In Horoma's Head 08

Hi everyone,

Finally back from holidays. Physically dead, mentally rested! Hope you're all well and ready to head back to work soon. 

To contrast with July, this month has been pretty dead and relaxed, but there are still a couple of things I want to write about for this month newsletter 😊

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The world of holidays 🎵🔈🧠

So, beginning of August was mainly dedicated to finishing off the last details of some videos and other stuff. And then I had the chance to take 2 full weeks off work and it was pretty nice to say the least.

I usually love to jot down notes about work and ideas all the time, and these holidays were so needed for my brain than the only time I took a notebook during holidays, I couldn't write down a single word.

On the other side though, I enjoyed taking photos with a new lens I bought for the occasion. Images are not fancy, but were part of this experiment that I like to make every now and then to shoot in specific focal length. Because as archviz artists, we tend to rely too much on very short focal length like 18mm or 24mm, and forget the type of images you can make with longer ones like 50 or even 200.

So you can find a small selection of images I took. As I said, nothing fancy, but still some food for thoughts and potential ideas for reference building.

The world of rest 💶💼⏰

It is a fun feeling to be physically exhausted and mentally rested. Probably not the best feeling though, but it probably is better than the opposite (that actually is not really possible since mind exhaustion tends to tire your whole body anyway).

Anyway, even though my mind is okeyish now, I have to admit getting back to work when I see the mountain of stuff I have to do in the coming weeks and months is a bit daunting. But it's probably normal and it'll take a week or two of adjustments so that I get up to speed.

I guess the one big error to avoid for when you're coming back from a break, is to go full speed directly. You need to ease back into it, even if you have a lot of work, try to take your time. You'll get everything done eventually anyway.

The world of Horoma Youtube channel 🖼📷📼

August was a month off so no new videos for this month, but I've scheduled and written the scripts for most of the videos I'll upload until end of this year.

This will touch mostly on important image theory topics, references building, and a bit of business management as well since I read too many articles about working for free. So yep, interesting topics ahead, so stay tuned 😁

The world of fun extra work 🚙🎬💶

A couple of months ago I did a set of images for a new client that I was really happy with. Client was really happy too. The panels limited us to two images, but there was an extra image I really wanted to do. So I simply did it. Later.

I actually often do extra images of projects I enjoyed working on and send the extra images to the client. It gives them extra material to post on their website, it gives me extra exposure, and it also hints at different ways of tackling subjects so that the client, if/when it comes back to me for another project, has an even more open mind when it comes to the topic of composition.

We actually won this competition, so while the project will get build, it's good to have extra images to put on the website before construction begins.

This is actually one of the core topic I teach in my masterclass : selling your ideas. And doing extra images for fun is one of the many ways to persuade your client to listen to you a bit more. There are of course other ways that you can implement directly in the negociation process. But this I think is a nice extra touch that clients seem to enjoy. And so do I.

The world of books

For those of you who don't know, I love books. Like. Really. But I kind of overdosed some months ago on books because I read litteraly hundreds of them in about a year, related mostly to image theory and composition in order to refine the masterclass I'm now running.

But it's very hard when you visit museums and nice bookshops to not want to buy some books.. so I ended up buying some little ones that will hopefull bring some insight in my work, one way or another.

So right now I'm really looking forward to being done with the heavy work I have and spend some time reading and ... probably buying more books later on.

Since reading can be very fulfilling, but timeconsuming, I'll do a video later this year on book recommendations in diverse topics which hopefully will help people that don't have to much time to dedicate to reading, to still enjoy a good read and learn new things.

In the image above : 

• An exhibition always hides another exhibition. A book about Hans Ulricht Obrist, a curator that did many interesting interviews with artists and architects, amongst many other things. Really looking forward to read this one. 
• Portman's America & Other Speculations. Very promising book with amazing photos of the work of architect John Portman. 
• The architecture of ethics. I've always been fond of philosophy and ethics, so this one seems like a good fit.
• SOM journal 1. I love the work of SOM, and this small format that does internal critique of their work sounded very interesting to me. 
• Palimpsesto architectonico. I never read stuff by Campo Baeza, but I love his architecture, so I was curious to see what kind of thinking goes behind all these great projects. 
• Ornamento journal. A collection of nice photographs of details in Mies's architecture. 
• Architecture on display. I love the format of conversations rather than simple conventional story telling. This one deals with the topic of how venice biennales were organized in the past, directly with their respective curators. 
• Escritos de juventud (quite hidden in the picture), is a collection of writings from director Andrei Tarkovski. I'm very familiar with his cinematic work, but much less with the autobiography and poems he wrote, so this should be quite interesting. 

There are a couple of monographs I want to get my hands one but I'll wait a little for that 😁

Die Empty

Still regarding books, one of my favourite book on creativity is called Die Empty, written by Todd Henry. Behind this curious and gloomy title is a set of very interesting insight and practice that I try to implement as often as possible.

To be perfectly honest I'm not a big follower of Todd Henry's podcast (I have too many others already that take a lot of my time already) but this book has had a big influence on the way I work, so there's a high chance this short series of 9 episodes dealing with core topics of the book might be worth listening to to get a good idea of the book. Or you can just purchase the book and read it :D

Either way you can check out the podcast here : https://accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/die-empty-part-1-three-modes-of-work/

I think that'll be all for this "back from holiday" newsletter. 😉

Hope you all managed to get some sort of break during this summer and are all rested more or leass, ready to do great things.
I also hope the few topics mentioned and books will give you some ideas of what to potentially dive in in the coming weeks.

If you find this utterly boring and useless, please let me know before unsubscribing 🎀. If on the other hand you do like it, then I'm glad, and feel free to share it with your archviz pals that would maybe like it too by sending them here : https://www.horoma.net/newsletter-subscription

Thank you

All the best for the upcoming month!

Cheers

Simon