Today, The Storefront for Art & Architecture released the much-anticipated results for the White House Redux Competition. White House 2.0, a labRAD entry collaboratively produced by co-founders Arielle Assouline-Lichten and myself, was awarded 3rd prize out of 500 or so entries from 42 nations. The entry will be featured in an exhibition at The Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York opening October 2nd and published in White House Redux: The Book, chronicling 123 submissions to the call for ideas. Needless to say, we're ecstatic!

However, we need the help of the Archinect community! With the competition jury having made its final decision, we're hoping that you, the in-the-know architecture crowd, will wield your collective voice, voting White House 2.0 as your favorite project out of the 40+ shortlisted entries.

There is a benevolent side to what might be misunderstood as a shameless campaigning--the competition organizers at The Storefront for Art & Architecture, by adding a popular vote to the Jury's decision, are advancing the aims of our proposal for altering the White House of the future, namely open-source government dictated by citizen input, legislation and decisions informed by statistical majority and real-time large-sample polling. Help us propel White House 2.0 towards winning the competition's popular vote and championing the argument for a user-friendly, globally-oriented vernacular U.S. government architecture .

Click here to cast your ballot!

Polls close November 3rd with the winner announced the following day as the Presidential election is decided. With your help, whether it is Obama or McCain, The White House will be made aware of your desire for the building to be reconfigured according to the plans of White House 2.0, bringing the President's mansion into the 21st century information age and creating a global symbol of democratic transparency rather than cloistered cronyism.

Perhaps your personal judging criteria are apolitical. That's understandable and probably a common ground with the jury. Please follow this link to Greg J. Smith's blog, SerialConsign, to read his review regarding the project's graphical effectiveness. Our submission, an infographic project about infographics, owes considerably to the Dutch firm CatalogTree and, of course, Edward Tufte.

Tell your friends to vote!

Before (I wrote this first part on Wednesday, during Palin's speech):

It's another night watching the American political circus/soap opera unfold and instead of wasting more time bickering on politi-blogs with other chronic comment posters, I figured I'd instead spend the energy writing on an issue with a bit less consequence, the 2nd year Housing Studio lottery at the GSAPP!

So, here are the candidates:

Laura Kurgan
Fred Levrat
Scott Marble
Robert Marino
Karla Rothstein
Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano
David Turnbull
Michael Bell

And here are the talking points according to my former classmates (advisors), now 3rd year veterans of Housing Studio:

Laura Kurgan: There's an emphasis on the diagram perhaps to the detriment of architecture--in other words, the research doesn't yields graphic design rather than built environment.

Fred Levrat: Rarely shows up and somewhat disinterested in students' progression.

Scott Marble: CNC, water jet, laser cutter, steel, glass, wood, fabrication masturbation--the end product is a prototype divorced from the site.

Robert Marino: Michael Bell introduced Marino; he was at the GSAPP for 15 or so years before heading up to the GSD for 4 years. Now he's back. None of my 3rd year advisors know anything about Marino and the talking points are pretty thin...

Karla Rothstein: Unnecessarily the taskmaster, pushing students to complete unnecessary tasks.

Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano (Lo-Tek): Charming duo with obsession for building infrastructure: water, HVAC, electrical, parking, etc. Under those circumstances, it’s difficult to let form take precedence.

Michael Bell: Bell is the housing guru and certainly well-informed, but the political, social & economic implications of the architecture can be paralyzing: how can you design the effect could be so disastrous?

Scott Marble: The importance of the studio site/context is greatly diminished once the fabrication fetish grabs hold.

After:

Gladly, the pageantry of political convention season is over (so many balloons!), and the comparatively non-dramatic school scene has come to dominate my purview. And now I'm free from political bickering until the debates and can blog about GSAPP/Architecture instead...

Perhaps the best part of taking a year off is the counsel you get from friends and former classmates. They took the courses, they have another year of experience negotiating school bureaucracy, and are that much more adroit at making their education work for them instead of against them. However, the presentations by all of the critics had their convincing portions. My housing partner and I (Junhee Jung, who also took a year off to work at BIG) chose to go against our recent work experience (She at BIG and me at BIG & OMA)--highly research-oriented, obsessed with site and program analysis--and expose ourselves to something new.

So, we chose Scott Marble and, fortunately, "won" the lottery. What's my argument for his studio over others? Well, besides the ability to break away from the research ball-and-chain temporarily and immerse in physical production, there are other reasons. With competitions and most studio projects, the paper project is sufficient. This is particularly the case at the GSAPP where space is limited, generally decreasing the ambition of models or making it altogether an impossibility. Work can be completed on any laptop anywhere that has CAD, Rhino, MAX and CS3. Tutorials are all over the internet and people are generally receptive to requests for cracks. Exposure to CNCs, Water Jets and other fabrication machines is a much harder to come by: some large offices have laser cutters, but as far as I know, almost all firms outsource small-scale fabrication to specialists (I'd like to know names of offices that have either...please comment).

Another argument for Marble's studio. Beside enjoying his contribution to the current MOMA show--Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling--he has an agenda to promote small-scale collaboration, a model he believes empowers "the little guy," undermines the necessity to work for SOM et. al. after school, and has significant value in a school where the individual project is extolled and often, as a result, projects suffer under homogeneity of thought. Naturally, this jives with the aims of my own collaborative think-tank, labRAD.

Beyond all of that, Scott seems to be, as many former students mentioned, keeping it real. Faculty at architecture schools are, understandably, obsessed with their own bent: in the age of specialization, school faculties are populated with specialists. Marble is certainly dedicated to the fabrication, design-build model, but it doesn't seem to have devolved into fetish. He placed his method squarely within a larger context of production where the CNC/Water jet/Laser cutter take are another means of output, a way to take design out of the computer, qualitatively no more profound than an inkjet printer.

I suspect the litigious Jay-Z management team doesn't read the Archinect school blog project, so I'm probably free from any intellectual property suit. (Don't sue me Jay, thanks)

Anyway, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce myself (after my first blog post), frame this blog and give a tentative prediction as to its content. I hope the blog can accomplish a number of things. For one, it will contribute to the goal of the school blog project generally: to give insight into the student process at architecture programs throughout the world. I'm an architecture student, have some friends at some other architecture schools, have worked a bit, so (like every other student), may be qualified not only give a peek into the crowded inner-workings of the GSAPP, but offer some comparison to how it's done at other places and how firms out in the working world think of the architects the programs are churning out.

Also, I intend the blog to work for me like a thought storage facility (similar to the Ghostbuster's smoking box where they kept Slimer, only for ideas), a place where I can retrace my steps during a project and see what I was thinking before, what I'm thinking now and be able to answer the question "what did I do or see in between that affected the change?"

All of that is a bit vague. Maybe I should be a bit more specific about the future content (as much for me to remember as for you to look forward to).

OK, so I'm re-entering Columbia as a 2nd year M. Arch student after taking a year-long leave-of-absence to work, first at the Bjarke Ingels Group [BIG] in Copenhagen and then in Rotterdam for OMA/AMO. These places get some press and since leaving a handful of people have asked me to describe the working conditions at the two offices and maybe offer a comparison between OMA and BIG. That sounds like a good future post topic, so look out for that.

In my first year of school I started to strike up some collaborations (although studio didn't support that so much) and competitions seemed to be an extracurricular outlet that would get the work out of studio and into the world. After a couple of failed attempts to pull a competition entry together in the spring semester--a combination of time constraints and odd working dynamics between my collaborators aided the flop--I started to pull more submissions together (before the deadline) once I left school. I've had some success with open competitions, both in collaboration and on my own, and really enjoy doing them. Friends and I, previous and new collaborators, have plans to submit to a number of competitions during the fall semester, so I'll update on their progression as they come.

What else will be in the blog? labRAD! Oh yes, labRAD grew out of the competitions I was working on with my girlfriend (starting her M. Arch at RISD in a few weeks). labRAD is an acronym that stands for The Laboratory for Research, Architecture & Design. It's sort of an office, sort of a think-tank, kind of a design hub through which we collaborate with other students on competitions. It has a website-- www.lab-rad.com --where you can see the projects I've worked on (only projects completed or ongoing outside of school, outside of work, and in collaboration are included) and recent news. One of our projects, a submission to the Tent London Urbantine Competition was shortlisted over the summer and is going on exhibition at the Nous Gallery in London in two weeks. So, I'll write about labRAD and all that comes with that: trying to collaborate with more people, keeping one foot in school and one foot out, walking the line between firm and think-tank, posting what other people write about labRAD in other blogs, etc.

Then there's school. Here's the thing about school: taking a year to go work at some production-heavy offices made me forget what working in studio was like. I remember the reviews and final products, but I can't say I really recall so much of the day-to-day activity. Maybe I blocked it out (friends will remind me how often I was sleeping in studio and generally creeping out my classmates when they came in the morning and I was still there not accomplishing anything). Either way, this may be the most interesting topic in future posts. In the fall semester of 2nd year, GSAPP students are in Housing Studio, one of the few times where we work with partners--mine is Junhee Jung who I worked with at BIG. She stayed there threw the year. I imagine we'll share the same types of reactions to re-engaging with studio and I'll keep you updated on that. Also, I'm going to take a couple of visual studies courses, more practical in subject than anything. While I'm still shopping around for courses, I want to take one that's hands-on, something to do with fabrication, and one dealing with computation or parametrics. It might be a class called Parametric Realizations taught by Mark Bearak (also an Archinect school blogger). There are major skill sets that I'd like to explore and haven't as of yet, so updates on that to come. I'm the TA for a joint studio between Historic Preservation & M. Arch students taught by Craig Konyk and Theo Prudon that will investigate a site in central Rotterdam snuggled between a 1957 Breuer building (De Bijnkorf department store) and a proposed OMA project (Coolsingel cube). That will make for some interesting blog posts.

Other than that stuff, I go to museums and exhibitions sometimes, so you'll probably see some reviews here as well.

This is the stuff I'll be writing about and, perhaps, you'll be reading about. Check it out and comment when you can.

For most of us school begins next week after Labor Day weekend. For some of us, that means we'll spend the next week grasping onto the waning days of summer in a futile attempt to delay school's start and the hours basking in the eerie glow of a computer monitor. You could head to the beach to work on your tan on stretches of sand so crowded you can leave your towel at home--why not just lie on top of one of the millions of strangers littered across the beach? Maybe there's an alternative: save the beach for the second weekend of school (neither school nor the beach is so busy) and take the next week partaking in that age old architecture student past time: Architourism!

In 2005 Prestel Publishing released Architourism: Authentic, Escapist, Exotic, Spectacular, a “cure for the average tourbook” edited by Joan Ockman, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at the GSAPP and Salomon Frausto, currently Head of the Architectural Broadcasting Program at The Berlage Institute. Admittedly, I haven’t read it. However, a friend of mine at YSOA recently turned me onto an alternative, www.mimoa.eu , a great website that allowed me to save $30 and, according to the site’s description, search “the world’s modern architecture, mapped and waiting to be discovered by [me].”



During my last weekend in Rotterdam, around the time I completely gave up at my internship at OMA*AMO, my friend Zach and I hit the road to see the best modern architecture The Netherlands has to offer with MIMOA as our guide. How does it work? You type in a city someplace in the world—generally, Europe is better documented—and a list of buildings pops up next to a linked Google map. Each building in the city and surrounding area has a thumbnail photo, description including architect or firm, and a rank out of five stars (presumably, all user-submitted) to help you decide what’s worth seeing, what’s a hidden gem and what’s hidden for a reason.



We may have just been lucky with our choices or maybe Holland is exceptionally archi-rich, but our weekend road trip was filled with many more hits than misses. What’s missing from the description of each building is its often backwoods location: beautiful architecture apparently lives in obscure corners of suburbia. Despite the way-off-the-beaten-track searching (walking through people’s backyards) I think there’s something to this wiki/opensource approach to Architourism. More often than not, the ratings on MIMOA jived with my own response. And if you’re interested in analyzing Dutch architecture only through the built work of Wim Quist, J.J.P. Oud and Neutelings, MIMOA is the easiest resource for you to plan such a madcap tour through the country.

If you want the names of any of these buildings in my pictures or the name of the architect--all found using MIMOA's searches and maps--write me a comment. Or, test out MIMOA. (a hint: they're scattered throughout Holland in Rotterdam, Groeningen, Breda & Utrecht.