Archinect - Knowlton School of Architecture (2005-2009) (Evan)

Ciao!

2009-08-09T14:40:14-04:00

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 graduatin...

Art | 40 | Basel

2009-06-15T18:02:54-04:00

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, the organizers decided to hold the fair the week prior to KSA's annual study-abroad tour, which I'm joining this year as an auxiliary professor, and which kicks off tomorrow in Berlin.

I'll be flying out in the morning, and I hope to keep up with the blog at least for the next six weeks on the trip, after which I'll be following in the footsteps of former KSA blogger Marc Syp, and moving to Rome for a position with Fuksas.

So, expect at least a few more updates here from me, here or on my [url=http://chakroff.blogspot.com/]dormant blog[url]. Until then, here's a selection of images from Art Basel and several associated fairs.

Created with flickr slideshow.

full flickr set here (still u...

Kipnis Final Exam

2009-05-31T21:01:33-04:00

"you will receive tomorrow our official proposal"

2009-05-28T09:39:17-04:00

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

Words: Exit Reviews

2009-05-26T14:45:47-04:00

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 their own work against this backdrop. My presentation is in a few hours, and I hope to re-format it for a later post here, but for now, here's some words. The clouds below were generated from the texts of the presentations, and should give you an idea of the kind of topics being presented over the next few days.

flickr set

Here's the full schedule:
TUESDAY MAY 26
9 AM - Jeff Squire, "Past, Present and Future Tension: Flailing at failing, or simply ailing, the problem of contemporary cities"
10 AM - Arienne Longstreth, "Towards A Nude Architecture"
11 AM - Liz Lagedrost, ( no title at press time)
12 PM - Katherine Eberly, "mixing [remix]"
1 PM - Tongsue Ly, "Repurposing Environment...

EXHIBITION: "MOCKUPS"

2009-05-19T16:03:13-04:00

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 something,” the projects in the gallery exhibit how a found characteristic in a material, in this case plywood, can be integrated into the various scales of architecture construction. Preceded by curious material investigations, the discovery of plywood's ability to 'Feather,' becomes a constraint for productively getting architectural objects to behave a certain way as opposed to only looking a certain way. Inherent within the behavior of these material objects is the potential for "Failure" which defines a limit to the range of possible configurations. Many of the objects are broken or pushed past the point of the materials ability to accommodate what's drawn in the abstract. These instance...

Re:imag(in)ing Scale - Draft #3

2009-05-19T10:04:10-04:00

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:

Quite a ways to go, but I think it'll work out in the end. Larger images available here but if I were you I'd wait for the final...

In news from the job hunt, it's been about 6 weeks since I started sending out portfolios. I have a telephone interview this week with Fuksas (you may remember that last year's KSA blogger Marc was hired there a few months after graduation), so wish me luck.

No other news aside from that - but I have decided to go on the KSA's Vienna Study Abroad trip (again) -- six weeks on a bus tour through Europe with stops in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Ljubljiana, Milan, Zurich, and most major cities in between. I'll fly out to Zurich on June 10th, spend a few days ...

Plan B.

2009-04-23T11:52:43-04:00

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 the island on LOST. With the job market looking pretty grim, I've already been considering moving down there temporarily to work on my portfolio and study for the ARE (there is no IDP requirement in the Virgin Islands, though getting reciprocity might be difficult without it), but this news opens up a new possibility. My parents are now considering selling the house and buying a plot of land, with the intent of eventually building a new house...

Obviously this would be quite an endeavor, but there are certainly worse ways to spend ones time while unemployed, so I'm feeling a little better about my worst-case-scenario. To make things more interesting, St Croix has a surplus of used tires, w...

25 lb. Sugar / 24 lb. Shortening / 5 c. Water / ¼ c. Vanilla

2009-04-13T12:21:29-04:00

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, this is not a mere rehashing of the historical avant-garde. The material treatment brings to mind the architectural models of late-60s Viennese architectural collective Haus-Rucker-Co, whose cake models were devoured as a dynamic treatise on the fleeting relevance of all avant-garde art and architecture, whose radical newness can never be permanent.

Material transposition can be aligned with numerous historical and contemporary art practices. Here, her use of frosting-as-media deals explicitly with domesticity and consumption. That the chair is a comfortable wing chair rendered functionally useless by its material construction is a comment on the utility of aesthetically-driven furniture design. This...

A Matter of Opinion

2009-04-08T22:01:52-04:00

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 checking out.

The Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture is located in Knowlton Hall at The Ohio State University.
275 W. Woodruff Ave., Columbus, Ohio 43210

iKipnis

2009-03-26T22:07:13-04:00

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....

portfolio: the remix

2009-03-26T03:10:48-04:00

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 from work on my own i did a few quick photoshop sketches to show her what i meant....

i don't presume to be better at graphic design than anyone else, but i thought it was a lot of fun to "remix" her layouts... and i think there is something useful in the exercise- if only to realize that you may need to take a step back from your own work in order to see how best to present it....

so, i suggest that everyone swap portfolios, redesign your friends, and then have a healthy discussion of layout over a few beers.

(orig - remix)

SPRING BREAK! (Or: Portfolio Draft #3)

2009-03-25T19:45:26-04:00

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 (essential!) and designed the cover to take into account the thickness of the booklet.

let me know what you think. high-res on flickr.

also, a question for anyone listening- any idea how to reduce the size of my pdf? no matter what i do i can't get below 11mb... unless i export every page to jpg, reduce to 800x600 and recombine in a pdf, which gets me a 5mb file... which i suppose is not *too* big to email, but i wouldn't want to send a file that big unsolicited....

anyway, i sent this copy to NBBJ this morning, to apply for a summer internship. I'll be in Seattle for a weekend next month, and I figure it might be good to get an interview while I'm there. So this officially marks the beginning of...

SPRING BREAK!!! (Or: Portfolio, Draft #2)

2009-03-22T13:05:03-04:00

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 yet how i feel about the overall design, especially compared to my last portfolio, which looks pretty clean & uncluttered by comparison.... i'm debating including some more of the older projects, but i don't want this to get too expansive....

anyway i'm curious what you all think, especially if you've been following my work this year. brutal criticism is, of course, encouraged.

(full set, high res, on flickr)

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Final Review: Transportation Futures Laboratory

2009-03-11T23:53:22-04:00

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 development, 2- the current project/proposal, 3- previous work/portfolio), and a physical model.

I haven't included the booklets below, as it's a lot of redundant material (all available on flickr set for the project), so what follows are the images and text from my presentation board. please feel free to comment, and thanks for looking. next quarter is 'exit review'......

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The Transportation Futures Laboratory at Confluence Park is devoted to the study of transportation infrastructure and the impact it has on the shape of our cities, the functioning of our economy, and the psychology of our populace.

Like many American cities, Columbus, Ohio is defined by its transport...

a taste of things to come

2009-03-06T14:38:30-05:00

5 days till pens down.

Essay: HdM's Schaulager

2009-03-05T13:35:33-05:00

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 review" next quarter, when we're to present a 30-minute powerpoint on contemporary architectural theory.... 5 days to pens down, and it's good to have this out of the way so I can focus on studio............

(presentation slides on flickr)

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Herzog & de Meuron – Schaulager / Laurenz Foundation – 2003 – Basel, Switzerland

“Wenn Kunst nicht gesehen wird, lebt Sie nicht.
Wenn Kunst nicht gehütet wird, verfällt Sie.”

“If art is not seen, it is dead.
If art is not conserved, it decays.”

In these two short statements from the website of the Laurenz Foundation and Emanuel Hoffman Collection, we find the architectural ambition of the Schaulager, the Herzog & de Meuron-de...

a quick diversion

2009-03-02T00:27:21-05:00

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 and cut it....

there were a few problems with this method. for one, the halftone generated in PS would have overlapping dots... in a field of black, for example, it would remain solid black. If you're cutting this, there's no material to keep the sheet together.

secondly, going through the illustrator live trace gives you distorted circles since it's interpolating from a raster image, so it's not ideal.

for this, i used rhino and grasshopper.... used create height field from image, extracted the points from the heightfield surface, then used grasshopper to scale a circle based on the relative height of each point, and put a limit on the maximum size (based on the initial grid of the ima...

Seeking Grasshopper/VBscript Master....

2009-02-20T01:04:21-05:00

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 decent rhinoscript that does what i want it to:

it takes two curves with an equal number of control points, and draws a new curve with most of the points from curve1, substituting every Nth point from curve2.

which is great, and with a little elbow grease i can get something like this:

so, that's all well and good, but i wish i could control it parametrically, and i'm intrigued by Grasshopper's new support of VB script... which, unfortunately, i know nothing about.

so, i've posted to the google grasshopper group in hopes of getting this figured out, but i wonder if anyone here has a little more experience in this....

my main issue is translating my working rhinoscript into a working VB...

INSTA-FOLIO

2009-02-18T18:50:21-05:00

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 printer and binding it....

Much like the booklet I did recently for midreview, I made a 8.5" x 132" sheet in indesign, subdivided with guides into 8.5x11 spreads. After doing the full layout, I exported to a one-page pdf. Then, I printed that PDF with "tile large pages" selected, with the paper size set to 8.5x11 landscape.. this gave me a file to send to the printer... I folded these pages in half, trimmed the borders, and stapled along the loose edges.

in order to get the jpgs, I took the original one-page spread, print with tile large pages again, but this time to 5.5x8.5 sheets... then i took this file, deleted a few stray sheets to get the flow right, printed to 8.5x11, 2 pages per sheet....

mid-review

2009-02-16T12:06:30-05:00

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 previous studio work. I took it as a binding/presentation challenge, laying out the whole spread on a 8.5" x 132" sheet in indesign, exporting to pdf, then printing to pdf again, splitting to 8.5x11 sheets that i then folded in half and stapled together. it took a while to figure out, but it works pretty well (indesign does tend to hiccup with such a large sheet size...) and it certainly saved a lot of time gluing the backs of pages together (no 2-sided printing here). It's also nice that this eliminates the border on the outer edge, so i could have gotten full bleed if i'd trimmed the other two sides...

so, pretty good results for the cost of 12 sheets of...

surface

2009-02-07T20:16:58-05:00

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 my copy in the mail today.

So, thanks to my near-obsessive habit of posting everything and anything online, I've got a new line for my CV! Thanks Flickr!

Full-Size photos

more photos from the Venice Biennale

snow day

2009-01-28T20:19:05-05:00

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 in rhino with a little more specificity.

it's still very much a diagram, but i like the way it's going. tomorrow i'll take this apart and build a quick physical model. our mid-review is next week, apparently.

full set on flickr.

evidence for future analysis

2009-01-21T13:06:51-05:00

for an upcoming essay/presentation on OMA's Waterfront City, Dubai. Guess the thesis!

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Exhibit A:

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Exhibit B:

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Exhibit C:

some progress

2009-01-20T21:39:50-05:00

(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 “the computer” for this project, and to rely on models and hand-drawings. This is somewhat of a relief, although I’ve taken it to mean “no Rhino,” not “no Photoshop” – and so I’m planning on proceeding with models, collages, montage, etc, rather than 3D models….
The program is defined loosely as a “research center” (12,500 sf for research, 12,500 sf for lodging, hotel, restaurant, and ??? sf for public amenities to be determined) – and each student must choose the type of research to be done at the Center.

Inspired by the proximity to the highway, bike path, and (potentially navigable) rivers, I’ve decided to make my research center focus on transportation.

Ideally, I’d like to create an architecture that embr...

concept/collage

2009-01-14T23:16:35-05:00

Confluence

2009-01-05T18:18:20-05:00

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 recently completed Le Corbusier's Saint-Pierre Church in Firminy, and whose Miller House (a little closer to home) is pretty stunning....

More on studio as it gets rolling...

VI_rnacular

2008-12-31T17:28:08-05:00

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 types of houses: flat roof, protruding rebar & conduits.

Final Boards

2008-12-03T23:16:05-05:00

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 - Beirut and Lebanon: geography, history, culture, arts, etc - and some time was spent on architectural precedents. A few weeks in we started tackling the program... after a few attempts at diagramming program areas and adjacencies we jumped in to massing... the full story (more or less) is documented here on my flickr page, but what follows are my final boards... with some work-in-progress commentary. Consider this a draft of what I'll present tomorrow.

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With WORKac as our instructors, it was clear that this studio was to focus on program. The competition brief included a fairly complex table of spaces, which was divided into the above categories. Dan & Amale encouraged us to rethink the pr...

t-minus one hour

2008-12-02T23:18:09-05:00

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 got tomorrow to come up with some decent drawings...