Archinect - Bartlett School Of Architecture 2004 - 2006

Bartlett U22 Website 2006

2006-08-01T21:45:32-04:00

Right. It's finally done. our unit website has been updated with another year's work.

In the end I wasn't able to get the site up and running in time for the Bartlett summer show. I reckoned I'd get it up the next week. I really should have realised how difficult it would be to get everyone to send me more of their work once they were all scattered around the globe, some working, some on holiday.

Anyway, I've now given up chasing the last two peeps (you'll notice the ones with no project info). The site now has a whole bunch of work from everyone else, though.

Everyone please go take a look at it HERE. Let me know what you think. I really hope we don't run out of bandwidth like last year!

Unfortunately if anyone discovers any broken links there's not much I'll be able to do about it for quite a while as I'm off on holiday on Thursday. Woo-hoo! Thanks to everyone who's been giving me such good travel tips on this this thread.

Bartlett Summer Show 2006

2006-06-19T09:24:24-04:00

It's that time of year again. How the months fly by when you're working your arse off, eh?!

The Bartlett summer show starts this Friday night, 23rd June. All the details are here. Friday night is the big open social night with much drinking and chatting and generally being happy that it's all over for another year. This is what it looked like last year.

At the moment we're all frantically trying to get everything ready for tomorrow morning when we'll be allowed into the Slade Gallery to start installing our work. I'll try to post photos of the build here as it happens. There're already some pics there.

My main responsibility is updating/building this year's entry on our website, U22.org. I hope to have it done before the show opens, or at the very least by next Wednesday (the night of the private view for loads of architects who might like to employ Bartlett graduates!).

One thing I'm currently worried about is bandwidth and making sure that the website stays up in it's first ...

Gehry on The Simpsons

2006-04-26T07:19:21-04:00

Ok, I'm sure this has already aired in America, so it's probably old news to many Archinecters, but I still think it's damned funny and therefore worth posting.

Click on the video above ur use this link to see Frank Gehry apprearing in The Simpsons.

Brilliant.

Wanderlust Podcast on iTunes

2006-04-13T06:56:29-04:00

Another post about music. Anyone would think I was avoiding work...

This one is about free music, something fresh to listen to while slaving away those long hours before the final crits.

I just got an e-mail from a mate of mine who's in a band called Wanderlust (he's Jack - the lead singer - we were at school together for 5 years). They're really good and are the only band I know that I listen to out of pleasure, rather than just duty.

Anyway, they've just released a podcast of a live set and it's available on iTunes (definitely iTunes UK, hopefully all the other iTunes too, please let me know if it's not accessible). Go to the podcast directory and search for "wanderlust". They'll appear as one of the "authors" in the music category. Download the podcast and let me know what you think. It's free.

If you like what you hear, maybe also check out their MySpace and Pulse Rated pages.

Let me know what you think of it all and I'll pass on the word.

Music to Watch Weeks go by by...

2006-04-11T17:56:47-04:00

Since I started at the Bartlett, I've had to work from home. Studio space is extremely limited, particularly compared to the spacious facilities I enjoyed up in Newcastle. In our undergraduate spaces we had enough space for a reasonably civilized game of studio cricket (similar to classroom cricket, but without the worry of teachers catching us). At the Bartlett there's no room to swing the proverbial cat, let alone a homemade cricket bat (looked like one of the paddles from Dazed & Confused).

So now my bedroom is also my studio, which means I have plenty of space to lay out drawings (on my bed), a seperate desk for modelmaking and a nice big dual-monitor computer setup. Those are the plus sides. One of the downsides is going stir crazy with lack of human interaction (MSN really doesn't count). The other is that it allows my music listening habits to stray to all the dark places they really shouldn't. My flatmates come home to find me perpetrating some truly awful crimes against mu...

Cantilevers [suggestions please!]

2006-04-03T09:44:19-04:00

We had our pre-Easter crit on Saturday. Yesterday was a day off, a precious rarity. A few of us went to a houseparty that was right by the finishline for the Boat Race. I got there about 5 minutes after the event. Train problems. Damned annoying.

During the crits I took a few photos of people's stuff as they presented it. One comment when I took a photo of some models "I'd better not see that on the bloody internet". Quite funny, really. I'll post some info on the crit itself when I get the chance. Hey, I might even go wild and actually write something about my project!

In the meantime, I'm working exclusively on my thesis for a few days. I'm doing a technical study (as opposed to a historical or theoretical piece). My thesis tutor is at Techniker, who're a bunch of absolute heroes.

The idea I'm researching involves trying to build a 3-storey building that is cantilevered 25m over an open ground floor. The additional constraints include
a) only a limited number of people on sit...

Peer Review 2006 - 10 weeks to go...

2006-03-10T10:48:54-05:00

Right. Time to use this blog the way it's supposed to be used...

Last night we had a peer review. It wasn't a crit because Peter & John (our tutors) didn't say anything. They just sat there, listened and enjoyed the break from talking (and had a beer).

Everyone pinned up a small selection of their work and had 5 minutes to explain where their project is at right now. I manage to keep track of a few people's stuff normally, but there are some that I just never get a chance to hear about so it was good for everyone to get a glimpse of the work with just 10 weeks to go.

What follows are some dodgy cameraphone photos of each student presenting their work. The pictures are rubbish, so please don't judge the standard of presentation on these images! I'll put their year in brackets (4th or 5th) and include a little note on each project. They're in the order they presented in, which was pretty much random. If I get the facts wrong I'm sure they'll comment and correct me...

Caspar Rodger...

U22 Fieldtrip 2005 - Budapest (general photos)

2006-03-05T12:22:43-05:00

Here are some pics from my wanderings around Budapest. I'll do another post soon with images of my site (and maybe some project info too).

Looking along the Danube on our first night in town.

Some Hungarian guys practicing their parkour on the Buda side of the Chain Bridge.

Looking East from Buda Castle across the Daunbe towards Pest.

Early morning on Buda Castle outside the National Gallery.

Two doors: one in the tourist area around Buda Castle, the other in the centre of urban Pest.

I took far too many photos of bits of doors and windows and other bits of decaying buildings. It amused me that, while other tourists go and look at all the beautiful pristine parts of a city, everyone on our trip went straight for the most delapidated and dangerous areas. Architects are a contrary bunch.

Some graf in Pest and a close-up of the junction between a new development and old building in Jozsefvaros (the district my site is in).

Comparing communist-era tower blocks with the older bu...

I'm back... Sort of..

2006-03-05T11:54:46-05:00

Right. I'm going to try to start posting again. There's so much that's happened in the last few months that I almost don't know where to start.

I suppose the logical place is: the beginning. So I'll stick up some photos of our unit fieldtrip all the way back in October 2005 (my how time flies when you're stressed).

04b: A taste of Finland & Estonia, 2004

2005-10-20T10:33:03-04:00

Right. Here's a few pics. from last year's trip. Also, there's a few different ones on my Flickr photostream, mostly from Estonia ,but also some from Finland.

FINLAND:

Here's a disused submarine on Suomenlinna island in Helsinki...

A boat in drydock on Suomenlinna with Dan standing in front of it...

ESTONIA:

Down by the docks in Tallinn...

Some kind of seriously communist concert hall in Tallinn. We thought it was a disused military bunker from the outside, but it seems to be still in use somehow...

Russian military detritus in the backrooms of a massive disused Soviet submarine training facility in Paldiski. It was known as the "Pentagoni" because of it's size. I reckon the Russians didn't know that the Pentagon was named because of it's shape...

This was the corridor outside our rooms in a really wierd empty hotel outside Narva on the Baltic coast where eastern Estonia borders with Russia. Six of us had gone off on a roadtrip to look for sites. The place was pretty big and...

04a: Spirit of '56

2005-10-19T09:35:16-04:00

We're off to Budapest and Venice next week. Very exciting. There's lots to do before we go, trying to make sure we have some reasonably solid ideas on which we can structure the visit and decide what we might be designing this year and roughly where to site it.

I've decided to site my project in central Budapest. I won't go into the brief or reasoning behind i right now. I guess I'm not very good at articulating the early stages of a project and this afternoon I'm not really in the mood. That may change.

I always try to make the research process slightly multimedia, so began with a recent Hungarian movie called Kontroll. It's the first movie by a guy called Nimrod Antal and is set entirely in the Budapest Metro system. Before the movie starts, there's a disclaimer read out by the controller of Budapest public transport saying how he was advised not to let the movie be made on location, but that he reckoned that audiences would be intelligent enough to realise that the whole thing...

Week 03a: My Peoples

2005-10-11T09:12:59-04:00

I'm very glad to see that Ollie Bayliss has started schoolblogging from ETSAB in Barcelona. I reckon those of us he's left back in London will get more info out of him this way than if we just rely on his notoriously sketchy e-mail communications. When he sets his mind to it, though, he's a damned fine writer, so everyone should check out his stuff here. He also takes good photos, so hopefully he'll include them regularly in his posts. To keep him company, above is one I took while queuing to get into the Dali Museum in Figueres when he, Dan & I were driving around Catalunya in September. It was perfectly positioned to get a REALLY long line of anglophone tourists thinking a bit.

Another honourable mention is also something of a plug for another website I put together. Those of you who were reading this site earlier this year will have seen the unit website I built at U22.org. People seemed to like it and one of our images even made it to the Archinect front page (which promptly ...

Week 01a: Here I go again (on my own)

2005-09-27T09:06:45-04:00

It's been a while since I visited this site. So long, in fact, that I forgot how to log in, what my password was, what my username was, how to access my blog and, finally, how to post an entry. Now I'm actually on the right page, I've rather forgotten what I was going to write.

This time last year I was VERY scared. The whole Bartlett entry system is by turns agonisingly slow and then stupidly frenetic. It took months and lots phone calls to actually find out that I had a place at the school, then the next thing I knew I was sitting through 10 unit presentations back to back and being told to sign up for my chosen unit by 9am the next morning. It's almost as if it's designed to be chaotically intimidating.

This year, thankfully, I know where I stand a little better. I'm staying on in the same unit and so won't be up at 6am tomorrow to sign up for unit interviews. Last year I got there at about 7.15am and was 10th in the queue. Those who got there at a more reasonable hour didn't...

Bombs & Websites

2005-07-07T20:03:20-04:00

What a wierd day. It's been a while since London got blown up (9 years, really). Quite scary to see such a co-ordinated attack. The emergency services seemed to do bloody well. Luckily I so far don't know of anyone with more than cuts and bruises. Very lucky really, considering that the bus bomb went off in the middle of the university and the last office I worked in was near Edgware Road.

London will be okay though, and I think that's a good thing.

On a very different note: The unit website is (pretty much) finished.

I want to add a couple of things to it, but for the moment it'll do. Everyone has a page with some pictures and some text and a link to e-mail them. That's a start at least.

It's all at www.u22.org. Let me know what y'all think (remember, I'm not a web designer!).

Night all. Sleep better in the knowledge that, just this time, it wasn't you...

U22.org

2005-07-01T08:05:57-04:00

Hi, all.

It's been a while. First work got hectic. Then my computer broke down 3 days before my final crit (2am on Friday 13th, of course).

The year is now over. All of the 5th years and most of the 4th years passed. Our show is now on and the work looks pretty good (the photo above is from last Friday's opening party). I'm now building a unit website at www.u22.org It seems that no other units have websites, which surprises me. I'll let you know when it's finished.

At some point I intend to go back and put up a bunch of photos from the last month or two. Probably after I get a job.

I hope everyone's enjoying the summer.

BIG origami

2005-04-14T18:12:42-04:00

Right. This is the next stage.

First I made the plaster model, then the first timber one. Since then, I've been working on an accurate model in 3D Studio Max. Now that's mostly done (modelled, but no pretty renders), I've got to make another timber model, using the Max model to make sure it's accurate.

The structural stuff went to the laser-cutter's on Wednesday. I get that back tomorrow. Once I've stuck all that together (about 60 pieces of 3mm ply!) I'll need to veneer it like I did the last one. In order to do that I've made the image above.

The original of this image is 1.8m x 1.3m. Here's a link to a medium resolution copy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdaniel/9424446/

It image shows that 3D model accurately broken down into a series flat conjoined polygons on a biiig sheet of paper. I'll then cut these out and use them as a pattern for cutting the timber veneer to shape before I stick it to the plywood structure.

Should be a LOT quicker than doing it by trail ...

OFFICIAL: Bartlett Student Not Gay

2005-04-08T18:51:25-04:00

Right. That title will take some explaining!

The guy in the picture is Pretesh (Prit) Patel.
http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/P/play_straight/pretesh.html

He was in U18 at the Bartlett last year (my unit, U22, is a new spin-off from U18).
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/programmes/units/unit18_04.htm

He's a great lad and is now working for Fosters.
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/

At some point over the summer he went to Mexico to be on a reality TV show. It was one of those ones where a pretty girl has to pick one guy from a choice of 10. Of course, these days, there has to be a twist.

The twist to this is that some of the guys are gay. No-one knows who. If the girl picks a straight guy, they share Ã‚Â£100,000. If she picks a gay guy, he gets all the money.

The show is called "Playing It Straight" and went out on Channel 4 tonight in the UK. I wouldn't normally watch this kind of thing, but made an exception for Prit. It's actually not bad for a ...

Another model...

2005-04-07T15:16:52-04:00

Here's the next model. From this I've started making it in 3D Studio Max. Hopefully the next step is use the Max model as a template to make a more accurate wooden model.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdaniel/8101344/

I'm currently in negotiations with some very helpful people who run a laser-cutting service in town. Apparently it shouldn't be too expensive. Fingers crossed, and all that.

Bartlett T-shirts

2005-04-02T06:46:15-05:00

While I'm on this site, there's something else I've been meaning to post for a while...

Ages ago, way back when I had time to think, i.e. 2004, I thought I'd work up some Bartlett T-shirts. Anyone who knows the school will get where I'm coming from with the prison theme, I'm sure. There's even a space to write in your unit number on some of them.

Here's the link: http://www.cafepress.com/mammon
(The image above is from that website)

They're on an American website, but with the current strength of the Ã‚Â£ agains the $ it's actually pretty cheap (even including postage to the UK, it's less than Ã‚Â£15 a t-shirt).

Anyway, let me know if you like 'em. I'd be great to see someone wandering around Wates house in one.

Too much to do. too little time.

2005-04-02T06:35:41-05:00

It's all getting a bit stressful here. Only 6 weeks to go until portfolio hand-in. To be honest, it's been stressful for a while, which is why I haven't really felt I could spend the time to put stuff on this blog.

I do, however, have some photos of work (without much explanation, I'm afraid) on a photoblog at Flickr.com. The link for the picture above is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdaniel/7293332/in/set-165323/

Coming up for air... briefly

2005-02-15T13:17:20-05:00

We had a mid-year review last Thursday. This wasn't a normal pin-up where we lay out our work and then talk about it. This time we laid it out, then went home and let our TUTORS talk about it. The idea is that tutors from several units get together to look at all our work and decide if we're passing or failing. It's our unit tutors job to persuade the others that we are all passing.

Do other schools have this kind of thing? I've never heard of it before.

Anyway, it all went ok. Apparently our unit is in a comparably good position for this stage in the year.

That was Thursday. You'd think that after a thing like that, we might get the chance to chill for a weekend, right? Time to sort out other stuff (bills, sleep, friends) before getting back to work, right?

Wrong. We had tutorials on Saturday. Pressure was duly applied. Only 14 weeks to go. Lots to do.

Sigh.

I'll get around to posting some pictures and a proper project description sometime soon. I hope.

Bartlett Christmas BBQ Photo

2005-02-02T16:38:34-05:00

I've just posted a photo from last term's Christmas BBQ here.

Wanted to test whether or not I could post stuff and back-date it.

Turns out I can.

Detailing

2005-02-02T14:11:50-05:00

I was in the Bartlett library looking for some back issues of DETAIL magazine from 1995 and 1996. They didn't have them. According to the librarians, there was no record of ever having had them. The Bartlett only started getting DETAIL in 1997.

I think that demonstrates a key difference between the old Bartlett and the new: Back then, there was no need for a subscription to detail magazine because everything was so conceptual. Now diploma students have to comply with the building regulations, there are loads of us who could use a little guidance in sorting out the junctions in our building fabric.

We're still expected to have gone through the conceptual and intellectual development of the project first, but now we have to get the DPC in the right place too.

Surely that's a good thing, even if it is a little boring...

Engineering

2005-01-26T11:54:00-05:00

Just got back from a meeting at a structural engineers' office. Now that the Bartlett expect us to actually comply with Building Regulations, it's nice to see that they've got some specialists involved to help us do so.

Rutger at Michael Hadi Associates gave me over an hour of time to help me work through the various options for burying my entire design under a metre of earth. I hope he found it refreshing t spend a little time away from his normal projects. What a nice bloke.

When I get the time, I'll actually put up a post explaining my unit (22, a new one spawned from 18) and my project (see the photos linked to the last post). Right now, I've got to call lots of concrete companies and get them to send me all their CAD details so I don't have to go making them up.

In academia, it's called PLAGARISM.
In architecture, it's just PRECEDENT.

Testing, Testing

2005-01-25T04:41:07-05:00

Right. I've just been signed up to this project. Thought I'd try a test post and include a picture of my site.

It's near a village called Kasmu on the Baltic coast of Estonia. I've got other site photos up at Flickr.com. More about that later.

Bartlett Christmas BBQ

2004-12-18T16:20:25-05:00

Here's a picture of the Bartlett Christmas BBQ, Friday 17th December 2004. It's from my cameraphone, so please forgive the low quality.

I really think it's one of the greatest ideas ever: an outdoor BBQ in central London in December.

I'm not sure quite who organises it, but I know the workshop team are heavily involved. The whole workshop and basement outdoor area are cleared out for it. The outdoor area has a bar and a couple of big BBQs (people bring their own food). The workshop becomes a dancefloor.

Brilliant!