1:30AM and no work to do.  Free time!  I'm gonna catch up on everything really quickly.

First project of the quarter was an exercise in creating specific spacial conditions, namely threshold, enclosure, vantage, movement, stasis, relationships and memory.  Although we had to use all of these, I focused heavily on vantage and the idea of a theater box that was presented in Beatriz Colomina's essay "Domestic Voyeurism."  There was a lot of process, but I'll just post photos of the first thing we did and the final result and you can fill in the gaps.  Just thought I should throw this in there too: I set a new record for time spent awake with the final model for this project.  42 hours.  It was a good time.

The first model we made with no idea of what the final model was to look like:

The final model, which fit into a row of other projects:

Row of my classmates' final models:

I should also mention that my crit for this project was the best I've ever had - the critics were thrilled with its conceptual base, although the craftsmanship had some issues.  

Now onto the current project.  We are doing critical analysis of some of Le Corbusier's villas.  The class was split in four groups, each taking one of the four villas that were chosen: Villa Stein (my group), Villa Rodin, Villa Shodhan, and Villa La Roche.

We were provided plans and elevations of the villas and told to recreate them all in AutoCAD over the weekend.  Note that most of us, including me, had never used AutoCAD.  So we had to learn it as we did these super curvy complex drawings.  It was crazy, but I feel like I'm proficient in CAD now after that, so I guess the professors achieved what they wanted.  

From those plans, we had to make a 1/4"=1' model.  A huge model.  A perfect model.  There were six of us working on it for pretty much five days straight.  Besides being perfect, the only other requirement was that the floors are removable to show the plans of each floor. 

Front:

Back:

Floors pulled to show plan:

That's pretty much where we are now with studio.  The current assignment is diagrams and plan oblique drawing of the villa.  

I'm going to put up another post with my last two drawing projects next.