sukkah city competition (summer 2010)

This past summer I was motivated to do a few sketches for a really interesting competition called "Sukkah City 2010." The task was to re-imagine a temporary religious structure erected every year during the jewish holiday, Sukkot. From the competition's website:

"Biblical in origin, the sukkah is an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice. Ostensibly the sukkah's religious function is to commemorate the temporary structures that the Israelites dwelled in during their exodus from Egypt, but it is also about universal ideas of transience and permanence as expressed in architecture. The sukkah is a means of ceremonially practicing homelessness, while at the same time remaining deeply rooted. It calls on us to acknowledge the changing of the seasons, to reconnect with an agricultural past, and to take a moment to dwell on--and dwell in--impermanence."

For me, most likely as a consequence of living in eugene for the past three years, the most evocative theme of this competition was the idea of homelessness. Questions arose about [the role of home in society] [the prospects/limitations of shelter to determine 'home']  [the significance of shelter in the act of gathering] and [what it means to be with or without home, shelter, and/or companionship].

the act of gathering informs a shape, carved from a shelter, to cultivate and enhance the act of gathering

There is something about the idea and the presence of a homeless population that feels incomplete - a combination of (a) their placement outside the boundaries of our society (which is perhaps the most vivid example of a social standard manifested by a physical, architectural reality [no roof, no walls, no service] or (b) our inability to house every human in our own societies (can we possibly be complete when people unwillingly live on the street?).

words read (top to bottom): unfinished, temporary, incomplete, impermanent, homelessness, placelessness.

I wanted this structure to feel unfinished to remind the occupant of her own incompleteness. In effect, the complete structure would allude to its own physical incompletion, drawing attention to the process and the meaning of a life through which one works continually to improve herself, the lives of those around her, and their relationships to each other.

trying to blur the lines of earth, floor, wall, roof by wrapping the structure into one continuous strand

The fun of this competition was in the interpretation of the simple, biblical rules, specifically relating to the walls and roof. In the above sketches, structural members would come from the earth, wrap the enclosed area and open to the sky, blurring the lines between floor, walls and roof. In theory this would allow for freedom of form and adherence to the guidelines through tectonic detail, color and material. 

context - union square park from a distance

Twelve winners were selected to build their structures in Union Square during the week long holiday in September. They are worth taking a look at.

Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall

This past Spring I was selected by the School of Architecture and Allied Arts to receive the Richard Campbell Travel Scholarship, a $5,000 stipend based on a proposal I wrote in January. I spent a small fraction of the stipend this summer on a visit to L.A. where I spent some time in Gehry's Disney Concert Hall and Rafael Moneo's Our Lady of Angels Cathedral. Below are some sketches from the concert hall.

[pastel sketch of BP Hall on vellum]

The subject of my proposal for the scholarship was the relationship of architecture to writing, so I started recording some of the experience in that medium. Gehry's building felt like it was the paper music is written on - the sound, or the performance felt inevitable in its space. Metaphor is obviously of interest to me, particularly its use during the design process and as a means of communication in presentation. 

[pastel sketch of path behind Garden Pavillion, Children's Amphitheatre]

One thing was certain after this trip; it is impossible for me to make an opinion on a building without visiting it (or in this case, on an architect). This was a building that I stepped inside and immediately felt overcome with emotion, something I have experienced in only one other place (Ando's Times Building in Kyoto). Gehry is not given much credit at the U of O, in fact I don't know if i've ever seen slides of the interior of any of his buildings. I guess I had come up with some idea of who he was or what his work stood for, and therefore did not think twice about visiting any of his projects. Thanks to Howard Davis' suggestion of adding the concert hall to my itinerary, I realize it was superficial and unjustified, and a building should only be judged through one's experience of that building. 

Fall 2010 Studio - A Museum for the Tiber River in Rome

Below is part of my first exercise for this term's studio (click here for PDF description):

Rome is a place of visitors, thriving on her recaptured, relived glory. The time has passed but superficially remains through the preservation of relics, monuments, lifestyles and traditions. What once defined the relationship of Rome to her Tiber - interaction, awareness, integration - was altered by popular aesthetics in the 19th century. We have witnessed a similar alteration in the growth of modern cities, a separation and harnessing to adapt our waters to our needs and aspirations only to see these interventions fuel our diverging relationship. Today water is feared. It is held over us as a threat, a reminder of our dependence on its figurative stagnation. A museum on the Tiber is an opportunity to embrace the ever changing relationships we have with our surroundings, to be aware of ourselves in a given moment, to realize the river, just as our relationship to it, is never the same. To experience the river for certain is to touch, smell, hear, see and taste our own impermanence in its presence. It is our current ability to interpret and perceive our relationship to water that we can honor the history of The Tiber River in Rome. 

Re: 'Places that work: I. Grand Central Station's Main Concourse'

I caught this brief post on Metrolpolismag.com the other day: Places that work: I. Grand Central Station's Main Concourse. In the author's opinion, daylight is the largest contributing factor to the success of Grand Central Terminal's main concourse. Though I am sure the daylight helps during the day-lit hours, I am not certain that it is the single most powerful force contributing to its success. This is my attempt to recount why on one particular evening Grand Central Terminal was a place that worked.

It was December 31st around 7:50 pm, a few hours after the sun had set, a few more until the ball would drop. It was my first trip back to New York City since starting architecture school six months earlier. Although I had been there dozens of times before, nothing had prepared me for this night. I was waiting to meet up with a few good friends of mine. We had chosen the center of the station, right by the big clock. It should be no surprise that we were not the only ones.

The first architectural detail I remember is the higher than human scale ceiling that seemed appropriate for the occasion. As I try to recount the scene from where I was standing, I cannot help but give way to a perspective that takes me above the crowd, looking down on all of us in our dark, winter outfits, our small bodies contrasting with the muted stone walls and floors. The visitors in motion glide seamlessly around each other until they leave the scene or pause to find their familiar counterpart to embrace. Impermanent as we move in and out at a hurried pace, for any given moment we are all guests of the station, dancing together under the varying tones of warm, electric lighting. The arched windows above introduce us to the glow of the surrounding city, shadows cast in all the deep layers of those high ceilings. Somewhere from within those layers, speakers play something classical and recognizable to one with little knowledge of the genre at just the right volume; loud enough to hear if you pay attention, but soft enough to ignore if you are caught up in the exuberant sounds and motions of the ground floor. The emotions and movements of the room mimick the music; there ware adagios and long rests between allegros and crescendos. I wait and watch for about twenty minutes as my friends ran late. I stood there hoping perhaps they had forgotten about me so I could stay and watch for another few hours. 

It was clear from the extra long embraces, the occasional tears and the genuine outpouring of love that some had not seen each other in years. Many of the guests spoke languages unfamiliar to me, which made their tones and expressions that much more revealing in my observance. The room radiated in a way I had never felt before. The architecture certainly played a role, but none of the station's individual architectural characteristics really mattered at that given time. The space was perfect in facilitating a unique human experience, as if nothing else could have possibly been in its place.

I am extremely interested in understanding how design can impact our experience of space. But no matter what any of us diagnose as the reason for a building's success, the real impact is not in our prescription of those characteristics, it is in our ability to persuade others that their execution has created a worthy place to visit and observe for themselves. Maybe that is the point of a blog series entitled 'places that work', but to me such a series is representative of a much larger dilemma in learning about architecture today. We can explain the benefits of daylight ad nauseam, but if the audience does not get out and see it in the context in which it was described, for which it was remembered, they will never understand it for themselves. If they never understand it for themselves, they will never be able to create it in a building born out of their own imagination. Yes, daylight is important in Grand Central Terminal - but such a brief attempt to explain why is not doing the space or the student any justice. She must feel the importance of daylight herself and be taught to observe it and its benefits. 

recent work

I've been taking a couple classes this term, and teaching the first year option III students in media. Below is some work produced over the last couple months. 

Gerlinger hall. ink and watercolor.

Kyoto Special Studies Assignment

The following book is something I put together to complete two 'special studies' credits from last year's trip to Kyoto. It is a series of images and writings chosen for their high quality and capacity to represent particular themes of the trip.

I would like to add more writing, but time was running out so this is the product as it stands.

It was nice flipping through my sketch book and all the photos. All the imagery is filtered down from thousands of different pictures, watercolors and sketches done over the 7-week span. It made me sad and wishful for a return trip in the near future.

Open publication - Free publishing - More watercolors

Scroll over the right side of the image to flip through the 30 pages (as if you were reading a book). I suggest opening it up to full screen.

William Steig, CDB?

CDB? by the author, sculptor, cartoonist William Steig (1907 - 2003) is one of the best books i've seen since coming to school. In much of our work we are asked to 'design drawings' and try our best to understand the relationship between text and image. Like I've said before, the text gets much less attention than the images. CDB? has dozens of beautifully clear, entertaining examples of that relationship. While flipping through these pages I can feel my brain moving back and forth between the text - a series of letters used to convey words - and the illustrations. It's a great example of how much ink is actually needed to convey emotions and ideas. The subtle differences in faces, positions, movements and exclamations throughout the book are fun to pay attention to as you decipher the messages. 

Here are some of my favorites:

ktisma journal

KTISMA

κτίσμα

is:

    a publication edited by graduate students at the university of oregon's department of architecture.  

   a focused forum of discussion about environments; how they are created, imagined, interpreted, presented, and questioned. 

each issue of KTISMA is a platform for the conversations within the school to provoke a discourse at large. 

issue #1:  "you hold the gun!" 

" . . . he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able
to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous

flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers
until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with buildings
is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to
grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations . . . " -Bruno Latour, Albena Yaneva

motivated by Bruno Latour's 2008 article "Give me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’S View Of Architecture." KTISMA asks for projects, of any printable media, that:

   - approach the environment as a "moving project"--beyond its imaging as something fixed and static

   - expand notions of communication (drawing, writing, photography, etc...) as an instrument of demonstration rather than representation 

   - resolve the breach between linear representation to complex manifestation
  - demonstrate the multi-faceted and dynamic culture of architectural proposals 

   - anticipate time-based properties of the built environment: decay, growth, modification, transformation, durations, and intervals 

submissions date:

6/2010

further information on 

submission specifications: 

ktismajournal.com

                               

publication date:

9/2010

Systems Flow Diagram

This term I am in a studio taught by David Cook, a principal in the German firm Behnisch Architeckten. David has been named the 2010 Belluschi Visiting Professor (more on this later). This past Monday we had a pin-up presentation and group discussion about our assignment. The assignment was to create a systems flow diagram representing the research we had done over the first week (research that was broken down into eight categories with respect to urban environments: water, transportation, solar, waste, food, education, trade and health). For my presentation I drew inspiration from a team of architects out of Russia named Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. Together they established a reputation for conceptual architectural presentations and beautifully detailed, allegorical etchings commenting on the life of cities.

From "Forum de mille veritatis", 1987

I spent one afternoon completely engrossed by their monograph for two reasons; first because of their use of text. As I mentioned in my post about communication in architecture, the written word is an often undervalued component of our education. When text is used effectively to tell an architectural story, or even poetically as in Brodsky and Utkin's work, it adds a lot to a presentation. As noted in the preface by Lois Nesbitt,

"Text is everywhere present in Brodsky and Utkin's etchings, drawing on the convention of labeling architectural drawings and of applying captions to storybook illustrations, and thus reflecting the hybrid architectural narrative nature of their production. Moreover, the pair plays with the idea that such texts explain or at least identify images".

The second reason I was captivated by this work was the effectiveness of storytelling in order to represent or diagram architectural ideas. Their use of text and selection of images effectively introduce entire fictional universes, armatures for the audience to participate with their own agendas, personal persuasions and imaginations. The work, a response to "the bleak architectural scene in the Soviet Union", seemed applicable to our task at hand; creating a model for the intervention of urban agriculture in American cities,

"an escape into the realm of the imagination that ended as a visual commentary on what was wrong with social and physical reality and how its ills might be remedied. It was a fortunate historical accident that the work was created on the eve of radical revisions of Soviet policy toward, among other things, cultural expression."

I wanted to write a story to help me filter the overwhelming mass of information our class had presented the week before. If I could figure out the characters of the story and create a narrative for those characters, maybe I could diagram the system in which they participated more effectively and in turn understand it myself. To do this I collaged components from three of their etchings, a project from Lebbeus Woods, two illustrations from Peter Sis and one from the cartoonist Heath Robinson.

There is a building downtown. it is one of many buildings. it stands unremarkable from the street.

Inside this building live people in dwellings furnished with everything necessary for life. most of the dwellings are oriented side-by-side, centered around a void. the void runs down the building, deep into the surface of the earth. every resident spends his time working on a task. the tasks vary from person to person. they vary in scope, size, concern, difficulty and gratification to the resident. sometimes the tasks overlap, sometimes they are repeated by others, sometimes they result in the production of objects and sometimes those objects go to good use. when one task is complete, another is waiting.

There is a resident in this building who continually performs one task. he is in charge of taking care of the other residents in the building. he picks up and discards superfluous objects, he distributes new tasks upon the completion of old ones. he lives inside a unique dwelling above the rest.

This building is a fine place to live. all the residents are content, happy to perform their tasks, indifferent to their isolation, likely unaware of'anything else.

And as a result of the story, this agenda was formed to prepare for the remainder of the term:

Credits for original work by:

Lebbeus Woods "High Houses"

Brodsky and Utkin "Columbarium Habitabile"

"Bridge"

"Villa Nautilus"

Peter Sis, "Starry Messenger" and Heath Robinson.

Lyceum Competition

During the Fall of 2009 I was lucky to be enrolled in a studio competing for The Lyceum Fellowship. Celebrating its 25th year with the 2010 competition, the Lyceum Fellowship is an annual design competition open to a select number of schools around the country. The location and program change every year, chosen by a distinguished professional architect and juried by a panel of professionals and academics in the architectural field. This year's program author was Steven Ehrlich of Ehrlich Architects. The program was to design a community center in the city of Abuja, Nigeria. 15 schools participated, and the results come out sometime this week (though i do know i did not place). The first place prize is $12,000 to spend six months traveling abroad. Second place is $7,000 for three months abroad and third place is $1,500 for whatever the student chooses. There are also honorable mentions and citations that are awarded for outstanding efforts. I did not post this earlier because the competition format is a six-week design phase. Our studio had our six weeks in the fall, but the deadline for submission was one week ago so presumably there were teams working up until March on the same competition.

Below are images from my final submission. The required format was 7 pages in an 11 x 17 layout. This was an incredibly rewarding exercise for many reasons, some of which i would like to get in to in some future posts. For now, just the submission as it was sent and reviewed by the jury:

[the above text] This design is a celebration and architectural reaction to the limitless variation in human beings. It is made for individuals of a community with immeasurable uniqueness, personality and diversity. It serves not as a calculated placement of gathering spaces, but rather as a series of interruptions in the earth’s surface through which spaces exist uniquely in time and in place. The monolithic, finite interruptions are physically defined by formal qualities of material and dimension. They are armatures that facilitate the creation of a forever-changing response to the environmental conditions of light, sound, soil, rain and wind.

The monoliths outline communities by acting as markers, denoting edges and scribing paths; they cluster and stand alone like different members of a community. They are powerful, present, and on a scale appropriate to the ambitions of a growing international city. While establishing presence for the site, they intentionally hold no programmatic elements. They serve as a reference to the strength of this community, the people who gather on its grounds. Every interruption of earth’s surface provides the opportunity for essential. human. community. space.

Whitespace

Between the meetings that were required with clients outside of studio, the preparation and administrative tasks that went into a teaching position, and interviews with faculty for my work as a journalist for the outreach and communications office, it felt like this term was more scheduled than normal. By the end of the day Monday I generally had my whole week on my iCalendar, which led me to make up a new word. Use it!

why A List of Books?

For a long time I wanted to be a celebrity. Vanity aside for the moment, I had good intentions. I wanted to tell people to do good things. I wanted to inspire and persuade an audience, as large as possible, to make this world better. In the same conversation that inspired my interest in sustainable design, my brother asked me "why don't you just do the good things that you want to tell other people to do?"

"A Summer's Reading" by Bearnard Malamud is a short story that first appeared in the New Yorker in September of 1956 (available to New Yorker Subscribers here and also available on the iTunes New Yorker fiction podcast). The protagonist, George Stoyonovich, is a young high school dropout with time on his hands and no summer job. He runs into Mr. Cattanzara, a man from town who foreshadows George’s fear of his own life down the road. One day Mr. Cattanzara holds a conversation with George, at which point, ashamed of his current situation, he tells Mr. Cattanzara of fictional plans to read from a list of 100 books he found at the library to enhance his education. It was a plan told out of earnest, something George wanted to do but just never got around to.

Word spread of George’s self-generated educational pursuits. People in town looked at him differently, George felt better about himself for a while. After a month or so George started to feel anxious about his situation. He kept meaning to read books, but when he did he quickly lost interest in them. Soon his anxiety affected his relationships with everyone around him. In one conversation with Mr. Cattanzara who knew something was amiss, he was offered the following advice, “George, don't do what I did."

As the summer’s heat mimicked George’s frustration it caused him to erupt and overflow into the streets where he realized no one else in town knew he hadn’t read the books. They still treated him with admiration and respect as if he had. He could easily have gone on telling people he read those books, but it was Mr. Cattanzara’s words, and George’s own conscience that drove him to the library where he sat down at a table and started reading.

A List of Books is the symbolic relationship I have to all the things I have ever wanted to do in my life. Unless I am doing those things right now, I do not want to do them enough. 

Winter term wrap up

The winter term is officially over. Kate and I celebrated by spending the day up at Willamette Pass skiing with a pair of bald eagles in 50-degree weather. It was a relaxing reminder of why we moved out here. The term itself was another whirlwind, but one that taught me a lot about what I have learned here, what I want to be learning over the next year and a half and what I think I can contribute to the world as an architect. Yes - after seven terms I can finally see myself becoming an architect, maybe. 

A big part of this term was a studio project for designBridge, the community design/build organization I have been working with since the Fall of 2008. The winter term design studio is the middle installment of the "designBridge year", an academic year of three classes dedicated to pre-design, design and construction of a real project. Our task since September has been to work with Camas Ridge Community School to design a bike shelter for the students and faculty. I wish I could explain all of the benefits I have experienced by working on this project, but it is too much for me to wrap my head around let alone communicate to anyone via blog. Instead I will show some pictures of the final review, and hope they can serve as cues to expressing the value of this term.

From dan gilman's photos

The photo above was taken at the end of the review. We are a team of four grad students and five undergraduates (not pictured is a grad student in the landscape architecture department).  An immediate component of any project is the number of people working on it.  Each individual brings different strengths, weaknesses, design styles, schedules and personal interests to the conversation. More people does not always mean more productivity. It was a learning experience in itself to try and understand how to get the most out of such a diverse group of students. I never would have been given the opportunity to manage so many people had it not been for this project. Even if I went straight into practice after graduation it would be years before I became a project manager. I have learned a lot about myself in this process and it has helped me understand what I need to work on before being in this position again.  From dan gilman's photos  This is a photo during our review. Pictured are several members of the team, a couple of professors from the University, an architect from Eugene and the head coordinator of Safe Routes to School Eugene. Another valuable lesson of this studio was the effort required to coordinate between all the different parties involved. The vast majority of my time was dedicated to communicating between the client (Camas Ridge), the city of Eugene, the school district architect, our professional mentors and the local architect volunteering his time for a separate project in development at the school, an outdoor classroom. The dynamic between our bike shelter and the outdoor classroom deserves an entire post of its own, but I will shorten it for everyone's sake. It was an interesting relationship because both projects have at one time or another been dependent on unconfirmed grant funding and both are being done by separate design parties. Early in the term we decided to move our site closer to the outdoor classroom and think of these projects as having the potential to create one large benefit to the school rather than two separate, smaller projects.   This resulted in some rather challenging design questions along the way:  1) The outdoor classroom is waiting for a grant so its future is uncertain. How do we design our bike shelter, in such close proximity to the proposed outdoor classroom, to function at its best with AND without the addition of the outdoor classroom? 2) The parents of the outdoor classroom have a rather specific idea in mind for the architectural language of their structure (shown below, a rendering generated by the architect volunteering his time to the outdoor classroom). It does not exactly mesh with our design interests, to say the least. How can we design our project to speak to this architecture without compromising the integrity of our own work?  A rendering of a separate project in close proximity to ours, the outdoor classroom by Pivot Architecture Images from final review  These two photos illustrate the final theme that jumps out about this term; the lessons learned working on a real project. The photo on the left shows a few people looking at our permit set, nine pages of architectural drawings to be handed over to the city for approval. A few members of our team worked extremely hard on this (not me). The night before our review I went over to FedEx to pick it up and it was quite a unique feeling to see all our hard work over the term summed up in a nine-page, 22" x 34" document.  I don't know what felt more strange, picking up the permit set or seeing our full scale mock-up come to life (right photo). The full scale mock-up was a requirement for our studio final. We chose to build one end of one of the shelters and the planter/bench beneath it.  Never before had I designed something of this scale to then see it erected. I literally finished designing the planter on Thursday and the build team put it together over the weekend for our final review on Wednesday. I designed something and someone else built it. I actually felt like an architect. It was a bizarre feeling, one that is not often felt by students. It was a reminder of what I observed during the 2007 Solar Decathlon (website and inhabitat article). Those team leaders had such an obvious and admirable sense of pride for the house they had worked on over the previous two years. They put everything they had into the design and construction of their house, and this was the first time I felt that same connection to any of my work here.  Sketch models and our poster presentation from dan gilman's photos  Our presentation included the permit set, the mock-up, a poster and a really beautiful site model. It was all well received by the community in Lawrence Hall. We dropped the finished permit set off at the city on Friday and now we are gearing up for construction if all goes well at the permit office.