And here it is.
Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
May 17, 2011
Review
Today is Tuesday, May 17. By the time you read this, I will already be dead. Seven days ago, we had our final review for studio. Architecture studio review is the classic tradition stretching back at least half a century (but where did it start?) whereby at the end of the term, students present their work in a representational manner with models, animations, drawings, renderings, in addition to an oral presentation to a jury, typically made up of architectural professionals.
Hours of sleep friday: 6
Hours of sleep saturday: 4
Hours of sleep sunday: 0
Hours of sleep monday: 4
Size of my final boards: 11'4" x 7'
Cost of printing: $200
Cost of prints that printed wrong that I couldn't get a refund for: $60.
Critics on my review: 6
I guess I've never really thought about why we do it this way. In the "real world" professionals present their work to people who are not architects, and at any rate, the intent is to "sell" the product of architecture, so the review isn't that. The alternative, that the review is about the critique of the students technique and theory, strikes closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really make sense when you consider that the review is the last thing you do for studio. There might be a good exchange of ideas in a presentation, directions the student might take the project, aspects unconsidered, tweaks and variations to explore.... but that time is not built-in. It's not part of the architecture school culture.
One of the critics for our studio was a landscape architect who early on in the day started talking about her "fantasy two weeks," amending it to professional fantasy two weeks after a humorously awkward pause. She was talking about a two week period after a review where a student might actually keep working on the project based on the feedback. What struck me was, why don't we do it? Do we need the time to develop the project up to the final review? Was there once an underlying idea that students would actually go back and revise their work? As a student, I can safely say that the vast majority of architecture students mentally checked out the moment they sat back down in their chairs, and that what was actually discussed in the review gets dissolved in a hazy mist of exhaustion mingled with two week fantasies of drinking, relaxing, and sleep. Which is why I have people take notes for me when I get critiqued.
It gets tricky though- suppose your entire project is suspect, or the underlying assumptions you have built the architecture on are invalid. One of our classmates was told that his project would kill many people as well as cause the destruction of the the greater part of New Orleans. I think this might have been stretching it, but suppose it were true. What is he going to do for those two weeks? There's also the issue of fallibility. Who's to say the critics are right? So much of what we do is subjective and dependent on unspoken convention and theory.
I guess review is about clarifying your own thinking- it pushes you to confront, understand, simplify, and synthesize your own thoughts about design and architecture, which is really the point of studio. Any studio. The projects don't really mean anything. Peter Cook said it best- words like Urbanism are just words to get the ideas behind them to move.
It's always interesting to hear the way students describe their reviews, especially given the ambiguity about their purpose. What exactly is makes a "good" review then? Or a "bad" one? In the context I just described, a bad review would be one where the critics do nothing but rave about how good the project is, and a good review would be one where the project is ripped apart to its most basic level and all its ideas exposed and challenged.
As a student, it gets emotional. The relationship between your project and you is tense- at the end of the semester, you hate your own project. Its an idiot thing, terrible, ugly, stupid, boring, and trite. Why did you even think it would work? You must be a terrible designer. But its too late to start over and there's too little time to tweak it into something good or interesting. You work on it numbly, filled with a mute loathing and dream of just finishing so you can sleep. But its also your baby. It's your work, your blood on the model, and its your tired eyes staring back at you from the beautiful six hour rendering. So you hate it, but its your work and emotional and drained and exhausted, it is too easy to conflate your project with yourself and get defensive about it in a review. Every time, I have to remind myself that its not about getting the reviewers to like me or my project. I have to tell myself this all the time.
Hours of sleep friday: 6
Hours of sleep saturday: 4
Hours of sleep sunday: 0
Hours of sleep monday: 4
Size of my final boards: 11'4" x 7'
Cost of printing: $200
Cost of prints that printed wrong that I couldn't get a refund for: $60.
Critics on my review: 6
I guess I've never really thought about why we do it this way. In the "real world" professionals present their work to people who are not architects, and at any rate, the intent is to "sell" the product of architecture, so the review isn't that. The alternative, that the review is about the critique of the students technique and theory, strikes closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really make sense when you consider that the review is the last thing you do for studio. There might be a good exchange of ideas in a presentation, directions the student might take the project, aspects unconsidered, tweaks and variations to explore.... but that time is not built-in. It's not part of the architecture school culture.
One of the critics for our studio was a landscape architect who early on in the day started talking about her "fantasy two weeks," amending it to professional fantasy two weeks after a humorously awkward pause. She was talking about a two week period after a review where a student might actually keep working on the project based on the feedback. What struck me was, why don't we do it? Do we need the time to develop the project up to the final review? Was there once an underlying idea that students would actually go back and revise their work? As a student, I can safely say that the vast majority of architecture students mentally checked out the moment they sat back down in their chairs, and that what was actually discussed in the review gets dissolved in a hazy mist of exhaustion mingled with two week fantasies of drinking, relaxing, and sleep. Which is why I have people take notes for me when I get critiqued.
It gets tricky though- suppose your entire project is suspect, or the underlying assumptions you have built the architecture on are invalid. One of our classmates was told that his project would kill many people as well as cause the destruction of the the greater part of New Orleans. I think this might have been stretching it, but suppose it were true. What is he going to do for those two weeks? There's also the issue of fallibility. Who's to say the critics are right? So much of what we do is subjective and dependent on unspoken convention and theory.
I guess review is about clarifying your own thinking- it pushes you to confront, understand, simplify, and synthesize your own thoughts about design and architecture, which is really the point of studio. Any studio. The projects don't really mean anything. Peter Cook said it best- words like Urbanism are just words to get the ideas behind them to move.
It's always interesting to hear the way students describe their reviews, especially given the ambiguity about their purpose. What exactly is makes a "good" review then? Or a "bad" one? In the context I just described, a bad review would be one where the critics do nothing but rave about how good the project is, and a good review would be one where the project is ripped apart to its most basic level and all its ideas exposed and challenged.
As a student, it gets emotional. The relationship between your project and you is tense- at the end of the semester, you hate your own project. Its an idiot thing, terrible, ugly, stupid, boring, and trite. Why did you even think it would work? You must be a terrible designer. But its too late to start over and there's too little time to tweak it into something good or interesting. You work on it numbly, filled with a mute loathing and dream of just finishing so you can sleep. But its also your baby. It's your work, your blood on the model, and its your tired eyes staring back at you from the beautiful six hour rendering. So you hate it, but its your work and emotional and drained and exhausted, it is too easy to conflate your project with yourself and get defensive about it in a review. Every time, I have to remind myself that its not about getting the reviewers to like me or my project. I have to tell myself this all the time.
Oct 29, 2010
Show me Juhani
Hmmm it's been one of those frenetic times that completely overwhelms, especially as I have been adamant about getting a minimum of four hours of sleep at night, eating, bathing, and other extravagant luxuries. What have I been up to?
Frost Warning
Last night, the temp dropped down to the low 30s and we turned on the heater for the first time in awhile. This morning, there was frost on the ground, the skies were clear and cold, and it felt like fall was preparing for its last dance while that cold bitch winter waits in the wings. It was nice to wear my black coat again.
Sound of Space/Spaces of Sound
This was a workshop I went to last saturday with Finnish Architect Juhani Pallasmaa and composer Kalevi Aho. It was basically a two hour lecture by Aho, who played samples of music he created for particular venues including the side of a mountain, along with a discussion of the spaces and the creative design process he followed. We then broke into teams for two hours with a loosely define task of mapping and composing the sonic landscape of the architecture school campus. This was a lot of fun. We grabbed a camera and headed out to document unusual and characteristic sounds (squeaky taps, sounds of feet running down stairs, thrums of air conditioners, buzz saws of the workshop, fallen leaves, wind, etc.) and then we all made interpretive sketches attempting to document the character of the sounds. At the end of two hours, we all went around and presented our findings and documentation to Pallasmaa and Aho who criticized and commented on our work and process. It was a fun and interesting break from the studio work I probably should have been doing, and at any rate, it highlighted an oft-neglected part of architecture school by focusing on the phenomenology of sound of spaces. I'm really enjoying the 'workshops' model of architecture school (as long as they're not mandatory!).
Long Week (and still in it)
Undergraduate school was all about studio, and the other classes were interesting side dishes. In graduate school, the other classes become their own dinner courses and you're being served them all at once. Monday, even before I knew I wasn't going to pin-up, I gave a 20 minute presentation with my partner for our Metabolic city class. The topic we are developing is looking at the British group Archigram as primarily interpreting biology instead of technology in their development of cities of the future. This was actually kind of fun, as Archigram is a really fun group to study, and I have a great partner who, even if we have different ideas, really want to push those ideas and argue about them. It's kind of nice to pass each other in the hall and have a five minute discussion of whether or not the internet more closely resembles a biological model or a technological model. Tuesday was mostly spent reading and preparing for Thursday's deadlines, Wednesday I presented, and thursday was taken up in the morning of presenting our site grading project and afternoon was taken up with the presentation of ideas of radical alternative architectural practice. It's been a long week.
Two worst things to hear in a review
In my opinion, my review basically told me nothing new, which is the worst thing to hear in a review, as well as the second worst thing, I was told I had a boring project. (Which I also knew). It's very frustrating. I'm a very systematic designer and professional work made me realize that one of my really strong suits is spatial optimization. But architecture is not an optimization problem. This was the lesson of the Modernist's failure. Le Corbusier once said that the problems people face would be resolved if their homes and families were as efficiently designed and organized as their workplaces. "The house is a machine for living in." But it is actually so much more.
I have a strong rationalist tendency that tends towards that direction. I get sucked into finding elegant solutions to mechanical or programmatic constraints. Essentially, it is an hard mindset for soft problems. Maddeningly, everything I see, read, and experience tells me how vital it is to embrace the soft problems- phenomenology, text, context, etc., and I came into this studio aware of my own tendencies to ignore the other issues in favor of clean rationalism. I am convinced that the value of architectural studio lies in experimentation, but at the end of the day, despite all that, I ended up with a hyper-rationalist project. Symmetrical, every apartment with 3 sides exposed to the outside for maximum daylight and ventilation, with only 5 repeated unit types. Cleanly diagrammable, clear circulation, and self-suggestive of how it could be structurally supportive.
And its boring. Its so boring. There is a subtle interplay of openings and variation of the surface, but ultimately the project is an eroded cube. There are some spaces like a series of 10' wide bridges 36' off the ground, but I cannot explain what they might be used for other what the community decides.
I hate how it looks boring, I hate how the reviewers called it boring, and I especially hate my own view of it as boring because I'm defaulting to formal interpretations of architecture as opposed to the all the other aspects. Partially its because studio is restricted to the primacy of form, partially because of my own mistrust of formal interest for its own sake. (Why make it look like a ball of crumbled paper vs a pile of penne vs a stack of paper cups, where is the critical difference or thought behind them?)
In short, I'm like Marvin the robot sans one leg, making furious circles in the mud. I want to engage in praxis, put theory into practice, but I feel a little like this studio is not looking wide enough at the project and context to be effective. But something tells me this is less the case of studio putting constraints on what we can do rather than my own unwillingness to look outside of the studio environment. Perhaps its a bit of stubborn arrogance; look at me, I can design this perfect thing. By creating this project that has pushed the boundary of optimization, I've painted myself into a perfect corner. Hence, the reviewers telling me to "break it down" and to "mix it up."
Perhaps by eschewing formal irrationality, I've been missing opportunities to exercise creativity within the confines of the formal studio. Why not excrete some wacky shape, and then try to rationalize it into a building? That is one way I could work in this framework. We shall see.
Frost Warning
Last night, the temp dropped down to the low 30s and we turned on the heater for the first time in awhile. This morning, there was frost on the ground, the skies were clear and cold, and it felt like fall was preparing for its last dance while that cold bitch winter waits in the wings. It was nice to wear my black coat again.
Sound of Space/Spaces of Sound
This was a workshop I went to last saturday with Finnish Architect Juhani Pallasmaa and composer Kalevi Aho. It was basically a two hour lecture by Aho, who played samples of music he created for particular venues including the side of a mountain, along with a discussion of the spaces and the creative design process he followed. We then broke into teams for two hours with a loosely define task of mapping and composing the sonic landscape of the architecture school campus. This was a lot of fun. We grabbed a camera and headed out to document unusual and characteristic sounds (squeaky taps, sounds of feet running down stairs, thrums of air conditioners, buzz saws of the workshop, fallen leaves, wind, etc.) and then we all made interpretive sketches attempting to document the character of the sounds. At the end of two hours, we all went around and presented our findings and documentation to Pallasmaa and Aho who criticized and commented on our work and process. It was a fun and interesting break from the studio work I probably should have been doing, and at any rate, it highlighted an oft-neglected part of architecture school by focusing on the phenomenology of sound of spaces. I'm really enjoying the 'workshops' model of architecture school (as long as they're not mandatory!).
Long Week (and still in it)
Undergraduate school was all about studio, and the other classes were interesting side dishes. In graduate school, the other classes become their own dinner courses and you're being served them all at once. Monday, even before I knew I wasn't going to pin-up, I gave a 20 minute presentation with my partner for our Metabolic city class. The topic we are developing is looking at the British group Archigram as primarily interpreting biology instead of technology in their development of cities of the future. This was actually kind of fun, as Archigram is a really fun group to study, and I have a great partner who, even if we have different ideas, really want to push those ideas and argue about them. It's kind of nice to pass each other in the hall and have a five minute discussion of whether or not the internet more closely resembles a biological model or a technological model. Tuesday was mostly spent reading and preparing for Thursday's deadlines, Wednesday I presented, and thursday was taken up in the morning of presenting our site grading project and afternoon was taken up with the presentation of ideas of radical alternative architectural practice. It's been a long week.
Two worst things to hear in a review
In my opinion, my review basically told me nothing new, which is the worst thing to hear in a review, as well as the second worst thing, I was told I had a boring project. (Which I also knew). It's very frustrating. I'm a very systematic designer and professional work made me realize that one of my really strong suits is spatial optimization. But architecture is not an optimization problem. This was the lesson of the Modernist's failure. Le Corbusier once said that the problems people face would be resolved if their homes and families were as efficiently designed and organized as their workplaces. "The house is a machine for living in." But it is actually so much more.
I have a strong rationalist tendency that tends towards that direction. I get sucked into finding elegant solutions to mechanical or programmatic constraints. Essentially, it is an hard mindset for soft problems. Maddeningly, everything I see, read, and experience tells me how vital it is to embrace the soft problems- phenomenology, text, context, etc., and I came into this studio aware of my own tendencies to ignore the other issues in favor of clean rationalism. I am convinced that the value of architectural studio lies in experimentation, but at the end of the day, despite all that, I ended up with a hyper-rationalist project. Symmetrical, every apartment with 3 sides exposed to the outside for maximum daylight and ventilation, with only 5 repeated unit types. Cleanly diagrammable, clear circulation, and self-suggestive of how it could be structurally supportive.
And its boring. Its so boring. There is a subtle interplay of openings and variation of the surface, but ultimately the project is an eroded cube. There are some spaces like a series of 10' wide bridges 36' off the ground, but I cannot explain what they might be used for other what the community decides.
I hate how it looks boring, I hate how the reviewers called it boring, and I especially hate my own view of it as boring because I'm defaulting to formal interpretations of architecture as opposed to the all the other aspects. Partially its because studio is restricted to the primacy of form, partially because of my own mistrust of formal interest for its own sake. (Why make it look like a ball of crumbled paper vs a pile of penne vs a stack of paper cups, where is the critical difference or thought behind them?)
In short, I'm like Marvin the robot sans one leg, making furious circles in the mud. I want to engage in praxis, put theory into practice, but I feel a little like this studio is not looking wide enough at the project and context to be effective. But something tells me this is less the case of studio putting constraints on what we can do rather than my own unwillingness to look outside of the studio environment. Perhaps its a bit of stubborn arrogance; look at me, I can design this perfect thing. By creating this project that has pushed the boundary of optimization, I've painted myself into a perfect corner. Hence, the reviewers telling me to "break it down" and to "mix it up."
Perhaps by eschewing formal irrationality, I've been missing opportunities to exercise creativity within the confines of the formal studio. Why not excrete some wacky shape, and then try to rationalize it into a building? That is one way I could work in this framework. We shall see.
Sep 27, 2010
Suddenly, Fall.
All of a sudden, it's fall here.
Saori really missed her mom yesterday, as we dropped Yoshiko-san off at the airport pretty early in the morning. She's flying on to visit her other daughter in New Orleans.
Sunday was cold and rainy, and we wore our Peruvian bufandas to school. Picked up some rasberry and lemon and ginger scones at Winslow's Home on the way to school, and they were really, really expensive. But also incredibly delicious. The day flew by mostly due to the ambigously gray skies, but also because we were working on the site model, milling and gluing and cutting MDF to make 1/32" scale buildings.
At 1/32", 1 inch is equal to 32 feet. A matchbox would be about the size of a one-story commercial building.
I've really gotten to enjoy using the wood shop. There's something really fun and involved about using tools to shape wood. The whole thing about "making" and the feedback loop. We needed a partial cylinder for a building, and we didn't have a compass, but I was able to mark points to approximate the curve, used the band saw to rough out the curves, and belt sand the whole thing down to the curve I drew. I was pretty proud of that.
Today was clear and cool and sunny, and I biked down to the project site I'm studying. This is located in northern central west end, a little less than a 30 minute bike ride down Delmar from where I live. I biked down and hung around the site for about two hours, making observations, taking photos, and listening in on conversations. Here's the site- on the corner of Delmar and Euclid:
View Larger Map
The site is really the most busy out of all of the sites our studio is considering. As Delmar divides our area of study like a broad river, the site really belongs to the neighborhood to the north rather than to the south, which is the gateway to more upscale and revitalized and commercial central west end. To the east of the site is a large ugly Missouri career center. To the southwest and northwest, two massive brick buildings, one residential, one commercial, both over 6 stories high and really creating a gateway on either side of Delmar.
There were two guys at the bus stop across the street from my site. One was an elderly pensioner who came out to watch the birds and get some sunshine, the other not as old, but graying. The conversation ranged in areas I didn't expect- at one moment they were discussing $5000 water-cooled gaming computers. Also of interest was their commentary on this Friday's dispersement of welfare checks- apparently the area goes crazy, with people buying up cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, and how 'five days later' those people are broke again and asking for money. Apparently, in light of the economic depression, area pawn shops are booming and a new one opened up near my site. Something that also caught my ear was that many landlords won't rent to people with drug convictions. I don't blame them, but it makes me wonder where those people go- if it actually drives them to worse conditions and deeper into drug culture and poverty. It suggests to me that extremely strong drug laws would then actually exacerbate the societal problems that come with with drug abuse.
At any rate, I wonder if this kind of information should come into my considerations for architecture at all- after all, people are people, and I've always believed strongly that architecture should be egalitarian, regardless of income level. I was going to say "lifestyle" but housing is so intimately tied to lifestyle, is should in some way acknowledge people's lifesyles (either indirectly, but creating spaces that allow the user to configure and use as they like or deliberate and specifically designing places for activities). But as architecture is inherently ideological, I'm not going to deliberately design the ideal drug warren. Or maybe I should, and do it so deliberately as to expose it architecturally in order to spark conflict. Modernists might take the former approach, or even take it beyond, claiming architectural determinism of space would discourage drug use. Postmodernists would take the latter approach.
I'm not trying to associate poverty and drug use here; I'm just saying these are two conditions which exist which I may need to address in this project. In either case, security and the perception of defensible space is a much more relevant design principle. (By defensible space and security, I mean to say, do the people who live there feel secure?)
Anyway, some other questions the site brings up- how will the building relate to the neighborhood to the north, which is primarily single family row housing? How will it relate to the 8 story residential tower block to the immediate west? Will the building belong to the high speed of Delmar or the slow speed of Euclid? Where do you build if you're surrounded by streets and parking lots?
Saori really missed her mom yesterday, as we dropped Yoshiko-san off at the airport pretty early in the morning. She's flying on to visit her other daughter in New Orleans.
Sunday was cold and rainy, and we wore our Peruvian bufandas to school. Picked up some rasberry and lemon and ginger scones at Winslow's Home on the way to school, and they were really, really expensive. But also incredibly delicious. The day flew by mostly due to the ambigously gray skies, but also because we were working on the site model, milling and gluing and cutting MDF to make 1/32" scale buildings.
At 1/32", 1 inch is equal to 32 feet. A matchbox would be about the size of a one-story commercial building.
I've really gotten to enjoy using the wood shop. There's something really fun and involved about using tools to shape wood. The whole thing about "making" and the feedback loop. We needed a partial cylinder for a building, and we didn't have a compass, but I was able to mark points to approximate the curve, used the band saw to rough out the curves, and belt sand the whole thing down to the curve I drew. I was pretty proud of that.
Today was clear and cool and sunny, and I biked down to the project site I'm studying. This is located in northern central west end, a little less than a 30 minute bike ride down Delmar from where I live. I biked down and hung around the site for about two hours, making observations, taking photos, and listening in on conversations. Here's the site- on the corner of Delmar and Euclid:
View Larger Map
The site is really the most busy out of all of the sites our studio is considering. As Delmar divides our area of study like a broad river, the site really belongs to the neighborhood to the north rather than to the south, which is the gateway to more upscale and revitalized and commercial central west end. To the east of the site is a large ugly Missouri career center. To the southwest and northwest, two massive brick buildings, one residential, one commercial, both over 6 stories high and really creating a gateway on either side of Delmar.
There were two guys at the bus stop across the street from my site. One was an elderly pensioner who came out to watch the birds and get some sunshine, the other not as old, but graying. The conversation ranged in areas I didn't expect- at one moment they were discussing $5000 water-cooled gaming computers. Also of interest was their commentary on this Friday's dispersement of welfare checks- apparently the area goes crazy, with people buying up cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, and how 'five days later' those people are broke again and asking for money. Apparently, in light of the economic depression, area pawn shops are booming and a new one opened up near my site. Something that also caught my ear was that many landlords won't rent to people with drug convictions. I don't blame them, but it makes me wonder where those people go- if it actually drives them to worse conditions and deeper into drug culture and poverty. It suggests to me that extremely strong drug laws would then actually exacerbate the societal problems that come with with drug abuse.
At any rate, I wonder if this kind of information should come into my considerations for architecture at all- after all, people are people, and I've always believed strongly that architecture should be egalitarian, regardless of income level. I was going to say "lifestyle" but housing is so intimately tied to lifestyle, is should in some way acknowledge people's lifesyles (either indirectly, but creating spaces that allow the user to configure and use as they like or deliberate and specifically designing places for activities). But as architecture is inherently ideological, I'm not going to deliberately design the ideal drug warren. Or maybe I should, and do it so deliberately as to expose it architecturally in order to spark conflict. Modernists might take the former approach, or even take it beyond, claiming architectural determinism of space would discourage drug use. Postmodernists would take the latter approach.
I'm not trying to associate poverty and drug use here; I'm just saying these are two conditions which exist which I may need to address in this project. In either case, security and the perception of defensible space is a much more relevant design principle. (By defensible space and security, I mean to say, do the people who live there feel secure?)
Anyway, some other questions the site brings up- how will the building relate to the neighborhood to the north, which is primarily single family row housing? How will it relate to the 8 story residential tower block to the immediate west? Will the building belong to the high speed of Delmar or the slow speed of Euclid? Where do you build if you're surrounded by streets and parking lots?
Sep 22, 2010
Harry Potter and the Flaming Wok
The design hive of the Sam Fox school of design and art is an interlocking collection of buildings with numerous studios, auditoriums, workshops, classrooms, and computer labs. However, if you just want a nice place to read or study, you find yourself a bit hard pressed. The coffee shop/snack bar which one would think might have some nice spaces to sit and read while you sip your coffee has the misfortune of being located in Steinberg hall. Japanese Metabolist Fumihiko Maki's first commission, the spaces are cold, angular, pristine white circulation spaces full of light and uncompromising hard planar forms. Even the coffee bar is white. The scattering of a few standing height tables in the corner of the large terrazzo covered space has the feeling of an international airport. It's a very cosmopolitain space, but it is just to transitory for focused study.
The architecture library is the other possibility, and is actually Saori's preferred place of study. There is apparently two chairs along a wall near the stacks that she is fond of. I'm not a huge fan of that library for studying - I don't like sitting and reading in subterranean large spaces. Sitting in the main reading room feels like being in the bottom of a large square white pit. There is daylight provided by large high windows, but the scale makes me feel small, and exposed. There's no wood, no color, and a bare minimum of texture. I like reading spaces to be comfortable, and I'm just not comfortable in those spaces.
Yesterday, I discovered the the East Asian library in January hall, which was the former law school. This is less than a five minute walk from the architecture building, but completely removed in atmosphere and feel. The building was built in 1922, and like other buildings around the campus, is done in collegiate Gothic style. The interior spaces are primerily offices with a large lecture hall at one end, but on the second floor, there is a double height interior space which houses the library. When I found it, the HongKongese librarian aide welcomed me to the "Harry Potter Library." It does bear a resemblance to the dining hall at Hogwarts actually. Bookshelves line the walls with high windows above them along the sides of the hall, rising up to interior wooden buttresses to a gothic arched ceiling. At the end of the library, there is a huge bay window with two easy chairs. It feels like the place hasn't changed much from the 1920, although it looks like there was some addional work done in the 60's-70's. One of the bookcases had a "No Smoking" sign attached to it. Surreally, this gothic space is full of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese books, but there is still that wonderful "old book" smell to it. This is where I like to read.
The architecture library is the other possibility, and is actually Saori's preferred place of study. There is apparently two chairs along a wall near the stacks that she is fond of. I'm not a huge fan of that library for studying - I don't like sitting and reading in subterranean large spaces. Sitting in the main reading room feels like being in the bottom of a large square white pit. There is daylight provided by large high windows, but the scale makes me feel small, and exposed. There's no wood, no color, and a bare minimum of texture. I like reading spaces to be comfortable, and I'm just not comfortable in those spaces.
Yesterday, I discovered the the East Asian library in January hall, which was the former law school. This is less than a five minute walk from the architecture building, but completely removed in atmosphere and feel. The building was built in 1922, and like other buildings around the campus, is done in collegiate Gothic style. The interior spaces are primerily offices with a large lecture hall at one end, but on the second floor, there is a double height interior space which houses the library. When I found it, the HongKongese librarian aide welcomed me to the "Harry Potter Library." It does bear a resemblance to the dining hall at Hogwarts actually. Bookshelves line the walls with high windows above them along the sides of the hall, rising up to interior wooden buttresses to a gothic arched ceiling. At the end of the library, there is a huge bay window with two easy chairs. It feels like the place hasn't changed much from the 1920, although it looks like there was some addional work done in the 60's-70's. One of the bookcases had a "No Smoking" sign attached to it. Surreally, this gothic space is full of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese books, but there is still that wonderful "old book" smell to it. This is where I like to read.
Sep 20, 2010
Studio at the Crossroads
Saori and I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly over a period of about a week where we could find the time to sit down. I was surprised by how much I liked it. The hokey spaghetti western-ness of it belied its surprisingly rich story and complex themes and characters. And the flashy style and music was a lot of fun too. Great opening titles.
In studio, our group is at a bit of a crossroads. We have only two deliverables- a 3D digital model of the site with relatively accurate buildings, and a physical model with simplified buildings. The models must show topography, streets, and buildings. Since we already have the plans via GIS data, its actually a relatively simple matter of dividing up the map and extruding buildings. The base (topography) is going to be several layers of MDF that we're actually going to mill down in a CNC machine. This means that we're going to feed a computer file of topography to a 3D routing machine that will carve the site. Saves us a lot of work. (In theory at any rate, although new technologies/techniques always have an additional learning curve before they become more efficient than the older way).
The issue is these site buildings, a collection of about a hundred small residences, businesses, and community buildings that inhabit the squared half mile of the site. We are currently divided on the appropriate direction of how to represent them. We can use a laser cutting machine to score and cut tiny houses out of chipboard and simply fold them into little boxes, or we can trim down boards and chop them up and sand them to approximate the shapes. Either way, it says there's going be a lot of work for wednesday, when this is all due.
Also due for studio, parallel to all of this, is a project of research and housing. We are asked to pick three categories of housing (or really, aspects that interest us) and find examples of each for an analysis and reduction of the formal gesture to a parti sketch. I've been mining ArchDaily a lot for examples, although I've been told I should really look to more historical precedent in that book I picked up from Amazon. Anyway, there's more analysis of space and of scale thats also due Friday, but in general, it feels like a light studio week.
Today, Saori's mom came to school and went to classes. Not with us, she took the light rail down and went into a class discussing classical Japanese texts. Then she went to another class the professor of the first one recommended and after that, she walked through the art museum on campus before returning back to the apartment. The last two nights, she's made us delicious Japanese dinners.
But before we could have dinner, we went to the monday night lecture series. Tonights lecture was rather underwhelming. Perhaps it was the disadvantage of following such a charismatic and dynamic previous lecturer, but his work was just kind of uninspiring. Although there were some interesting moments, for the most part his work seemed to be merely the development of conservative projects one might do at a level of architecture school. There appeared to me to be a lack of theoretical cohesion, an over-reliance on "tips and tricks", a hesitancy of either making a bold statement or wanting too do too much with other spaces.
To his credit, he gets his work built (a marked achievement), and it doesn't look like typical buildings (another marked achievement). By putting work out there that challenges the public conception of what is architecture, he is, at the very least, elevating the cause and role of architecture in people's lives. However, I sense that he falls into the belief, common to certain Modernists, that the role of the architect is to convince the public that a certain 'style' is beautiful.
And perhaps I'm projecting here too, to a certain extent- possibly my own latent fears of merely being a competent architect, but never really making that great leap in the field in the way that some architects seem to be able to do. Either way, its good to be self-critical- I recently realized that I'm making huge assumptions about housing that reveal clear stances on the way people ought to be living, without ever really examining those theories and the values behind them.
Architecture is an inherently political act, but it is also an expression of values. Values underpin theory, which directs all design, whether or not the acting theory is acknowledged.
In studio, our group is at a bit of a crossroads. We have only two deliverables- a 3D digital model of the site with relatively accurate buildings, and a physical model with simplified buildings. The models must show topography, streets, and buildings. Since we already have the plans via GIS data, its actually a relatively simple matter of dividing up the map and extruding buildings. The base (topography) is going to be several layers of MDF that we're actually going to mill down in a CNC machine. This means that we're going to feed a computer file of topography to a 3D routing machine that will carve the site. Saves us a lot of work. (In theory at any rate, although new technologies/techniques always have an additional learning curve before they become more efficient than the older way).
The issue is these site buildings, a collection of about a hundred small residences, businesses, and community buildings that inhabit the squared half mile of the site. We are currently divided on the appropriate direction of how to represent them. We can use a laser cutting machine to score and cut tiny houses out of chipboard and simply fold them into little boxes, or we can trim down boards and chop them up and sand them to approximate the shapes. Either way, it says there's going be a lot of work for wednesday, when this is all due.
Also due for studio, parallel to all of this, is a project of research and housing. We are asked to pick three categories of housing (or really, aspects that interest us) and find examples of each for an analysis and reduction of the formal gesture to a parti sketch. I've been mining ArchDaily a lot for examples, although I've been told I should really look to more historical precedent in that book I picked up from Amazon. Anyway, there's more analysis of space and of scale thats also due Friday, but in general, it feels like a light studio week.
Today, Saori's mom came to school and went to classes. Not with us, she took the light rail down and went into a class discussing classical Japanese texts. Then she went to another class the professor of the first one recommended and after that, she walked through the art museum on campus before returning back to the apartment. The last two nights, she's made us delicious Japanese dinners.
But before we could have dinner, we went to the monday night lecture series. Tonights lecture was rather underwhelming. Perhaps it was the disadvantage of following such a charismatic and dynamic previous lecturer, but his work was just kind of uninspiring. Although there were some interesting moments, for the most part his work seemed to be merely the development of conservative projects one might do at a level of architecture school. There appeared to me to be a lack of theoretical cohesion, an over-reliance on "tips and tricks", a hesitancy of either making a bold statement or wanting too do too much with other spaces.
To his credit, he gets his work built (a marked achievement), and it doesn't look like typical buildings (another marked achievement). By putting work out there that challenges the public conception of what is architecture, he is, at the very least, elevating the cause and role of architecture in people's lives. However, I sense that he falls into the belief, common to certain Modernists, that the role of the architect is to convince the public that a certain 'style' is beautiful.
And perhaps I'm projecting here too, to a certain extent- possibly my own latent fears of merely being a competent architect, but never really making that great leap in the field in the way that some architects seem to be able to do. Either way, its good to be self-critical- I recently realized that I'm making huge assumptions about housing that reveal clear stances on the way people ought to be living, without ever really examining those theories and the values behind them.
Architecture is an inherently political act, but it is also an expression of values. Values underpin theory, which directs all design, whether or not the acting theory is acknowledged.
Sep 1, 2010
First day of studio
We went in to school early this morning to talk with a professor about a class we were scheduled to take. Afterwards, we wandered up to studio when it was about lunchtime, and caught a friend of ours we had drinks with the other night, Zhuli, and we invited him out to lunch. Since we moved to STL we've been looking for Pho. It's cheap, relatively healthy, and fills you up pretty well, so we tried out a spot out on Olive. The service was terrible, the longest wait for Pho I've ever had. The Pho was also about $7 a bowl, which is a little spendy as far as my Pho experience goes. However, the portions were very generous and the broth and noodles were great, so it got pretty high marks in my book.
Over lunch, we talked about architecture schools. Zhuli characterized most of the Chinese schools as very practical and industry directed- the intent and focus is to produce architects who can oftentimes play the role of engineer as well as architect, rather than on the design process. Is it buildable? Does it make sense? These appear to the be the questions of concern. The Chinese process also seems to take longer, which makes sense if you're also preparing architects to take on the roles given to the other engineering professions in the united states; five years of undergraduate followed by three years of graduate work. Since Chinese schools dont get out until July, and Zhuli is fresh from college on the mainland, he's effectively jumping straight into grad school from college with about a month to change continents.
I think theres a bit of circular poetry to all of this as well- my good friend Chase had his first day of teaching Chinese to first graders in Shanghai today. I don't know how it went, but I can't wait to find out.
Since there are so many students in the studio, the hall is broken into differnet sections, each handled by a different instructor. We got a quick outline of the studio, some points to consider, and a deliberately brief discussion of the first project- a week long project to produce a habitable, hollowed out block 12'x24'x36'. No programmatic parameters so its pretty open ended. Our instructor came around to meet with us individually and looked at our portfolios and asked us about what kind of software we knew.
At this point, I've worked with AutoCAD, Revit, Form-Z, AGI32, Rhinoceros, Sketchup, and I'm sure others that escape me. These programs tend to fall into two categories- user-friendly and useless, and mind-bogglingly complicated and extremely powerful.
Anyway, we needed foamcore, the selected material for the project, and so we set out on a hot tip from Dew that $1 sheets of foamcore could be had at Hobby Lobby. That sat fine with me, as I wanted to pick up some sewing pins as experience has shown them to be fantastically useful for holding foamcore while the glue dries. And I may just skip the glue and stick with the pins. Anyway, it was a bit of a drive out there but once we were done we were also periously close to Duncan Donuts, so we picked up a half dozen. Four for us, and two for the informant, Dew. Coming back to studio with a box of Duncan Donuts we were stopped not less than three times by people wanting know where donuts could be had.
After an evening of frustrations trying to locate and print a PDF for the studio, I finally was met with success and called it an evening. Saori and I retreated back to our home on Tulane ave, cooked dinner, did laundry, and watched part of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Pretty fun stuff so far.
Over lunch, we talked about architecture schools. Zhuli characterized most of the Chinese schools as very practical and industry directed- the intent and focus is to produce architects who can oftentimes play the role of engineer as well as architect, rather than on the design process. Is it buildable? Does it make sense? These appear to the be the questions of concern. The Chinese process also seems to take longer, which makes sense if you're also preparing architects to take on the roles given to the other engineering professions in the united states; five years of undergraduate followed by three years of graduate work. Since Chinese schools dont get out until July, and Zhuli is fresh from college on the mainland, he's effectively jumping straight into grad school from college with about a month to change continents.
I think theres a bit of circular poetry to all of this as well- my good friend Chase had his first day of teaching Chinese to first graders in Shanghai today. I don't know how it went, but I can't wait to find out.
Since there are so many students in the studio, the hall is broken into differnet sections, each handled by a different instructor. We got a quick outline of the studio, some points to consider, and a deliberately brief discussion of the first project- a week long project to produce a habitable, hollowed out block 12'x24'x36'. No programmatic parameters so its pretty open ended. Our instructor came around to meet with us individually and looked at our portfolios and asked us about what kind of software we knew.
At this point, I've worked with AutoCAD, Revit, Form-Z, AGI32, Rhinoceros, Sketchup, and I'm sure others that escape me. These programs tend to fall into two categories- user-friendly and useless, and mind-bogglingly complicated and extremely powerful.
Anyway, we needed foamcore, the selected material for the project, and so we set out on a hot tip from Dew that $1 sheets of foamcore could be had at Hobby Lobby. That sat fine with me, as I wanted to pick up some sewing pins as experience has shown them to be fantastically useful for holding foamcore while the glue dries. And I may just skip the glue and stick with the pins. Anyway, it was a bit of a drive out there but once we were done we were also periously close to Duncan Donuts, so we picked up a half dozen. Four for us, and two for the informant, Dew. Coming back to studio with a box of Duncan Donuts we were stopped not less than three times by people wanting know where donuts could be had.
After an evening of frustrations trying to locate and print a PDF for the studio, I finally was met with success and called it an evening. Saori and I retreated back to our home on Tulane ave, cooked dinner, did laundry, and watched part of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Pretty fun stuff so far.
Aug 18, 2010
Nurbs Nerds
Day 1 of Pre-Semester Studio:
We were asked to create three concepts representing our definitions of what an "observatory" is, in Rhino (a 3D modeling program), for tomorrow afternoon's homework. Three major challenges.
We were asked to create three concepts representing our definitions of what an "observatory" is, in Rhino (a 3D modeling program), for tomorrow afternoon's homework. Three major challenges.
- I don't have a copy of Rhino
- I've never used this relatively complicated modeling software
- "tomorrow afternoon."
Additionally, I have some issues with the philosphy driving the homework, namely the intent to get us to learn Rhino and use it. Rhino, for those not in the industry, is a computer program for making 3D models that primarily relies on NURBS. From Wikipedia:
Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) is a mathematical model commonly used in computer graphicsfor generating and representing curves and surfaces which offers great flexibility and precision for handling both analytic and freeform shapes.More simply, NURBS are special curved surfaces. People tend to use them to design very radically warped surfaces, rather than simply warped surfaces. For obvious reasons, NURBS are primarily used by industrial designers, aircraft designers, and shipbuilders. I have issues with architecture derived from NURBS for the following reasons:
- NURBS architecture tends to be unbuilt architecture. I think architecture should be about the built environment.
- Difficulty of fabrication- if the skin of a building is a wacky curve, the wacky curve does not just show up on the site. If its a concrete skin, a form work must be erected with the same curve. If its panels, each panel must be individually milled or fabricated to its own unique shape, which then must be placed in precisely one location. All of these things mean huge added costs and usually more waste material.
- Extra structure- everything goes back to a building structure, which means that there is going to be a lot more steel, wood, or concrete to make the wavy distorted skin attach back to the secondary and primary structural elements. That's also added costs and additional material.
- A famous architect apocryphally looked at a brick and asked it what it wanted to be. A brick suggests brick-like buildings, or with more skill and imagination, systematic curves a la Eladio Dieste, but still with the idea of the brick in mind- moving from the material to the form. NURBs give a form fully independent from the constraints and advantages of actual materials.
However, I will stick to my own advice of "Be open to new tools" and shut up and learn the software and use it, and THEN I'll complain about it.
Aug 12, 2010
Personal guide to Grad School, Revision I
These are some things I feel like I need to keep in mind coming in to graduate school. I may revise them as I go, but I think its a good starting point.
- Ask many questions and don't be afraid to follow them.
- Embrace new ideas, new tools, and new methods.
- Be bold, be daring.
- Let professional experience support, and not cumber, experimental design
- Seek collaboration and input, reach outside the school.
- Sleep is a priority.
- Follow fun and interesting, but don't let them distract from necessity.
Jul 17, 2010
The Mid-Sized Firm
This monday will mark my last week of work. Since technically we're on a shortened week, it will really be my last four days. It's been a great job, and thinking about not working makes me think I'll miss working there. Honestly, when I first saw the place I'd be working as a summer intern, I felt a little deflated.
I decided to take the job anyway, despite my initial misgivings about working in a firm that did civic and educational projects. The working environment was good, I was learning a lot, the people were low-key and friendly, and the salaried offer was very generous, along with the benefits and paid vacations.
In the three years of working full time there, I'm really glad I made that decision. Personally, and professionally, I saw a lot of growth. The firm's commitment to education (they call it "stewardship") pushed me to see all the different aspects of the business of architecture. I was invited to meetings with clients, product representatives, consultants, and contractors. I was taken out in the field. They sent me on field trips to other buildings, to conferences. They paid for me to take a 3 day Revit class, and told me not to worry about coming in during those days. I worked on projects from programming through construction administration, which is pretty rare for an architecture firm of our size. I got to design, which is why I got into this field in the first place.
More ambiguously, or ambivalently, work has changed how I view architecture; its nature, its role in the world, what it can or should be. My view of architecture is colored by what I've done and seen. It would have been different if I'd been working at a national corporate firm, or at a four-person firm. I think my design philosophy has also changed. I'm a lot more aware of building systems, of structure.
And of course, it goes without saying that taking that position kept me employed throughout the recession. I saw people in the firm being let go, in various waves of layoffs. The first round was hard, and they had to keep letting go of better and better people. But my firm was nothing to hearing about the gradual bloodbath in the industry. Scores of small boutique firms just dropped off the face of the earth as the cutting edge (read by clients as "expensive") design disappeared. Work in general pretty much dried up, and our firm would probably not have been able to make it had it not been for the fact that have 60 years of experience with a core group of large, well-funded clients. The municipalities and universities that gave us the civic and educational work that I initially was reluctant to accept was just about the only kind of work left, which was a lesson in itself.
But I'm ready to move on. In order to find the right kind of job, and to continue my education as an architect, I need to see what else is out there. I want to spend some time working for the huge corporate firms, where there is a constant revolving door of architects and designers who are basically used like plug-in commodities (or so I hear). Ditto for the small firms, where you work for a single architect/owner who is never in because she's out finding work and you have to do all the work (also, so I hear).
I think I'm kind of rambling here, so I'll conclude.
Basically, it was a fantastic job where I learned a lot, and now I'm ready to move on.
But I will miss the easy life, the money, and the sleep. Definitely the sleep.
Consider, you spend two years as an architecture student, coming up with wild ideas, and you get this vague idea in your head about what an architecture firm is like. Since studio focuses on fast-paced, creative exploration and expression, you get this idea that firms are fast paced, cutting edge, fun environments, with either creative mess everywhere or uber-minimalist sleek coolness where everyone wears slim black ties and rolled up sleeves. While firms like that do exist, and get occationally get some attention from the press, the reality is that most architecture firms are just that; firms. They gots biz to do, and furthermore, the vast majority of architecture that gets built is not the cutting edge, Metropolis cover shot.
Anyway, when I came to my office for the first time, I saw cubicles, I saw people hunched over computers, I saw a small corporate firm that seemed to be producing a lot of very not-Metropolis-worthy architecture. I was kind of expecting something a little more, design-y.This is the first post where I mentioned working in my blog, way back in May of 2006 as an intern:
Today I rose and showered before 7 AM. I wore pleated pants and a belt. In my minivan, I fought the morning traffic to downtown. I wore a tie. I sat in a cubicle and attended an office meeting. I drove home through rushour traffic, in a minivan.A year later, when I approached graduation, I was asked by the head of HR if I wanted a full-time, salaried position there. It was a time when the Phoenix economy was still booming. It was a time of bounty when architecture workers were jumping from one firm to another since the pickings were so sweet. I'd worked there long enough to know the kind of work they did, and what other firms in the valley were doing.
These are new things to me.
I decided to take the job anyway, despite my initial misgivings about working in a firm that did civic and educational projects. The working environment was good, I was learning a lot, the people were low-key and friendly, and the salaried offer was very generous, along with the benefits and paid vacations.
In the three years of working full time there, I'm really glad I made that decision. Personally, and professionally, I saw a lot of growth. The firm's commitment to education (they call it "stewardship") pushed me to see all the different aspects of the business of architecture. I was invited to meetings with clients, product representatives, consultants, and contractors. I was taken out in the field. They sent me on field trips to other buildings, to conferences. They paid for me to take a 3 day Revit class, and told me not to worry about coming in during those days. I worked on projects from programming through construction administration, which is pretty rare for an architecture firm of our size. I got to design, which is why I got into this field in the first place.
More ambiguously, or ambivalently, work has changed how I view architecture; its nature, its role in the world, what it can or should be. My view of architecture is colored by what I've done and seen. It would have been different if I'd been working at a national corporate firm, or at a four-person firm. I think my design philosophy has also changed. I'm a lot more aware of building systems, of structure.
And of course, it goes without saying that taking that position kept me employed throughout the recession. I saw people in the firm being let go, in various waves of layoffs. The first round was hard, and they had to keep letting go of better and better people. But my firm was nothing to hearing about the gradual bloodbath in the industry. Scores of small boutique firms just dropped off the face of the earth as the cutting edge (read by clients as "expensive") design disappeared. Work in general pretty much dried up, and our firm would probably not have been able to make it had it not been for the fact that have 60 years of experience with a core group of large, well-funded clients. The municipalities and universities that gave us the civic and educational work that I initially was reluctant to accept was just about the only kind of work left, which was a lesson in itself.
But I'm ready to move on. In order to find the right kind of job, and to continue my education as an architect, I need to see what else is out there. I want to spend some time working for the huge corporate firms, where there is a constant revolving door of architects and designers who are basically used like plug-in commodities (or so I hear). Ditto for the small firms, where you work for a single architect/owner who is never in because she's out finding work and you have to do all the work (also, so I hear).
I think I'm kind of rambling here, so I'll conclude.
Basically, it was a fantastic job where I learned a lot, and now I'm ready to move on.
But I will miss the easy life, the money, and the sleep. Definitely the sleep.
Jul 9, 2010
There are some architectural interests in studying in St.Louis.
- The Mississippi mound-builders from the prehistoric times, built mounds.
- The city's massive population explosion in the 19th century led to hard learned lessons in urban planning and infrastructure.
- The Wainwright building, considered by many architectural historians to be the first "skyscraper" was built here and still stands today.
- The Worlds Fair in 1904 kicked off the City Beautiful movement, which set a neoclassical standard for civic and public buildings that deeply impacted the architectural styles of the US.
- Pruitt-Igoe, the public housing project infamous to architects and planners, was unveiled and given many architectural awards as a Modern architecture solution to the urban poor. It was demolished 20 years later as a failure after crime, extreme poverty, abuse, and neglect spiraled.
- The iconic arch, built by architect Ereo Saarinan, is located here, and is pretty cool looking. One of the senior partners of my architecture firm told me that when he was a student in St.Louis, one of his friends' aligators died, they put it in small coffin and buried it under the planned apex of the then in-construction arch with a small funeral. Alcohol may have been a factor.
- The city straddles the border of its own state, which is very odd to me, having lived in a state where the distance one has to drive to reach the state border would cross several eastern seaboard states.
- Not so architectural, but certainly work-generating: apparently St.Louis is the largest city to be repeatedly struck by lethal tornadoes.
- If one measures a city's vitality by its population increase and decreases, St.Louis shone most brightly in the early 1900s. Following the slow decline of industry and the rust belt, the population of St.Louis fell by half between 1950 and 2000. This alone creates what I consider very interesting conditions. What happens to a city when half the people just leave? However, it is also representative the more recent phenomenon of inner city gentrification. Educated, wealthier, mostly young, moving out of the 'burbs to the inner city. This has the overall effect of making the suburbs poorer, with higher percentages of minority groups as well.
Jun 30, 2010
It's been a long week, and its only Wednesday night
Saturday night I was on a boat of the coast of Mexico, partying wildly with family and contraband liquor. Monday morning I was back in the office. Sunday was a long day.
Yesterday, I found out my office is changing its health benefits again, which is never a good thing. It's almost to the point where I may just try to find my own insurance. I have no faith whatsoever in insurance companies. I fully expect them to try to get the most money they can out of me while providing the minimum amount of care they are legally obligated to provide, and to fight me every step of the way. Our new fringe benefits company actually brought in reps for each of the health companies they were selling us, so we were subjected to the dog and pony show. My mistrust level went through the roof.
Then I went to the dentist for a tooth cleaning, although I didn't tell him my coverage was expiring in two days. It was uncomfortable, the dentist asked me to not brush my teeth so hard, to take out my aggression elsewhere. But on the shiny side, at least I don't have any soft spots or cavities.
At work, I was assigned to a Revit committee, where I was bemused to finally get upgraded to "Revit Guru" status, joining the ranks of the other three or four Elite Reviteers. No badge though. Just a long meeting to try to figure out how to standardize and implement better Revit practices within the firm.
Today, I also wore a tie as I had to present some glass samples to the head of our biggest client. That was a little nerve wracking as I usually don't have a lot of face time presenting to clients. In fact, I almost never present material. I really really need to work on my speaking and presentation skills. My intent is to join the local AIA in Missouri and see if there's any groups that would help that, or all else, toastmasters.
Tomorrow is one of my coworker's birthdays, so he, Saori and I went out to celebrate during lunch. We went to Gallo Blanco, a Mexican cafe in uptown Phoenix in the swanky Clarendon boutique hotel. The food was really good. I got a pork torta (sandwich). Highly recommended for lunch. Not sure if they have dinner. Afterwards, coffee ice cream before heading back to the office. My coworker is turning 30, a milestone that doesn't stand too far off from where I'm at, and when I asked him about it, he said that he was happy with what he had done with his 20's.
Tomorrow is July 1st. It is a deadline to log in hours over six months old in the IDP (intern development program) for NCARB (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards). This means that if I want to get credit for work I did before January 2010, I have to get it in. I was pretty close, but I still scrambled a bit last night to log my hours. The website is still really buggy since its under the internet pressure of all the other people scrambling to get hours logged in, so they extended the deadline by a day.
Another thing related to that is that I realized my NCARB registration will expire at the end of August, and that because its less than 60 days away, I can't renew online. I was worried initially that I might lose my hours, but I think the worst thing that could happen if I can't renew is that I will have to pay an additional $40 a year after I re-establish my registration. It adds up, especially if I keep my registration current through taking the ARE (architectural registration exams). I've sent out some emails and I'll make some calls to nail that sucker down though.
Next Thursday, I'll be flying out again to St. Louis to look for apartments/houses. The only thing I've done is bought a plane ticket and arranged to meet a friend to see his apartment. I still need to line up places to visit, maybe locate an agent, figure out whether I'll need to rent a car or if I can take local transportation, and reserve a (cheap) hotel room. Or, I need to make close friends in St.Louis in very short order.
Can I please go back to this?
Yesterday, I found out my office is changing its health benefits again, which is never a good thing. It's almost to the point where I may just try to find my own insurance. I have no faith whatsoever in insurance companies. I fully expect them to try to get the most money they can out of me while providing the minimum amount of care they are legally obligated to provide, and to fight me every step of the way. Our new fringe benefits company actually brought in reps for each of the health companies they were selling us, so we were subjected to the dog and pony show. My mistrust level went through the roof.
Then I went to the dentist for a tooth cleaning, although I didn't tell him my coverage was expiring in two days. It was uncomfortable, the dentist asked me to not brush my teeth so hard, to take out my aggression elsewhere. But on the shiny side, at least I don't have any soft spots or cavities.
At work, I was assigned to a Revit committee, where I was bemused to finally get upgraded to "Revit Guru" status, joining the ranks of the other three or four Elite Reviteers. No badge though. Just a long meeting to try to figure out how to standardize and implement better Revit practices within the firm.
Today, I also wore a tie as I had to present some glass samples to the head of our biggest client. That was a little nerve wracking as I usually don't have a lot of face time presenting to clients. In fact, I almost never present material. I really really need to work on my speaking and presentation skills. My intent is to join the local AIA in Missouri and see if there's any groups that would help that, or all else, toastmasters.
Tomorrow is one of my coworker's birthdays, so he, Saori and I went out to celebrate during lunch. We went to Gallo Blanco, a Mexican cafe in uptown Phoenix in the swanky Clarendon boutique hotel. The food was really good. I got a pork torta (sandwich). Highly recommended for lunch. Not sure if they have dinner. Afterwards, coffee ice cream before heading back to the office. My coworker is turning 30, a milestone that doesn't stand too far off from where I'm at, and when I asked him about it, he said that he was happy with what he had done with his 20's.
Tomorrow is July 1st. It is a deadline to log in hours over six months old in the IDP (intern development program) for NCARB (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards). This means that if I want to get credit for work I did before January 2010, I have to get it in. I was pretty close, but I still scrambled a bit last night to log my hours. The website is still really buggy since its under the internet pressure of all the other people scrambling to get hours logged in, so they extended the deadline by a day.
Another thing related to that is that I realized my NCARB registration will expire at the end of August, and that because its less than 60 days away, I can't renew online. I was worried initially that I might lose my hours, but I think the worst thing that could happen if I can't renew is that I will have to pay an additional $40 a year after I re-establish my registration. It adds up, especially if I keep my registration current through taking the ARE (architectural registration exams). I've sent out some emails and I'll make some calls to nail that sucker down though.
Next Thursday, I'll be flying out again to St. Louis to look for apartments/houses. The only thing I've done is bought a plane ticket and arranged to meet a friend to see his apartment. I still need to line up places to visit, maybe locate an agent, figure out whether I'll need to rent a car or if I can take local transportation, and reserve a (cheap) hotel room. Or, I need to make close friends in St.Louis in very short order.
Can I please go back to this?
Jun 5, 2010
Aztec Fridays
Yesterday on my recession Friday, we started off with a breakfast at our local Jack-in-the-Box, which was kind of nice as the uptown one on central made an attempt to upscale itself with high, cafe-style tables by the front windows. Next stop was the giant Fry's Electronics, the big box store that for some reason looks like a Aztec temple. It's beyond kitch, with the giant fake stone snakes, and the life size tableus of natives bearing consumer electronics, but the whole thing is so surreal and arbitrary, I actually find it much more preferable to the typical steaming piles of stucco I see everywhere. I'm sure I'm reading too much into it, but the fact that its an electronics store in the form of a temple strikes me as commentary on consumerism as nearly religious worship. Make sacrifice unto HD.
[Actually, I am reading way too much into it. Apparently, Fry's Electronics attempts to theme most of it's stores. There's a "pre-1960's Indianopolis 500" theme in Indiana, an oil-derrick theme in the Houston store, and oddly, stores that use an Alice in Wonderland motif with life-sized characters. Aztecs were a native group in Mexico, but as we're in Arizona, I don't see how they could make the connection. Saori was wondering where do you even find contractors who carve giant foam sculptures.]
Anyway, after Fry's we went to PV mall to look for a swimsuit for Saorichan. We had mixed luck- she found a suit she liked for a price she didn't so its off to the internet for some comparison shopping. I picked up a new hat, and we wandered through the various stores. PV seems to have stablized itself. Last time I was there about a year to two years ago, there were a lot of shuttered stores, and it seems like there were only one or two closed storefronts.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the indoor mall typology is on its way out the door. The retail trend which follows the financing trend is that they are being supplanted by outdoor malls. Typical form is a "district" or short pedestrian street lined with boutique retail, dining, and entertainment surrounded by a lake of parking and the entire thing ringed by a chain of big box retail stores. If you're in Phoenix; Desert Ridge, Tempe Marketplace, Mesa Riverview, San Tan, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
We finally got around to watching our latest Netflix disc, Chungking Express by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046), which tells the story of two Hong Kong cops and their love lives. Tony Leung stars as one of the cops, and there was another Japanese actor I saw in John Woo's Red Cliff who played the other cop. Apparently shot in two months while Kar Wai was editing another much larger epic, this is a much simpler, lighter movie than his other works. The story centers around a food stand which sells everything from fish and chips and chef's salads to pizza, where the two cops, who never actually share the same screen, come to eat and relax. The story is okay, its more about the characters and their relationships. Singer and model Faye Wong is a lot of fun to watch as she plays one of the food stand staffers who secretly loves one of the cops, and she is constantly grooving to the same song, "California Dreaming." I liked it more than Happy Together, and 2046, but I didn't think it measured up to In the Mood for Love.
The style is great, his camera loves the culture and city of Hong Kong, its internationalism, its frenetic pace and neon signage, the packed vegetable markets in the tropical heat and concrete, the incredible density and labrythine urbanism, even the griminess. It makes me want to pack up and head straight to Hong Kong. American filmmaker Quinten Tarintino geeked out over this movie so much, he introduces the film, and actually created a line of special US releases to make sure that the film would be exposed to US audiences.
Thinking about Tarintino, it makes me wonder if there are "filmmaker's filmmakers," or possibly, "architect's architects." Can they be judged in the same way? Or is it only valid to evaluate and compare works? Tarintino might camp out at the theater to see the latest Wong Kar Wai work, as George Lucas might to see a Kurosawa film, or John Lasseter (Pixar) for Miyazaki (Ghibli), but so would so many other people. The cinema is so accessible and directly experienced that it makes me think that the reasons the Tarintino's and Lucas's go to the movies is not so different why you or I go to the movies.
Fundamentally, maybe its not so different with architects and architecture. Yes, if Tadao Ando designed a gas station a hundred miles from my house, I would drive to go see it just because it's Tadao Ando's work. Like a movie, architects and designers would be interested in the details and craftmanship, but I think really at the end of the day, what is most compelling is the spaces that are created, and I think everyone really does appreciate architecture in that same way, whether or not they even notice it. Perhaps people like being certain places and its just that industry people pay closer attention to the causes of what makes a space nice. There's differences of taste, and also of ambition of course. Scottsdale Fashion square mall has a nice atrium, you could say the sliding glass roof and ambient daylight and bridges are nice architectural features, but no one but architects will pay close attention to them. But people pay money to see Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, which is a space that grabs you and shakes you. Designer or no, most people say "wow."
[Actually, I am reading way too much into it. Apparently, Fry's Electronics attempts to theme most of it's stores. There's a "pre-1960's Indianopolis 500" theme in Indiana, an oil-derrick theme in the Houston store, and oddly, stores that use an Alice in Wonderland motif with life-sized characters. Aztecs were a native group in Mexico, but as we're in Arizona, I don't see how they could make the connection. Saori was wondering where do you even find contractors who carve giant foam sculptures.]
Anyway, after Fry's we went to PV mall to look for a swimsuit for Saorichan. We had mixed luck- she found a suit she liked for a price she didn't so its off to the internet for some comparison shopping. I picked up a new hat, and we wandered through the various stores. PV seems to have stablized itself. Last time I was there about a year to two years ago, there were a lot of shuttered stores, and it seems like there were only one or two closed storefronts.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the indoor mall typology is on its way out the door. The retail trend which follows the financing trend is that they are being supplanted by outdoor malls. Typical form is a "district" or short pedestrian street lined with boutique retail, dining, and entertainment surrounded by a lake of parking and the entire thing ringed by a chain of big box retail stores. If you're in Phoenix; Desert Ridge, Tempe Marketplace, Mesa Riverview, San Tan, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
We finally got around to watching our latest Netflix disc, Chungking Express by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046), which tells the story of two Hong Kong cops and their love lives. Tony Leung stars as one of the cops, and there was another Japanese actor I saw in John Woo's Red Cliff who played the other cop. Apparently shot in two months while Kar Wai was editing another much larger epic, this is a much simpler, lighter movie than his other works. The story centers around a food stand which sells everything from fish and chips and chef's salads to pizza, where the two cops, who never actually share the same screen, come to eat and relax. The story is okay, its more about the characters and their relationships. Singer and model Faye Wong is a lot of fun to watch as she plays one of the food stand staffers who secretly loves one of the cops, and she is constantly grooving to the same song, "California Dreaming." I liked it more than Happy Together, and 2046, but I didn't think it measured up to In the Mood for Love.
The style is great, his camera loves the culture and city of Hong Kong, its internationalism, its frenetic pace and neon signage, the packed vegetable markets in the tropical heat and concrete, the incredible density and labrythine urbanism, even the griminess. It makes me want to pack up and head straight to Hong Kong. American filmmaker Quinten Tarintino geeked out over this movie so much, he introduces the film, and actually created a line of special US releases to make sure that the film would be exposed to US audiences.
Thinking about Tarintino, it makes me wonder if there are "filmmaker's filmmakers," or possibly, "architect's architects." Can they be judged in the same way? Or is it only valid to evaluate and compare works? Tarintino might camp out at the theater to see the latest Wong Kar Wai work, as George Lucas might to see a Kurosawa film, or John Lasseter (Pixar) for Miyazaki (Ghibli), but so would so many other people. The cinema is so accessible and directly experienced that it makes me think that the reasons the Tarintino's and Lucas's go to the movies is not so different why you or I go to the movies.
Fundamentally, maybe its not so different with architects and architecture. Yes, if Tadao Ando designed a gas station a hundred miles from my house, I would drive to go see it just because it's Tadao Ando's work. Like a movie, architects and designers would be interested in the details and craftmanship, but I think really at the end of the day, what is most compelling is the spaces that are created, and I think everyone really does appreciate architecture in that same way, whether or not they even notice it. Perhaps people like being certain places and its just that industry people pay closer attention to the causes of what makes a space nice. There's differences of taste, and also of ambition of course. Scottsdale Fashion square mall has a nice atrium, you could say the sliding glass roof and ambient daylight and bridges are nice architectural features, but no one but architects will pay close attention to them. But people pay money to see Gaudi's unfinished Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, which is a space that grabs you and shakes you. Designer or no, most people say "wow."
Jun 3, 2010
Park & Ride
It's been a few busy days. Memorial day was nice and sleepy in the morning, and then we went to a cafe and on to mom's house in the late afternoon for dinner and a movie. We watched Porco Rosso, another animated movie by Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away and Ponyo. It's a very different kind of movie- it has the look of a kid's movie, with ridiculous air pirates, but its actually much more geared to adults with lots of ambiguity and nostalgia.
Tuesday Wednesday were long days where I jumped off my current project to help out my coworker with some design options for a park and ride. Park and rides are basically bus hubs for commuters with tons of parking. There's actually a lot of fun designing them, since only real thing they need to do is provide shade and seating. Revit has been very helpful with this- basically the program is being used as a conceptual design tool. Monday, I took a hand sketch of a plan, and by wednesday night, I had a relatively photorealistic rendering of what it would look like, complete with people, plants, cars, etc. I actually developed two designs simultaneously. And then this morning, we generated shade studies.
We picked a perspective view of a bus stop, like you were standing there looking at it, told the computer that the location was Phoenix, AZ, and asked the computer to show us how the shadows would be from sunrise to sunset on July 17. It took about 40 minutes for each design, but at the end, we got a nice, 30 second long animation of how the shadows move around the platform. All this was done with the same program. I'm actually debating getting a student licence for Revit, since its less than $200 and usable for up to five years. That's cheaper than SketchUp was when it first came out, before it was bought by Google.
Anyway, this afternoon, I went to a client meeting, which is always very interesting. I wear a nice shirt and a tie, and the glossy shoes, and we sit at the biggest table I've ever seen in person. You could probably get 30 people comfortably around this table. It fills the conference room. The meetings are interesting because the top administrative staff, the people who make all the decisions for the large organization, are also there as well as their counterparts in my firm, and from the construction firm. And its interesting to see how they communicate, how they present ideas and discuss things, and really, just witnessing how top-level decisions are made that have the potential to affect hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
That probably sounds a lot more insidious than it actually is, if you consider the fact that the corner circle K affects thousands of people in some way. I'm just happy I can tag along and listen and see firsthand.
May 17, 2010
Joint Strike Fighter
One of the nice things about Netflix via Wii is that I can sit down and have access to a variety of great blockbuster entertainment. So I streamed a NOVA presents. This one was actually pretty interesting, as it followed the Joint Strike Fighter program, at least from design development to prototype. Two teams, same amount of money, same specifications. It sounds like "Junkyard Wars" but instead of five hundred dollars, each team received around $700 million, and instead of a week, each team were given two years. Still an incredible feat, with a lot more on the line. It was a facinating show to watch, as NOVA cameras were given simultaneous access to the two camps of Lockheed's Skunk Works and Boeing's Phantom Works (coincidently separated by only a few miles in the same stretch of isolated california desert).
In a sense, watching the competition unfold, I was struck by some of the same similarities in architectural competitions, or I suppose, any competition where corporations battle for high-stakes contracts. Packed meetings with harried engineers and designers, long shifts and working weekends. And of course, one has to wonder about the scale of the politicking and behind the scenes maneuvering and deals being made. It would be nice if competitions could be won and lost on the merits of design and on the terms of the competition alone, but I'd be naive to say that relationships and negotiations don't enter into it. One can hope, at any rate, for a more balanced competition considering that it is the US government who was the arbiter, responsible to the people.
The film makers struck me as slightly biased against Lockheed, whom they twice associated with "arrogance," although they did catch the design leader on the record with a very arrogant stance towards the competition (although who knows if was just that day or just that person). It could also be a slight attempt to portray the Boeing team as scrappy underdog, with the knowledge in editing that it was going to lose the competition.
In the end, both teams turned out a spectacular product. Boeing might have taken the dance if they'd come up with their design sooner, or if Lockheed had turned out a less sexy final product. It really comes back down to architecture school pin ups, where one guy with a great design finds it too late in the game to change his model, and the guy with the basswood takes the highest praise. I do feel for the Boeing team, however, who sacrificed a lot to get a pretty phenomenal vehicle to do some amazing things. The design team I'm on, we may call ourselves sucessful in 'winning' the competition to get our building designed, but the day it opens, my building will not hover off the ground or reach supersonic speeds.
May 15, 2010
Tucson interlude
Thursday afternoon, I thought it might be fun to go visit my friend Cassie in Tucson, so after I got off work, Saori and I packed a quick trip bag and made a dash for the border. The drive from Phoenix to Tucson is so barren, mind-bogglingly flat, and endless that it really only compares to the first hour of the road to Flagstaff from Phoenix. We got to Tucson around nine, and stopped for a bite at Jack in the Box. I got a grilled cheese with turkey and sun-dried tomato sauce, which was pretty good. A little pricey for just a sandwich, but better quality ingredients I suppose.Anyway, we parked at Cassie's house and she picked us up and took us to her friend's house for game night.
She had told me earlier about game night; apparently a group of her friends get together and play board games. I thought, hey that sounds like fun, Saori and I are totally up for that. Monopoly, Sorry, Scrabble, yeah. Turns out not those kind of board games. Cassie led us up to an apartment block that looked like it had come from the 1960's-1970's, with high plaster ceilings and great block walls. The apartment belonged to a French graduate student, and there were about a dozen people there, apparently a mix of "Ramblers" (the UofA hiking club) and bioscience/optical science graduate students, with heavy overlap between the groups.
Saori introduced us to everyone and we got started playing a new game, Settlers of Catan. This is a German-style board game, a trading and strategy game. You start with one piece on the board, and you have access to the resources your piece straddles. The object is get 10 points, generally the more pieces you have on the board, the more points you get. Anyway, you can learn the rules pretty quickly, and I was actually surprised how quickly I got into it. In fact, I won the game, although it was pretty close. Afterwards, the group dispersed and Saori and I crashed at Cassie's house.
In the morning, we packed up our stuff and headed out to Bobo's, my favorite breakfast place in Arizona. Yes, more than Matt's Big Breakfast or OverEasy, or even Harlow's Cafe, although they're all really good. Bobo's is well-worn and dingy, the epitome of a cheap-eats place. However, on this weekday morning at 9 am, they were packed solid. The three of us had to wait to get bar seats. The food they serve is delicious and cheap. I got buttermilk pancake, delicious, fluffy, and larger than the plate. One pancake and you're pretty much set, although then you'd miss the best link sausage. It's a loud place, with people constantly moving around, two cooks working the stoves and the wait staff running around carrying food and coffees. If I owned a restaurant, I'd sell sophisticated food at night, Bobo's food in the morning.
After breakfast, Cassie walked us over to where she works/studies as a graduate student. She took us up into their relatively new biological sciences building and showed us around. I was curious to see it as it has a similar program (function, elements) to the project I helped design in Illinois. Here are some comparisons:
She had told me earlier about game night; apparently a group of her friends get together and play board games. I thought, hey that sounds like fun, Saori and I are totally up for that. Monopoly, Sorry, Scrabble, yeah. Turns out not those kind of board games. Cassie led us up to an apartment block that looked like it had come from the 1960's-1970's, with high plaster ceilings and great block walls. The apartment belonged to a French graduate student, and there were about a dozen people there, apparently a mix of "Ramblers" (the UofA hiking club) and bioscience/optical science graduate students, with heavy overlap between the groups.
Saori introduced us to everyone and we got started playing a new game, Settlers of Catan. This is a German-style board game, a trading and strategy game. You start with one piece on the board, and you have access to the resources your piece straddles. The object is get 10 points, generally the more pieces you have on the board, the more points you get. Anyway, you can learn the rules pretty quickly, and I was actually surprised how quickly I got into it. In fact, I won the game, although it was pretty close. Afterwards, the group dispersed and Saori and I crashed at Cassie's house.
In the morning, we packed up our stuff and headed out to Bobo's, my favorite breakfast place in Arizona. Yes, more than Matt's Big Breakfast or OverEasy, or even Harlow's Cafe, although they're all really good. Bobo's is well-worn and dingy, the epitome of a cheap-eats place. However, on this weekday morning at 9 am, they were packed solid. The three of us had to wait to get bar seats. The food they serve is delicious and cheap. I got buttermilk pancake, delicious, fluffy, and larger than the plate. One pancake and you're pretty much set, although then you'd miss the best link sausage. It's a loud place, with people constantly moving around, two cooks working the stoves and the wait staff running around carrying food and coffees. If I owned a restaurant, I'd sell sophisticated food at night, Bobo's food in the morning.
After breakfast, Cassie walked us over to where she works/studies as a graduate student. She took us up into their relatively new biological sciences building and showed us around. I was curious to see it as it has a similar program (function, elements) to the project I helped design in Illinois. Here are some comparisons:
A Few Facts about the Thomas W. Keating Bioresearch Building
- Size: 177,000 square feet
- Occupants: 350+ researchers (faculty, research staff, and students) from many UA departments within multiple colleges
- Architects: Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Partnership
- Contractor: Gilbane Inc.
- Total construction cost: $61,500,000 / $289 per square foot.
- Sixty-five percent of the cost of the building is mechanical, electrical and plumbing
May 12, 2010
Alec Misses a Good Opportunity to Practice Networking
One of the other ecologically minded members of my office tapped me on my shoulder this afternoon and asked me if I had any plans for tonight. Apparently there was some kind of green event that she had signed up for / had been signed up for, that involved some speakers talking about sustainability. Drinks and "power networking" followed by a panel discussion. Saori is working tonight, so I thought, sure, why not. I can always learn something new about sustainability. My coworker didn't really know much about the event, not even who it was hosting it, or why it should cost non members of the IFDA (International Furnishings and Design Assoc.) $60 to go. In retrospect it seemed oddly convenient that her daughter should be sick so that she needed someone to take her spot.
At any rate, I took her up on the offer, left work an hour earlier than usual, classed up my professional attire by putting on socks, and drove out to Scottdale. I got there about midway into the "power networking" and to be honest, I should have driven slower. Didn't see anyone I recognized from industry. A few architects, not many, mostly custom home builder types. The predominant group were older interior designers. For the most part, these middle-aged women all had very elaborately styled hairdos, heavy makeup, and very distinctive (read: chunky, colored, odd) eyewear. The uniformity made me wonder if it was a kind of professional standard.
I was not exactly a "power networker." To be perfectly honest, I network like a cat taking a bath. I'm minimally sociable, and I have to constantly reiterate to myself the advantages of networking in order to engage with strangers in a professional setting. This is not a good state to be in as an architect, and I was not really in the mood to practice tonight. Plus, it was a cash bar. You'd think that with a limited number of people attending and a $60 event fee, that they'd at the very least throw in a cheap glass of wine. No such luck. I bought a beer and wandered into the auditorium.
What the $60 DID get me, remember this is a conference on sustainability, is one of those cheap nylon woven tote bags that feel like a greased paper towel, filled with product information for "sustainable" paint and furniture. Oh, I also got a pen and a few notepads with manufacturer's logos all over it. Additionally, we were each handed, as this "Going Green" event, a stapled printout of one of the presentations, single sided.
I quickly realized that I was at an event directed to the interior designers who had heard some stuff about this "green movement" in design and who wanted to learn more, or at least, where they could buy it. While some of you may sense a slightly deprecatory tone, I do have to give them credit for coming out to learn about it, and for making the investment in time and money to do so in an unfavorable (read: starvation) market.
The speakers at least were interesting. One was a venerable (read: nevermind...) architect with a firm to his name, who was an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright, and in the work this architect showed, you could almost see some of it under the heavy FLW style. At least he went through his images quickly and described them generally, not making the mistake of many architects who attempt to describe the entity of the creative process for each piece. He had some interesting points that I happened to agree with, namely that while technology defines our lives now, behavior will define our lives in the future. (LEDs vs turning off the lights). There was talk about green building codes and the city, which probably went over a lot of people's heads, on sustainable paint, on getting LEED certified and what that meant (I was the only LEED AP in attendance apparently) , and on furniture.
One big difference about these interior designers, as the older architect was going through his images, I could hear constant murmuring "oooh!"s and "ahhh!"s and quiet "Fabulous!"s and "How Gorgeous!"s. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.
The furniture guy kind of irked me with his presentation. He's a local furniture/upholster company, but he kept hammering in the whole "local" thing. In big picture sustainability, this is important to remember, 9 times out of 10, HOW something is made and WHAT is its made of has more impact on the environment than WHERE it comes from. If you're comparing apples to apples, then yes, there's a less environmental impact of sourcing your granite slab from Colorado instead of say, Italy. However, if you're looking at different products, it's a lot more sustainable to ship doors of reclaimed barn wood from Pennsylvania, than solid core doors made from local pine at the corner mill worker.
In the Q and A section, the two main questions the audience focused on was "how do I justify this to my client", "why does green cost more," and "where can I find a list of green products." The first two are pretty good questions, the third is just ignorant, bordering on inane. However, the panel did a good job of explaining that it is the designer's responsibility to determine the greenness of the product. There is no list. What makes a product sustainable is different for each application, although questions about what it is made of, how it it made, what are its harmful direct and indirect byproducts, etc are a good place to start, and reps for truly sustainable products will be able to give you good answers on all of these questions.
My question: what am I supposed to do with this stupid tote bag?
May 9, 2010
Precast!
I designed the precast units based on the neighboring building’s, so I can’t claim credit for designing them, although I pretty much had my hand in every aspect of revising their design for this building. It’s really exciting to me, but also a bit scary; if I screwed up somewhere, there’s much more money at stake here than invested in my graduate school education. What if the panels don’t fit? What if the client hates how they look when they go on? Longer term, how will the precast joints hold up? Another thing they don’t tell you about in architecture school.
Laptops for architects
I got my first laptop when I graduated high school, a Dell Inspiron, which worked out great. It cost a grand or better, but it came with the latest and fastest hardware available. It lasted through four years of architecture school, running some of the most graphics intensive programs this side of CG video editing. Functionally, it held up great despite my dragging it back and forth to studio on a daily basis and several trips around the world. When it finally crapped out from internal power issues, I was ready for another Dell.
The second laptop I purchased about two years ago in expectation that it would go with me to graduate school. It set me back about $1500, but the specifications I got on it still make it school appropriate. I picked up a precision M4300, upgraded the processor to an intel core 2 duo T9300, and upgraded the graphics processor to a 512MB Nvidia Quadro FX. I'd say its still a top of the line machine.
I found a good page which describes and explains the ideal configurations for computers for architecture here.
May 5, 2010
Cardinal rulemaker
Apparently, not many people write about the cardinal rule of architecture, although Corbu did write five cardinal rules of architecture.
Click this link to google the phrase: cardinal rule of architecture.
Is this blog still at the top of the list?
Click this link to google the phrase: cardinal rule of architecture.
Is this blog still at the top of the list?
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I’ve been seriously hungover before, so I was very happy to roll out of bed (still early) with little worse than grogginess, a slight heada...
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I really enjoyed watching Dune, and it's such a cheesy movie, it made me wonder why I enjoyed it so much. I think what set it apart for ...
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Saori and I started looking at wedding rings in Stuttgart and didn't get too far. For one, we could see the dollar signs accumulating in...
