well, ladies and gents, it’s a very exciting moment. school’s out–forever! i’ll definitely miss my friends of–can you believe it?–six years. they’ve taught me a lot and i’ll be sad not to see them every day. i hope we’ll all keep in touch. we had our final, ah, final review on thursday (and again on friday as one juror was a bit day late). compared to the rest of the reviews i’ve had this semester, it went pretty well. our jurors were also excellent–particularly incisive was the commentary of two principals of the paris-local firm kilo, linna choi and tarik oualalou. they presented that wonderfully elusive admixture of criticality, humor, and optimism that can really carry a jury. their work is also pretty exciting, so check it out! and of course, with the last day of school (ostensibly forever) comes the terrifying moment of the search for work. i’m looking at a few firms in europe already, but the states are hardly out of the question. perhaps more excitingly, i’ve finished work on my brand-spankin’ new barch graduate portfolio! i hope you enjoy and (as i haven’t printed yet), any comments (positive or otherwise) are extremely welcome. just shoot me an email. in the meantime, i’ll be tuning up the work section of the site a bit to ready it for this new addition. next up before a triumphant (though possibly temporary) return to the us of a? an ecstatically exciting trip to amsterdam, copenhagen, oslo, bergen, and (potentially) belfast, delft, goteborg, rotterdam and a few other places. everybody wish me luck! (…mostly in retrieving my eurail pass from DHL at this point)
you know what looks great? when you shrink down model photos for web display. like these! please enjoy consuming these images from the final model for this semester! …i really should be writing essays. i know.
rill rill! have you heard sleigh bells? it’s a sort of noise pop group from brooklyn. apparently they met in a brazilian restaurant. they’ll hurt your ears, but in a good way. in other news, another glorious charrette has come and gone. a lot of things were different in the school this semester and while they were mostly good, there were some bumps along the road as well. the work was really impressive, though–from all the studios. most of our critics were internal, but we did have a fair number of visitors (including derek dellekamp, francois blanciak, scott ziegler, kevin alter, chris cornecelli, etc al). the criticism was of a different type, perhaps, than in years past. but as rudyard kipling would say, “that is a tale for another day”.
my project, finally completed, tried to give shape to a sort of figure-field thesis. the studio focused on the development of a “void type”–and organizing typology that used negative space to produce urban, esthetic, sociological, or other effects. i tried to take a somewhat more conceptual approach to this, maintaining a certain distance from urban arguments–often so hard to formulate plausibly. the underlying thesis of the project was to read the void against something else, rather than as an isolate monumental form of its own. as such, a void and a mass “figure” were each placed in contradistinction to the other. each form would operate on its “doppelganger”, sometimes truncating form and extending empty space (or the reverse). i tried to carry this conceptual ethos down through the scales of the project (detailing, interiors, etc), but found a certain limitation to the depth of this study in the timeframe of the project. the governing factor of the envelope became the maintenance of a tight, taut skin with virtually no surface relief for fenestration or material changes–all to emphasize the carefully-derived massing. i hope you enjoy some of the more scenic images from the project–i may pass, at least for now, on including the drier, more technical diagrams. final model photos soon to come.
well, mid-semester review has come and going to go tomorrow. along with a french test. we’ve just been learning the futur proche, as in:
“je vais à l’échec mon examen de demain.”
we’ve also been learning reflexive verbs, but i’m not going to fail myself. someone else will be doing that to me. anyways, my whole body hurts and like that because i’ve been working all the time all the time. i’ve also been listening to shearwater’s apocalyptic album “rook”. it’s very good and may have mitigate the effects of this pseudo-charrette on mon corps. the band was formed by two members of okkervil river (who are no longer in the band, think). it’s kind of like muse transposed down into a tolerable register and done twice as well with more interesting material and less annoying instrumentation. very sing-able. lots of things about birds and the end of days.
the studio i’m currently in is taught by mark wamble of interloop architecture. it’s called “groundwork for a void type”; the concept being something to the effect of creating a new architectural typology to negotiate a prospective increase in density along houston’s bissonnet corridor. so we’re exploring technical and conceptual definitions of the void in tandem with the history of “typology” as discourse in architecture (colin rowe, anthony vidler, and their distant and not-so-distant predecessors all the way back to laugier). my project has the working title of ghost block. the idea is pretty simple: two interlocking and overlapping figures, one void and one mass. the idea is to bring the reading of the building’s volume and elevations very close to the figure-field phenomenon (you know, is it a lady or a fat gentlemen with a poodle etc?). so yes, i will put up some photos of the model or something, but in the meantime here’s a rendering. and please be kind and remember that my project is only a mess because this is a mid-review. right? okay. yeah. miss y’all–
