Archinect - École Spéciale d'Architecture (Travis)

SuperDutch SuperNOLA

2009-09-13T16:30:30-04:00

Now that I've come back to New Orleans and Tulane I should probably get around to emailing Paul Petrunia or whomever about changing my school status from the ESA to Tulane but until I take that initiative, I'll just carry on assuming people can figure it out.

For my second to last studio at school I ended up choosing a studio that bases its premise on a colloquium that happened a little under a year ago. It involved bringing in varies Dutch architects, planners, landscape architects, hydrologists, engineers, politicians, lawyers, blah blah to New Orleans to do essentially a mini charette around saving New Orleans by re-thinking its approach to water. It seems that they realize that although the Netherlands and New Orleans are similar in their imminent danger to water, the situation in New Orleans is just altogether worse in just about every way possible.

So in particular we are focusing not so much on hurricane protection but on simply dealing with rainwater. Basically every ...

It's over.

2009-06-12T10:08:34-04:00

I finished presenting for my final review literally ten minutes ago. Literally, I just sat down and started blogging.

I have to say this semester has been a more than a little bizarre just in the way it's set up, though I guess it's just my non-French self trying to figure out how studio works here.

We spent an enormous amount of time doing "research" about the site or about various subjects related (maybe) to the site. Normally I'm used to the studio being a lot more directed (not that I like that) but for the project here everyone developed their own program, scale, and project that has absoultely nothing to do with anyone else's project.

For me, this meant a multi-modal platform primarily featuring a system of transit I'm dubbing as a derivative of Personal Rapid Transit, though I really hate to do that as PRT people in the States are generally wackjobs, kind of the second cousin of New Urbanists. But luckily in France, that term doesn't mean much so I can get away with i...

En bossant

2009-05-15T05:35:48-04:00

We had a small rendu today for this past two weeks of work. These are just a few images I presented, however most of the work was in models. Unfortunately my camera (like every other piece of technology around me, it seems) is on the fritz. In fact, I just came back from a harddrive failure and replacement and of course the fun weekend of reinstalling everything again. Still missing some things unfortunately, not to mention I can't seem to retrieve my bookmarks, majorly lame. Anyway...

That Program Thing

2009-05-13T05:00:05-04:00

It's really bizarre, the way we're working. We've spent the last two months or so doing research on methods of approach and urban concepts, in each person's preferred direction. Now we've developed a program for the design project itself, for a different program for each person based on this same multi-modal transit station in Massy.

I spent the majority of time researching alternative transit modes. I was mostly interested in this idea of Personal Rapid Transit which I learned about primarily through a project from Mark Gorton who is the creator of LimeWire and I guess just digs all things open-source.

This is the quick presentation I gave to introduce the concepts and the general program. We now have two weeks to turn it in to a loose proposal. That'll be interesting...

[img/http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Glf8Kc1s5VI/Sf9olhjLC1I/AAAAAAAAABE/r6LepnxK5Ww/s1600-h/3_Peit+Couronne+Growth.jpg[/img]

Pour ce project, la proposition sera limite seulement du fonctionnement de la gare fer...

Teddy Cruz Lecture

2009-04-17T04:58:52-04:00

Last week, Teddy Cruz came, ostensibly to lead a week-long workshop/charette that the school hosts every semester (last semester it was Paul Virillio). Though in fact, from what I could tell the workshop didn't yield a who lot. However his lecture that he gave before the workshop was excellent.

I had never seen him speak and knew his work vaguely but to see him speak is great. Before I really get into it though, I have to say I think what makes him so successful is that he comes from this really bizarre situation in relation to the area of his work in San Diego-Tijuana. I mean, though he teaches and works based in San Diego, he is neither from San Diego nor Tijuana, neither American nor Mexican, but at the same time not really an outsider. Somehow he has found a way to be a local of both cities but not entrenched in either one to create an us/them mentality.

For this reason I was really interested in all that he had to say about informal development in the cross-border metr...

Le Grand Pari[s]

2009-03-19T09:12:34-04:00

Since our studio subject is taking place in Massy in the banlieue, it's pretty much necessary that we take into account a project that is in the works currently here in Paris, Le Grand Pari[s]. This is a project proposed by the ever-unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, two years ago that involves many things, but most importantly the propositions of ten architecture firms for a model of Greater Paris to unite Paris (~2 million inhabitants) with it's huge suburban area (~10 million inhabitants). The representatives/firms are:

Richard Rogers, Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners
Yves Lion, Groupe Descartes
Djamel Klouche, AUC
Christian de Pontzamparc, Atelier Christian de Pontzamparc
Antoine Grumbach, Grumbach et associé
Jean Nouvel, Atelier Jean Nouvel
Bernardo Secchi/Paola Vigano, Studio 09
Finn Geipel, LIN
Roland Castro, Ateliers Castro/Denissof/Casi
Winy Maas, MVRDV

This past Tuesday a public conference was held at the Cité de l'architecture et patrimoine in ...

And we start again

2009-03-07T14:55:30-05:00

And finally I can start back up here.

The enormous gap between this entry and the last is because we only this week started the Spring semester. I think they try and make the Winter and Summer breaks equal so that people can find internships during both breaks. This happened to be also what I did.

Luckily, the whole Crise thing was a bit slow in coming to continental Europe so it was a bit easier to find work in Paris.

Another helpful factor was my having met the owner of the firm I worked for when he was the visiting architect for a design charette back at Tulane in New Orleans. And finally, the crisis doesn't seem to hit so hard of haute couture/fashion businesses, who happen to be the primary client of the firm, so work wasn't slowing down too much, yet anyway.

So I passed January and February working my internship. It was great especially considered what most other people my age are doing at their internships. We were actually there to think, rather than churn out model...

Urban Ecologies Conference

2008-12-04T10:52:02-05:00

As part of our final jury and the theme of our studio, this conference will be taking place at the ESA.

Well a lot has changed

2008-11-08T11:08:25-05:00

It turns out the government department with which we were partnering on our project decided that it would, in the future, hold an architecture competition on certain aspects of the canal project and thus would be unable to provide us with previous discussed materials (i.e. maps, climatological date, GIS, etc) as it would give unfair advantage if any of us were to enter any of these as yet unnamed competition.

Thus, we have moved entirely to a new site, still in Northern France, and still along a river, but more or less a good bit of starting over. Since our studio has been combined with fifth year students (who do a year long diploma project) this semester has been framed more as a research and proposal framing time. Which has been interesting and frustrating at times. That aside.

We had a three-day long Rhinoscripting Workshop with two consulting engineers out of London. I was skeptical of how much I would really be able to get out of it as I had tried teaching myself with ...

A little Charetting

2008-10-27T08:09:05-04:00

So about a week ago I took part in a one week charette with a bunch of American grad students from Catholic University of America (in DC) studying here in Paris. Basically it was one student from the ESA paired with one American student. It was kind of a campy project and pretty typical of an American study abroad program: a museum of wine. In fact it was their way of kind of kick starting their semester and making up for the fact that they were only then starting studio. After this charette, the American would continue on developing this project as their studio project for the rest of the semester. So already that gives a lot more weight on the design choices of the American over those of their partnered French student.

Anyway I decided to do it because there was money involved and I wanted a good but motivated break from regular school work. It turned out to be in the offices of Atelier Dominique Perrault, which was pretty cool I suppose.

So we had the choice of two sites,...

Pin Up and Change

2008-10-22T10:38:55-04:00

Well a lot of things are changing as we seem to be having a fair amount of problems with the government organization that we're partnering with on this project. Apparently they have an interest in hosting a large scale architecture design competition for a few aspects of their 106 km canal project. Thus they have denied our request for detailed GIS-like information on the project as it would give an unbalanced advantage to us if we were to enter said competition, given that this alleged competition is nowhere near actually happening. So this leaves our studio kind of in the middle of nowhere with kind of a cap on how detailed/advanced we can get with our studio projects, but I believe we will proceed as we were before and just intend on doing our best with what little information we can collect. So to have to speak so incredibly vaguely about this.

Any we had some kind of mid-ish pin-up. Basically we were divided into groups based on categories of research on the enormous area...

So things have been a little slow...

2008-10-06T17:42:01-04:00

As our studio remained only two students, we were joined in with a studio of fifth year diploma students working under the same professor with more or less the same parameters (though larger and more intense). That is, we are still addressing this soon the be built 106 km canal in Northern France. We are spending at least the first half of the semester diagram as much information as possible, overlaying it to find issues to address (and from whence to define a program for a design project).

So with that said I have been given the task of researching demographic information which, like most areas of research on the part of France, is scarce. So I've begun simply with these diagrams about total populations, population change, population ranking.

Charting ranking cities along the canal by population and thus likely industrial/economic importance, the bands connecting represent the growth or decline in population of the city from 1962 to 1999, the larger the strong the greater the ...

Thanks Jane

2008-09-20T11:32:57-04:00

So the other day I was walking around in the 18th arrondissement and as I was crossing the street to get to the metro, I realized the was an argument going on in the middle of the intersection between a woman, straddling a bicycle, and an older man. Then the man shoved the woman in defiance.

Immediately, from all around, there were shouts from people scolding/threatening the man. The argument began to build from there as the woman tried to fight back. However several men jumped in to hold each back from the other. There was a lot more shouting but as I saw it was winding down I continued on to the metro. The argument started to die off to the sidewalk under the strain of the slowly encroaching traffic, trying to make it through the fray; someone picked up the bicycle the woman had left in the middle of the street to pursue the argument.

Maybe it's because I recently read The Death and Life of Great American Cities over the Summer (finally, after half-assed glimpses from sec...

Ah yes, and of course, the lecture series

2008-09-18T09:07:05-04:00

And the upcoming one:

Send Offs, Take Offs, and Evacuations

2008-08-29T21:08:48-04:00

Looks like I'm getting out of here right on time:

Meet Gustav.

On the left side of the cone:
Houston. Where I am now. Where I grew up.

On the right side of the cone:
New Orleans. Where Tulane School of Architecture is. Where I am and have been enrolled for three years.

Didn't we just do this some three years ago?

In fact it was exactly three years ago yesterday that Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, so I suppose we're due this again. It seems every other or every third year Tulane evacuates (normally as a precaution) ahead of a hurricane. Which is exactly what began today. Tulane closed it's doors at noon until Thursday of next week at the soonest. However the city itself has not mandated evacuations as of yet given the large cone of uncertainty.

Lucky for me:

I'm 'evacuating' tomorrow to Paris as an exchange student for the academic year to the École Spéciale d'Architecture. I clearly picked a good time.

This will be my 4th Year in Tulane's undergraduate five year program....