Archinect - Arch Street Adventures

I'm excited about these photos

2012-03-02T20:48:33-05:00

Here are some photos of our Villa Stein model. I'm really excited about them.

drawing update

2012-03-01T02:47:44-05:00

Here's my last two drawing projects. They are both buildings on Penn's campus that we studied and drew/rendered.

Finally an update on studio 1b!

2012-03-01T01:44:00-05:00

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 -...

Well this got swept under the carpet....

2012-02-21T18:28:28-05:00

I'm going to update with as much as I can as soon as I can... quite a bit has happened in the last however long it has been.

Whoops

2011-12-16T14:57:45-05:00

I meant to put a little wrap up post on here as soon as the term ended, but I've been asleep since then.

Anyway... the first term of architecture school.... it had many ups and many downs, but even the downs turned out being awesome. Regardless of being in studio almost 18 hours a day and having a few almost sleepless nights, it was most definitely the best 11 weeks of my life thus far.

As a studio, we did some really great work and we've all come a really far way from the beginning of the term in September, which was pretty obvious by how much better everyone's crits went than the first time around. Go us!

Today marks the first full week of break, and man am I bored. I almost wish I didn't have to stop working for a month. So far it's just been Woody Allen films and sleep with a little bit of house music thrown in there. For the rest of break I want to finish 'Streets and Patterns' by Stephen Marshall, which I started a few days ago. Hopefully I'll also get around...

What to do, what to do.

2011-12-12T14:09:24-05:00

So we are currently on winter break after our first term at Drexel, and I think the biggest thing to figure out is, what to do without studio work!??!?! First off, lots of sleep, been catching up for the past few days and it is by far the best thing about break so far, didn't think I could miss my own bed so much. Taking a shower without having to wear flip-flops and actual water pressure is awesome too. I noticed I'm the only one who has not put any picture of their work yet, so I'll add one of my final pier, maybe some others too, but if you're a fellow architecture student reading this anywhere, go sleep!

Sweet Dreams - Erik

We Made it!

2011-12-09T13:29:31-05:00

We have successfully lived through our first term in the Architecture 2 + 4 program at Drexel, and it definitely was not an easy feat. Many late nights filled with tedious amounts of work, but also a lot of fun along the way. The shock when we got here was overwhelming and we did not know what to expect. But as this quarter has gone on, it has gotten better and more manageable, at least I think anyway. I've come to enjoy a lot of the things that we are doing and am really looking forward to next quarter to see what challenge awaits us when we get back. Until then, after tomorrow, we have a month long break, which I'm sure we will all use to catch up on some much needed sleep. I also plan to sketch a lot and start reading things that may serve to increase my knowledge of architecture, but maybe I'm just being an over-achiever. Anyway, this term has been one of the best times of my life, it's been a lot of work, but its been a lot of fun along the way and I've met a ton of awesome ...

What's Up?

2011-12-02T21:21:24-05:00

Holla! I'm Jacob, Jake was gracious enough to invite me to join him and Erik on their quest to document the triumphs and trials we're battling through here at the studio. I mean, its 9 oclock on a friday night and there are a ton of people here right now, crazy right? It must be right before final crits. - You guessed it, the second year students have their crits tomorrow and we've got ours on Monday, so in other words, its crunch time. We've got to collect all the work that we've been doing over the past five weeks, touch it up, tweak it and make it presentable for monday. This includes putting finishing touches on our models, drawing a number of plans and sections as well as postscript diagrams. My model currently looks like this, im prettty siked about it, just gotta finish up a couple of final touches.

There is a veritable boatload of work for us and each piece takes time and focus, but i must admit there is a certain rewarding feeling being able to pin up work that you'r...

Time to catch up

2011-11-30T20:53:21-05:00

First off, my names Erik Mangano, I'm also a freshmen in the 2 + 4 Architecture program at Drexel along with Jake and Jacob. I'm going to guess Jake left off at the crits for living cubes, which were very interesting, but it was a very good first project. The final project we are preparing for now is a design for a pier. It was a very long process but I'll attempt to start filling in how we did it.

I'll start with the first day back after our first crit. Our professors took us out to study movement, the assignment they gave us to coincide with this task was to put us into groups of three and each member had to come up with a different way of representing the movement we observed with different mediums. One person would use sketching or painting, another person would use paper, and another person would use photographs. The next step in this process was combining all these mediums into one thing to form a collage. The next big thing we did was go to race street pier and we had to...

WELCOME WELCOME WELCOME

2011-11-30T13:45:28-05:00

Since I obviously can't fill this with content nearly enough, I have enlisted help from two studio-mates, Erik Mangano and Jacob Gulezian. I have not a clue what they will post, but I'm sure it will be great! Hopefully they'll fill in the one month gap that has been filled mostly with our final project for the quarter.

Three Weeks Later

2011-11-04T19:42:03-04:00

Well... this blog fell apart quickly against my will. The last three weeks have been very strenuous. My work load has been increasing in my other non-arch classes which takes up the time I used to write here. On top of that, I got a pretty bad concussion two weeks ago which led to two ER visits that took a pretty huge toll on my work time... not to mention the post-concussion syndrome which made it impossible at even half the level I was at prior to the concussion.

So much has happened between studio and drawing that I can't go through all of it.

The most important thing since the last update was my first real critique from a professional. I was in a pretty bad spot going into it, because I had drastically changed the direction of my project two nights before the review. The continuity in my process was broken, and the critic noticed very quickly. With the project we are doing now I am trying to focus more on the process and making sure that my iterations are going in ...

Busy Busy....

2011-10-16T21:06:24-04:00

Well, I've been too busy to post for the last week and however many days. Because of that, I have way too many photos and examples of work to put up here. We've done a whole lot of axonometric drawing, sketching, modeling, playing, eating, etc. On Friday our midterm project is due for studio, which is taking the 8x8x8" cube and all it's iterations and making it into a living space. For drawing we have to make our own visual dictionary using 12 formal terms, hand lettered definitions and photos and diagrams representing the terms. I'll put some photos up of the last few cubes and drawings and such and that'll be it for the time being.

No Sleep Till... No Sleep...

2011-10-06T01:52:45-04:00

Alright, so it's been a while. I have a three full assignments to go through here. But first some personal stuff I guess. Architecture school is time consuming. So much more time consuming than I ever expected. Last weekend I decided to take off Friday and Saturday to see my friends at Temple University. On Sunday I ended up having my latest night yet - 3am with a 9am class on Monday. Besides the long hours, it's been a really rewarding and awesome three weeks. All the kids in the program are great and the work is a lot of fun. Just. So.Much.Time.

To the assignments.

Using everything we've learned about line & point, planes and masses, we had to construct an 8x8x8" cube using those three concepts. Each concept has it's own material, the same ones that the last three cubes were.

For the cubes, we once again made the grading rubric as a class. I'm really happy that we're doing this. It helps us all figure out what we should be doing and lets use voice what we...

"Ching is God"

2011-09-28T16:45:33-04:00

It's the third day of week two. I haven't gotten to sleep before 2am since classes started. It's starting to catch up with me.

Monday, as a class we created the grading rubric for our projects. Around 20 criteria were thought of and then similar ones were grouped together and given an overarching name. It ended up being three categories: concept, process and communication, each being scored on a scale of 1-5.

We started a new round of assignments that build off of the previous assignments from last week. The new assignment included reading and "unpacking" while defining the italicized words in the text below:

• What do we mean by the phrase "poetic intentions?" As a starting point, we will say that by "poetic intentions" we mean those intentions that cannot be justified by appeals to logic or, to deploy a more contemporary phrase, instrumental reason. these are also all of those intentions of aspirations that relate to the archaic Greek meaning of poiesis, the human...

The Beginning

2011-09-27T00:21:07-04:00

Hello, internet! I am Jacob Kenney, a freshman in the 2+4 architecture program at Drexel University. We started school a week ago, so I am a little behind with starting this. I'll start off with a little rundown of what has been happening in the last week.

The first day of class (Monday the 19th) we jumped right into things, going to 30th Street Station and diagramming anything that we thought 'looked cool' and had relation to geometry and number. The only thing is, we didn't have much explanation of what a diagram needed or how to really draw one. On Wednesday, from those pictures, we chose 3 that we wanted to expand on and drafted a neater version in pencil. Only after that did we get a clear explanation of what a diagram is. Even with the clear explanation, people were still struggling with the concept. I had some idea of what it was in my head, whether or not it was the correct idea is yet to be seen. For Friday we had to draft in pen a more 'diagrammy' version of ...