Stepping into these first days of August I finally find myself with some free time. I spent the entirety of my last year at the GSD completely enmeshed in my thesis work which was the design of a new US Capitol Building. I expected my life to get a lot more simple as soon as my thesis crit was... View full entry

This gem comes as an aside in a longer email from the GSD listserv: "in the 36 hours from Friday 5/2 - Monday, 5/5, ~1000 color plots were printed in preparation for this week's presentations. Exactly zero of those were mine. Thesis reviews are (mercifully) still more than a week away... View full entry

Dear internet,I'm sick of making stairs and auditorium risers by hand in Rhino. Easy enough if you're working with a continuous width per tread/riser but when you want to step an irregular plan shape it becomes a nightmare of trimming and clean up. No more!As per my usual warnings, this script is... View full entry

Uh, yeah, excuse the absence. Little busy working on my thesis right now. My desk is lodged between two bookshelves so, as you may imagine, the books that are close at hand tend to matter to me a bit more than the ones that stray to the outer limits of the shelf. It's this immediate access that... View full entry

Last night I was in Providence, RI working in the Graduate Graphic Design studio down there with a friend who is doing the identity for the Space Rocks! event. It was nice to be back at RISD for a bit, but it always sucks to be up all night. So here's the question, what do you call it when you've... View full entry

I'm taking a break from Elite Modeling School while all sorts of other things are taking my time. The great thing about being in thesis prep is that I only have one class and ostensibly that would leave me with a lot of free time. However, the magic of grad school is that your workload expands... View full entry

Once again, welcome back to Elite Modeling School. We hope you've been following along, otherwise you may want to jump in the time machine. As a reminder, we're not focusing on extreme cases: this tutorial is about optimizing your workflow in Rhino. In fact, this is the last day of Rhino tips (for... View full entry

Welcome back to Elite Modeling School. If you missed it, day one would be a good place to start. As a reminder, we're not focusing on extreme cases: this tutorial is about optimizing your workflow in rhino and later maybe we'll cover other programs.In general, the instructions here will be fairly... View full entry

Today I'm going to start a small series of posts summarizing some basic software techniques that will make your life easier. These have been accumulated over the past three years at the GSD and are not groundbreaking, but hopefully it will help someone (especially students who are just... View full entry

Dear ICA, Congratulations on opening your Design Life Now show last night. It was excellent to see local faculty like Howeler Yoon, Scott Cohen, and surely others that I didn't even know were from the north east. As far as I can tell this is the first design show that the museum has hosted and it... View full entry

Tonight at MIT Saskia Sassen lectured about the possibility of "cutting edge, state of the art architecture" behaving in the role of infrastructure to facilitate global capitalism. In summary, that there are certain qualities of space which cater to the needs of and assist the development of... View full entry

Tap tap tap. Is this thing on? Well, that was a blur. In the past year I had one of the best studios of my life with Wes Jones, designed a Zeemonster during my second option studio with Francine Houben of Mecanoo, TA'd both semesters, and then spent the summer working in Spain for F451, a great... View full entry

Summer was nice and while it's great to see all my friends here at school, being back in Cambridge is a little less than exciting. This summer I worked for Toshiko Mori on Varrick St. in NYC. Varrick is an interesting place because it's stuffed with architects and designers. Our floor had... View full entry

Commencement has come and gone, so this is a bit late, but here are a couple images of the devastation left after the end of the year. Not pictured are the piles and piles of models, drawings, and assorted crap that people heap into, onto, and near the trash cans. The semester ended well and I'm... View full entry

I'm interetsed in how the UI in various programs informs our way of seeing. People often lament the 'lack of scale' in autocad and rhino-- a symptom of the ease with which one can zoom in and out-- but I think it's just a new way of thinking about the relationship between 2d and 3d, scale and... View full entry

Yes, final reviews are a mere thirteen days away. What am I doing with my time? Photographing the collection of beverage containers collecting on my desk. What's your favorite procrastination technique?YikesRandom, unexplained diagram. The best kind. View full entry

Students in a course organized by Katrin Scholz-Barth recently installed a test patch of green roof on the top of the trays in Gund Hall. I believe that the intention is to cover the entire roof, but right now it's one column and one bay of green. Anyone in the class care to weigh in with more... View full entry

How many ways can you pronounce "facade" in English? There's the standard way of saying it with the middle "ca" pronounced as "saw." Another typical way of saying it comes from native Spanish speakers who say "fuh-chad." The other day I added a new one to my collection: "fuh-sad". The speaker was... View full entry

The good news is, I finally figured out how to get usable surface geometries out of Cinema4D in such a way that Mastercam will let me make toolpaths for them. The (not really) bad (at all) news is that now I get to spend a lot of time in the basement routing said surfaces. Good thing these... View full entry

With the fall semester finally over (Harvard has this weird hold-over system wherein finals are completed in late January after returning from the holiday), YK and I got out of Cambridge to clear our heads and, most importantly, thaw our toes for a while. Neither of us had been to Barcelona, so it... View full entry

The current strategy is: drink so much water that the need to urniate urinate keeps me awake. View full entry

We're down to 7 days till final review. Last night I drew out some sketch elevations and tightened the plans. As usual, I haven't gotten as far as I would have liked with this project. Have you ever been truly happy with the level of resolution of a studio project? EH came through studio a couple... View full entry

I'm not even going to fake any sort of narrative, all you get are some random images collected over the past few weeks.Every studio needs a rubber banana, doesn't it? The object that results from pouring casting rubber into a taped up banana peel is not only surprisingly realistic but also quite... View full entry

Today is the end of year two, week two at the GSD. My head is still on vacation and I'm slowly getting back into the groove of school. I spent the summer working at IDEO in San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA as part of their "Smart Space" group which deals with architectural and environmental... View full entry

Student Forum sponsored three days of free massages during finals. I did not partake. The semester has been over for weeks (?) and I'm just now starting to recover. Lots of ice cream and sleeping in until noon every day have helped this process immensely.At least we only had to pay them $100+/hr... View full entry

Left: Pierre De Meuron's shoe during thesis crits @ the GSD. Allianz image from the Guardian. Now the secret's out. View full entry

Wednesday morning we had our final reviews, which went fairly well considering the minimal amount of time I spent on studio. At 5pm that day we started working in the shop to finish up some last minute fabrication for the Swedish project. At 3am I went to logan and rented a mini van which we... View full entry

4pm on Sunday with a final jury rapidly approaching at 9am on Wednesday. Plans done? Nope. Sections? Nope. Model, renderings, animations? No to all. Yet, what we're learning today, if nothing else, is that even when you're not being productive there's still room for procrastination.Portion of... View full entry

We have our final presentation in studio next week and I ended up spending two days in rural, central Vermont getting polycarbonate panels waterjet cut for the Swedish By Design project. Trust me, when you're on deadline there's nothing better than eating two whole days. There's a lot to talk... View full entry

This week the trays were terrorized by gobs of vaseline smeared onto desk drawer handles and hand rails. Thankfully I haven't personally experienced this yet, but apparently one of the studios on the 3rd tray was the primary target. What are you people doing up there to inspire such acts? Student... View full entry