So, first off sorry for the lack of posts... I've been busy.

Immediately after graduation, I flew to Basel to see some old friends and check out Art Basel 40, the annual contemporary art fair (accompanied by numerous other loosely-associated fairs).

After 5 days there, I flew to Berlin to begin the KSA's 5-week study abroad trip through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Basel, Munich, and everywhere in between. I had done this trip before, but this time I was hired on as a TA, making it well worth a second try....

Before the trip started I had received a job offer (internship) from Fuksas in Rome, and after the trip ended in Munich a few weeks ago, I flew to Rome to scope out apartments and do some sightseeing (and save some money, as galavanting around Europe isn't cheap.)

It's odd that this was the only offer I received, and I had only really applied on the recommendation of my good friend and former KSA blogger, Marc Syp, who worked there for about a year after graduating in 2008. He has since left the office, but I think it's pretty odd that I'm now signing off from the Archinect school blog project the same way he did, and proceeding to the same firm...

At any rate, the internship doesn't begin until Sept 1st, and so I'm occupying myself in the meantime with Italian lessons and a few book projects: one a kind of 'yearbook' for the KSA study abroad program, and another, a book of essays, photos, and drawings of Jose Oubrerie's Miller House in Lexington, KY. Plenty to keep me busy for a month, though of course I'll be doing some sightseeing as well.

So, that's that. It's been a great experience doing to Archinect blog, and I hope it was useful for anyone trying to get a glimpse inside Knowlton Hall (though obviously I could have posted more frequently....).

If you liked what you read or saw, you can continue following me at http://chakroff.blogspot.com/, which I've recently revived to chronicle Art Basel, the KSA Vienna '09 trip (so far: Berlin [IMG] [TXT], Dessau [IMG] [TXT], and Leipzig [IMG] [TXT], and more to come...), followed by a brief week in London, and my adventures in Roma.

As always, my Flickr stream will be constantly updated, and organized by City and by Architect, a useful resource for me at least... as a always-available collection of buildings I've managed to see in person, kept ready to reference (or rip-off) at a moment's notice...

So, I suppose that's all for now. See you in the forum.

Ciao!

As far as I know, I graduated, and am now the proud owner of a Master degree in Architecture from the Ohio State University. I assume, because I left the states before the graduation ceremony to come to Art Basel, the international contemporary art fair held annually in Switzerland. Conveniently...

this job hunt stuff sure can be cryptic.....

Today, tomorrow and thursday are the Knowlton School of Architecture's annual Exit Reviews, in which the graduating M.Arch candidates present a powerpoint developed over the last quarter, in an attempt to unite contemporary theory with examples from recent and historical architecture, and position...

EXHIBITION: "MOCKUPS" 05/13/2009 - 06/05/2009 Mockups is a collection of work from the past year of research focusing on the general condition of the relationship between materials and architectural scale. Less about the way things look, and more about the concept of “Something which does...

At OSU, we do a kind of mini-thesis - 10 weeks to prepare a 35 minute powerpoint presentation as a summation of our graduate education. Our final drafts are due this friday. Current state of mine? 6000+ words (needs to be around 3500), 0 images organized (needs to be about 120 slides). So far...

I got a call from my mother yesterday, for my birthday. Shockingly, their small house on St Croix (US Virgin Islands) has doubled in value in the past two years, confirming my suspicion that the Virgin Islands exist in some sort of bizzarro-world, or possibly are simply jumping through time like...

Last quarter, my friend Casey Parthemore created this piece for visiting professor Lisa Hsieh’s seminar. This piece consists of a chair, reupholstered in cake frosting, and a lamp, its shade covered in the same. While her use of found objects immediately recalls Duchamp’s Ready-Mades...

it's been a busy start to the quarter, but more on that later.... this coming saturday marks the KSA's criticism conference "A Matter of Opinion" - A detailed description of the event can be found here but suffice to say it's a pretty exciting lineup. If you're in town it's definitely worth...

for all y'all kipnis fans: last autumn's Arch 200 Class (Introduction to Architecture) has suddenly appeared online.http://knowlton.osu.edu/open/media.asp a good place to start? windows....

so here's an idea. don't do your own portfolio. choose a friend or colleague. trade. supply the images and text, but leave the layout up to them. if you were a barber, would you cut your own hair? a friend of mine asked me to crit her port, and we talked earlier tonight. later, needing a break...

I think this is getting somewhere.... I've been soliciting advice from all my friends (including, amazingly, some outside of architecture), and taking their comments into account... the layout hasn't changed much since sunday but I have purchased more staples for my high-capacity stapler...

So, it's spring break here at OSU, meaning I've finally got some time to catch up on GA work and to start laying out my portfolio. This is draft #2, following the general layout of my work samples pamphlet i put together quickly for the KSA career fair (and didn't show to anyone...) I'm not sure...

So this is it, my last studio project of M.Arch 1, and I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out. We're on quarters, so what you see below is 10 weeks of work. The presentation is one big board (roughly layed out on a grid of 11x17s) accompanied by 3 small booklets (1- study models and project...

5 days till pens down.

The following is a short essay I just completed for Rob Livsey's seminar. Technically, the seminar is about formalism, but I might have stretched it a little. If you do take the time to read it, let me know what you think. Believe it? Any spelling errors? This will probably reappear in my "exit...

i needed a break from studio so i decided to tackle a problem that had been bothering me for a while.... if i wanted to lasercut (or mill) a perforated pattern, normally i'd take the image in photoshop, use the color halftone filter, take it into illustrator and use live trace, export to a dwg...

so, following out midreview (which went very well for me), i've been looking into ways of introducing apertures into the surfaces of my project. our critics suggested "gills" as a method, so i've been hacking away at grasshopper and rhinoscript in an attempt to make it work... so far, i've got a...

So, tomorrow is the annual KSA Career Fair. We had our mid-review on Monday, so I hadn't had much time to put anything together until today. So, the following is the result of about an hour of work in InDesign, then half and hour of PDF-wrangling in Acrobat, and about an hour waiting for the...

today is our mid-review, it's been a busy weekend, but i managed to get a full night's sleep last night. we pin up in about an hour. Jose had us all compile a booklet containing a description of the project, images of the chronological development over the quarter so far, and a few examples of...

late last year, i was contacted by someone at Surface magazine asking if they could use some of my photos Venice Biennale for an upcoming issue of their Chinese edition. I said yes, of course, as long as I was given credit and a free copy. They agreed, and I sent them the hi-res photos. I received...

classes at OSU were officially canceled today due to weather... which means I finally got a chance to work on my project for a day without distractions... the first batch are from a paper mache model i made last week, and the following renders are from today, in order, as i built up the equivalent...

for an upcoming essay/presentation on OMA's Waterfront City, Dubai. Guess the thesis! ----- Exhibit A: ----- Exhibit B: ----- Exhibit C:

(more images here.) So, a little bit about this quarter’s studio project… Our instructor is Jose Oubrerie, notable for his Miller House (Lexington, KY), and for overseeing completion of Le Corbusier’s Eglise Sant Pierre (Firminy). He has encouraged us to shy away from...

more on this later....

Today was the first day of classes.... this quarter's theme? Confluence. The lecture series is focused on the theme, but perhaps more pertinently, my studio project this quarter is sited on the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers in Columbus, Ohio. Our instructor is Jose Oubrerie, who...

Just got back from the xmas with the folks on St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. Here, buildings are not taxed by the territorial government until they are "complete," so it has become common practice to leave construction unfinished for years or even generations, leading to the proliferation of these...

Tomorrow is our final review... this quarter, our studio instructors were Dan & Amale of WORKac, and the project brief was taken from an international competition for the House of Arts & Culture, Beirut, Lebanon. The first few weeks of the quarter were dedicated to research on the context...

technically, i should have some plans and sections by now.... or in an hour when "pens down" goes into effect.... but after working all weekend (mostly on Grasshopper wankery), decided to go see Synecdoche, New York instead or pushing through tonight. Final review's on thursday.... meaning I've...