It takes $500 million to start a new city in South Mississippi, according to The Journal of South MS Business. It's not everyday that one hears that someone decided to start a new city. Sort of struck me as bizarre, but I guess anything is possible when you have hundreds of investors involved. It's planned to be developed in an area north of Biloxi. Investors include many of the casino owners in Biloxi and are really trying to help the area recover after Hurricane Katrina.

As far as the rest of the south coast, many of casino hotels that existed before the hurricane are now fully operational and bringing back the economy to South MS. After talking to some realtors about properties near the site of my thesis project, I found out that they're all in the process of being developed into condominium hotels and casinos. Of course, developers are having to invest more because of the new building codes and extremely high insurance rates. Hearing in on some of the city council meetings, it seems that they want the area to be like Las Vegas, but with beaches. We'll see how that turns out. In any case, it's good to hear the area is doing well to recover.

Yesterday and today was the Chicago International Conference for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). It was here at in the Herman Union Building at IIT, which was pretty nice since I got a good excuse from classes. This year's theme was "Thinking Outside the Box - Tapered... View full entry

Walking back from my class yesterday, I ended up running into a hawk, or I think it was a hawk, feeding on one of the many squirrels roaming around campus. It was definitely out of the ordinary and pretty amazing, considering the fact it didn't even move when I approached it to take a picture... View full entry

I've been using Autodesk Architectural Desktop for some time now and I've found it to have a pretty smooth work flow. A lot of guys in my studio have been using Revit and have been trying to convince me to look into it for the past year. I'm told it has a similar work flow and transition into 3d... View full entry

Midterm is approaching and I've just finished researching most of what I need to really begin developing the details of the site. I've decided to divide my site into two buildings. On the east side of the site there will be a hotel with restaurant and on the west side of the site there will be a... View full entry

I never thought I'd say this, but I kind of miss MIT. It's pretty amazing to see what students come up with for the famous MIT pranks. On September 11 of this year, students decided to set a fake fire truck on top of the Great Dome, the site of many previous pranks. Here's the story from the... View full entry

Luckily I live on-campus, so I don't have to worry too much about commuting to studio. Although I do miss living close to downtown, like when I was in Boston. I did my undergraduate at MIT in Cambridge, but I lived across the river in Boston. It was so nice to have stuff to do and places to eat... View full entry

I'm sure many of you have seen and heard the progress of redeveloping the Gulf Coast area from the Hurricane Katrina damage. It's going to take several years before it gets anywhere near to the way it was before, but the communities and city governments are really working to make it better than... View full entry

I'm finally getting into the site planning part of the thesis. For a few weeks now, I've been researching the Mississippi Gulf Coast area, particularly since Hurricane Katrina. There have been so many changes to the zoning and building codes of the area, so it'll be interesting to see architecture... View full entry

It's a Mies building too, but it's just not the same as Crown Hall. The studio I'm in is just for thesis students and there's not as much room as in Crown Hall, but I'll be fine. I'm working on adding pictures of my studio and other stuff around campus to this blog, so hopefully I can get that... View full entry

This is my first entry for thie school blog project. I'm in my second year in the M.Arch. Program 2 at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I hope to use this blog to give others an idea of what IIT is like, particularly to those who are preparing to pursue an education in architecture. To begin... View full entry