Poetic tales of dunes, bricks and triangulating trusses motivated a search for U of Valpo´s very own design build heaven. The reality of barbed wire and guard dogs (we were technically trespassing) fortified an unplanned landscape of oddly beautiful, unfinished and accretional structures housing a handful of professors and their small cars. Our guide, a local stray, led us around.
West´ern influences 
Our guide 
9 Comments
that's a pretty neat place...every school should have their equivalent.
accretional ? I need a dictionary to read your blog man.... ;) Still waiting for more news..... I am currently stuck in SE Asia....
nice yellow shoes.
what is the stick wall with the stair case in it all about?
are these buildings abandoned? Nonetheless a great find!
they are basically student (and teacher) projects, houses for the profs and other things of the open university, etc. the students work with poets and artists in collaboration to make architecture of ocassional creativity, as part of their official education (actual building is required to graduate i believe). they have a lot of faith in the method but then a lot of the projects look like the kids were looking at pics of work by lebbeus and leibeskind which is funny to me at least (not to the person i pointed this out to, though).
my prof helped with that hanging concrete thing, casting it in fabric formwork that he took there on an airplane in a dufflebag. which is pretty cool. it is supposed to be duplicated several metres down the way and a floor erected on the hanging beams...which will eventually become a house. who knows if it will ever happen. like everything else in the open city there is a lot of unpredictability built into the process, from what i am told anyway.
jump,
were you in Valpo with chuck and dan?
no, i couldn't afford to go then, unfortunately. but they were my classmates.
I thought I recognized the 'language' of that concrete as West's... and I've yet to even study under him. Soon enough!
Thanks for the pics and update.
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