Monday night, I went to the jam-packed lecture by the world renowned architect Raphael Moneo, where there were so many people crammed into the hall, they sat in the aisles and had to be cleared away from sitting in front of the doors. I was underwhelmed by the lecture at first- Moneo at his age has a weak voice and a heavy accent, not improved by our stellar sound system. It was an odd selection of works he presented, three laboratory science buildings recently completed in three Ivy League schools. I gradually got into the lecture, less taken by the architecture of the work as much as I was by the enthusiasm and passion Moneo brought to it. It was also personally interesting to me in that I'd spent two years working on a similarly programed building. Student's reactions were underwhelmed and the aisles gradually cleared before the two hour lecture ended.
Last friday, we had our first real review for studio. How does one rate critiques? Was it instructive? Perhaps. Was it fun? By absolutely no means. There are a few teachers in this school who seem to have a certain view of architecture that is so meticulous and distilled that there is no room for personal enjoyment. It is architecture of space shuttle construction, without the space shuttle. It is an understandable reaction for a compromised and weak profession which has nearly given everything away to consultants and contractors, but this more often than not comes across as bitterness which leads to the piss-on-everything attitude I find so frustrating and deadening.
For this review, I created ten scale models of various edge conditions of water meeting land in New Orleans (natural bayou, Mississippi river pier, drainage canals, underground culverts, etc) with the intent of then taking these pieces and somehow with their juxtapositions, create a new language for how water meets land. New Orleans, for those who have never considered it, is a city in a delta between a lake and a major river, and yet there is more richness in the relationship between urban context and water in downtown San Antonio, Texas. At any rate, I ended up with just the pieces and not the wider idea, so we were justifiably criticized for having a "conceptual" model that was less conceptual than our abstracted "literal" model.
I was commended for the physical models I made. The most praise I got out of that review was for the level of craft. I bought a douglass fir 4x4 post and sliced it up and sawed it up in the band saw to create the various "natural" or pervious landscape. It was then sanded to perfection. The hard, impervious parts of the sections I cast out of Rockite, which is a kind of anchoring cement, in formwork made of styrene. These bits and pieces were played with by all the reviewers during our presentation. If you want to engage the reviewers, make toylike models.
A note about casting- In my undergraduate at ASU, in our first semester of studio, we were introduced to pourstone, another brand of anchoring cement, which I practiced into a skill mostly using foamcore formwork. Creating a mold out of styrene requires lots of patience, craft with the cutting and welding of the styrene, and a ton of toxic weld-on, which chemically melts the styrene, is cancer causing, and does lots of other nasty stuff. The formwork was easier with the foamcore, but the product far inferior- if you want beautiful cast concrete architectural models, you have to go with the styrene-rockite method. I tested both for this project. The generic anchoring cement came out looking like a rusty steel plate. The rockite came out looking like polished granite. Absolutely beautiful and crisp.
Saturday night, Chuck and I took the bus to a themed party at a friend's apartment. People in my studio have a hard time understanding why I take the bus when I have a perfectly good car and a parking permit. Anyway, the theme of the party was the twentieth century. Come as any decade, kind of thing. The vast majority of guys, myself included, went with the 30s-60's professional male. White shirt, black pants, narrow dark tie, fedora, and optional suspenders. Fun. There are still Chinese students who come up to me and tell me that they've heard I've lived in China, and I flash my rusty "I speak a little chinese" back for their amusement.
I was dismayed to learn so late that the study abroad programs here are free. There is the regular tuition, and whatever it costs to get there plus living expenses. Early my first semester, I attended a lecture by the study abroad program coordinator who never made this clear. The massive numbers thrown up on the screen for the program cost were inclusive of tuition that we were already going to have to pay. If I had known this, I would actually considered more strongly going to Helsinki. It would leave me a little bitter if there were any bitterness left.
Got a fun book in the mail today: Kitch: an Anthology of Bad Taste which happily enough is for school. My final paper for the AA class concerns populism and architecture and so it seemed an appropriate source material. Should architecture submit to the public's taste or challenge it and make taste?
Showing posts with label studio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label studio. Show all posts
Mar 1, 2011
Dec 12, 2010
This building is protected by Batman
Its 11:08 pm and I'm in studio along with about half of the studio, and we're crunching for the final presentation coming up tuesday and wednesday (I go tuesday). My boards are printed and my 1/32" scale model is done, and I'm 75% done with a 1/16 scale model. So I'm in pretty good shape overall.
It started snowing last night, cold, hard, dry crystals. When we woke up this morning, the snow was still coming down and several inches deep. We elected to take mass transit to school instead of learning to drive on ice by the school of hard knocks. One of my studio mates spun out on her way here and did a 180, so I'm happy that we walked. Still a few inches of snow on the ground although it stopped about midday. Really cold weather next few days.
The thesis students presented today and yesterday. The big name guest reviewers were Juhani Palasmaa, the Finnish architect and author, and (surprise!) Kenneth Frampton. No, not that one. The one who is among the most famous architecture critics in the world.
Anyway, here's a quick demo of how I do my renderings:
I started with this photo of the site: (the parking lot is my site, not the brick building).
and I used Revit software to model my building and make a rendered image of what it would look like at night from the same angle:
And then I combined the two, changing the day photo to a night image with lighting, added people, an overlaid image of falling snow at night, and snow on the ground to get this final image:
Oct 18, 2010
Oct 7, 2010
process
Here's an example of how my process flow works.
I have three types of apartment units, each a different size, that I put together in a somewhat rational or potentially interesting way. I'm using Revit to do all of this work at this point. Each unit is actually an identical component so that later on, I can edit that component and all of the units of the same type will change. Once I had the basic unit blocks, in Revit it's simple to put them together and move them around. The purple blocks are two bedrooms, the light blue blocks are one bedrooms, and the green blocks are studios.
I have three types of apartment units, each a different size, that I put together in a somewhat rational or potentially interesting way. I'm using Revit to do all of this work at this point. Each unit is actually an identical component so that later on, I can edit that component and all of the units of the same type will change. Once I had the basic unit blocks, in Revit it's simple to put them together and move them around. The purple blocks are two bedrooms, the light blue blocks are one bedrooms, and the green blocks are studios.
I've also created a site model in Revit, which I link this file into to let me see how my massing works in the site- that is, how it relates to buildings nearby, how it looks at the corner, scale, etc.
I have a corner site with two massive buildings to the west and southwest of me, and a big ugly postmodern governmental building directly to the east which creates an ugly triangle of parking. From a bird's eye view, it would look something like this:
I've actually set this image up in a very deliberate way, since I have an image taken from Microsoft Bing maps that has almost identical point of view in relation to the site. As masses, these don't really tell me that much, and its better to look at the building in more detail. So I take this image into photoshop with the Bing aerial photography, and in about two minutes I have this:
Using the same techniques from different perspectives within my Revit model, I take snapshots of my digital model that correspond to actual photos I've taken of the site.
And with the same process in photoshop, bring this image into the photograph. There is a bit of set up work where I have to trace out the tree and the light pole and the traffic light, but once you set up the foreground as a layer, I can quickly swap in buildings to test them out. This lets me really get a feel for how the building might feel in the site. I've set up about three or four of these kinds of images from different places around the site, so it really streamlines the process.
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 16, 2010
GIS CAD WTF?
Our studio was broken up into groups to study an area of the city. Some groups got to study the history of the place, some focused on ethnographic and socioeconomic demographics, some groups looked at trees. One group is responsible for mapping the entire site, and is responsible for making a massive site model and also modeling the whole thing in 3D. Guess which group I'm in?
Since no one had a CAD file of the city handy, the loose idea was to trace over aerial photos. However, I thought that perhaps, in the entire history of the school, which happens to be in St.Louis, someone in the architecture program or urban planning or geography might, just might, have needed to map St.Louis. I got in contact with the top GIS (global information system) guy at the school and he directed a group of us to some very nice maps which included street edges, topography, and (praise be!) building outlines of every building in the city. This is really really cool. Since we figured we just saved a huge amount of time and energy.
Almost. There's issues with the data. The data used to map the city was done at different points in time which means that the coordinate systems they used do not exactly line up. Long story short, when we overlaid all the maps on top of each other, they didn't line up. Out of six maps, only two lined up. We spent about five hours to figure out first why they weren't lining up, and then finally how to export the data with a coordinate conversion in place. So finally at the end of the day (or around 6pm) we had a CAD file with streets, street edges, parcels, topography, and houses, all in reasonably the same spot. Except for parcels which had something odd with the data. So that was frustrating, but now we have a map that the entire class of 71 students will use as a base file.
We'll take that data and use it to build the physical wooden model and the digital 3D model, all of which, by the way, has to be done by next wednesday.
Also, by the way, Saori's mom is coming to visit from Japan this Saturday, and she'll be staying with us.
Since no one had a CAD file of the city handy, the loose idea was to trace over aerial photos. However, I thought that perhaps, in the entire history of the school, which happens to be in St.Louis, someone in the architecture program or urban planning or geography might, just might, have needed to map St.Louis. I got in contact with the top GIS (global information system) guy at the school and he directed a group of us to some very nice maps which included street edges, topography, and (praise be!) building outlines of every building in the city. This is really really cool. Since we figured we just saved a huge amount of time and energy.
Almost. There's issues with the data. The data used to map the city was done at different points in time which means that the coordinate systems they used do not exactly line up. Long story short, when we overlaid all the maps on top of each other, they didn't line up. Out of six maps, only two lined up. We spent about five hours to figure out first why they weren't lining up, and then finally how to export the data with a coordinate conversion in place. So finally at the end of the day (or around 6pm) we had a CAD file with streets, street edges, parcels, topography, and houses, all in reasonably the same spot. Except for parcels which had something odd with the data. So that was frustrating, but now we have a map that the entire class of 71 students will use as a base file.
We'll take that data and use it to build the physical wooden model and the digital 3D model, all of which, by the way, has to be done by next wednesday.
Also, by the way, Saori's mom is coming to visit from Japan this Saturday, and she'll be staying with us.
Sep 13, 2010
Walking the site (in new boots!)
Walking around the site where we will be working over the course of the semester. Click the photo to go to a public album of the rest of the photos!
Sep 12, 2010
Housing Studio Workshop Ends: Housing Studio Begins!
Last night, after we broke up around 5:30 from the housing workshop, everyone went to Heman park for a BBQ. We went home first, dropped our car and bicycled to the park. It was a beautiful afternoon. I don't know if you've seen photos of my neighborhood, but the trees canopies completely cover the streets, creating a canopy that filters light down to the street level. It was a short, five minute bike ride to the BBQ site, and although it took awhile to get a grilled sausage, it was so worth it when they were ready. All the invited speakers were there, and so was the beer, so it was a really nice time to just chat, and mix and relax. It was a nice time. The park is huge and beautiful in the late afternoon sun, warm edging into coolness of evening.
(One of the surprising differences about private schools vs public is this whole alcohol thing. At ASU, my mom has to sign a paper swearing that that none of the money dispersed for college events will be used to buy or subsidize alcohol. They have booze at nearly every event here.)
Today, we went into school an hour before our scheduled meeting time of 10am. We were bicycling, and the weather was beautiful, and I thought it was the perfect time to explore Forest Park some more, so I split off from Saori who had to do some reading, and bicycled through the meandering paths, pastures, forests, hills, and pavilions that make up the park. It really is a special place, on the epic scale of the gardens of Versailles, and it was especially nice this Sunday morning. Tons of joggers and bicyclists.
Today's work session was very much about consolidating the information we gathered over the past two days and discussing the questions and issues that arose from it. Of course, the conversation of conclusions became very sidetracked and diverted as the visiting architects began to essentially have a public debate. I swear, you get a couple of accomplished architects in similar fields in the same room and they start to go boom-boom-boom, shooting ideas back and forth over the heads of students. Bill Morrish actually apologized to everyone for their "entertaining each other." The other two visiting lecturers/workshop leaders were Julie Eizenberg and Donnie Schmidt. Donnie was actually an ASU graduate and was definitely the young gun of the group. All together a great group.
We finished the workshop by taking two sites across Delmar and creating massing models for those sites, and then finally critiquing the massing models in the giant site model. It made for a really long day, and we didn't finish until about 6:30 in the evening. Saori and I went home and realized we were both too wiped out to do anything so we just cooked rice and ate some soup and called it a day.
Overall, I really liked the housing workshop. I mean, its not a pleasant experience, although there are moments of exhilaration and excitement with the intensity and exchange of ideas. It was very intense. Very intense. You come up with different solutions and work differently when you're given three hours compared to three days. Theres more risk, more adventure, more bold strokes and more interesting mistakes. We didn't really produce much in the way of viable solutions, but what it was really useful for was to understand the problems and the consequences of architectural and planning gestures. Basically, we delved a bit into planning theory, and a bit into the culture and politics of socioeconomics. If you create a building close to the street, what happens? If its far away from the street edge, what happens? How does that affect the perception of the buildings around it? or across the street? Etc ad infinitum.
We've got classes tomorrow morning at 9AM, so its good to get a good nights rest. While we still can.
(One of the surprising differences about private schools vs public is this whole alcohol thing. At ASU, my mom has to sign a paper swearing that that none of the money dispersed for college events will be used to buy or subsidize alcohol. They have booze at nearly every event here.)
Today, we went into school an hour before our scheduled meeting time of 10am. We were bicycling, and the weather was beautiful, and I thought it was the perfect time to explore Forest Park some more, so I split off from Saori who had to do some reading, and bicycled through the meandering paths, pastures, forests, hills, and pavilions that make up the park. It really is a special place, on the epic scale of the gardens of Versailles, and it was especially nice this Sunday morning. Tons of joggers and bicyclists.
Today's work session was very much about consolidating the information we gathered over the past two days and discussing the questions and issues that arose from it. Of course, the conversation of conclusions became very sidetracked and diverted as the visiting architects began to essentially have a public debate. I swear, you get a couple of accomplished architects in similar fields in the same room and they start to go boom-boom-boom, shooting ideas back and forth over the heads of students. Bill Morrish actually apologized to everyone for their "entertaining each other." The other two visiting lecturers/workshop leaders were Julie Eizenberg and Donnie Schmidt. Donnie was actually an ASU graduate and was definitely the young gun of the group. All together a great group.
We finished the workshop by taking two sites across Delmar and creating massing models for those sites, and then finally critiquing the massing models in the giant site model. It made for a really long day, and we didn't finish until about 6:30 in the evening. Saori and I went home and realized we were both too wiped out to do anything so we just cooked rice and ate some soup and called it a day.
Overall, I really liked the housing workshop. I mean, its not a pleasant experience, although there are moments of exhilaration and excitement with the intensity and exchange of ideas. It was very intense. Very intense. You come up with different solutions and work differently when you're given three hours compared to three days. Theres more risk, more adventure, more bold strokes and more interesting mistakes. We didn't really produce much in the way of viable solutions, but what it was really useful for was to understand the problems and the consequences of architectural and planning gestures. Basically, we delved a bit into planning theory, and a bit into the culture and politics of socioeconomics. If you create a building close to the street, what happens? If its far away from the street edge, what happens? How does that affect the perception of the buildings around it? or across the street? Etc ad infinitum.
We've got classes tomorrow morning at 9AM, so its good to get a good nights rest. While we still can.
Sep 11, 2010
A home is a not an optimization excercise
This morning, we met down at the site for consideration- a quarter mile stretch of Delmar between Union and Kingshighway. We all met in the lobby of 3rd degree glass studios- a facility that began as a glass blowing studio and turned into a gallery/exhibition space with custom glass and melt glass for industry for sale. Cool place.
We broke up into four groups, loosely interested in documenting both sides of the street in the following categories of People, Movement, Signs, Utilities, Edges, Vegitation, and Gaps. I was part of the sign group and we further split into people who were looking at the north and south sides of the street. I started photographing street signage, business signage, and advertising, but gradually became more aware of a broader view of semiotics vs text on the wall. I started photographing places where signs SHOULD BE or WERE. Or conspicuous lacks of other types of signage. Food brands on trash on the ground. Clothing brands of discarded shoes in the alley behind the street. Juxtapositions and small security signs. We had about an hour to document.
It's a complex site- a few seemingly abandoned buildings, about 50% of the lots on the site were overgrown fields. Very few people walking around, mostly concentrated around the barber shop, the car wash, and the very happening blood donation center. No vandalism, or what little vandalism there was had been painted over, which either suggested a high level of community involvement in the neighborhood(or a few people who care) or that the area is so deserted to not warrant the attention of taggers.
Delmar is a demarkation zone, a boundary separating the private streets and neighborhoods to the south of Delmar, from the rest of the neighborhood, mostly Black, on the north side of Delmar. There is a continuous fence that runs along the border, unbroken, for the entire length of the site. The streets that pass through to connect to Delmar are blocked by massive concrete planters and locked gates and even the pedestrian gates are key code locked. Do we even want to attempt to bridge the two neighborhoods with this project? We are being asked to take a stand.
Good KFC lunch with Dew (Japanese), Saori (Japanese), and Kenny (Chinese), where we compared the differences of KFC from our respective countries.
After lunch, we met back at school for another lecture, this time by Julie Eizenberg (of Koning Eizenberg Architects ). The visiting lecturers keep getting better for this workshop, and I really like the way that the outside lecturer comes in, gives a lecture, and then folds into the workshop, becomes one of the directors of it, and throws themselves into discussion with the students. It's one thing to sit through a lecture and leave and another to work directly with someone. So that is really cool.
After the lecture, we went back upstairs to studio and worked on taking one observation from our group's study and extrapolating a design principle from this observation. We were also required to show one "secret" that we photographed that we think no one else saw. So that was fun. After a fast two hours, we pinned up and had a thorough discussion of our methodology, our ideas, and what questions were raised after these two days of study and observation.
Housing, especially public housing is very tricky. One could say that the failure of Modernism to "solve" the issue of public housing was the fact that they approached it as an optimization problem- most efficient units and site use. I went through a phase where I considered architecture largely as an optimization problem- but there are bigger issues at play of meaning and society and culture and individual experience that also come into it. This is a challenging site in a challenging city, and one of my new rules is to not think about "good" or "bad" streets or parts of the city, but to feel out what exactly gives them those labels and why. St.Louis is a dilapidated, decimated city. Decimated in that quite literally 10% of the city was destroyed as part of "urban renewal." More than half the population had left the city since the 1950s. There's so much open land in the urban core and the neighborhood because its a deserted urban landscape, and housing needs to be more than just a roof and walls to be successful in these places. Community building is required.
It's very challenging, it makes me feel like I'm back in BsAs studio, but now I realize that we dont have the option of saying "oh well, its an unsolvable problem with pure architecture." We have to build something and do what we can. It tiring to think about it.
We broke up into four groups, loosely interested in documenting both sides of the street in the following categories of People, Movement, Signs, Utilities, Edges, Vegitation, and Gaps. I was part of the sign group and we further split into people who were looking at the north and south sides of the street. I started photographing street signage, business signage, and advertising, but gradually became more aware of a broader view of semiotics vs text on the wall. I started photographing places where signs SHOULD BE or WERE. Or conspicuous lacks of other types of signage. Food brands on trash on the ground. Clothing brands of discarded shoes in the alley behind the street. Juxtapositions and small security signs. We had about an hour to document.
It's a complex site- a few seemingly abandoned buildings, about 50% of the lots on the site were overgrown fields. Very few people walking around, mostly concentrated around the barber shop, the car wash, and the very happening blood donation center. No vandalism, or what little vandalism there was had been painted over, which either suggested a high level of community involvement in the neighborhood(or a few people who care) or that the area is so deserted to not warrant the attention of taggers.
Delmar is a demarkation zone, a boundary separating the private streets and neighborhoods to the south of Delmar, from the rest of the neighborhood, mostly Black, on the north side of Delmar. There is a continuous fence that runs along the border, unbroken, for the entire length of the site. The streets that pass through to connect to Delmar are blocked by massive concrete planters and locked gates and even the pedestrian gates are key code locked. Do we even want to attempt to bridge the two neighborhoods with this project? We are being asked to take a stand.
Good KFC lunch with Dew (Japanese), Saori (Japanese), and Kenny (Chinese), where we compared the differences of KFC from our respective countries.
After lunch, we met back at school for another lecture, this time by Julie Eizenberg (of Koning Eizenberg Architects ). The visiting lecturers keep getting better for this workshop, and I really like the way that the outside lecturer comes in, gives a lecture, and then folds into the workshop, becomes one of the directors of it, and throws themselves into discussion with the students. It's one thing to sit through a lecture and leave and another to work directly with someone. So that is really cool.
After the lecture, we went back upstairs to studio and worked on taking one observation from our group's study and extrapolating a design principle from this observation. We were also required to show one "secret" that we photographed that we think no one else saw. So that was fun. After a fast two hours, we pinned up and had a thorough discussion of our methodology, our ideas, and what questions were raised after these two days of study and observation.
Housing, especially public housing is very tricky. One could say that the failure of Modernism to "solve" the issue of public housing was the fact that they approached it as an optimization problem- most efficient units and site use. I went through a phase where I considered architecture largely as an optimization problem- but there are bigger issues at play of meaning and society and culture and individual experience that also come into it. This is a challenging site in a challenging city, and one of my new rules is to not think about "good" or "bad" streets or parts of the city, but to feel out what exactly gives them those labels and why. St.Louis is a dilapidated, decimated city. Decimated in that quite literally 10% of the city was destroyed as part of "urban renewal." More than half the population had left the city since the 1950s. There's so much open land in the urban core and the neighborhood because its a deserted urban landscape, and housing needs to be more than just a roof and walls to be successful in these places. Community building is required.
It's very challenging, it makes me feel like I'm back in BsAs studio, but now I realize that we dont have the option of saying "oh well, its an unsolvable problem with pure architecture." We have to build something and do what we can. It tiring to think about it.
Phones, Boots, and Housing
I bought a new cell phone yesterday. My old Sony-Ericsson slider was a fantastic phone. Really had a nice physical motion of sliding the phone open with a clean gesture to answer it, and a smart click to hang up. However, the phone started to randomly turn itself off without warning after about two years and when mom let me know I was up for a new phone I went down and picked up a a new phone.
Unfortunately, the physical attributes and mechanical gestures of the phones have suffered an apparently huge drop in popularity, development, and availability. Two years ago, it was all about sliders. Now, its all about the smart phones. I don't want a smart phone. I'm already too dependent on the internet as it is. Additionally, I don't want to pay the cell phone companies any more money a month, especially for crappy data streams at outrageous prices. So no to smart phones. However, I did buy a phone that looks like a smart phone, but is really a dumb phone. It's a Pantech Link, manufactured by a Korean company I've never heard of, and its essentially like someone took a stick phone and flattened it and added a small keyboard. Its a phone designed for texting which it does really well. It's really thin, and pretty easy to use, so I'm happy with it so far. Cheap too, ten bucks after rebate.
I also picked up a pair of boots for bad weather. Given that St.Louis is a cold, wet place for a lot of the year, and given that my shoes are best suited for a desert environment, I took a trip down to the Red Wing Shoe store and tried on some of their boot before finally picking up a pair of 6" work boots that are waterproof and insulated. Going to start breaking them in today.
Intensive, surprise workshops seem to be the M.O. of the architecture school at Wash. U. We were given a brief verbal warning that we would be having a weekend workshop in two weeks when studio started, but then about three days before with no other information distributed, we were given a schedule for friday, saturday, and sunday that pretty much takes up the entire day.
While I'm very happy that we're having this workshop, and I appreciate the intensity, it would be nice to have a little more warning. I know I came here to study and to struggle, but it still feels like they're yanking the carpeting out from my feet when they spring this stuff on us. Maybe its the deep set type A personality. On the flip side of that, I've never had more dedicated staff. Instructors come in for desk crits and for discussion saturday mornings, sunday afternoons, 9pm at night, sacrificing their own personal time to work with us in studio. None of this 9 am - 5 am m-f schedule.
Anyway, our workshop is on housing, specifically public housing, which is the focus of the semester. We began the day with two long lectures by visiting architects and academia, then broke into a 3 hour charette to design massing models for a high density project on Delmar road. The school provided us with a massive 1/32" scale street model with existing buildings, and we plugged all of our sketch models into it. Then we discussed how each model project was affected by its neighbor, and how two projects could start to make the same gesture with similar forms and spaces, or splits that could be continued. It was kind of a fun exercise actually.
Today we're going to meet at the site itself for photos and to better understand what we're dealing with.
Unfortunately, the physical attributes and mechanical gestures of the phones have suffered an apparently huge drop in popularity, development, and availability. Two years ago, it was all about sliders. Now, its all about the smart phones. I don't want a smart phone. I'm already too dependent on the internet as it is. Additionally, I don't want to pay the cell phone companies any more money a month, especially for crappy data streams at outrageous prices. So no to smart phones. However, I did buy a phone that looks like a smart phone, but is really a dumb phone. It's a Pantech Link, manufactured by a Korean company I've never heard of, and its essentially like someone took a stick phone and flattened it and added a small keyboard. Its a phone designed for texting which it does really well. It's really thin, and pretty easy to use, so I'm happy with it so far. Cheap too, ten bucks after rebate.I also picked up a pair of boots for bad weather. Given that St.Louis is a cold, wet place for a lot of the year, and given that my shoes are best suited for a desert environment, I took a trip down to the Red Wing Shoe store and tried on some of their boot before finally picking up a pair of 6" work boots that are waterproof and insulated. Going to start breaking them in today.
Intensive, surprise workshops seem to be the M.O. of the architecture school at Wash. U. We were given a brief verbal warning that we would be having a weekend workshop in two weeks when studio started, but then about three days before with no other information distributed, we were given a schedule for friday, saturday, and sunday that pretty much takes up the entire day.
While I'm very happy that we're having this workshop, and I appreciate the intensity, it would be nice to have a little more warning. I know I came here to study and to struggle, but it still feels like they're yanking the carpeting out from my feet when they spring this stuff on us. Maybe its the deep set type A personality. On the flip side of that, I've never had more dedicated staff. Instructors come in for desk crits and for discussion saturday mornings, sunday afternoons, 9pm at night, sacrificing their own personal time to work with us in studio. None of this 9 am - 5 am m-f schedule.
Today we're going to meet at the site itself for photos and to better understand what we're dealing with.
Sep 8, 2010
Studio project- done!
Yesterday was a long day of work. Saori and I biked to school together around 9, which was good since we're trying to get away from driving every day. Beautiful morning, cool and crisp without being cold. We worked in studio pretty much all day long, taking a break for an hour and a half for our systems I class. This was a bit of a waste of time for me, since most of it was "why we have seasons" and "what is latitude and longitude" etc. Went back up to studio and worked until around 6. Saori went to a class, and I biked home to pick up the car and get some more reading done. I ate at home and drove back to campus to deliver a pot pie to Saori who was just getting back from class. I ended up taking off from studio a little after 1AM. Saori caught a ride with a friend and she got back home after 3AM. It's now 7:30 in the morning, and we're getting ready to take off back to studio.
It's now 11:35 and my project is done with about two hours to spare. Time for some coffee, some water, a deep breath and on to the next project for environmental systems! Glad I got some sleep last night.
Today we have a presentation of our "sketch" models. As usual, the rules we were given for this project don't really matter. It's kind of frustrating to design around rules and then realize that the 'rules' given are really more guidelines. In the real world, you can't circumvent code, ADA, or structural tolerances, no matter how strongly your design supports that decision.
It's now 11:35 and my project is done with about two hours to spare. Time for some coffee, some water, a deep breath and on to the next project for environmental systems! Glad I got some sleep last night.
Sep 4, 2010
Bathroom Birthday
Yesterday's studio went really well. Saori and I came in early, and worked until class time. When my instructor came around for desk crits, he was very impressed with the quantity of work that I had done in two days. I had a computer model in Rhino, a physical model at 1/4" scale, photographs of the physical model in sunlight, and I was in the process of importing the model into Revit for the solar orientation and rendering capabilities. Many students only had sketches, or computer models, and few had an actual foamcore model. To be honest, I have a significant leg up on a lot of students, especially the 3+ students, who are coming into the program and for whom this is the first truly architectural vs spatial or conceptual project. It also helps that I knew a few nifty programs, and techniques for working quickly with foamcore. Tip #1: (quickly learned) Use a sharp knife. #2: Sewing pins are fantastic for sticking foamcore together. Elmers takes a long time to dry on foam, and pins have the added advantage of being removable later for dissassembling and re-assembling the model.
Our studio was cut short by an all-school meeting which was 90 minutes of "welcome back to school" speeches, introductions, and reminders.Could have taken a pass on that one, although it was interesting to see the breakdown of all the students by year and program.
The welcome meeting segued into the friday happy hour on the patio where snacks, sodas, and $1 beers were sold. Saori, Dew, and I ducked out to hit the store East East on Olive, which is one of the few places to get Japanese groceries in St.Louis. They were shopping for Dew's roommate, Alex, birthday party, and I got included too.
The party at Dew's was a lot of fun. Dew's apartment is very close to campus, up on the top level of a series of apartments. About a hundred years old, and sized for a family, it is full of twisting corridors, and linked rooms. About 20 people ended up coming to the party, mostly grad students in architecture, although there were some social work grad students as well. Dew and Saori made a Japanese curry stew for the group, and everyone went out to the outdoor patio to chat and drink and play guitar.
You would think that by the age of 26 I would have learned a few things about myself, and specifically, my tolerance for alcohol. But I got swept up in the party and ended up having a few too many, and I've been paying for it dearly today. I've been ill all day long, unable to take or return calls to loved ones, and also generally missing the most spectacularly beautiful day we've seen in St.Louis. Although it will warm up again later this week, summer has turned the corner. Today and yesterday was sunny, beautiful, and with a nice crisp coolness to the air. We've opened the apartment windows up and it smells wonderful. I do really regret missing today, not just because it is my birthday, but also the loss of spending time with Saori exploring St.Louis on what would have been a perfect day. (although she's been wonderful, tending to me.)
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.
The Drawing of the Desks
Yesterday was the first day of school.
Officially, I mean, if you don't count the two weeks of 15 hour day studios of the "pre-semester orientation."
Our day generously started at noon, as our studios are in the afternoon leaving the mornings free for other classes. Tuesday's class was actually at 1:30, but we stopped by early to sit in on a short talk on dual degrees since both Saori and I are kicking around the idea.With the architecture masters degree, there is also possibilities for other masters degrees as credits transfer between fields. Their most common dual degrees are MArch/MBA MArch/MUD (masters of urban development), MArch/MLA (masters of landscape architecture), and MArch/MSW (masters of social work). Many of these masters degrees would require only an additional semester or year to complete, essentially giving you an additional masters for a year less of time, energy, and expense than it would separately.
I've been kind of kicking around the idea of getting a masters of social work. On the one hand, I've always wanted to pursue an architecture that benefits humanity, and this would give my architecture masters and future career a directed focus. The field is very broad- I'd be more towards the economic and community development side of social work, perhaps with disaster mitigation thrown in, rather than abused child kind of social work. On the other hand, I really need to evaluate how dedicated I am to that field, and how more time and money I can afford to spend. On the flip side, the school of social work at Wash U is consistently ranked the #1 or #2 school in the country, and they provide excellent scholarships. Anyway, I have a semester to think about it.
Anyway, our first class was very straightforward, Environmental systems I, which we may or may not end up waiving depending on what our course material from ASU shows. I think we'll actually end up taking it, and waiving out of Environmental systems II: The HVAC Strikes Back. The instructor was good, clear, and held our attention pretty well. We got our first assignments:
Officially, I mean, if you don't count the two weeks of 15 hour day studios of the "pre-semester orientation."
Our day generously started at noon, as our studios are in the afternoon leaving the mornings free for other classes. Tuesday's class was actually at 1:30, but we stopped by early to sit in on a short talk on dual degrees since both Saori and I are kicking around the idea.With the architecture masters degree, there is also possibilities for other masters degrees as credits transfer between fields. Their most common dual degrees are MArch/MBA MArch/MUD (masters of urban development), MArch/MLA (masters of landscape architecture), and MArch/MSW (masters of social work). Many of these masters degrees would require only an additional semester or year to complete, essentially giving you an additional masters for a year less of time, energy, and expense than it would separately.
I've been kind of kicking around the idea of getting a masters of social work. On the one hand, I've always wanted to pursue an architecture that benefits humanity, and this would give my architecture masters and future career a directed focus. The field is very broad- I'd be more towards the economic and community development side of social work, perhaps with disaster mitigation thrown in, rather than abused child kind of social work. On the other hand, I really need to evaluate how dedicated I am to that field, and how more time and money I can afford to spend. On the flip side, the school of social work at Wash U is consistently ranked the #1 or #2 school in the country, and they provide excellent scholarships. Anyway, I have a semester to think about it.
Anyway, our first class was very straightforward, Environmental systems I, which we may or may not end up waiving depending on what our course material from ASU shows. I think we'll actually end up taking it, and waiving out of Environmental systems II: The HVAC Strikes Back. The instructor was good, clear, and held our attention pretty well. We got our first assignments:
- Read an incredibly introductory introduction to building systems (central heating and cooling), that actually began with the dawn of life in the seas (ocean temps are pretty stable due to the thermal mass of water, fish are cold blooded, etc) through mammalian adaptation including the strategy of Not Being There (hibernation, migration, or death). This is the only text I've ever read on building systems that include the discovery of fire before finally getting to the invention of air conditioning.
- Student questionaire which essentially asks for basic contact information and a definition of sustainability, so I printed out my speech on the subject that I presented in Scottsdale earlier this year and attached that.
Afterwards, we went home and had a pretty lazy day of reading while Saori recuperated from being sick. (She's feeling a little better today). Then, at 9pm, we were called forth to the highest level of the architecture building for the Anciente and Hallowed Ryte of the Drawing of the Desks.
Considering that the majority of time spent in architecture is spent in studio, the location of a desk is given utmost importance. Windows, corners, and walls are all prized amenities. Usually the way it was handled back at ASU was a crowd would form at the door before studio and when it was unlocked, there would be a mad scramble for desks a bit like Wal-Mart shoppers on Black Friday. I don't know how it normally happens here, as the studios are all open and connected in large halls.
Actually, the Drawing of the Desks is a new thing here. Why it had to be at 9pm is beyond me. Anyway, we went to our assigned quarters of the hall where our studio was and our names were drawn from the Grande Chalise of Choosyng Tupperware container and we got to pick our desks based on the order we were drawn. I got a window and a short ledge which will come in handy I'm sure.
I was surprised by how many people immediately started moving in. And I do mean moving in. I came in this morning to find people desks laid out with rows of tea jars, extra monitors, coffee makers and microwaves, additional shelving, personal desk chairs, you name it. It lends a feeling that something monumental or awesome is about to occur.
Anyway, that night, we went out to Blueberry hill with some new friends. It was quite a mixed table. Representation from US, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Vietnam. Our Vietnamese friend, Hiep, told us an interesting story of his flight to the US. He flew in the country for the first time a few weeks ago, and United bumped him and made him sign some paperwork that was not clearly explained. He was then stuck in San Francisco for twelve hours along with another woman who also got bumped and they ended up going sightseeing together. She was a local of St.Louis and while they were placed on different flights, she came back to the airport to pick him up and drive him to campus. She actually hosted him with her family for a few days, took him to the grocery store, bank and phone store, and drove him to to the apartment he ended up renting. Sometimes I think that the world is held together by the kindness of strangers.
We ended up heading home around 1pm when the bar closed after we all played a miserably bad game of darts in the dart room.
Aug 30, 2010
"You came here to work, St.Louis is dead."
Last night, everyone in the pre-semester studio returned at 9 pm to bring their models downstairs. Most groups were done, although there were a few groups who took a while longer- one group actually worked until 4am to complete their amazing model- which was completely laser cut and looked like a fantastic teardrop shaped spaceship.
We all wandered around the studio, looking at each other's models until Sung Ho showed up and started telling people to bring their models downstairs. We brought our models down and he showed us where he wanted them, stretched all along the full length of Givens hall, the main thoroughfare of the architecture school.
As we were making final adjustments to the models, it came out that we would not have studio until friday of this week, which would give us effectively four free days, unless you count our other required classes. People were tongue-in-cheek talking about perhaps getting out to actually do something in St.Louis, maybe finding a good restaurant, exploring their neighborhoods, finding out where the grocery store it, etc. mostly small barbs that we've basically been tied to this studio the past two weeks. As he strode away, our instructor commented "you came here to work, St.Louis is dead."
Anyway. It was fun to see the row of models. On the stands, in the hall, they looked good. It was interesting that while there were a few shared typologies of form (the vertical box) most of the models in fabrication and form looked radically different. There was one that was covered in bondo to form a smooth Naguchi blob that reminded me of the crashed alien spaceship from Alien, there was one that looked like a wooden tornado, there were models that looked like complicated machines.
I had a professor once who dismissed basswood as a material because of its propensity to make things look attractive, in his view, that a weak design could be hidden in basswood. He referred to a studio of basswood models rather dismissively as a "basswood parade", and that name has stuck with me.
Anyway, that was sunday night. Today is monday, registration day where we met with out advisors. I hate to say it but registration is a frustrating affair. We were given no indication of how to register or when to register apart from being directed to a certain website. We have to wait to meet with our advisors to register for classes. Classes begin tomorrow. We were supposed to review courses that we want to take and discuss them with our advisors but they only put the booklets out with the information this morning. Yes, this information was also online, but difficult to find and access. It is nice that our advisors are actual professors- mine is a PhD with degrees from Harvard and MIT, and that there's only a handfull of students for each advisor, but at the same time, he didn't really have that much info on the process. I threw out a few course titles I was interested in after hurriedly perusing the catalog, and he recommended most of them. It was a pretty quick meeting.
We actually register ourselves for the classes we want to take, they just 'unlock' our registration accounts. Registration was not so tricky itself, but by the time we got around to it, two of the classes I wanted to take threw me on a waitlist. Also, all of the 2+ waived out of certain classes, but these classes were automatically added to our class schedules. Some of the classes changed names to make them more obscure- "site planning" became "Environmental systems" for example, and one class is actually mandatory but only mentions that it is mandatory in the course description and nowhere else. I tracked down the registrar and confirmed that yes, it is mandatory, and that more information would be forthcoming. Even though it is a 1 credit hour class on weekends, considering that we're registering for classes TODAY, when exactly would this information be more forthcoming? I also learned from inquiring that there is a 2 week drop/add period, which is also, not mentioned in any of the material given to us or easily found online.
The faculty and advisors are very friendly, I ended up getting some of the registration information from the dean of the school himself, and despite the fact that this is their second busiest time of year, they were all nice and happy to answer my questions. It would be nice to have a little more direction, but as my downstairs neighbor pointed out, we're in grad school, and you pretty much do what you want to do.
We all wandered around the studio, looking at each other's models until Sung Ho showed up and started telling people to bring their models downstairs. We brought our models down and he showed us where he wanted them, stretched all along the full length of Givens hall, the main thoroughfare of the architecture school.
As we were making final adjustments to the models, it came out that we would not have studio until friday of this week, which would give us effectively four free days, unless you count our other required classes. People were tongue-in-cheek talking about perhaps getting out to actually do something in St.Louis, maybe finding a good restaurant, exploring their neighborhoods, finding out where the grocery store it, etc. mostly small barbs that we've basically been tied to this studio the past two weeks. As he strode away, our instructor commented "you came here to work, St.Louis is dead."
Anyway. It was fun to see the row of models. On the stands, in the hall, they looked good. It was interesting that while there were a few shared typologies of form (the vertical box) most of the models in fabrication and form looked radically different. There was one that was covered in bondo to form a smooth Naguchi blob that reminded me of the crashed alien spaceship from Alien, there was one that looked like a wooden tornado, there were models that looked like complicated machines.
I had a professor once who dismissed basswood as a material because of its propensity to make things look attractive, in his view, that a weak design could be hidden in basswood. He referred to a studio of basswood models rather dismissively as a "basswood parade", and that name has stuck with me.
Anyway, that was sunday night. Today is monday, registration day where we met with out advisors. I hate to say it but registration is a frustrating affair. We were given no indication of how to register or when to register apart from being directed to a certain website. We have to wait to meet with our advisors to register for classes. Classes begin tomorrow. We were supposed to review courses that we want to take and discuss them with our advisors but they only put the booklets out with the information this morning. Yes, this information was also online, but difficult to find and access. It is nice that our advisors are actual professors- mine is a PhD with degrees from Harvard and MIT, and that there's only a handfull of students for each advisor, but at the same time, he didn't really have that much info on the process. I threw out a few course titles I was interested in after hurriedly perusing the catalog, and he recommended most of them. It was a pretty quick meeting.
We actually register ourselves for the classes we want to take, they just 'unlock' our registration accounts. Registration was not so tricky itself, but by the time we got around to it, two of the classes I wanted to take threw me on a waitlist. Also, all of the 2+ waived out of certain classes, but these classes were automatically added to our class schedules. Some of the classes changed names to make them more obscure- "site planning" became "Environmental systems" for example, and one class is actually mandatory but only mentions that it is mandatory in the course description and nowhere else. I tracked down the registrar and confirmed that yes, it is mandatory, and that more information would be forthcoming. Even though it is a 1 credit hour class on weekends, considering that we're registering for classes TODAY, when exactly would this information be more forthcoming? I also learned from inquiring that there is a 2 week drop/add period, which is also, not mentioned in any of the material given to us or easily found online.
The faculty and advisors are very friendly, I ended up getting some of the registration information from the dean of the school himself, and despite the fact that this is their second busiest time of year, they were all nice and happy to answer my questions. It would be nice to have a little more direction, but as my downstairs neighbor pointed out, we're in grad school, and you pretty much do what you want to do.
Aug 29, 2010
Done! (again)
I changed my mind about the base. Or to be more accurate, I talked to a few people including my TA who nervously asked if I'd cleared my choice of a canvas topography with Sung Ho (our instructor), and also Saori who strongly recommended I do something to upgrade it.
I went into to studio around 10 this morning and helped Saori build her group's model stand. Nan, my partner, was just leaving after taking photos of the model herself. Then I went outside and took about 100 photos of the model in the sunshine from various angles and orientations. There are really two modes of thinking about studio models. You can hold on to them forever until they start to break into smaller and smaller peices until you are effectively transporting a model entirely in plastic baggies or you can trash the damn things after a semester and after you've taken about 100-200 photos of it. I used to be the former category, but then when I couldn't store models in my parents garage anymore, I switched modes of thinking.
It's hard to throw away an architecture model. They are quite literally the embodiments of huge amounts of time, thought, and money. They are beautiful and interesting objects of art that are also usually the capstone of a design studio, and until a final presentation, there is no more sacred object in the proximity of the architecture building than people's final models. There are unwritten rules to architecture school and one of them is basically "Thou shalt not touch other people's models" written right above "Thou shalt not kill." Given all this in mind, it becomes very difficult to simply toss it in the dumpster like an old lamp, which is why most people start with the Keep mentality.
Anyway, looking at our model, photographing it, and then comparing it to the other finished models, I started to feel pretty crappy about having a crappy canvas base. Not only does a crappy base make the model look, well, crappy, but its also a crappy reflection of your group to the rest of the studio, who most of which took the time (and expense) to make nice basswood bases. So I tore up the canvas and booked it for Art Mart, a store on Hanley which sells (surprise) art materials. Really fun store. Dangerous, as Saori would call it, since there's so much for sale that creative people want to buy immediately. Great variety and selection. I picked up a roll of cork board, a disposable fountain pen, and a tiny penguin eraser for Saorichan.
Took about two hours to glue down the new cork topo but it turned out much nicer than the canvas. Afterwards, Saori and celebrated the end of the pre-semester studio with Thai pizza- small thin crust pizzas with Thai food covered with mozzarella cheese. Really good.
Took about two hours to glue down the new cork topo but it turned out much nicer than the canvas. Afterwards, Saori and celebrated the end of the pre-semester studio with Thai pizza- small thin crust pizzas with Thai food covered with mozzarella cheese. Really good.
Aug 28, 2010
Done!
For better or worse, we're calling the pre-semester project "done."
In addition to providing a model and the base, we were also required to build our own 3' tall model stands. So today I took a break from studio and drove down to Home Depot. I picked up a sheet of 3/4" plywood and had them rip it into two 3' boards which I threw into the Prius and headed back to studio. One of the 4'x3' sheets went to Saori's group. It's a pretty good deal- it breaks down to about $5 a person.
Back at school, me and my partner on this project, Nan, took our sheet of plywood down to the workshop and student monitors helped us chop the board up into the constituent parts for our model stand. Our studio teacher gave us plans for the standard platform, and thankfully they were about as minimal and uncomplicated as you can get for a plaform- essentially the two boards interlock to form a rigid X on top of which you secure the table top. I aped another group's design of using wooden dowels to attach the top so that when we're done, we can break the platform down easily for storage and transportation. It did take some extra effort and I didn't do a really clean job (its hard, drilling a 5/8" hole into the edge of a 3/4" plywood board!) but it worked and its effective. Nan sanded down the sides and the top so we have a slightly more finished look than rough ply.
We decided to go the easy and cheap route with our model base. Originally, our studio teacher said he wanted us to use basswood for the base, but that is just not happening for us. Neither Nan nor I wanted to shell out the dough, and secondly, while it would be good to use the laser cutter, its an additional pain in the ass to make the damn thing. So we opted to stretch raw canvas over cardboard topographical sections, and used small brads to secure it in place. The overall effect is like a dune or a sandy hill.
I am willing to be that our instructor, Sung Ho, is not going to like it. We actually hid the material during the desk crit time. In fact, I would predict that he will tell us that it sucks, that it looks cheap, and that it detracts from the model. He'd be right about a lot of that- however, I'd like to have at least one last day of freedom before the semester starts, and Nan is excited for seeing the St.Louis arch, who, despite having lived in St.Louis for over a month now, has never left the 2 mile radius around the school due to the studio.
On a lighter note, the architecture grad student assoc. put on another happy hour yesterday. At 5:30 we all came downstairs from the studios to munch on the Pappy's BBQ chicken and pork and to buy $1 Schlafly beers. We drank, we ate, we mingled, we enjoyed the late afternoon sun, all in all the best cost to happiness ratio I've found in St.Louis. The best part is: its a weekly event.
In addition to providing a model and the base, we were also required to build our own 3' tall model stands. So today I took a break from studio and drove down to Home Depot. I picked up a sheet of 3/4" plywood and had them rip it into two 3' boards which I threw into the Prius and headed back to studio. One of the 4'x3' sheets went to Saori's group. It's a pretty good deal- it breaks down to about $5 a person.
Back at school, me and my partner on this project, Nan, took our sheet of plywood down to the workshop and student monitors helped us chop the board up into the constituent parts for our model stand. Our studio teacher gave us plans for the standard platform, and thankfully they were about as minimal and uncomplicated as you can get for a plaform- essentially the two boards interlock to form a rigid X on top of which you secure the table top. I aped another group's design of using wooden dowels to attach the top so that when we're done, we can break the platform down easily for storage and transportation. It did take some extra effort and I didn't do a really clean job (its hard, drilling a 5/8" hole into the edge of a 3/4" plywood board!) but it worked and its effective. Nan sanded down the sides and the top so we have a slightly more finished look than rough ply.
We decided to go the easy and cheap route with our model base. Originally, our studio teacher said he wanted us to use basswood for the base, but that is just not happening for us. Neither Nan nor I wanted to shell out the dough, and secondly, while it would be good to use the laser cutter, its an additional pain in the ass to make the damn thing. So we opted to stretch raw canvas over cardboard topographical sections, and used small brads to secure it in place. The overall effect is like a dune or a sandy hill.
I am willing to be that our instructor, Sung Ho, is not going to like it. We actually hid the material during the desk crit time. In fact, I would predict that he will tell us that it sucks, that it looks cheap, and that it detracts from the model. He'd be right about a lot of that- however, I'd like to have at least one last day of freedom before the semester starts, and Nan is excited for seeing the St.Louis arch, who, despite having lived in St.Louis for over a month now, has never left the 2 mile radius around the school due to the studio.
On a lighter note, the architecture grad student assoc. put on another happy hour yesterday. At 5:30 we all came downstairs from the studios to munch on the Pappy's BBQ chicken and pork and to buy $1 Schlafly beers. We drank, we ate, we mingled, we enjoyed the late afternoon sun, all in all the best cost to happiness ratio I've found in St.Louis. The best part is: its a weekly event.
Aug 25, 2010
Pre-semester whining
This pre-semestser studio is throwing me a little bit for a loop. I can understand wanting to get us prepared for the studio environment by doing an actual little ungraded project, but this is really going too far. There are many good reasons to have a pre-semester studio- get students aquainted with the studio environment, learn the software, find out where you can buy materials, figure out how to laser cut, establish standards, etc. However, I cannot understand why we are being pushed to spend upwards of 16 hours a day for the last two weeks of freedom before classes being in an ungraded orientation.
A lot of these students just arrived from China for the first time. You would think that you might show a little consideration in letting them perhaps get a little more settled, hmm? I consider myself lucky that we got a week and a half to settle in and explore the town a bit before these silly studio shenanigans.
Our pre-semester studio instructor, Jung, really wants us to have something interesting and nice to put on display so that when the architecture faculty come in on the first day of school monday, they will say, "F***, I want these students in my studio." I appreciate his dedication to the academic and theoretical field but I dont really feel that his area of interest and my area of interest in architecture coincide much.
Oh well, time to sleep.
A lot of these students just arrived from China for the first time. You would think that you might show a little consideration in letting them perhaps get a little more settled, hmm? I consider myself lucky that we got a week and a half to settle in and explore the town a bit before these silly studio shenanigans.
Our pre-semester studio instructor, Jung, really wants us to have something interesting and nice to put on display so that when the architecture faculty come in on the first day of school monday, they will say, "F***, I want these students in my studio." I appreciate his dedication to the academic and theoretical field but I dont really feel that his area of interest and my area of interest in architecture coincide much.
Oh well, time to sleep.
Aug 23, 2010
Our Observation Truck
This post goes out to Chase K, who just got to Shanghai a few days ago to teach Chinese kids to speak English. Since blogspot is blocked by the Great Firewall, he can no longer read these posts.
Got back home from studio around 12:30 am last night, and the studio was still about halfway full. Everyone else's model has crazy curves, angled walls, sails or soaring towers. At this point, our model looks like a bus, and I'm kind of wondering where we went wrong. Our concept of an observatory as a place for meditative and focused looking was pretty simple but perhaps too boring. Or at least the initial concepts we attempted to develop never really went anywhere to our satisfaction and it eventually became an endless game.
At least we don't have to do series of drawings, like the class below ours. They have to draw sections of vegetibles and map the universe. We got to jump right into the more fun stuff of modeling and building. Anyway, back to studio.
Got back home from studio around 12:30 am last night, and the studio was still about halfway full. Everyone else's model has crazy curves, angled walls, sails or soaring towers. At this point, our model looks like a bus, and I'm kind of wondering where we went wrong. Our concept of an observatory as a place for meditative and focused looking was pretty simple but perhaps too boring. Or at least the initial concepts we attempted to develop never really went anywhere to our satisfaction and it eventually became an endless game.
At least we don't have to do series of drawings, like the class below ours. They have to draw sections of vegetibles and map the universe. We got to jump right into the more fun stuff of modeling and building. Anyway, back to studio.
Aug 21, 2010
Before the Beginning of the Beginning or Sleep Alec Rambles a bit
It's 10:30 pm on a saturday night, and I consider myself lucky to be at home cooking dinner. Saori's still stuck in studio. Me any my partner finally arrived at an idea we both liked and quickly called it a day and took off. It's been a not so much fun studio so far, which I need to work on. I jumped right back into my old studio habits of leaping before thinking. It tends to happen instinctively when the studio instructors throw an impossible task in front of you. I need to have more discipline of taking the time to sit down and plan out what my phases of design are going to be and scheduling them better. Its also difficult with group work where I'm working with a person who has never before been to the US and for whom English is a school subject. There's the challenge of the language barrier on top of the challenge of collaborative design work. However, my partner, Nan, has been very easy to work with, and we've both been working hard to try to really understand each other, which may account for the ease of working with her. Perhaps people working together who speak the same language take too much for granted in their conversations, or don't articulate thier ideas as well. For my part, in this project, I've tried to be pretty open, and to be honest, I haven't really developed my ideas at the right time.
Our first assignment was to form three definitions of what an observatory is and to make 3 models in Rhino expressing these concepts. As it turns out, what they meant by that, was, they wanted you to make three observatory concepts at a very intimate human scale that express experiential qualities in a sequence, to wit, what would your ideal observatory be, your own place to escape to. So when I got up and showed my work it was a bit of swing and a miss. Other people didn't seem to have this same sort of problem.
I've basically been working in studio from 9am-10pm every day since Wednesday, except for an hour-2 hour break each day. Originally, Saori and I intended to ride our bikes to school and back each day, but so far this has only happened once. We are, of course, expected to work through each of the weekends until school actually starts. I'm happy to note that I am getting very involved in the design work, at least to the extent that if I didn't really care about a 2 week pre-semester doesn't-really-count studio, I wouldnt be putting in the hours and the effort.
Anyway, for monday, we're expected to build a quarter scale model, which for my project, will be approximately three feet long. At least this one will be built out of cardboard and chipboard. Less than a week later, we are expected to build another model, this one in basswood, and have a 3' tall basswood base AND a 3D model in Rhino with handrails, stairs, etc. everything one would expect on a quarter scale model. In a quarter scale model, just for perspective, 1" = 4', so a regular door would be 3/4"x1 3/4". It's a pretty large scale to work in.
What else is going on...
We got our futon finally delivered. It was Saori's shift when it arrived. She had her partner over at our place working on the project while she waited, and when the package finally arrived it was about 8o pounds and in a huge box. I'd just had curbside service, but the driver took one look at the two girls and carried it up the stairs for them, which was very nice of him, so wherever you are, sir, you have my regards. I assembled the futon wednesday night, and it looks pretty spiffy for a $115 couch. Not uncomfortable either.
Its a pain that this apartment/duplex is so far from school- it takes about 15 minutes to bike it, but I'm happy that it kind of removed from the school, just like a spacious quiet retreat. It's so nice to walk on wood floors after a long day in studio.
Yesterday, there was an amazing storm at night. We were the last people in the studio and it was incredible to watch from the second floor as the waves of rain thrashed their way across the parking lot, whipped around by winds. Before that, the tornado warning siren sounded, and I followed the national weather service website advisories until they ended the warning about fifteen minutes later. We drove home in pounding rain and watched the incredible lighting and thunder rattle the house from our dark apartment sitting on our new futon.
Its amazing to me that I'm back in studio. Sitting in reviews, shopping for supplies, sitting at my desk, etc. etc. I need to think more, relax more, work more effectively and efficiently. As Saori pointed out, this is simply studio. Its not even considering the OTHER coursework I'll be doing when the real semester starts. All I know is that I'm already tired. Its going to be a long 2 and a half years.
Our first assignment was to form three definitions of what an observatory is and to make 3 models in Rhino expressing these concepts. As it turns out, what they meant by that, was, they wanted you to make three observatory concepts at a very intimate human scale that express experiential qualities in a sequence, to wit, what would your ideal observatory be, your own place to escape to. So when I got up and showed my work it was a bit of swing and a miss. Other people didn't seem to have this same sort of problem.
I've basically been working in studio from 9am-10pm every day since Wednesday, except for an hour-2 hour break each day. Originally, Saori and I intended to ride our bikes to school and back each day, but so far this has only happened once. We are, of course, expected to work through each of the weekends until school actually starts. I'm happy to note that I am getting very involved in the design work, at least to the extent that if I didn't really care about a 2 week pre-semester doesn't-really-count studio, I wouldnt be putting in the hours and the effort.
Anyway, for monday, we're expected to build a quarter scale model, which for my project, will be approximately three feet long. At least this one will be built out of cardboard and chipboard. Less than a week later, we are expected to build another model, this one in basswood, and have a 3' tall basswood base AND a 3D model in Rhino with handrails, stairs, etc. everything one would expect on a quarter scale model. In a quarter scale model, just for perspective, 1" = 4', so a regular door would be 3/4"x1 3/4". It's a pretty large scale to work in.
What else is going on...
We got our futon finally delivered. It was Saori's shift when it arrived. She had her partner over at our place working on the project while she waited, and when the package finally arrived it was about 8o pounds and in a huge box. I'd just had curbside service, but the driver took one look at the two girls and carried it up the stairs for them, which was very nice of him, so wherever you are, sir, you have my regards. I assembled the futon wednesday night, and it looks pretty spiffy for a $115 couch. Not uncomfortable either.
Its a pain that this apartment/duplex is so far from school- it takes about 15 minutes to bike it, but I'm happy that it kind of removed from the school, just like a spacious quiet retreat. It's so nice to walk on wood floors after a long day in studio.
Yesterday, there was an amazing storm at night. We were the last people in the studio and it was incredible to watch from the second floor as the waves of rain thrashed their way across the parking lot, whipped around by winds. Before that, the tornado warning siren sounded, and I followed the national weather service website advisories until they ended the warning about fifteen minutes later. We drove home in pounding rain and watched the incredible lighting and thunder rattle the house from our dark apartment sitting on our new futon.
Its amazing to me that I'm back in studio. Sitting in reviews, shopping for supplies, sitting at my desk, etc. etc. I need to think more, relax more, work more effectively and efficiently. As Saori pointed out, this is simply studio. Its not even considering the OTHER coursework I'll be doing when the real semester starts. All I know is that I'm already tired. Its going to be a long 2 and a half years.
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