. Like our first experience with Moorilla cooking instruction, today’s session was taught by Vince Trim {that’s Vince on the right. On the left is The Source executive chef Phillipe Leban. Vince runs the Moorilla functions, wine bar and café}. In addition to top-drawer cooking expertise, Vince is an engaging and very effective coach. And yes, Vince’s Paella is every bit up to the Paella we enjoyed during our two November weeks in Barcelona. For good reason, The Source is a big deal in Australian cuisine – reviewed here.

For us the big musical winner today was the Gilmour Ensemble {pictured above, with composer Russell Gilmour on the left} – a Hobart post-classical quartet comprised of cello, violin, woodwinds, and xylophone. Surprisingly, the Gilmour Ensemble plays only the compositions of Russell Gilmour (Hobart Conservatory of Music). We just loaded up on their music at iTunes – do check it out.

ABC Classic FM says “Tasmania’s premiere new music ensemble”. That’s true. PS If you have time to only try one track we would recommend “Pink Chesterfield #2″ from their first album Seven Things I’ll Do Tomorrow.

MOFO: Nick Tsiavos, Liminal

Well, MONA FOMA 2012 is just getting started, but today gave us goosebumps. Composer Nick Tsiavos performed Nick’s Liminal at St. Mary’s Cathedral. We and a couple hundred other lucky concert attendees were completely entranced. You could hear a pin drop in the cathedral until the standing ovation.

The Liminal album can be purchased on iTunes at “Nick Tsiavos Liminal“, performed by the same stars that we enjoyed today:

  • Nick Tsiavos – contrabass, composer
  • Deborah Kayser – soprano
  • Adam Simmons – saxophones, wind instruments
  • Peter Neville – percussion
  • Eugene Ughetti – percussion

ABC Radio National recorded today’s performance of Liminal, so keep an eye on ABC Classic FM for a reprise of today’s concert.

For another perspective on Nick’s music, visit the Jouissance website for the previous album. The site features quality audio samples so you can “try before you buy” the album on iTunes. Performers Kayser, Neville and Tsiavos intersect the Liminal group artists. From the album blurb:

Jouissance was formed to explore the dialogues between ancient chant and contemporary culture. The musicians share a fascination with the mysticism, sensuality and rapture found in the works of Hildegard of Bingen , Peter Abelard and the Byzantine Rite .

MOFO: Gabriella Smart, Tuba Skinny and eMDee

Tuba Skinny
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The entire MONA FOMA 2012 (MOFO) program PDF is here – we’re using the iOS app and the PDF program on our iPads.

MOFO began for us with the Gabriella Smart afternoon workshop on the John Cage prepared piano Sonatas and Interludes on Thursday afternoon at the amazing Baha’I Centre auditorium. Gabriella is doing two candlelit midnight performances Friday and Saturday.

The Friday opening street party was launched by ‘high tech didgeridoo meets drum’ eMDee.

Then we had a far-too-short taste of the remarkable New Orleans sextet Tuba Skinny before we cycled home with the last of the sunlight. You can buy the latest Tuba Skinny release ‘Garbage Man’ via direct download here.

MOFO: MONA FOMA 2012…

…launches this week in Hobart. Togatus received and posted a typically Walshian communication describing the festival, as follows:

“Woody Allen once said, ‘We should all be careful to confine our opinions to matters of which we are completely ignorant.’ Well he didn’t actually. I made that up. I’m thinking to myself, who am I to not follow Woody’s advice, even if he didn’t give it? Had Woody said what I said he said, he would have been following his own advice. He is, after all, ignorant of ignorance. I am, however, a Zen master of not knowing. That’s why I built a museum. I didn’t know it was hard. Actually it wasn’t. I didn’t know anything about art either. But I learned a bit. Now I know what I don’t know. Ignorance comes in many guises. Of these, the unknown unknowns remain mostly unknown to me. I don’t know much about music either. I don’t know what I don’t know. But Brian and his musical mates know what they don’t know and they want to know it. Hopefully, while they learn it, they’ll teach it to me. And you.”

– David Walsh

We just bought festival passes, so see you at MONA FOMA 2012.

ADAGIO’s 2011 Holiday Newsletter

Year 2011 came and went like a flash, and we savored every minute.

ADAGIO spent the year at her berth in Hobart, where we also spent the first six months of the year. Summer in Hobart can’t be beat, and this year was especially full of entertainment and friends. The year began with the opening of the sensational Museum of Old and New Art. Next was the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in February. Ten Days on the Island performances took us into April – Power Plant was especially memorable. We traveled overland around Tasmania in May. Cruisers from around the world came into our lives throughout the months. A highlight was our participation in the workshop, Women On Boats, organized by our Cruising Yacht Club of Tasmania.

[All our Australia-Hobart galleries are here. Also, if you would like to receive the link to the protected MONA gallery please email us].

California: July and August found us in Menlo Park, California, driving our grandchildren to sailing, tennis, marine mammal training camp, cello and violin lessons, and much more. During a weekend in Ashland, Oregon, we attended three of Shakespeare’s plays.

France: In September we flew to Zurich, then drove to Lucerne for a reunion with one of our favorite cities. Then by train into France to join our friends Adrian and Josephine at the mill in Jonvelle. The sunny month of September offered opportunities to explore the Franche-Comté and Bourgogne, then a glorious cruise on Adrian’s Dutch barge, GEESJE.

[All our France galleries are here]

Italy: Come October we drove from France across Switzerland to Italy via Lake Como. Our Italy destination was the Borgo di Gaiole villa we had reserved in Chianti. Our good luck: we arrived in Gaiole for the finishing festivities of the famous vintage bicycle race L’Eroica.

Italy – Tuscany: The first half of October continued brilliantly sunny – perfect for exploring: around Gaiole, Siena , Arezzo, Cortona, the Colle di Val d’Elsa Crystal Factory and Orvieto. Castles, vineyards, olive groves and forests, small cafes, gardens and art galleries charmed us. Museums of course, but we also had access to the art in situ – in the churches and palaces for which the art was created.

Italy – Florence: Two weeks in Florence, what can we say. Our photographs are an inadequate recounting: Florence- around town, Basilica Santa Croce, our local neighborhood market, Palazzo Vecchio, Folon’s Rose Garden, Boboli Gardens, and the Sicilian Festival. We visited the works of our favorite artists, taking advantage of having adequate time to see the best. Side trips to Lucca and Fiesole were a delight.

[All our Italy galleries are here]

Spain: We spent the first two weeks of November in Barcelona (see Around the Town) where we indulged our admiration for Antonio Gaudi. First we spent a glorious day exploring his Parc Güell.

Then multiple days digesting the famous Sagrada Famila, and the associated Museum. The weather challenged us to find suitable sun and daylight to visit Gaudi’s remarkable Barcelona houses (Casa Mila, Casa Battlo and Palau Güell), enjoying his natural artistic style and whimsy as well as his architectural genius and structural engineering.

Tapas were more varied than we had expected and we have vowed to learn to cook them ourselves.

[All our Barcelona galleries are here]

California: Back to the San Francisco Bay area for the remainder of November and all of December, being with our daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren brings us a great deal of pleasure. After the New Year we will return to our beloved ADAGIO and Hobart, to begin planning our year 2012 cruising schedule.

Barcelona

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The last two weeks of November we immersed ourselves in Barcelona. Our apartment in Barceloneta made our stay very special. From our comfortable “home” we toured all over Barcelona for the first two weeks of November. All by foot or Metro.

Location, location, location, yes indeed. For example, a walk of:

5 minutes to the excellent market Mercat de la Barceloneta (including supermarket);
4 minutes to the beach in two directions= 6 minutes to the marina at Port Vell;
10 minutes to the Barceloneta Metro station (quick access to all of Barcelona);
15 minutes to the trendy quarters of Passeig del Born and La Ribera
The Barceloneta neighborhood is populated with numerous shops and services — for almost any need, you need not leave the neighborhood. But if you are a shopper, the classy seaside mall of Maremagnum is only a 20 minute walk.

Barcelona is a walking and bicycling city. We rented bicycles from the friendly shop near the Mercat. Even better would be a membership in the Barcelona community bicycle program (see www.bicing.com or Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicing). Our research concluded that the wonderful Bicing program membership is only available to residents (due to protests by rental shops). Hopefully that will change.

Gaudi: La Sagrada Familia museum

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We cannot imagine what Gaudi might design today if he had access to modern computer-aided design tools. But Gaudi didn’t even have a mechanical calculator. So graphical calculations were his workaday tool.

Almost all of Gaudi’s drawings and models were destroyed by mistreating and looting of the Spanish Civil War. What we know about his designs and methods has been reconstructed from the few remaining photos, notes and fragments of physical models. The Gaudi museums at the Sagrada Familia and the Casa Milá (La Pedrera) have assembled wonderful exhibitions that give us perspective on how Gaudi worked.

One outstanding example are Gaudi’s clever physical form-finding methods. For catenary arch designs, Gaudi developed the hanging-chain funicular model in depth for his Colònia Güell chapel project. The image below is an inverted photo of the detailed reconstruction of the Colònia Güell model. The actual model is, of course, hanging “upside down”. Inverting the photo makes it easier to visualize the catenary arches as built. Gaudi constructed these models over a mirror so he could visualize the actual building as he worked.

This method exploits the property of a catenary curve, which describes a chain in pure tension. When the catenary is inverted it becomes a curve in pure compression.

The remarkable website of the Sagrada Familia is rich with architectural information. One example is The Calculations of La Sagrada Família [PDF], excerpt:

Gaudí always chose the simplest path when it came to making the calculations for his projects. At that time, with no calculators or computers, a good graphic calculation was more efficient that a pile of papers of calculations with analytical operations. But that was the most trodden path. Gaudí distanced himself from his contemporaries’ way of doing things and went beyond that phase of the graphic calculation and on to empirical experiments with hanging models with weights and strings, a system which no other architect in the world had ever developed to the degree and on the scale which he did.

Another useful source is the MIT project paper: CatenaryCAD: An Architectural Design Tool. Here is an excerpt on Gaudi’s technique from their proposal:

Catenary systems have been used for construction in Catalan areas of Spain for a long time. For example, if a Catalan stair has to be constructed it is not detailed by the planners or architects. Instead, the masons on site hang a rope between the point of departure and the point to be reached, trace the shape and flip the curve over to use as the guide for constructing the masonry arch that carries the stairs. The rope is in pure tension, as it can not take any compression due to its flexibility. Therefore the form it finds contains the pure tensile force within the envelope of the string. If one inverts the parabola, one gets a pure compression arch which is necessary for brick construction, which cannot take any tensile forces.

Antonio Gaudi developed the system of catenary string statics into a spatial design system. He constructed scaled models of his design ideas by developing forms through a weighted string form-finding method. In his case, the models are spatial and are much more complex then the catenary staircase example. Gaudi achieved the desired forms through the control of three variables – anchor points of the strings, the length of the strings, and the weights attached to them. By designing his forms this way, Gaudi knew that the resulting geometry would act purely in compression when inverted. He also had a pretty precise estimate of the loads necessary on the different members of his construction. Beyond structural form finding, Gaudi also used this method for rendering the interior and exterior shapes of the buildings. He imagined them by painting and tracing over the “wire frame” models of lines in photos.

Axel Kilian and associates have continued to develop the project — now called CADenary. Some useful further resources:

A one minute video demonstration of CADenary (fun). A CADenary web applet — you can try out your own simple designs.

Axel Kilian “Linking Hanging Chain Models to Fabrication“, and

Axel Kilian and John Ochsendorf Particle-spring systems for structural form finding published in IASS VOL. 46 (2005) n. 147.

Axel Kilian’s website.

A virtual visit to Church of Colònia Güell .

Gaudi: La Sagrada Familia

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Nothing can prepare you for your first experience of the Temple Expiatori de La Sagrada Familia. At the Nativity facade entrance, the outside appears aged and autumnal and intricately sculpted. Upon entry, you find yourself surprised by the brilliance of a towering sacred forest, lit as if through leaves from above and through stained glass windows from all sides. The influence on Antoni Gaudi, the architect, of the natural world is striking both inside and out. As a boy he showed a strong interest in shapes, colors and the geometry of nature. He learned copper smithing from his father. At the age of 36, having earned his architect’s diploma only five years earlier, Gaudi was commissioned with the continuation of the work on La Sagrada Familia. In addition to that responsibility, Gaudi completed numerous other major projects over the following years during which he developed his unique architectural style and technology. At least six of these buildings have been granted World Heritage status by UNESCO.

Beginning in 1914, Gaudi devoted all of his time to La Sagrada Familia, until his death in 1926. During the last years of his life, Gaudi planned many parts of the church so that they could be built in the future. He did this by combining geometrical forms and performing structural experiments and calculations.

Since the outset 129 years ago, the La Sagrada Familia has been built from donations, always respecting the will of the architect’s original design and models. Gaudi used the architectural structure as well as the decorative images to express the symbols of Christianity.

Gaudi: Casa Battlo

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