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.

final essay for the Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship

Below is the final draft of one of the essays required for the Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship. I would be surprised if I were selected for the award as I don't think the essay came out that well and they won't be looking at the supplemental documents i included, but i found the process of applying extremely valuable. Writing, whether for this blog, for graduate or research fellowships or for university scholarships, helps me to process and analyze the often overwhelming amounts of information being thrown at us. It forces me to have an opinion about it, to articulate it and to figure out why it is or is not important to me.  Writing as a tool of process helps me communicate to myself.  For this essay in particular I had a number of conversations with professors and peers who helped me figure out what I want to get out of my education over the next year. There were also several moments along the way that I observed in reference to the subject of architectural communication, moments that helped me figure out what i want to do after graduation (see post john Peterson). Anyway, thanks to everyone who gave me feedback! It was so helpful and great to feel engaged with you through this venue.


[The Architecture of Communication – Today and Tomorrow]

In the architectural education we are formally taught how to express ideas to potential clients using a small handful of tools and graphic styles. Informally we are taught how to approach, evaluate and solve problems of the built environment. Over the last two decades the tools with which we communicate have changed dramatically, and with them so has our ability to reach out to broader audiences. Technological advances and the availability of three-dimensional computer software have bridged a large gap between architects and the general public. Supplementing this change in technology are the implications and awareness of the effects of construction on the environment, as well as a general undercurrent noticeable in the profession and unavoidable in our particular student body; design should not be available only to those who can afford it. These factors combined with a staggering unemployment rate have resulted in a competitive advantage for architects to be responsive and adaptive in redefining their roles. Architects have an increased responsibility and incentive to change the public's perception of their role in the pursuit of a better built (or non-built) environment. Those who are willing to take an active approach in response to these changes are the ones who will shape our profession in the years to come. They will utilize their skills as problem solvers and extend their reach to problem identifiers. To do this they need to be experts of communication to a vastly diverse and ever changing audience. They need to help their clients make more informed, better-educated decisions about the implications of their actions. 

Thus far in my studies I have dedicated myself fully to the act of communication as defined by the architectural education at the University of Oregon. As of the most recent fall term, those studies narrowed on writing and how we use words and text to convey architectural ideas of spatial configuration. While satisfying the requirements of the department that primarily focus on the traditional methods of architectural communication and continuing my employment as a journalist for the office of media and outreach in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, I have structured my remaining education around the following two projects of communication:

[Publication Writing for the Student Organization, designBridge]

As I step down from my position as Organizational Manager of Public Relations, I have assumed a new role to help designBridge grow and continue its assimilation in our curriculum. I believe strongly in the educational impact of community design/build programs and I want to use the written word to inform others of the widespread benefits of such organizations. I am working with the faculty advisor of designBridge, Juli Brode, to help convey the benefits of the organization to national architecture and design publications, as well as to our own department curriculum committee. During the spring and summer terms I will be researching the media outlets available to us and writing articles intended for publication. To support my work I will be enrolled in a summer journalism course.

[Product Design Collaboration with Professor Erin Moore]

Erin approached me to partner with her on a series of informative flash cards depicting the ecological properties of building materials. A combination of appropriate graphics and concise wording will serve as a clever way to take vast amounts of information and communicate it to students and professionals. Erin is one of the nation’s foremost experts on materials and ecological design. Right now her goals are mass production and distribution. My work will be part of an independent study in the spring, followed by an intense schedule over the summer to reach production by winter of 2010.