What happens when we forget how to cut things by hand:


The unruly mob waiting to sign up for laser cutter time a few days before final crits

In a scene tonight that would have been more funny had I not been in one of the lowest rungs on the caste-based system that governs assigning a day of time slots for laser use at 1130-12 midnight the day before, we saw a few of us first years waiting hours (I now realize foolishly) for just six open non-priority time slots, that were swiftly snapped up by a few third and second years who waited 5-15 minutes. But don't worry about us poor untouchables - there is equity in this system - First years have two dedicated priority blocks that we can sign up for at midnight tomorrow. I'll either be gunning for those, or going back to the Dark Ages (undergrad) and cutting my stuff by hand (gasp).

The midterm crits for our Donovan gallery project in studio a couple weeks ago were okay. We were reviewed by our section's instructor, Jason Payne, along with another section instructor Georgina Huljich, and a rotating cast of characters including Andy Qu (from SCI-Arc), and UCLA's Dagmar Richter, Kivi Sotamaa, and Steven Dieters.


Midterm review

I think we were all a little behind where our instructors wanted us to be, but there was definitely some good work emerging. I had a little burst of productivity leading up to it and still felt behind, but now progress seems to be coming really slowly.


My not-really-near-completion physical model from the midterm crit, showing just a couple half-finished panels of the striated ruled surfaces cladding system I'm developing, with scale Donovan pieces within

I'm happy with where I've gotten despite the lethargic pace at which I've gotten there since the midterm crit, but now I need to actually produce models and drawings, and it's feeling more and more daunting the more I think about it to do it all by Tuesday. I wish I could outsource great conceptual diagrams like we're told we can outsource our laser cutting...

So, I've finally finished semester 1 of second year. I have some images from my project. I felt like it went pretty well although I wish I had worked out those few things they mentioned. Mainly just further pushing my concept on the design.








The first two are pretty much finished simple renderings of the building in its context. The final one is my physical model somewhere in its early stages. I wanted to have everything laser cut but didn't get the chance to. As usual, it started off very well when I had plenty of time and near the end as time runs out it slowly degrades with each new piece. Hahaha.

Anyway, I'll photo up all my semester projects for my semester portfolio this weekend.

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...this will seem like a lot of fun. But right now, deadlines are my frenemies.

(oh, and an update on the Da Vinci/Kramer sleep soon! Sorry for the delay)

I just completed reading and noting 18 articles and scholarly papers relevant to my thesis topic of memory, identity, and architecture. I'm knee deep in thesis since the final draft of my thesis proposal is due Wednesday. One might suspect after a long day of reading I'd be tired of thesis and my topic. But surprisingly (at least to me) I'm not, and I'm very much motivated (and its not yet the deadline causing such motivation since I still have 5 days).

More specifically I'm looking at architecture as targets of purposeful violence because the architecture is "who we are - past, present, and future". And for my design project next semester I'm looking at the treatment of this damaged/destroyed architecture. Its all so complicated, deep, controversial, exciting, so on so forth.

There are some who tell you that thesis determines what you do with the rest of your life. Others will tell you that is just another project. I don't subscribe to either extreme but as I continue to explore my topic, I'm convinced more and more that its something I want to continue to explore in my professional career.

For all intents and purposes there is very little research on the means of treating this architecture. There is plenty of research on memory (collective, public, cultural). There is plenty of research on architecture as targets violence. There is plenty of research on preservation. But there is little, if any, research that looks at the convergence of all these areas and how architecture responds to the damage and destruction of architecture.

So as I complete my proposal I look forward to sharing it with y'all. I expect there to be questions. I expect there to be controversy. I expect a little of everything. If I'm not pushing the boundary, than whats the point?

As difficult and satisfying as its been to define the problem, I look forward to the challenge and reward of designing my solution next semester. Please continue to join me along with way.

In what could be cued as a response to Emily's post I was a jury member for the 3rd design studio project on Sustainable Housing.

The projects took 2 urban sites in a troubled inner city community North of Kingston for the proposal of a variety of housing types to satisfy the needs of young professionals, new families and mature couples as well as a commercial provision (offices and retail over two stories)

The housing proposals were varied however many lost touch with the community they were designing for, instead seeking off-the shelf solutions and failing to both use and protect themselves from the temperate environment. Or getting caught in a stylistic trap of "what a house looks like"

The BIG message that rang through was how Third World communities can embrace sustainability as a vehicle towards poverty alleviation.

Here is one of the more inventive solutions. Student: Linda Dias

(See title... Comp Final is MONDAY!!!!!!)

Finished with architecture school for the next... 6-18 months. We had our final studio critique yesterday, the last architectural project required for acquiring a BEDA...



The project still isn't finished, as a presentation or as an architectural project. The crit went well, though. We we're lucky enough to have our new School of Architecture director and a familiar adjunct professor. Some interesting discussions...

As part of our final jury and the theme of our studio, this conference will be taking place at the ESA.

Tomorrow is our final review... this quarter, our studio instructors were Dan & Amale of WORKac, and the project brief was taken from an international competition for the House of Arts & Culture, Beirut, Lebanon.

The first few weeks of the quarter were dedicated to research on the context - Beirut and Lebanon: geography, history, culture, arts, etc - and some time was spent on architectural precedents. A few weeks in we started tackling the program... after a few attempts at diagramming program areas and adjacencies we jumped in to massing... the full story (more or less) is documented here on my flickr page, but what follows are my final boards... with some work-in-progress commentary. Consider this a draft of what I'll present tomorrow.

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With WORKac as our instructors, it was clear that this studio was to focus on program. The competition brief included a fairly complex table of spaces, which was divided into the above categories. Dan & Amale encouraged us to rethink the program by combining spaces, thinking about sectional adjacencies, etc. In their lecture at OSU they suggested that their own practice dealt with an expanded definition of program - one that encompassed sustainability, urbanism, and material practices as well as the typical layout and functionality of spaces.



For my project, I chose to pick up the line of inquiry initiated by Paul Virilio's "The Oblique Function" (in Architecture Principe, 1966) and advanced by Rem Koolhaas/OMA in the Jussieu Library project. Virilio's text contends that in "the future" architecture will do best to concern itself less with verticals and horizontals than with inclined planes... when walking on a flat surface, no direction of travel requires more energy than any other, wheras inclined surfaces introduce a phenomenological and energetic directionality... the implications for programming seem obvious: there are certain inclinations that are habitable, and certain that are not. In the OMA project, folded floor plates are used to define programattic gradients: for example from grand public spaces to intimate private zones. This is acheived primarily through the modulation of ceiling heights and floor plane inclination, with walls eliminated. I took this Virilio-OMA approach to programming: spaces are defined through the single gesture of a manipulated floor plate.

Secondarily, I wanted to continue the architectural project of HdM's Prada Tokyo, wherein structure, space, and facade patterning become merged. In Prada, the facade patterning extends through the volume of the building as enclosed tubes, the structural diagrid becomes the facade.



The ambition of my project is to combine these two approaches: to define spaces through the relationship between adjacent folded floors, and to define the facade patterning, structure, and interior volumes with a single system. In our cultural research I had hit upon the underlying geometry of arabic screens: many patterns can be generated from a tiling of octagons and squares inscribed with various figures. To avoid a blatantly referential facade pattern I decided to use this underlying geometry as a base.



One desire of the House Of Arts And Culture competition was to create an open, accessible, public center. It was to be prominent without being ostentacious. Highly visible yet unobtrusive. I decided that the basic massing could be a simple extrusion of the site boundary, and the major program elements would be pushed to the exterior in the spirit of openness and connection. By pushing the program to the exterior, I could begin working with the unwrapped facade as a generator. Program areas were placed in elevation according to their specific functional requirements (entry on ground level, for example) and for contextual reasons (the main exhibition space was placed above the adjacent highway, for better views to the south.)

I overlaid this programmed unwrapped-elevation with the base pattern defined above, and began to manipulate it. The pattern could grow or shrink to accommodate the relative sectional size of program areas. The floor configuration required for each program element could be built into the facade pattern. For example, the seating rake in the auditorium could easily be achieved as the diagonal side of an octagon...


(view large)

The macro-scale pattern could be used as a rough guideline, but to define the smaller scale facade divisions (and the floor plates that would be extruded from the facade) I turned to Grasshopper (Rhino plugin), and set up a parametric pattern based on tiled octagons.

It starts with an array of evenly-spaced squares, each connected by diagonal lines to its neighbors. This array is affected by 3 attractor points which control the size of each square by a function of its distance to the three points. The diagonal lines are drawn between diagonally-adjacent squares, which means the angles vary, but the squares will always consist of verticals and horizontals, and their midpoints are always evenly spaces. As such, if this were to be constructed it could be done with custom-cut panels, each unique, but all equally-sized.

The attractor points were placed where they were for several reasons: if the octagons were to be open and the squares to be closed, it would be desirable to allow the facade to open up towards the southwest into a kind of Briese-Soleil. And following on Virilio's theory, it would be useful for the pattern to take on the appropriate angles where neccessary: for theater seating, for staircases, or flat floors for exhibition spaces and workshops. The grasshopper definition was designed with this in mind. The base grid was set with regard to floor level heights, so the facade generated in this way would be of appropriate scale.







After the facade pattern was designed, the geometry was generated and wrapped back onto the building envelope. The floor plates were then developed based on this facade pattern.





Palm trees were a requirement.





Finally, I think the project is fairly successful. As always, it feels like I didn't quite have enough time, but perhaps it's for the best. I thought i would need to go in and get the plans to a better level of detail, but I think now that that would derail the argument about redefining program based on floor level geometry, so I'm willing to leave them blank. In preparing for tomorrow, I'm expecting some criticism on that (and on my physical model - not pictured) but I think even if it's solely a geometric exercise I can live with how it turned out.

thoughts?

There is a lot i can write about at this point. Its been a while, but the only thing on my mind right now is getting a FINAL model done. Thats right- final. Our design final is in a week from today- and the countdown is on. I've decided to get my model mostly done first (minus little detailing work) and then quickly move on to drawings (sectional axons, plans, perspectives) pictures to come. Hope everything materializes... I am quite excited for this critique- the process was the most fascinating part of this project and my aim with the final model is that it will directly reflect that.