I hope everyone is enjoying their summer for those who are on break from school already. I’m certainly taking advantage of the much needed break. My summer break will be a little short this year due summer school. Structures. It should be fun as the class is only six weeks long. Not the usual 10 week long haul. But the class allowed me to push my trip to Europe back to august, which will be a nice vacation before school starts.

Looking forward to a new semester. We lost two faculty members but that means we are getting two more. Even though I never had the two as professors it will be nice to get two new viewpoints in the program. The alumni are taking an active role to help improve the program. I don’t know what they have up their sleeves but any help would be much appreciated. The semester ended well for me. I walked out with more questions than answers, which is good. It leaves me time to soak in all the basic design skills I learned this year and narrow down the direction I want to head. I know I want to focus on Urbanism/sustainability but living in a town birthed by sprawl doesn’t leave me with many local places to study…well Norfolk and Richmond are pretty close. I think Europe can help me have a different viewpoint on urbanism and sustainability. Hampton Roads needs to have some kind of smart Growth plan. Sprawl is spreading like wildfire here. I’ve been reading about Ken Yeang

and his theories on skyscrapers. Virginia Beach has decided to put them around their beloved town center. A “hopeful” sign of the growing economy here. : ) It’s just odd that they would build a residential tower instead of a commercial tower. It does serve as a marker. We don’t really have a marquee building to call our own. Since they are going up why not show them a better way to.

Third year, time flies when you’re busy. It wasn’t too long ago I was in first year complaining about making it all the way to fifth year and now I’m in third year with out even knowing it. My class started off with sixty and now were roughly in the mid 20’s. Who knows whose coming back! I guess this is around the time where people start to fall off. It will be a challenge as all the other years have proven. Here are some pictures of my final and some fun in the sun. The boards are actually 30x42 (6) + study models, final models, sketches but the images here are of the book I made. Thank you all for those that offered advice about the vellum. I decided to go with watercolor paper because I could not get the tones I needed on vellum. I will have pictures of the full pinup when my Prof emails them to me. So the colors from the book are not the colors I used on my final hand rendered pages. Don’t want to harass her during summer it is vacation time so I have to be patient and just wait until she emails me.








Gotta set up before the ride



Paddle Paddle



Enjoy the ride. The waves sucked that day but I'm sure they will get better as the season goes on.



Catch some sun and waves(if your by the coast)archinectors