Doing Frank Lloyd Wright

News from the blogosphere (Prim Perfect) about a newly-revised Frank Lloyd Wright Museum. Great! Looks like the new organizers are doing it right.

Having had a long-standing fascination and interest in FLW and having maintained for some years (until reality of vacancies and heavy primmage forced me to change) a community requiring people to keep houses in an FLW theme, I decided to see if I could teleport there -- to Usonia, where it was previously located -- and see if I was still banned.

I was a big critic of the previous FLW operation in SL and got banned for it.

But now I am no longer banned, and the owners either changed, moved on, grew up, whatever.

I was gratified to find two things:

o Troy Vogel and his furniture are no longer used and his store is no longer part of the build. Good! This thin-skinned little creep really dragged the project down and was the source of much of the agida on the forums, if you go read it. He raged -- and still rages -- on Second Uncivil and truly, he's a little mediocrity. Good that they lost him on the way, accidently or on purpose.

o Frey Bravin, another thin-skinned and defensive geek type is also "moved on" from the project, and the new interrim CEO is Curt Kongo, a long-time builder in SL and a prefab maker for whom I have a lot of respect (the funny thing is that prior to my FLW community, in the same space I had placed CK prefabs, I loved them).

There's lots more transparency and adult supervision and professional organization to the entire project.

o The group now has RL 501-c-3 status. So you know you are dealing with a real educational nonprofit that is not covering commercial activities in SL with the nonprofit label. That gives them a discount on an SL sim -- great.

My concern previously was that by having a mall with builders' stores flogging their FLW knock-offs, not only were there licensing issues, but the question of why a loss-leading nonprofit promoted by Pathfinder Linden should help the revenue stream for only certain resident profit-making companies. That they couldn't pay tier with their businesses is besides the point.

o The group now has a visible system for how you support it which is a great idea -- there are open, public ads that you pay into for $1000 or $2500 or $250, and each donation by the month of that amount is like a RL museum subscription -- you get to go to private showings, viewings, parties, etc. All good. Go and support it. It's a great system.

o There is no mall of people's stores, although there is a Museum Store with some of the organizers' FLW replicas. That's fine, and people WANT that and it's good they now have even MORE content than they did (before it was only Frey's stuff).

o Even so, they need a statement that explains whether proceeds of sales to those individual creators go to the upkeep of the museum or the upkeep of those craftsmen. Either is fine; you just have to explain it.

o The layout is more intuitive, there are more RL pictures that tie you better, there is more clear labelling, etc.

o There are less houses displayed because I think there is less space, but there are several classics including Fallingwater and more to come

o There's a nice sort of hangout/party place with dancing in the Breeze replica which was very nice and filled with couples dancing and a DJ.

All in all, a great destination for either study or art exploration or socializing -- it's great when builds can combine all three.

The only false note I saw was Pathfinder Lester joining their board. Sigh. Well, what's a picnic without ants. He was up to his usual shtick at SLCC describing himself as a "brain researcher" when all he was, was the IT guy. But...they'll figure it out. People eventually do.

The best part of all this, aside from no longer being banned and being able to buy more beautiful content and promote this site to my customers and newbise, was that the director gina was on the premises and was a completely normal person.

When I mentioned the threads (note this new link to the old Linden blog on this FLW build because my previous blog's link is now broken), she was unfazed, saying she would read them and took on board the criticism. When I said that maybe she needed a notecard explaining how the proceeds of donations, patrons, content sales were used to support both museum activity, tier, and the craftsmen, she said, "great idea" instead of whining for two hours or ejecting me, which is what her predecessors did.

I pasted to her my simple summary sentence of the public's demand to such an enterprise: that if it is educational, that it be transparent about its fundraising and its relationship to inworld commerce and resident business. That's all. It's ok to *have* that relationship. You just need to explain it. She was perfectly fine with accepting this proposal and completely normal about discussing any aspect of the business. Such a rare thing in SL!

Another good bit is that they have more explicitly explained their licensing arrangement with the FLW people in RL.

The previous Linden blog on this is really a great study in group dynamics and the Linden cult and the FIC cult and the role of critics like me (and I am far from the first or last in that thread). It shows you in spades how a person coming in an making perfectly legitimate and needed and valid criticism is treated by the thin-skinned geek freaks of SL, how they rage and rant and strut hysterically and then create a false image of me as a monster when they are are the problem.

Time passes, grown-ups come along, they change thigns, those raging freaks like Troy are retired, they are no longer part of the picture. I wish more of Second Life were like that.

Whenever you see the hate pages of me appearing in Google due to the bombing of these geek sectors, remember this story. What I said was right. It was legitimate. It wasn't expressed with any "vitriol" or "obscenity". I was attacked freakishly and wrongfully. When that happens, I don't play nice anymore. Then the next round of freaks cite some passage where I've called them fucktards, and with gleeful malice make that part of their argumentation.

*I don't care*. I'll do whatever it takes to fight this class of people. And the reason is because I'm right to do so.

Comments

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Perhaps it should be pointed out that there would be no FLW museum in SL at all had it not been for Frey Bravin's initiative in the first place. In some ways, his efforts epitomized what we should most LIKE about content creation in SL: he undertook to put something new and interesting together out of sheer love.

I'm sure the museum, now that the enthusiastic amateur has been dropped, and it has been wholly taken over by the "professionals," will become a more comprehensive and scholarly resource. But it will also be run by committee. It would be a sad thing indeed if every project in SL ended this way.

[Prokofy Neva]

There have been many other Frank Lloyd Wright replicas before Frey; there will be many more after these new people. Years before they arrived, there was Annie's Place and there was Fallingwater replicas.

To be sure, he established the museum and contacted the RL people. And that's all good, but the simplest questions couldn't be answered. I marvelled at that.

I'm all for amateurs. IN fact, it would be great if this could be done without the nuisance of 501-c-3 and all the rest. I'm an amateur myself. I advocate organizations free of fund-raising, too.

But if you are going to have something this ambitious with lots of events and activities and funds raised, you need to be accountable, and professionalizing does bring some of that.

You don't have to be professional to be accountable.

I don't think they see it as dropping the enthusiastic amateur, as they still have other enthusiastic amateurs. Maybe it was an ego thing, tho.

I'm a big believer in amateur -- that's why I founded the Society for Virtual Architecture. Pathfinder, who is the consummate amateur who won't admit it, tries to legitimize the illegitimate by pulling rank with "real life" and "profession educators" in tow. That's annoying, and I do hope that people continue to walk around the museum and make their own FLW stuff if it doesn't seem to sustain their vision.

[Prad Prathivi]

I'd implore anybody who builds in Second Life to try and replicate a Frank Lloyd Wright build, simply to understand his amazing use and arrangement of space.

[Prokofy Neva]

One of the problems with doing that is that if you were to keep to the FLW scale of RL in some formula in SL, an avatar might not be able to walk into it without head-banging.

So many people in SL make avatars that are 7 feet tall or higher, myself included, that are outsized, so to speak.

Let me point out that when I made my avatar, I didn't say, gosh, let me make him taller than other people, tall as a basketball player!

I simply made him in what seemed to me to be rough proportion to the other things I was standing around at the time, like Linden trees and fences and rocks. And he came out that tall as a result.

Things in SL are often outsized for funny reasons, because the person making them "just feels that's how it should be" and who the hell knows what their real sense of scale is, and what it is based on.

Later, when I would walk near other avatars, I would say, hmm, why did they make their avatars shorter? But they made what "felt right" to them.

I'm going to obviously exlude here the sinister little edgecasers who make deliberately small and short avatars to play the ageplay gaslighting game and then whine that everyone picks on them because they're short and accuses them of ageplay.

You can tell the difference between people who simply happened to make a shorter woman and someone making a girl child they're trying to foist off on the public as not what it is. Oh, you can't? Well, you need another five minutes in SL then.

Ryan Linden made a Fallingwater replica of sorts that had terrible headroom problems even for short avatars, probably because he made it to scale. It's a fun building to make -- there's a free kit for it -- and you can at least sort of perch on it like a sculpture and sort of live in it.

I noticed with another Fallingwater replica in world it had low ceilings that took some camming to get into.

Also in the museum, one of the replicas also has very low ceilings -- it has to, in order to work as a build. But then you do feel cramped as an avatar.

[Ace Albion]

It's not even just the 7' avatar problem. I had a scale replica of an RL kitchen I rezzed out last week to show some friends. I took screenshots of our avatars inside it, from "realistic" camera angles to show how it looked correct, and in proportion. My friends and I are around 6' or less in SL so you would think it would all work great.

Except... When trying to get around the place, there wasn't enough room- even avatars shorter and narrower than doorways can't get through them, I guess due to that invisible egg shape we all really have that we can never see, being too big. Also the camera couldn't cope with the small scale of the place.

It was all to explain why we build stuff bigger in SL- not only due to 7-8' avatars. You see the same problems with scale (worse even) in WoW. If you ever see characters in that game stood next to stuff or in buildings, you'll notice how it' all Land of the Giants. I think the 3rd person cameras mess us up.

As to the FLW Museum, I'll check it out. I'm glad something structured has been done, with a good purpose. To be honest, I'd got fed up in the past with reading blogs that gushed about people who'd effectively done nothing more than Xerox'd real builds into SL as if this was in some way creative. It put me off the whole "RL architecture in SL" thing.

Scale is relative- FLW's spaces will make the same sense even if scaled up 1.25x or 1.5x to accomodate the virtual view.

[Terra Tepper]

Thank you for the article update on what has been happening at the FLWVM...it has been almost a year (a decade in SL terms!)since your initial article.

When you are reproducing (not just inspired by) an architect's RL work, there is the serious issue of copyright. Our relationship with the FLW Foundation gives us that opportunity to (under their approval process)legitimately create and display Mr. Wright's work.

Regarding scale, we work to 1: 1.6 scale. Even then the headroom seems low...but it was low! Much of the drama for Mr. Wright's progression of space comes from this purposeful compression and expansion of vertical scale.

I will be posting a sign today in the Museum Gift Shop to the effect that all monies raised is (and always has been) used for tier and direct expenses for creating the FLWVM experience. The items for sale are exclusives; no money has ever gone to the builders.
Like so many others, I volunteer my time and builds freely for personal satisfaction only.

The FLWVM is undergoing a metamorphosis; the change will be even more apparent in the weeks and monthes ahead, so visit often :-).

Thank you,
Terra Tepper

[Prokofy Neva]

Hi, Terra,

Thanks for stopping by and providing additionalinformation. That's an interesting idea about the drama of the headroom and the purposeful compression and expansion, I'll have to try that again.

Ace, if the scale of the original building is whatever it is, let's say 6 feet of headroom for every 6 foot human, or 5 and then 6, following this compression idea, then you couldn't keep *that* scale in SL and have it work if all the avatars happen to be 7 or if camera angle issues mean you have to change it even further. So sure, you could simply increase the scale and make it 1:2 but it's the proportions you'd then have to change, that was my point. But I could still be misunderstanding something.

Terra, I'm sorry to be persistent on this point, but it's not about you personally, it's about public non-profit projects of any kind, and what they have to do to inspire trust.

Because you want the object to show CREATOR in the museum gift shop, and preserve the copyright DRM that SL does thankfully provide, you have to have the proceeds for the sale of each and every individual object go to the avatar who created the piece. And that's ok.

But then do you ask them on good faith to turn over all proceeds for the museum upkeep? How can you know they are doing this unless you are logging on to their account and examining their payment records, which LL would be discouraging, as they technically don't allow people to share accounts? For reasons of security.

So you have to take it on faith that those builders/creators are turning over all their proceeds of sales made on that sim.

Again, I personally do not find anything wrong with them keeping the proceeds to support *themselves as artists*. That's ok. It's just something that has to be explained.

And *how* you explain it or respond is important. If you become idignant and say "How dare you distrust our wonderful selfless artists" you're not answering the question. If the artists say "how dare you distrust us selfless hardworking artists" you're not answering the questions.

There's several ways around these. One is to have the artist open up all the perms on the object and hand it to a museum worker who is the owner and seller of all objects on perms. You have to hope everybody is trustworthy there and doesn't run off with somebody's stuff.

It *sounds* like that's what you're saying - that an artist gives away a permmed-up object to a museum avatar as an exclusive, and then it is is sold off that avatar for the museum upkeep.

Another way of solving it is to simply ask the artists on good faith to send in a monthly payment of all their proceeds, or an agreed percentage of all their proceeds (that would be fair).

Yet another is to require that any artist selling in the shop has to pay the museum a standard fee monthly which essentially comes out of his proceeds.

None of these are very effective methods but there's a built-in problem here.

[www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawms5DGWgHRJcGWDK0EFZky5Cgn-5U4kJak]

Hi Prokofy,

Very true, funds management is a huge task on a sim wide scale working with a large group of volunteers. Most of our staff that deal with proceeds and donations use an ALT account for funds matters, this allows for easier accounting by sending a transaction report weekly (not mixed with day to day L$ expenses of their main avatar) to our CFO, He then sends a weekly report to the Director and Board members. Other scripted items that take in donations send out emails and IMs to other persons with transaction information allowing us to service items such as Membership levels, adding to groups and allow for checks and balances where we can. You will find that the Membership Boards are owned by me and not an ALT at this time, but do send notices to a group of people with every transaction, and if you click on the Membership board for information you get a NC telling you where your L$ goes. I will be moving them to a new Membership ALT when time allows.

The builders of the items in the gift shop make them, knowing before they start, they are for the gift shop and the sales will fund the FLWVM project. Most of the items, if not all were created by staff. We are happy to talk to outside creators if they would like to help support this project via donation of their content creation. Please feel free to contact us.

The scale Terra stated above (The Erlanger Scale) is a compromise allowing what we feel is the best fit within reason for a good representation of RL scale for a world of people in SL ranging from Tiny to Huge and with a camera floating 3 meters up and behind our heads.

[Curt Kongo]

Hi,
The post above was posted by: Curt Kongo

It did not show my name.

Thanks

[Ace Albion]

I suppose I was just saying that it's not just avatar height that's the problem when building in SL, but also the camera.

To build for 7' avatars you'd think you only have to build at 1.2x real world measurements, but as Terra has found, you really have to build at over 1.5x

[Darien Caldwell]

Just read that this museum is closing. Reason as quoted:
"I don't know the details but all I know that the Foundation that issued the license to build the Virtual museum had terminated it and the deadline will be Dec 10th."

http://blogs.secondlife.com/message/520675#520675

[cube inada]

its the foundations right. those who lament the closing are in the wrong. Not to say that the foundation may also be acting against its interests, BUT its their RIGHT to.

and I do beieve that the sales, even at a "buck a chair" of "inspired wright designs" is a good reason to want to end such a project.

the IDEA is to RAISE the VALUE of an IP, not DEVALUE it. I would question the value of "30 cent" knock off design artifacts being sold at a "museum" officicially tied to the WRIGHT legacy. its possible they did too.

C3

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, isn't that interesting! I wondered about the sale of the knock-offs. On the other hand, they told me they had to do that to get tier paid.

[cube inada]

lol..so LINDEN can morally be valued..lol

levels of rot...

web2.0 ethics. taints us all.

[Prokofy Neva]

Apparently what the issue is, now that I've read up on that forums link, is the FLW real-life Foundation's concerns about *other* people selling knock-offs of the houses in SL. There's a ton of that, of course. They saw it on the Marketplace, and they obviously didn't want to be in an environment where their copyright was stolen like that. I don't think they may have realized that the FLW museum in SL didn't have control over other people doing that. But certainly the Lindens would, had they issued a DMCA letter. They didn't, and decided to just close the museum.

The whole issue is muffled by the fact that those involved aren't speaking in a straight manner, speaking indirectly, using euphemisms, etc. They even went in RL to have a meeting with these Foundation people and it didn't work out. I don't know what happened, really, but it's possible that virtuality just wasn't so appealing to the RL museum people.

[cube inada]

Or as it will happen - Virtuality- becomes IMPORTANT to those with Brands and VALUEABLE IP to utilize, and once realized, those owners will want to realize that VALUE.

and let's be thankfull for that "realization".

took long enough.:)