so recently at work [i work for hacin + associates, a firm in boston] we finished a very fun project, the boston magazine concept home. it's in fp3, one of our buildings in fort point. boston magazine asked us to turn one of the penthouse units into a show house.

it was a difficult and interesting project--not only did the team have to make use of donated items and services from local vendors, but they also didn't always get to choose who those sponsors were or which pieces they would use. the result is this funky space that is actually pretty realistic for all of its eclecticism. most people's furnishings tell a story, and they don't quite go together, and they don't always follow a pattern. it's the same idea, that you might buy a painting here and a vase there, and have your grandparents' rug and your dad's couch and your mom's collection of knickknacks. and it's all precious, and somehow you make it all work.

so enough background. i got pulled onto the project at the very end, mostly to help out and run errands before the photoshoot...andddd i ended up getting to do some pretty sweet stuff. we had vintage signage letters from an old factory from one of the sponsors, like hundreds and hundreds of them on old dirty cardboard palettes. they were to be installed in the dining room, as a large scale art thing, and there was lots to do...so the letters fell to me!

i didn't have a full alphabet to work with, which ended up being a good thing, i think. it made it become more about the shapes and densities of the letters relative to each other, rather than words. also, they were totally filthy. in a good way. like they were old anyway, and had been lying around on these palettes for years, collecting grime. so they were different colors, from bone-white to rust to ashy gray.

so here are pictures from the process. they're ceramic letters, kind of like tacks with little spikes cast into them for hanging. i broke down cardboard and assembled them on there, and then tap-tap-tapped them into the wall with a hammer wrapped in foam packing material. they were brittle, and a few broke, but not many. it took about six hours to install.

i am also working on a very new blog for h+a that has a photo album with more images of the project. the finish photos don't belong to me, so i can't post them, but they're on the concept home facebook page. and the magazine is on newsstands now!


















and, the final product:

so i've really been an abysmal blogger. i had such high hopes when i started this thing that i would constantly be on top of it, and sharing projects and writing brilliant things. maybe my hopes weren't as high as all that, but i really hadn't anticipated being so bad at it.

i'm not sure exactly what my problem has been. i've started a lot of blog posts, never to be finished. usually i would start them, get into it a little, run out of time and have to do something else, and not return to them until they had sort of already become obsolete. i think the other problem is i've been afraid to say things for some reason, maybe afraid they would come out wrong.

i also haven't been in class very much. i've been working for a firm most of the time i've had this blog, and i've been mostly in between classes. and i've never quite known if it's okay to share the stuff i do for work on here, especially while it's in progress. so it's not that i haven't had stuff to write about. but for some reason, i just never got my gumption up to post.

but all of that is in the past now. i'm turning over a blogging leaf. i will conquer my fear of posting things. i will publish things even if they are not finished or just right. i will be a blog failure no longer.

it will be easier, since i think i'll have lots to write about. our aias chapter is pretty involved this year. up until now, the architecture students have been not very group-oriented. we're all just sort of friends with our studios, and the aias hasn't really done much of anything the past few years. but not so right now. we have lots planned for the year ahead, and we're hosting the aias northeast quad conference in march.

buut most importantly for me, we're starting a new student architectural publication--and i'm editor in chief. it's a lot of work already, so i'm sort of preemptively overextended for fall with studio and other classes. but it's exciting.

it's going to be called 'draft'. i came up with the name, not sure if it was going to stick, but everyone seemed to like it and i'm glad. i mean, it obviously references architecture and writing and such, but it speaks to the student-run nature of it. it's funny, because it's a lot of the same thing i've been struggling with for this blog. the point of the magazine/newspaper thing is that we're students, we're still learning, but we have opinions and thoughts that are worthwhile, and we're making someplace to discuss them.

for some reason, until now, i don't think i've been ready to do that in any kind of public. in classes, in studio is one thing, to talk out loud. but to actually write down my opinions about design, for the perusal of other people, has been hard. i think part of it is that i sort of happened into architecture after a year in college. it wasn't something that i have lived and breathed my whole life, at least not consciously.

so i'll be growing along with 'draft', i think. it's funny--trying to think of things to write for the blog has been difficult, where it's just mine. but thinking of magazine content and themes has been a breeze. there seems to be so much that i think we should talk about. i keep wondering, if i can do it now, then why was it so difficult before?

it should be cool. i've done a folding mailer for my office on newsprint, and i'm planning that this will be printed on newsprint as well. so it will feel a little imperfect already--not glossy or polished, and much, much cheaper. cheap is a big consideration. we know students arent going to pay, and we're planning on securing local advertisers to fund it. that's going to be the hardest part.

i'm including the logo for now. i'll have lots more to talk about very soon, like the theme of the first issue and such. it's going to be such a blitz to get it done, but i am really truly excited.

Of all the architecture with which I have thus far come into contact, the least impressive have been those that are often described and prescribed as the most breathtaking.

Rome is a city that is terribly hindered by its age, and by the ways in which modern society regards Rome’s history. The difficulty is that Rome devotes vast amounts of its area (and resources) to historical monuments. Most of these monuments lay in ruin due to the multitude of sacks after the fall of the empire, and an entire middle age of indifference. It is these monuments and how they are treated that hinder much of the city’s functionality and potential growth. These are public buildings, parks, and entertainment venues that have been reduced to mere museums to their own existence—they exist solely because they exist. Such is arguably the most useless purpose for architecture. They are relics that occupy space, while providing no opportunity for program.

Urbanistically, it is unfathomable how and why this impractical misuse of such large tracts in such a dense city persists. Economically however, it is obvious. For what would tourists come to Rome if not the historical relics? Also these projects do act to propagate Italian nationalism. Yet the latter two ideas have so vastly reduced the splendor of the very spaces on which they place emphasis. This internal discourse on the subject originally began during a visit to the Coliseum.

During Mussolini’s crusade against non-extraordinary architecture in an attempt to metaphorically link the marvels of the ancient roman empire to the new fascist empire that he was building, he razed the neighborhoods around the Coliseum leaving it as an emblem amidst a traffic rotary designed to carry Hitler’s troops on his visit to Rome.

The consequence is that the Coliseum now sits alienated from its surroundings—the rotary acting like a pedestrian moat. Internally, the Coliseum exists as no more than a ruin. One bay of seating is restored on the inside, and one level of walkway is available for exploration. Story’s are told about the amazingly sophisticated trap door equipment in the basement, and how quickly a full stadium could evacuate at the end of a sporting event. Yet one must only take the word of their guide or trusted travel book, as only one stair is traversable and one’s only view into the labyrinthian substructure is from a height of approximately 3 storeys.

The successful historic buildings are those that have maintained their purposes or have been re-appropriated. The most famous of which is the pagan-temple to the gods turned Christian church to the God, the Pantheon. There is incentive to maintain the Pantheon for it still holds mass, in addition to being a fairly impressive structure. As a church, admission is not charged.

Perhaps Rome’s other relics, the Coliseum, the Forum, etc. could benefit from their original function being restored. The forum is already often a location for large-scale outdoor concerts, and the pope occasionally holds mass to a crowd 1/10th the size of maximum occupancy at the Coliseum. But perhaps their being more stable venues will not only justify their existence but provide even more revenue for the city of Rome.

-Ben

Ciao,

I'd returned to the good ol' United States on May 1st to resume classes at Northeastern but 4 days later. In spite of my 2-week long bout with some sort of debilitating disease that I contracted as a result of having only 1.5 hours of sleep in my last 48 in rome, I'm glad to be back. I've traded in my first-story apartment in Rome that was consistently 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the air outside for the well climate-controlled environment of a tenth floor flat in Bill Rawn's West Village H here at Northeastern. However, my tenth floor living arrangement has made fatal the method for taking out the trash of which my roommate and I have grown fond.



Aware of my shortly realized capricious to blogging in Rome, the next few posts will be retrospective accounts of my time there. Some will be entries that I'd written and didn't post, while others will be reflecting back on my experiences.

Looking forward to looking back,

Ben

for more romely goodness, check out my roommate's blog:
kylejonasen.wordpress.com

While sketching the Pantheon, I was approached from behind by a woman, whose alcoholic breath I could smell long before I noticed that she was there. She spoke and startled me. I looked up from my sketchbook, my pencil still pressed against the page, and made eye contact with her, as I would anyone who was speaking to me. I continued to do so as she persisted in her rambling in indeterminable Italian under the misconception that at some point, perhaps, I’d miraculously be able to understand her. Realizing after a moment that I can’t understand sober Italian let alone intoxicated Italian, I stopped her and let her save her breath and explained “non capisco.” “All right, I will speak in English,” she replied. That didn’t help much either. And as she insinuated that I drew “like a pope,” a hand came out of my periphery and, grabbing her by the back of the collar, dragged her away.

I am beginning to regret not having been excited for this trip before I left. I implore all those who come after me to be enthusiastic enough about such an endeavor to be motivated to learn Italian before they get here and to maintain a lifestyle that includes a constantly overused sketchbook. In Rome, I have found these insufficiencies terribly inconvenient. While confident in my ability to craft a comprehensive fluency in both Italian and drawing during my stay, having honed these skills more prior to my arrival would have provided me opportunities to gain so much more than I have thus far been able.

My interpersonal skills have witnessed a drastic decline in the short week that I’ve been here. This is especially the case when interacting with Italians. My very limited Italian vocabulary was strongly tested on the day that I needed to complete my permesso di soggiorno (residence permit). My inability to speak Italian was mirrored by the post office clerk’s inability to speak English, so it was futile for either of us to try to speak the others’ language. As if the bureaucratic postal system wasn’t confusing enough on its own, she spoke more, and faster than I, as I stood dumbfounded with money and official documents in hand. Luckily a Filipino gentleman, fluent in both English and Italian, had just finished his transaction and aided in deteriorating the language barrier that hindered mine.

The after-effects of this event are still fairly strong, as speaking with an Italian evokes a flashback to the terribly stressful moments that I experienced at the post office. Even when they speak English, I immediately think, “crap, they’re Italian, I have no idea how to respond to what they’re saying.”

The language barrier has proved inconvenient for my classmates as well (as none of them possess a full comprehension of Italian). The worst example involved jay-walking and a moped scooter. As my classmate lay bruised on the pavement, one of the few people with whom she could communicate was the Chicagoan priest that hit her.

ciao,

ben

having navigated the first (almost) two weeks of class more or less successfully, i have come to find that our studio is going to be entirely different than i expected. i’m not hugely surprised—there are often major discrepancies between what is described on our program’s website and what actually exists in real life.

we will not be attempting a redesign of city hall plaza after all (and neither will mayor menino, it seems). that was the content of the 1960s urbanism studio before, but they switched it for this year.

and now, for the new studio project. (can i get a drumroll?) we will be converting a new bedford bus terminal / parking garage into a ymca. i’m including an image of a preliminary 3d model of the existing building below—it needs some tweaks, but it’s close. we’re visiting the site today (in 16 degree weather, no less), so i can update soon with diagrams and site photos.




new bedford was basically the hub of the worldwide whaling industry in the golden age of slaughtering huge sea mammals for their blubbery hides, and later became a major center of textile manufacturing from the mid 19th century until the great depression. all of this i was pretty familiar with, but what i had no idea about was the extent to which 1960s redevelopment had transformed the city. a major swath of waterfront real estate was bulldozed in order to build the j. f. kennedy highway. it allows quicker transport of goods from the seaside fish processing plants, but effectively cuts off the historic downtown area from the waterfront that has shaped its entire past. the figure ground drawings below are from 1960 and 2000, respectively, so you can see the scale of changes—it’s astonishing, really.

downtown new bedford in 1960, pre-bulldozing:


and downtown new bedford today, post-bulldozing:


our site / building is not directly on the waterfront, but it is surrounded by civic buildings in the historic downtown area—it is directly adjacent to city hall, and a block from the library and central post office. so i guess it’s fitting that the intended program is for a community center. it is certainly a city in need of some developmental tlc, but the economy being what it is, they may have to wait a few years more.

we’ve done some preliminary diagrams of the building’s structure, circulation, etc., which i’ll add when they’ve been revised.

if there is anyone out there with knowledge of other projects where a parking garage has been successfully converted into...anything else, your input would be much appreciated! there is a mall in harvard square called (huge surprise) “the garage” which is, of course, a converted parking garage. i’m planning on visiting it very soon. they also have a ben and jerry’s and a tattoo shop which, i’ve found, many people know about. so maybe i’ll get some ink and a brainfreeze while i’m conducting my architectural research.


on a completely different note, my classmates have arrived in rome! and i miss them even more than i thought i would. i’ve been seeing their pictures and hearing stories about getting run over by priests on mo-peds (true story). we’ve all been away from each other since april anyways, but being in classes without them makes the loss of solidarity more tangible. it’s comforting to have a group of people around you contending with the same urban issues that are way over our heads, or swapping obscure design websites and x-acto war stories. when i first began taking design classes (and also when i started co-op), i was suddenly surrounded by so many people that were like me in fundamental ways: curious, opinionated, perfectionist to the point of self-destructive, critical but insecure. we’ve been growing up together in a way, and i can’t wait until they’re back.

When traveling, I usually like to immerse myself in the culture of the country that I am visiting. However, yesterday morning, I found myself in a situation that was quite the contrary. I boarded an aircraft with my classmates in Logan to pass through immigration. It having been nearly eight months since I had seen any of them, our flights, our layovers and our delays had become venues for reintegration into Northeastern culture. Yet this was reintegration into a culture that typically exists 4108 mi (6611km) from our final destination. Passing through Frankfurt to gain entry into the European Union, and later deplaning in Rome were done together. And as we boarded our coach bus at Fiumicino, the trip evoked sentiments akin to a family reunion. Although the settings and landscapes flying past the oversized plexiglass windows of our bus were those of the Italian countryside and compelling fascist architecture, I was still very much in America. Even the bus’s velour drapery was reminiscent of bad mid-nineties Miami design. Our program’s director even addressed us via a microphone at the front of the bus that was connected to the bus’s PA system.

After our bus stopped at the edge of the Tiber, we traipsed through a block of Rome to our housing in Santa Maria Capella, a converted convent near Rome’s old Jewish ghetto. As a group we met the building’s American super and our doorman, and were shown inside to our respective suites. Mine, occupying the first floor, met us with 15’ (4.5m) ceilings—my room (which I am sharing with my best friend in the program) having large operable windows facing the street. The apartments furnishings are slightly less majestic, and despite it having been more or less what I had anticipated, I was glad that it at least met my expectations.

As we were getting settled, our apartment headed out to explore the area, and find ourselves some food, and later, the program visited our studios in Villa della Gatta. As part of a group, it was easy to neglect to take in my surroundings and truly comprehend the route that we were taking. These instances are examples of that painfully bland way of thinking when in a group that if one maintains a view of the person’s head in front of him, he can be confident that he would end up where he wants to be.

During our return from our studio tour, two of my flat mates and I decided to meander back to our dorm. It had begun to rain and, having had left my umbrella at a friends house when I was visiting Boston, I was unprotected from any precipitation. Having been so thoroughly entrenched in group-dom today, my friends and I found ourselves with no recollection of how we got to where we were nor with a direction home. Head strong, we trudged through the puddle sidewalks and slick cobblestone alleys of Trastevere in attempts to find our housing again. We wandered the streets as haphazardly as they seemed to have been designed. Although we were lost, tired, and soaked, and despite having at times been unknowingly a mere 50m from our dorm, I realized that this was what I was looking for.

Having successfully found our way back to the apartment, my friends and I became customers at the local grocery store, and I finished my day with a dinner of cheese, olives, tortellini, and wine and a massage.

ciao,
ben

school is officially back in session, and i've made a new year's resolution: i promise not to neglect this school blog.

i'm also happy to announce that i will not be going it alone. in about two weeks, my friend ben (along with the majority of my class) will be heading to rome, for a semester abroad in that ancient city. he's agreed to be a foreign correspondent for me, so i think we'll be alternating blog posts. we're sort of an odd couple for this endeavor: a year ago, i was absolutely sure i would be going to rome (which i'm not) and he was absolutely sure he would not be (and he is). things happen, so we both have reversed expectations to contend with.

the curricula (that is a very uncomfortable word, but so would be "curriculums") for the abroad program and the one here in boston should deal conceptually with similar subject matter, according to our course descriptions. i guess we'll find out soon enough.

in boston, i think we'll be looking at 1960s urbanism, with a focus on (of course) kallman mckinnell and knowles' city hall. i'm not sure if we'll be looking more at the building or the plaza or both, or what the scope of the changes will be, but i'll post when i find out.

i'm equal parts nervous and excited to take on a hotly contested site like that. city hall is undoubtedly cool--walking up the central stairs feels like timidly ascending into a spaceship or the belly of a big concrete beast. there are startlingly unexpected light wells, framed views of hurrying bostonians, and textural contrasts like polished half-wall banisters and echoes of wood grain where formwork was removed.

being nosy by nature, i always ask the security guards or the front desk employees what they think of their workplace. adjectives like ugly, cold, leaky, gloomy, depressing and confusing are some of the milder ones i remember them using.

the plaza works really well a few times a year, for big food and music festivals. in the winter, it's cold. cold cold cold. and windy. and treacherous--under a few inches of snow, it's hard to find the shallow changes in ground plane. government center station is often under construction and surrounded by barriers on all sides.

it will be an interesting semester.

i haven't had much time to post in the last few weeks (with my first trip to new york city! among other things), but for now here is some information about northeastern's architecture lecture series for the fall. the first one is coming up this monday, and i'm excited for it--amanda reeser lawrence was my professor last semester for a course on 20th century architecture, and the co-founder of praxis. very cool.





The Practice of PRAXIS
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Northeastern University
School of Architecture
Editor, Praxis: Journal of Writing and Building

09/29/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture

Location: 20 West Village F

This talk will consider the practice of PRAXIS; in other words, the making of the journal as a collaborative architectural design project. The design, writing, editing, marketing, and distribution of PRAXIS are all operations deeply rooted in the techniques of the architect. More broadly, the talk will investigate the disciplinary role of the architectural journal, both in contemporary and historical terms, considering the overlaps and interferences between discourse and the profession.

Amanda Reeser Lawrence received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MArch from Columbia University, and a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University.
She is co-founder and co-editor of the architectural journal PRAXIS. Her research focuses on post-war British architecture, in particular the work of Sir James Frazer Stirling (1924-92), and on the relation between theory and practice in architecture.




Deep Decoration
Nina Rapapport
Author, Curator, and Educator
Publications Director
Yale University
School of Architecture
with
Kiel Moe, Faculty Moderator

10/06/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture

Location: 20 West Village F

This talk will discuss the development of the role of structure and that of the engineer in the design of architecture projects. In particular she will discuss structure as a generator of form where the refinement of a project is one that is lead by decoration as structure that is integral to the design in great contrast to that of superficial surface designs. Deep decoration, often evolving through algorithms and geometric patterning have become the organizational system for a building as well as its structure in an overall network of distribution with a holistic spatial effect.

Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, and educator.

Her book, Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation, for which she received grants from The Graham Foundation and New York State Council on the Arts, was recently published by The Monacelli Press.

As Publications Director at the Yale School of Architecture she is the editor of the school’s book series, the biannual publication Constructs, and the school’s exhibition catalogs. She was a Design Trust for Public Space Fellow completing the project and book, Long Island City: Connecting the Arts. She has contributed essays to Architecture, Architectural Record, Praxis, Future Anterior, 30/60/90, Metropolis, and Tec21 among other publications. She has been an adjunct professor at Yale, City College of New York, and currently Parsons School of Design, teaching seminars and studios on topics such as the post-industrial factory, urbanism, and the culture of engineers.




Design for the Apocalypse
John McMorrough, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Chair, Graduate Programs in Architecture
Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture
The Ohio State University
with
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Faculty Moderator

10/20/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture

Location: 20 West Village F

Apocalypse: (from Greek, literally “the lifting of the veil”) the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the mass of humankind. The term is often used to mean "end of the world" - historically imagined as everything from the judgment of God to nuclear Armageddon; in contemporary manifestations it has taken the form of various environmental crises. With the intermingling of the improbable and the prosaic today (think Katrina and ‘The Day After Tomorrow,’ or 9-11 and ‘Children of Men’), the consideration of the apocalyptic is no longer a matter of fantasy, but of policy (recently referred to as “disaster capitalism”). This talk will consider how the idea of the “apocalyptic” appears in various narrative for¬ms (films, novels, reports, games…) and will posit its relation to recent environmental design (in architecture, landscape and city planning).

John McMorrough is assistant professor and Chair of Graduate Studies at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University, teaching architectural design and the history and theory of architecture. John writes on post-war urban form, technologies of architectural signification, and contemporary design problematics and holds a B.Arch from the University of Kansas, an M. Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a Ph.D. in Architecture from Harvard University.




Strategic Architectures and Cold War Environments
Michael Kubo
2008–09 Banham Fellow, State University of New York, Buffalo
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute, New York
Visiting Critic, University of Texas, Austin
with
Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Faculty Moderator

11/03/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture

Location: 20 West Village F

The talk will discuss the Cold War architecture of the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, the world's first purpose-built think tank. Built from 1951 to 1957 and demolished in 2005, the RAND building was the epicenter of strategic military thought in the postwar period, designed according to a diagram drawn by a RAND mathematician as a literal extension of the Corporation's interdisciplinary research model. Its headquarters was the built result of a complex set of ideas on how to stimulate creative thinking in a group environment, and itself one of the Corporation’s most important strategic products during the Cold War: a spatial experiment in human interaction and the application of mathematical techniques to architectural organization, conducted at the scale of a building for 300 people.

Michael Kubo is a writer, editor, publisher, and educator based in New York. He is the Banham Fellow at SUNY Buffalo for 2008–2009, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, a visiting critic at the University of Texas, and a consulting editor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His publications include The Function of Ornament (with Farshid Moussavi), Desert America: Territory of Paradox, Seattle Public Library, and Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark; recent editorial projects include Sanford Kwinter’s Far From Equilibrium and Kazys Varnelis’s The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. His research focuses on the strategic Cold War architecture of the RAND Corporation, to be published with the support of the Graham Foundation, and on publishing as a parallel form of critical architecture practice.




Rhythmic Self-Regulation: Postwar Schools and the Science of the “User"
Roy Kozlovsky, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Northeastern University
School of Architecture

11/10/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture
Location: 20 West Village F




Integrated Design in Contemporary Architecture
Utile, Inc.
The Rose + Guggenheimer Studio
Benisch Architekten & Next Phase Studios
Florian Indenburg, SO-IL, formerly of SANAA, and Arrowstreet Inc.
with
Kiel Moe, Faculty Moderator

11/17/2008 -
Sponsored By: School of Architecture

Location: 20 West Village F

This event will be a book release panel discussion.