[Image: Who said rivalry was dead?! An EmTech student carrying out a last minute decision to mark the divide between their exhibit and the DRL's; photo by Kirk Wooller].
all this talk...
...about North Korean missiles got me thinking back to my experience in White Sands. I've just put together my first podcast in five weeks.
In the recording, I will walk around and point out various missiles in the park, and then let some of the museum video material speak for itself. You might want to sneak over to my flickr set to look at the missiles while you listen:
There is a simple fact about America, and that is its bigness. Because of bigness, we can pretty much do whatever we want within our borders. (and we have remarkable freedom outside of those borders, too--like all of these bases on foreign soil) We can take a forty by one hundred mile stretch of desert and launch over forty thousand rockets over a period of sixty years, if we want to. Today we are responsible participants in nuclear non-proliferation treaties, and we instead focus our development anti-missile defenses.
There's a lot of inferiority syndrome going on out there. Take North Korea, for example. I don't think they even have a desert to play war games on. They have an ocean, but too bad that's bordered by a host of angry, terrified neighbors. What else can they do, marginialized as they are?
Of course, North Korea should not be allowed to follow our path toward missile supremacy, just as we don't want third world countries spewing out the same CO2 emissions that we did decades ago. But maybe we should refrain from labeling the country as insane, unless we wish to wear the same label ourselves. I don't think it would be far off-base. We're in love with military power and our anti-missile missiles. How redundant.
The tour through White Sands has convinced me of our insanity. I bought a postcard and sent it to my wife while I was there. It was an anti-missile missile launch against a beautiful twilight sky. The smoke trail featured a loop de loop. It was a beautiful postcard. Walter Benjamin famously wrote "All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war." These anti-missile missiles, having their own currency in politics, have been rendered aesthetic. Aren't they, then, just begging to be tested?
I will be in New Zealand on July 4th, and I can only hope there won't be any fireworks to see.
[AAPhD] Designated Graffiti Area
The PhD Programme exhibit (created by Emanuel de Sousa and yours truly) for this year's AA Projects Review plays on the tension between officially sanctioned architectural research (certified and library-catalogued AA PhD dissertations from the grand old days of yesteryear) and more recent, uncertified research-in-progress; research that, while perhaps considering itself as somewhat subversive, will more than likely end up becoming just another background tile on the wall of knowledge.
Or will it…
[Image: AA reception wall, tiled with library catalogue entries of completed AA PhD dissertations; photo by Kirk Wooller].
[Image: Wallpaper tiles... clean; photo by Kirk Wooller].
[Image: 'Designated Graffiti Area' and someone's quite fitting post-graffiti graffiti; photo by Kirk Wooller].
[Image: AA reception tagged with (predominantly, for now...) research-in-progess; photo by Kirk Wooller].
[Image: AA reception tagged; photo by Kirk Wooller].
AA Projects Review is on from the 3rd to 25th July. Marker pens not included.
[AAPhD] MA (H&T) Thesis Reviews
[Image: MA (H&T) End of Year Thesis Reviews. Photo by Valerie Bennett].
In this manic part of the year (yes, here in the UK we are STILL in school), where every day there seems to be a new set of juries being run and your own work flounders as a result, the MA (Histories and Theories) graduate programme hosted their two-day end of year thesis reviews. Run each year, the objective is to enable each student to present the topic of their thesis, which they then write up over the next 3 months - making for an ambivalent summer of enjoyable writing/research and not-so-enjoyable self-imposed house arrest; when all you really want to do is head to the beach (he says, remembering the fabulous summer of 2006… through his bedroom window to the world).
This year I was on the other side of the desk, as an invited critic alongside Bob Maxwell, David Dunster, Murray Fraser, Brian Hatton, Douglas Spencer, Emanuel de Sousa, Braden Engel, Reuben (sorry, can’t recall his surname), as well as the course tutors Mark Cousins, Marina Lathouri, Francisco Gonzalez de Canales and Pedro Alonso. It was, indeed, a full house. The experience was intense, thoroughly enjoyable and, hopefully for the students, productive. Now it’s up to them to decipher the barrage of constructive critique so they can power through the next three months, without too many distractions from what is shaping up to be a highly unproductive (I mean, amazing) summer.
Prologue: Hej from Copenhagen!
Goddag Archinect! It's great to finally be blogging - I've anticipated this for awhile. I feel like I know most of you regulars... I've been posting for a few months, now! Anyways, for those of you who don't know me, I'll briefly introduce myself.
I'm a 4th year Architecture student at the University of Cincinnati, and I'm currently in Copenhagen (DK) enrolled in the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (D.I.S.) architecture program. I'll be taking a Scandinavian architectural history course and participating in an architecture studio with perhaps 75+ other American students from all across the States. I've met people from Pratt, RISD, and Harvard, to people from UOregon and Sandiego - though I must say that the contingent from UC is the largest (~35 students).
Anyways, I'll be sharing what life and studio is like in Copenhagen for Archinect's benefit, as well as interested 2nd year students back in Cincinnati.
So! I left the states about 2 weeks ago, and hit up London, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam before coming to Copenhagen. Whole 'nother story - check FB for some photos.
After arriving at CPH yesterday we were collected by some friendly DIS staff, and taken to the city center for some orientation stuff. After being shuttled to our kollegium (student housing, not unlike dormitories), we chilled and got settled in, then eventually hit the sack.
[7/1]
Today was the first REAL day of class. After meeting downtown we took some DIS buses to Christianshavn, a district on the eastern edge of the main Copenhagen canal.
After congregating in the Danish Arch. Academy, we went through some welcome and introduction speeches and kicked off the quarter with a dope performance by a Danish string quartet. We had some time to kill after that, so we walked around the corner to check out Copenhagen's Opera House, done by Danish architects Henning Larsen and Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller.
Apparently there was some controversy between them regarding some design decisions with the opera house cladding... can anyone shed light on that? I couldn't understand our tour guide. >_<
After some lunch, we sat down for a stimulating lecture on Copenhagen's historic to current day city sprawl, touching on different periods. Given by Erik Skoven, who's a practicing Danish architect and graduate from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. I think he's prof'd at UC Berkeley and UOregon, too.
Then, we went for a canal tour! It was a beautiful (albeit hot) afternoon, and luxuriating on a boat was a fine conclusion to the day. Here's an image from one of Christianshavn's canals.
All in all, I'm really psyched about the next 7 weeks. We'll be taking some study tours to Stockholm and Helsinki, and I've heard talk of an unofficial expedition to Oslo to see Snøhetta's opera house.
Yea, that's about it for today. I'll check back in this weekend and give you guys a sense of what studio's like, and what our project will be. I'll be sure to include some Danish life-in-general stuff, too. I took some more photos of Copenhagen, and will continually be adding to them, so check up on those via my Facebook.
Hej hej!
DISCO Project 1: The Stair Project
The only way to describe any 6-week design program is INTENSE. Intense for the administrators, instructors, but specially for the students.
I empathize, I did my first two semesters of design school in two six-week semesters over the summer with studio everyday. And one of those was with UF's infamous professor Bernard Voichysonk, a man known for being a GREAT professor who was rumored to occasionally destroy drawings and models (never happened to me). I did not sleep.
This is a little different as no one here is in design school and we are all aware of it. However, design is design and it takes a lot of time and it takes its toll on everyone. Some of my students decided that this was not for them and out of the eleven I started with we are down to eight.
This is the process we took during the first project.
The first week project was to design a new staircase for the Laurentian library, except we did not tell the students. Their job was to simply connect an abstract tall room to a long room.
This first project was so lose and open that I decided that what I would try to teach each student how to develop an architectural language.
I began the process by asking each of the eleven students that were working with me to bring me a stair and a staircase of their choosing. We then took that staircase and tried to find its main concept. The way the staircase shaped the space. We sketched that and tried to separate it from the stair. We then went out into different spaces in Harvard yard and sketched similar conditions in real stairs.
At that point we took all the sketches and tried to distill that concept in a watercolor. It was back in my second semester that Voichysonk (who worked for Joseph Albers) taught me how to make analytical watercolors. I had workshops for all the techniques used (focusing on quick and 'sketchy', if colorful, ways of working) and worked individually with each student to find their own individual spatial languages and logics.
Those watercolors served as the 'blueprints' for the design of the staircase. By this point each person had both a spatial concept and a burgeoning architectural language to work with.
The process this first week was clear but at the same time weirdly chaotic. I had to get to know my students, I had to teach them how to use all their tools and what the different media can do for them. Perhaps more importantly I had to remember what is like to not know what plans, scales, sections, etc... are. How to unlearn the archispeak that I have developed in the past ten years.
The week ended with a joint review with DK Osseo-Assare's studio. DK and I are good friends and invited other people that we are close to for the jury. The result was a fiery yet friendly critique (among the jurors) that the students loved as entertainment and pedagogy.
As the archinect blogger I obviously think that showing work and writing about it is an important thing for a designer to do, so I asked each of my students to make a flickr account to begin their digital portfolio.
Check out this one week project (in no particular order):
Up Next... DISCO Project 2: The two house project (final review is tomorrow)
Above from left: Q, Jonathan Evans, DK Osseo Asare
Below: Full crit mode
(photos of the crit by Patricia)
Pet Power Lines
I've spent the last week packing up my apartment, preparing to travel for a continuous four months. And finally, my wife is able to join me! She's taking a four-month leave from her office . Luckily she is in architecture too but getting her to accompany me on 25-mile circuits of military bases is another matter..
So I have a strange love for packing up and moving out (my own stuff, that is). It's a pleasure to discover things like that favorite pen you thought you had lost, or to open an old sketchbook as you stuff it away. It's fun to try and erase your presence from a building. All the dust, the flour, the marks on the wall. Voices echo hollow inside the rooms lacking the stuff to absorb sound. Moving out means another opportunity to adapt to a new location, to build out a new space. For the next four months, that space will be a nomadic one.
moving south
Driving down the 5 freeway to Los Angeles , I have finally found a way to entertain myself on what has to be one of the world's most monotonous drives. The Central Valley is actually a landscape of great diversity and interest. That is, if you are interested in power lines.
Some of them have rat faces and some of them look like dejected puppy dogs. You can collect pet power lines: foxes. giraffes, rabbits, spiders, orangutans. The scale can get gargantuan.
I would like to drive across the United States some day and make a typology of power line structures. They might become an endangered species in our lifetime. I suppose that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
While my wife was driving I had some fun sketching:
moving further south
Next stop: New Zealand
2009 Graduation Exhibition
Some pictures of our Thesis Student's work on display in our gallery. The display is up until July 12 and open to the public, come visit!
I'm going to start liking these photos to my Flikr account, which is a little easier to post photos to, so click on the images below to see more.
Summer Prologue Part II
Where to begin?
Since my last post I worked with a local Miami firm, BEA, on a small mock-up model (1/4"). While there, I met one of the partners named Gus who graduated from Columbia in the 90's. It was a nice long chat about the nature of the profession and GSAPP back then and now, BIM, and his experiences in New York. The theme of our chat would reiterate the need for architects to learn the language of business, something that his own firm has had to learn along the way, and I suspect, most other firms do as well. Besides that talk, not much else was as memorable during my time there.
In other news, the design company my friend Adrian and I started (FOM) close to a year ago has a revamped website. No glitz and glamour, just something simple currently being hosted by the fine folks at cargocollective. Their platform was a breeze to use and would highly recommend it.
We also are working on a poster for FIU's SOA Fall Lecture Series. The collection on this site has been helpful in learning what mistakes to avoid and we hope to reveal it sometime soon.
I am also currently working on a competition with David De Cespedes and Emily Navarette sponsored by IAAC and HP. We've been recording our conversations during meetings to see if we can, post-submission, develop a way of presenting the process. It should be interesting and I'll keep you posted.
Other than that, I have my ticket ready for July 28. I move in August 4th and am ready to spend the next month before school starts in good company, exploring the city, its people, and of course its food.
Graduations at the Salk
Last week on June 20, 2009 I had the opportunity to attend the Graduation ceremony of my former classmates and friends finally complete the mission of getting through architecture school. The ceremonies where held at Louis Kahn's Salk Intitute. It was something special as I could see the happiness that filled their eyes. An even though the economy has hit the industry hard the joy of completion is still there. The ceremonies began around 9am and did not end till the late hours of the night. (some are still celebrating)
note: these image were taken from my cell phone - not a good idea
Watching my friends walk has re motivated me to keep pushing forward. With one more year to go and my two beautiful kids waiting for me I know its time to get back to work and kick some butt (my own butt of course). These last three years have not been easy working full time and going to school. Truthfully it has been a pain, difficult, stressful, and of course lots of fun! Going through architecture school can be one of the worst and best experience one can go through in their lives - at least it has been for me.
Architecture school = boot camp for architects - it rocks
