I was back in Columbus last week, and took the opportunity to revisit my alma mater, with a new toy, the Samsung Gear 360 camera. I've compiled the resulting panoramas into a virtual tour, at the address below.  With a new batch of relatively cheap, easy-to-use 360-degree cameras now coming on... View full entry

Some thoughts on the Okayama Orient Museum, one of the trip's unexpected surprises. (Originally posted at the author's blog, evanchakroff.com)As previously noted, I spent most of last December in Japan, leading a group of students and professors (from Ohio State University) on a tour from Tokyo... View full entry

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly going through my photos from the Japan trip, and posting, bit by bit, to my Flickr account.Today I edited photos from the Ise Shrine, where I took a few matched shots of the new and old shrines, for comparison. The new shrine is constructed (and... View full entry

Well, it’s over. The whirlwind 17-day tour of central Japan went even better than expected, thanks to our excellent driver, and to the kindness of the many Japanese folks who let us into their buildings when they could have easily turned us away, and especially to the students who came... View full entry

Day 15: Kanazawa to Takayama Rainy and miserable, we trudged through Kenroku-en, one of "japan's top three landscape gardens" - it may have been the weather, it may have been garden fatigue, but few of us could really appreciate the garden's charms at this point. Too bad (and maybe worth... View full entry

Day 12: Kyoto First stop: Ryoan-Ji, a Zen Buddhist temple most famous for its dry (rock) garden: a mysterious arrangements of rocks that's been the subject of speculation for centuries. It's been said the rocks represent a family of tigers swimming across a river, or mountain peaks piercing the... View full entry

KSA Japan Day 11: Hiroshima - Okayama - Kyoto After departing Hiroshima, we headed towards Kyoto, picking up a few sights on the way. Our first stop was the Kurashiki City Museum (former government offices) by Kenzo Tange, 1960. A massive, solid block of a building, it lacks the subtlety of... View full entry

KSA Japan Day 9-10: Takamatsu - Naoshima - Hiroshima On Day 9, we started with a quick stop at Kenzo Tange's 1958 Kagawa prefectural office building. As in other postwar modern projects in Japan, we find Tange engaging history explicitly, and searching for a synthesis of modern and traditional... View full entry

in Osaka, we took a quick look at the Open-Air Farmhouse Museum, another excellent collection off vernacular architecture from around Japan. visiting this museum/park, it's easy to see how the refined minimalism of traditional Japanese arc extrude developed. in one farmhouse, straw mats covered... View full entry

The morning after arriving late in Nara, we toured the historical sites in the city center. None of the temples or restored merchant houses in Nara are really "must-see" but as a dense collection of traditional architecture, it's hard to beat. the highlights here are mostly around the Todai-ji... View full entry

Though it was a significant detour (on the way from Yokohama to Nagoya) there was no way we could pass up visiting Ise Shrine. Ise shrine is widely lauded as the best extant example of Shinto architecture, free of the influence of Buddhism. Given the syncretic nature of Japan's traditional... View full entry

Day 4-5 Tokyo to Yokohama to Nagoya From Tokyo, we drove to the Yokohama Port Terminal, which  is looking even better than it did when I visited in 2010, as the wood decking continues to age to an ash grey. While still impressive in concept and execution, the building does now seem a bit a... View full entry

Instagram impressions, day 4-5: Tokyo and Yokohama. View full entry

KSA Japan Day 2-3: Tokyo The tour continues. For the past 3 days, we've been exploring the city by subway, and on foot, stopping briefly in front of  each building on the itinerary, to chat a bit about the design, the architects, and the historical context. In our curbside discussions, a... View full entry

Day 2, Instagram impressions. More here: http://instagram.com/evandagan View full entry

Tokyo day 1. From our hotel in Akasaka, we took the subway (and a brief walk)to Meiji shrin, walked through the park to the 1964 Olympic Gymnasium, on to Shibuya Crossing (viaAtelier Bow Wow's Miyashita Park), then backtracked a bit to the luxury boutiques along Omotesando-dori (hhstyle, Gyre... View full entry

Students arrive tonight. I'll have some more thoughts on Tokyo later, but first, a few photos.... Instagram impressions from the last two days in Tokyo.  View full entry

After about 20 hours in transit (including some jet-lagged confusion on the Tobu Line out of Tokyo), I've arrived at my first stop in Japan: Nikko. The city had been cut from our official itinerary fairly early in the planning process, and I wanted to see what we'd be missing (and, I admit, ... View full entry

  Students at the KSA are putting the final touches on the guidebook before sending the files to print. Compiled over the past three months by our team of ~30 students, this could well be the most comprehensive book of its kind ever prepared for a study-abroad tour at the Knowlton School... View full entry

In December, several OSU professors and I will be leading a group of 30 students on a two-week architecture tour of Japan. With over 400 buildings on our "master list" and over 150 assigned as student research, we would obviously need some maps. On similar tours in previous years, we've used... View full entry

  ::tap:: ::tap:: is this thing on? It's been nearly five years since I graduated from OSU with my M.Arch, and though I moved away - to Rome, and then to Shanghai, then Seattle - I'm still very much connected to the school. Professor Jackie Gargus has been kind enough to invite me - again... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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this job hunt stuff sure can be cryptic..... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry

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... View full entry