Hello again,

Well, I graduated, thank God, so it's not too clear what further purpose my blog entries can serve. I am hoping to keep this blog open long enough to get my professional webpage and portfolio online, so that I can put a link in here.

Since graduating, I've mostly been traveling, but part of it was work. I've been lucky enough to find a friend who may commission me to build a house for him and his parents in Fiji. So, he flew me to Fiji and we researched the possibilities. What an eye-opener of a trip! The house-building industry there is quite solid and well-equipped, but the political situation is so tenuous that it's not clear how my client would be able to rent the place once we build it. So we ended up spending a lot of time brain-storming on how to differentiate the house from other rental properties, and perhaps how to define a larger community on our little island that would attract tourists. It's tricky to put forward an environmentally-aware agenda in a place like that, where everything _looks_ like paradise and even the incredibly filthy soot from the many trucks is quickly forgotten in the balmy trade winds. At the same time just because Fiji seems idyllic doesn't mean it doesn't have environmental problems, or that we can neglect the issues. We're hoping that the remote-ness of our site will actually make it a particularly good place for Tokyo urbanites to re-think their relationships to the resources that support them (esp. water and power and food and construction materials).

Driving around Fiji we met many people with various visions for development projects. Things happen very slowly there, though. I really don't like the tropics that much, due to heat and the slow pace of daily life, but I am excited about how quickly we could get something going if we had the right group of people and money. There are (so far as I know) no current legally-enforceable building codes in Fiji, at least for private homes, so anything goes.

It's certainly the wild frontier compared to New YOrk City, which is where I am now planning to spend a few years working and learning. Job hunt starts tomorrow morning...

Oh, I should also say thanks to Hans Park, a fellow blogger, who gave me a great tour of the Tokyo U. faculty of architecture.

Okay, people out there in archinect-world don't seem to want to talk about tools, but for those few souls who might care, I just ran across something I probably should have known about long ago: SVG. It's a vector-graphics standard as open as HTML (since it's written by the same people)... View full entry

Well, the final review was yesterday. Overall it was great, the panel was probably the smartest group of people I've ever interacted with. Smart, and varied in their approaches to design. Here's the list of who showed up (as opposed to the 23 people Ed invited, and the 18 who "confirmed"!): Brett... View full entry

Here are some pictures from my ongoing cellular automata work. I had put this aside after an early flirtation with coding in processing early in the semester, but have now come back to it and have finally made a system that exhibits some pretty interesting (if un-surprising) properties. Well, I... View full entry

This is a quick one, because I have slightly less than one week until my final review. I just wanted to throw in a link to Terra-Nova here, both because I think everybody with any interest in virtual space and virtual communities should read it, but also because there's an entry that is... View full entry

We found this plastic baby in the concrete spillway. He became our mascot. Tracking radio signals from the sun in the Owens Valley. These dishes were amazingly beautiful, and we were able to walk right up under them. The beaches of the Salton Sea are made of fish bones and shells of some kind... View full entry

HI. Well, the midterm review (this past Friday) went fairly well. The discussion was interesting and relatively wide-ranging, and some of my studio-mates' project proposals were fairly clear and interesting. I was kind of all over the place, unfortunately, so I neither made much of an impression... View full entry

Alright, two topics to cover here: 1) the "launch" of voluME here at the GSAPP last night, involving Rem, Wigley, Ole Bouman, etc. 2) my ongoing studio struggles So, voluME... basically these three guys (listed above) gave brief lectures arguing for a "new kind of architectural publication/event"... View full entry

Okay, let's talk a bit about my studio work. Above is a pic of some cells living off each other's energy. As I mentioned before, I got the code for this from a guy named Michael "Flux" Chang who is a student at UCLA, and a very helpful fellow. I have since migrated the original proce55ing code... View full entry

I'll post for real this weekend. We're starting to produce some work in studio, so there will be some images (nothing too cool yet, though). I'm working with proce55ing and an awesome cellular automata script by Michael Chang (who generously shared his code with me). Check out his website at... View full entry

Here is my stack of books I'm reading or browsing or trying to remember the contents of for studio. I'm not sure that Ed Keller advocates all of these; some are my own additions to his reading list. Tonight I'm reading the top book, Fernandez-Galliano's "Fire and Memory". It's quite enjoyable... View full entry

Some people in this school like to smoke. Very few people seem to like the snow (fools). Okay, I had my first studio session today with Ed Keller. You may have noticed that one of the other GSAPP bloggers, John Kher Kaw, is also in this studio, so I guess you will all be hearing a lot about Ed... View full entry

Hello! It's Saturday evening on the 7th floor of Avery Hall. I'm sitting in studio surrounded mostly by empty desks. Almost all of the studios met on Friday, but there is as yet very little stress. My studio critic, Ed Keller, will not be coming until Monday, so I am in limbo. I've been running... View full entry