***UPDATE***
Discussion topic will be "Form, Why Bother?"



So, tomorrow at 4:00pm, Peter Eisenman will be making a visit to the KSA - presumably for his annual football game with Jeff Kipnis. However, before kick-off on Saturday, Peter will be in a panel discussion with KSA faculty Jeff Kipnis and John McMorrough tomorrow afternoon. No idea what the topic will be, but I can almost guarantee it will be fantastic (on multiple levels).

TOMORROW
Eisenman + McMorrough + Kipnis
Knowlton School of Architecture
Gui Gallery

Discussion begins at 4:00 pm

See you there!

So we had open house recently which made me think about this time last year when I was working on my portfolio and application materials. The handful of portfolios which made their way to the archinect discussion boards I found quite helpful - both in terms of ideas to emulate and those to avoid. So here is the portfolio I sent in last year, maybe those of you going through the application process will find it helpful in either way.

anti-archinect-portfolio

Note: I deleted all of the text, partly because it was the weakest aspect of the portfolio, partly because I don't want to reference other people/firms/projects in this forum. It loses some continuity and balance in layout, but you get the picture. All of the land arch projects are professional work from my time with EDAW (Shenzhen office), except the highline competition board. The installation work is from my time in an MFA program that I never finished. My letters of reference were a professor from undergrad, a former boss (edaw), and a professor from my MFA program. GRE scores were solid but not spectacular. Essay was very personal about what I wanted out of the profession, what I thought it was capable of.

Other stuff to give you a quick snapshot of my class: I am in the MLA II program which is post-professional (my undergrad BSLA is from U. Wisconsin 2002). There are 9 of us this year. Two of us are licensed (although I hadn't passed my last LARE section by the time my application was submitted). Three of the group are straight out of school (Purdue, Berkely, Tshinghua though two of these are out of their 20s). Two are international (Korea, China) and the rest are domestic. 6 females, 3 males. A few in the 24/25 area, a few in the 30 area a couple older. Previous employers include EDAW (x2), Ken Smith, Mathews Nielson, Korean Gov't, .

Ill finish with a thought from my professional practice class with Paul Nakazawa about approach to marketing and work in general: "Its all about commitment, this business runs on intensity."

I spend a lot of time looking at ugly buildings. You could say I'm addicted to them. US military bases are not pretty things. One base planner put it to me this way: "We build 'em like jeeps, simple and functional." And there's a certain logic to jeep aesthetics: because it looks cheap and functional, then it probably is. The same goes for a lot of military architecture. It's basic, modular, cheap (in terms of finishes), and pretty damn ugly.



Well you can't quite build like that in Italy. I toured Aviano Air Base, northeast of Venice. It was a weird "architectural pilgrimage" being that one of the key books I read putting together this proposal was Mark Gillem's America Town. As a reserve Air-Force planner, he details the mocking of Palladian style: faux loggias and other such gestures at cultural assimilation. The book is more about land use and less about architecture. That's one thing that interests me in military bases (when my eyes get tired) is to think about the land use issues: who owns it, how does the treaty allow for its continued use, what happens when the land goes back to civilian use, etc.

In Italy I also met with some planners at Camp Ederle in Vicenza, where there's been a heap of protest over the new Dal Molin development. That's a whole 'nother story. But one of the planners gave me a .pdf of design guidelines for the army post derived from Palladian style. It's gold. You can just imagine the architecture being used as a beard for the military, saying "hey, this barracks has A-B-A-B proportions and square windows, see how it fits?" or "look at those doric columns at the headquarters; that means we belong here." .



Right, so this post is really not about the attempt to make the ugly beautiful, but it's simply about two really, really beautiful buildings that I had the pleasure to explore. One is famous, and the other is relatively newly restored. Check 'em out:



Castelvecchio was one of the first things I remember in architecture school. Someone at USC showed it in the intro to architecture lectures and it struck a deep chord. I feel like it came right when we were all neck-deep in Corb's five points, Itten's color theory, and the oppression of Mies's free plan. I thought, hey architecture isn't all about construction from a blank slate. You can do beautiful things with reworking an existing palette. So it's a bonus that I got to do this pilgrimage and chalk it up as a post-military site visit.

The "old castle" became a museum in the early 20th century but was in tatters after WWII. Enter Carlo Scarpa. The dude was obsessive, constantly working over drawings, washing them in white tempura and scribbling on them anew. His hand is in every corner of the building and, yet, it as though no hand has touched it but rather the natural, sublime forces of erosion have just shifted some planes, left some corners gaping, some stones stepping.

It's an amazing feeling when you get to walk through the building of an architect you've always admired in slides and in books. That's the real Grand Tour, and the only proper way to learn architecture, I think.

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The other building not to be excluded from a set of the post-military beautiful in Italy is the restoration of a tower in San Erasmo in the Venetian lagoon. The architects are Carlo Cappai and Maria Alessandra Segantini. If you can find the book Infrastrutture dello Sguardo (I bought it on the site) I recommend getting it; it's a beautiful book as well as a beautiful building.

There was an art installation as part of the Venice Biennale of Art and uncannily, one of the video works was about bunker towers in the lagoon built during WWII.



That's all I have time for, I'm jumping on a plane from SFO to Manila in six hours. The last leg of the trip starts tonight!

[Image: "Surfaces", Bernard Tschumi's 'Fireworks 1974/2009'; photo by Kirk Wooller].

For 35-year-old fireworks, Tschumi’s pyrotechnic display last Friday over the rooftops of the AA was pretty damn impressive. (Thought I get the feeling this wasn’t a completely authentic restaging of his 1974 project.) The fact that both fireworks and audience were under a persistent rain shower certainly added a touch of magic to the event. Tschumi himself was pleased with the “fire and water” combination, but this enthusiasm was matched by a guarded reluctance to discuss the project.


[Image: "Lines", Bernard Tschumi's 'Fireworks 1974/2009'; photo by Kirk Wooller].

“Fireworks 1974” was the project that Bernard Tschumi featured in the recent exhibition “First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s”. At the time of its original staging, the project made a claim for the value of words and signs (as opposed to images and spaces) in architecture. It was also a fierce reaction against a rising architectural historicism. The driving concept behind the work is stated in the first two of lines of Tschumi’s Manifesto 1:

“Good architecture must be conceived, erected and burned in vain. The greatest architecture of all is the fireworkers’: it perfectly shows the gratuitous consumption of pleasure.”

An AA flyer, released shortly before the event, claimed in large font, “TSCHUMI. MEGAPHONE. FRONT STEPS. FIREWORKS. FIRST WORKS.” While the megaphone angle was perhaps a little presumptuous for Tschumi’s more self-effacing demeanour, it did get me wondering whether he still found in his “first work” something that continues to operate as “the basis for long-term interests, agendas and even obsessions” (as the First Work’s catalogue makes claim). I wondered whether he still felt that “the greatest architecture” should be “gratuitously consumed with indifference”, or whether his enthusiasm for such gratuity - something that sounds decidedly antiquated - was curbed in light of the recent economic and ecological climate.

Fortunately, I had a chance to put this to Tschumi in the reception drinks after the fireworks. However, his guarded response of, “Oh, we’re not going to get all intellectual now”, was followed by an impromptu slideshow of the misty photos he had just taken of his own work, in which he paid particular tribute to the magical combination of “fire and water”. It seems that Tschumi’s first work holds other interests for him now.

A movie of the fireworks event can be seen here

I have to admit that I am reaching the point of burnout this semester. This is primarily because I took 15 credits this summer which was required of all students who did not have a prior degree in architecture. That translated to class everyday from 8:30 - 6:00, May to mid August. After one week off I rolled into 18 credits for the Fall which is also required if you want to stay on track to graduate with the doctorate in 3.5 years. So I am definitely eager for the winter break to arrive. Final review week will occur starting Dec 4 so I have around a month left.

One of the reasons also for my burnout has been the high number of group projects in classes. In one class in fact every single project for the semester has been a group project. While I certainly understand the benefits of knowing how to work as a part of a design team it gets old when that is the case in almost every class. It is difficult to build your own momentum and really run with ideas as they occur. Hopefully in future semesters there will not be such an emphasis on group work.

As an update to an earlier post, I wanted to mention that the school has been able to open its doors once again for weekend studio use. At the beginning of the semester the university had decided to close all non-research buildings on the weekend to cut energy costs and help make up for the massive budget shortfall. An energy task force was put together at the architecture school to find a way to re-open the building on the weekends and still cut costs. A plan was drafted and submitted to the school and we were allowed to open the building on weekends. It has hardly made a noticeable difference though because students were still using the building on the weekends before because security was extremely lax in enforcing its closure. However now at least we don't have to feel like we need to hide in our studios.

My attmept at widening scope.

Last friday an exhibition opened in the main gallery at the AA entitled First Works. I found it timely because I have been struggling for a while with the theme of the exhibition (outlined in the curatorial statement). The work on show in the exhibition, all done in the 60s and 70s, has an undeniable influence on the work being done today, but the question one has to ask (I think) is what exactly these influences are and how are they being expressed.

Answering some of these questions would narrow add some specificity to an otherwise floating situation. Seeing all the work in one place (an amazing number of original drawings) is key in clearing up some of the confusion (my confusion).

Come for a visit if you are around.

Here are the photos of some of the casts before the casting operations.

The work here was done with Brendon Carlin, Kyle Chou, Carlos Piles, and Lluis Enrique Monzo.

After our first studio project, Garmenture, was completed most of my class took the weekend to catch up on work for our other core courses before we were presented with our next studio project the following Monday, September 28th.

This project is not quite as infamous as Garmenture but it was much more challenging. “Between the Planes” explores the problems that come with moving between 2D and 3D representation. The project also serves as a means of learning 2D drawing softwares. For the most part UBC students use Vectorworks but some people with previous exposure are using AutoCad.

The project gave us the following two drawings with the measurements of 18 m long, 11.124 m wide and an assumed 18 m deep or high (depending on whether you interpreted the drawings as plans or sections.) The assignment was to infer a simple set of rules that link these drawings in order to generate a 3-dimensional space.



The problem posed an incredible amount of possibilities in our interpretation and the opportunity to develop the concealed space was at times overwhelming. My studio instructor encouraged us not to worry about a program for the space and rather to focus on a conceptual idea while developing a system of consistent rules to create the space. He pushed us to think abstractly about our operations and not to be restricted by our understanding of conventional space.

I chose to read the drawings as plans and stacked them directly on top of one another. I decided to angle all of the planes creating as many connection points as possible, which served to eliminate any redundant shapes. I was also interested how hidden planes could intersect with the visible ones in plan to provide structural support without creating any volumetric space.

Here is a simple axonometric drawing of my idea. It was one of my first attempts with the software and I have become much more adept with it since. The feedback I got on the project was that I didn’t develop the space enough and my final model didn’t look very rich. I was also encouraged to think about user experience more and be more aware of the way a person would interact with a space of these dimensions. The critics were interested in the way a created movement using the structural planes and the way I spaced them based on predominant vertical lines created by the plan. They encouraged me to develop ideas like this further for next time.



Between the Planes was at times mind blowing but I overall a really positive exercise that changed the way I think about spaces. It was also a great springboard for perfecting drawing mechanics, model building, and presentation techniques.

October has been an exceptionally busy month with midterms, essays and the wrapping up of the first three of our studio projects for the term. I have yet to pull any all nighters (some people in my studio are up to 7 for the term) but I haven’t been doing much other than school work and had to cancel most, if not all, of the social commitments I had for the month, including family and friends visiting from back east for thanksgiving.

Our first studio project is known as Garmenture and has been going on in the school of architecture for as long as anyone can remember.

The assignment is basically to conceive, construct and present a conceptual form that can be worn on your body. The purpose of the project is to help first years develop a design process, as well as to understand the importance of the body as a constant within architecture and the necessity of understanding your site. The project also served as a method of introducing us to different methods of 2D and 3D representation as well as exploring a number of different materials.

My studio instructor, Oliver Neumann, encouraged us to explore a movement of our body and develop a piece that functions based on this movement. I was interested in the how the skin moves over the body in a range of motions. So I constructed a shirt that basically had long sticks poking through it. Underneath the shirt the sticks were affixed to my skin extending back out through the shirt to exaggerate any movement. With the subtle movements of my body, such as slouching my shoulders, the sticks showed the very fluid motion of the skin. They often reacted in a complementary fashion with their tips coming together on the front of the shirt and separating at the back.

In addition to presenting the project in studio to our instructor and design critics we also had to show our projects to the entire student body in a Friday evening fashion show. This was a really fun way to wrap up all of our hard work and reminded us not to take it too seriously. Here are some pictures from the studio reviews and the after hours fashion show.

Studio Reviews From George Wagner's studio:






The Annual Garmenture Fashion Show:

I have no idea what 'Loop' we are technically working on currently in this project. If I had to guess, I would say I'm in the loop where one swirls around in a confused stupor, much like a giant toilet bowl, before being deposited into a heap of disappointment and well, shit.

I've pretty much lost all motivation. Yes, that excitement seen in previous posts...gone. And it's not just me. Pretty much everyone in this studio is finding it hard to care about the project....or anything at all. Which is strange because it's not simply the semester weighing on our mental tolerances...it feels different this time. Most likely the visions of Italy have us all seduced into the prospects of a less intense semester experience. Italy-itis. It is literally so close...in fact, only two months from today my plane leaves Detroit for Paris.

Recently we received the final program brief for our final project, sited in Ohio City, a neighborhood of Cleveland located on the outskirts of downtown directly west of the Cuyahoga River. The project is a culinary institute of sorts and calls for a Fast Good Restaurant, El Bulli Restaurant, Kitchen, Restrooms, Business offices, Library and Reading room, Food Culture Department, Social Department, Scientific Department Laboratory, Multimedia/Conference Area, 6 apartments for visitors, a public garden, and a private kitchen garden. In addition the site requirements include 3 interconnected freshwater aquaponic fish hatchery ponds encompassing an area of ¼ acre, feed storage, and waste disposal.





Here are images from the recent site visit.

fast good storefront site.


the west side market, located across the street.


interface between culinary institute site and west side market.


boundary.


boundary.




downtown across the river.


i have a weird obsession with surveillance cameras.


We have another site as well. We were asked to investigate a formal dining event, much like the informal eating event explored at the beginning of the semester. Myself and a group from studio went to Lolita located in Tremont, Cleveland. I set up my camera and took a time-lapse video of the event and investigated the structure of the formal meal (courses, ordering, etc.) in relation to time-space and the varying perception of those time-planes.

time-lapse flipbook.





[meal mapping > to be completed]


I don't really know where all this is going...just that 4 weeks isn't enough time.