In lieu of a final paper and project for Toshiko's class I've been working on a project for the Swedish Trade Council with a group of six other people*. We've basically been hired by the consulate of Sweden to help introduce the new wave of Swedish furniture and product design to the North...

For all the wonderfulness that MIT produces, it's a physically weird place. How can the preeminent research institution in the United States have posting boards in the infinite hallway that look, with their construction paper and scalloped edges, like they belong in an elementary school classroom?...

We're working on a project in one of my electives that requires the use of Pergo flooring products so they sent us a small shipment for testing. Wanting to know how durable this stuff is before we put it on the floor in the Javits center, I decided to install a small swath of it in studio where...

For the open house last Friday we had a dog and pony show of a crit which resulted in many people producing models and such just to have something to show. I jumped straight into a model that is now a little overbearing but rethinking it is proving to be more formidable a task than I had expected...

Back from a very brief Spring Break and honestly not all that ready to begin working again. Summer, you can't arrive soon enough. It was, however, nice to get out of Cambridge for a while and enjoy the good food and weather of my home state, California. Visiting my mom and her family on the farm...

Our next project has begun. It's a smallish museum/think tank building sited at Brandeis University a few minutes outside of Cambridge. As usual, on the site visit I was more interested in the textures than anything else. I never really turn this fascination with the micro into anything...

A drafting brush shows up in your kitchen*......Or you find a tape measure in your medicine cabinet......Or empty bottles of whiskey appear underneath your Eames chair in the wake of a party.*not my kitchen!

Yesterday we had a public lecture by Jacques Herzog and it was easily the most popular lecture we've had all year. GSD Students are allowed into the auditorium early, but I arrived 45 minutes before the start of the lecture and the main auditorium had already filled up! Not only that, but the...

The good news is that my studio critic was sympathetic to the fact that none of us slept last night and had no work for today and thus canceled class for the day. The bad news is that I'm so used to sleeping in fits and starts that I can't get more than a 4-5 hour nap in without waking up and...

Time is not told so much by the hands of a clock as it is by number of times you've listened to the CD playing on repeat, or the hunger in your stomach, or the rising of the sun... A friend reminded me that in 2000 I wrote about being a founding member of an internet company and after reading a...

After a weekend spent dotting out a Morse Code of sleep-eat-sleep-sleep-eat, Monday brings another long night in studio. Tonight's assignment: the City of Wood final project. We've been drawing details all semester and now we must construct models, both physical and digital. I wish my City of Wood...

Friday was the final crit for our first studio project of the semester and I haven't spoken to a single person who is sad to see the project go. We've had enough designing with escalators to tide us over for quite a while.The Escalatron: A creature built out of escalators waiting to be inserted...

Some comic genius posted this sign on the door into the studio near the microwave on the fifth tray. I've been laughing about this for days.Elsewhere a battle is played out between oddly aggressive maintenance staff with dubious english skills and dubiously motivated design students aggressive bic...

ML brought a fancy hotpot that boils water faster than I knew it could be boiled. Tea is saving me a good chunk of cash previously flowing straight to Starbucks.This weekend I sent off a few things via Fedex via this drop box halfway between school and my house. Bryan ♥ Fedex.

A small survey of favored vices in studio late on a Sunday night. After the midreview yesterday the general feeling was: why does today seem like Friday? That's not an encouraging way to start the week.

Having waived out of the Digital Media class, I'm taking Toshiko Mori's Innovations in Structures as an elective this semester. The class is set up as a series of guest lectures to increase the dialog between architects and engineers. According to Mori, this class is, in some respects, a...

In the vacuum of Beer & Dogs (a weekly event that makes the trays smell like cheap pork products) yesterday, I ran into M.arch I AP student WILL WHEATON wandering the second tray with a beer in his hand and a vicious gleam in his eyes. I'm not sure if it was the beer or a deeper, more...

After spending some time working on functional code to modify the way lofting works in C4d, I began pursuing some more frivolous pursuits. The following images were generated by lofting together randomly generated splines. There's more information and a brief code sample on my site. While these...

Suspiciously dedicated thus: This book is dedicated to Ross Francis Tucker, whose interest in young men and construction left an indelible mark on the personnel of the industry.

Googling for Harvard GSD returns this weblog as the #3 result. So, hello googlers, and let me show you some things that have little to do with the GSD:This dead sticky bear thing is hereby named the Ben B. Memorial Computer Bear. Someone left it on one of the lab computers and he seems to have...

Its almost 10pm and I should be detailing wall sections for my wood construction class, City of Wood, but instead I'm finishing up the website for what promises to be a fantastic conference we're hosting at the GSD in April.Website: LOOPHOLES between Discourse & Practice A conference at the...

The gods are speaking to me and they are saying: lay down thy mouse; shun thy nurb, loft, and pixel; embrace thy graphite. First semester I had the one critic who favors hand drawing and this semester I have Kelly Wilson, a critic who not only favors hand drawing but also teaches the first...

When I was TA'ing architecture history classes at RISD I told our students that the act of digging through books to look up plans and sections is a useful activity, but now there's a great book for all of your intro arch. history needs: Richard Weston's Key Buildings of the 20th Century features...

How to route your GSD email to gmail and never have to deal with (not so) Silky Mail anymore. As an added bonus this will neatly sweep all of the student-announce messages into a folder that you never have to check unless you're bored.Go to Websieve and log inClick "forward mail".Type your gmail...

Desks are assigned tomorrow, so today was cleaning and packing.You asked, and I'm delivering. Here's a shot of my wax project from a while ago. Not very exciting... there were much better pieces in the review.Some of the thesis presentation were conducted in early January and I managed to snap...

This semester Farshid Moussavi is teaching one of the options studios and to kick of the semester FOA has turned the lobby into a disco lounge.One wall features a bunch of patterns (haven't found the explanation for these yet) and the other is comprised of pages that are essentially taken from the...

We've all been warned about the yellow snow, I've seen black ice, but today I discovered something new: green snow. The first thing that occurred to me is that someone had gone around mixing colors by combining blue dye and, shall we say, naturally yellow snow. I think I'll just stay inside until...

Finally, totally, and officially done with the semester. I didn't plan on sending the winter break recovering from a cold, but I've managed to catch a one in the last week of rushing to recreate work that was lost on my laptop (Smokey says, "remember to back up!"). If there is one lesson that I...

While in theory it seems nice to have studio final crit before the finals for all of our other classes-- thus letting us focus on history papers and drawings assignments and such-- in reality it's not so great to be back in Boston right now. The spring semester doesn't officially start until the...

With our final crit for core studio yesterday the semester feels like it's officially over. But it's not. Harvard has this awkward schedule where you have final studio crits before the holiday break but then come back and have final classes and such in January. After the crit last night we went...