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TOWER DISTRICT NEWS
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Tower
District News capitalizes on an attention grabbing virtual
reality Advertising section where readers experience the striking photoreal images of historical
landmarks in and around the business & cultural area of Fresno and Clovis, California since the newspaper's founding in 1984.
Theater
of the Mind
Taking this design tack means that the metaphor is first presented through slick, seamless, and attention grabbing graphic presentations. The hands-on slide show invites interactivity and exploration once the surfer enters the Screening Room auditorium and takes a seat. The slides are the photoreal 'stills' that serve as a transition from the theater metaphor to the other locations within the site.
and Ayn Rand, Writer, Philosopher
A short piece from the book: 'Rules?' - 'Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, and the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.'
In Edward Hopper's famous painting 'Nighthawks', [1952], he expresses his version of Ayn Rand's philosophy (inset below). He gives his viewers a sense of quiet city spaces, juxtaposed with the power of the heroic individual, then softens it by a suggestion of cooperation among its citizens.
All are searching for meaning within a world whose architectural designers structure reality through the use of dramatic buildings, open and closed space, and lighting. The city, is seen as a lighted stage. The spaces and buildings are the necessary stagecraft against which the human drama is experienced as 'real'. Hopper's work is part of the Collection of the National Museum of Art. It was the Ayn Rand philosophy combined with the works of Hopper that inspired the photoreal environments that are the trademark of Web Portal, Inc. Our designers build virtual reality Web sites that are subtly expressive of those philosophical insights. |
Ayn
Rand, 1905-1982, the Russian-born American writer primarily known
for her novels such as The Fountainhead (1943), defended a
conservative philosophy expressing itself in civic architecture, and
private finance of public buildings. Her hero is widely believed to
have been modeled on the life and designs of F.L. Wright.
In
her magnificent 1957 book [later a Hollywood film] Atlas Shrugged
Rand writes 'My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a
heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life,
with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as
his only absolute.'
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