MICA’s Brown Center was a great venue for TEDx MidAtlantic

Tim Windsor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:53:37 +0000

I’ve driven past, or under it nearly a hundred times, but today was the first time I had the opportunity to spend time inside The Brown Center, the glass-curtained building with the thrusting overhang that opened on the MICA campus a few years back.

All I can say is: Wow. Modern spaces can often be cold and odd and, while The Brown Center is certainly quirky, it fits in nicely on MICA’s semi-urban campus, reflecting from the outside and providing amazing vistas from the inside.

The building sometimes appears mirrored, sometimes clear.

Clouds and church reflected in the glass wall.

The view out, from upstairs.

Tom Stoppard on writing, via Scott Simon at today’s TEDx MidAtlantic

Tim Windsor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:27:27 +0000

It had been years since I’d thought of this beautiful passage about writing until I heard Scott Simon quote it this morning at TEDx MidAtlantic. It comes from the amazing play The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard:

“Words… They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more… I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”

You can see Scott Simon’s magnificent presentation here:

(No direct link, sorry. Select his talk from the scrolling list on the left)

Zero Percent Idle » tedx

MICA’s Brown Center was a great venue for TEDx MidAtlantic

Tom Stoppard on writing, via Scott Simon at today’s TEDx MidAtlantic