Archinect - Columbia GSAPP (Daniel Linder)

"design your ride" competition - please vote!

2006-02-20T12:33:17-05:00

i just submitted my images to the "design your ride" competition that was brought to my attention through archinect. i posted exact instructions on how to vote on my blog www.nummer5.blogspot.com . i would really appreciate it if some of you would find the five minutes in a coffee break to vote for my designs - if there are any other archinect bloggers or users who also submitted designs please let me know your details or post them in a comment to this post - i'll also vote with a "5" for you then. let's get those boards on the road to win! as a short reminder: time is of the essence - there are only six days left to vote.
and most important of all: thanks to all who take the time to vote - you rock!

Ten books every architect should have on her/his shelves

2006-02-03T00:40:49-05:00

In the seminar by Jeannie Kim "Architects and their books" we were encouraged to write a personal list of ten books that we thought every architect should own and have on her/his shelf. So here is my go at it, I would be delighted if any of you would post their favourites. But please consider that the books should benefit the architect in her/his general task to create architecture and that they need not necessarily be your favourite books or about architecture at all.

So here are my top ten in descending order:

01) Neal Stephenson: Snowcrash
02) Paulo Coelho: Manual of the Warrior of the Light
03) Sun Zu: The art of war
04) Wolfgang Meisenheimer: Choreographie des architektonischen Raumes
05) El croquis: Zaha Hadid
06) Reyner Banham: Megastructure : urban futures of the recent past
07) Leonardo da Vinci: Any reprint of his codices
08) Antonio Canova: Any book about his sculptures
09) Helmut Newton: Any book of his studies in the nude
10) Ernst Neufert: Bauentwurfslehre

polemic versus contemporary german architecture

2006-02-02T17:34:39-05:00

after realizing that the time of my studies would soon be over i took a look at some german offices that a friend of mine was friendly enough to recommend to me and i got profoundly sick. when hearing that we germans were known for owning the latest design knick knacks including the latest and fastest design car, only to park it in the newly built 50s-afterwar-style-shoebox-garage i laughed politely, only to realize now how painfully true that sentiment was. i have no idea when it all went wrong - why is everybody building cool avant - garde stuff only we germans stick to brutally stupid utilitarian cubic architecture? its not even modern style anymore, more like pure banalism in steel and glass, throw in a bit of unfinished concrete. what is wrong with the taste in building of the people who were once known as the thinkers and poets? what is wrong with our profession, to offer such banal and highly uninventive designs? who in the world still uses nemetschek for doing renderings? th...

Studio has started...

2006-01-23T19:00:27-05:00

...and the confusion is great: For the first time here I was encouraged to work just as I did at my old school back in germany, that is: Forget about the site (we were not even given one yet), make some diagrams of your concept and develop the form and the rest after that. I was totally flabbergasted to say the least: Such strong conceptional work with everything else considered second important was a nice twist - maybe there is still hope for the old TU Darmstadt... Otherwise all is progressing well, the assistants are nice and nobody got his head ripped off up to and including today. The only nagging question that remains is how you can put art and commerce and a component X together in a meaningful way when you don't even have a site and no spatial relationships or constraints whatsoever. The given freedom here proves to be the challenge on which we will be measured in the first pinup. I'll post the reults as soon as its over.

New photos on the alternative blog

2006-01-23T18:50:44-05:00

As the images on this blog can only be small and I want to keep the archinect blog more centered on theoretical issues anyway I decided to post my images that I made for photography class only once and submitting here only the link. The other blog I keep is more object- and result-oriented than this one so there might be some material there that could be of interest to those of you who are reading my theoretical ramblings here. The link is www.nummer5.blogspot.com , comments there as well as here are welcome.

studio lottery - ups and downs

2006-01-19T08:30:34-05:00

The new semester is coming up and it started with the usual studio lottery. This time there were many interesting names with interesting proposals for studio topics or destinations for the Spring break Kinne trip but in my opinion in every proposal something was off. As I talked with my fellow students there was no studio that had everybody really going. For instance the Asia/Hong Komg studio from Jeffrey Inaba: It was top of my list until he mentioned at the end that the work would be urban scale and there would be groups to work in. So down to 8th choice he went. Bernard Tschumi obviously got a lot of first votes but that might be related to the nice announcement that he wouldn't tell where the Kinne trip was going until we were at the airport. Ed Keller had a brilliant proposal that was only marred by having the intention to cram to much into it: Urban solutions, a building design and a extended movie documenting the work progress... I don't know. Being realistic and seeing what ...

One down - three to go

2005-12-13T08:51:19-05:00

The final presentation for this semesters studio is over now (only the seminar papers have still to be submitted now) and I wish to thank Reinhold Martin for his amazing studio, the critics for their benevolent discussion of our studios and my studiomates for their help in making this studio so much fun. This studio was, as far as I am concerned, the best that I ever had. We had a healthy competition among us students in a friendly way, encouragiing ourselves to push the bounds with every step on the way. The theoretical discussion was very profound (although I think that a lot of Reinholds amusement with me came from me not getting half of what he was telling me... :-) ). The question of whether a utopian building can be also an icon lasted throughout the semester and was not really solved by the end, maybe there is no answer. The buildings proposed ranged from a 3-mile diameter ring connecting Brooklyn, Manhattan and Governors Island over a multi-perforated-screen themed building ...

"...all slime mold cells were created equal..."

2005-10-30T20:40:21-05:00

That sentence is one of the nicer quotes from an article about the power of selforganization in nature ("Emergence" by Steven Johnson). The article is a recommended reading for our class of generative components taught by Alisa Andrasek which will start next week. Until now the impression is that we will do a lot of tiling and mathematical scripting but the article is hinting of more to come. The only problem with the course is the tricky and still bug ridden software but the introductory weekend seminar was one cool trip into math basics combined with raw 3D. Lets see what comes out of this, maybe we can learn a bit from the slime mold... :-)

lets see - maybe I still get it with the images...

2005-10-29T00:48:16-04:00

After seeing that it MUST be possible to post images (well, others are doing it) I will try again.
So here we go. If there is no image following in this post I think I'll have to live with the label of a DPU (dumbest possible user)... :-)
The images shown were taken during a long and very enjoyable talk in the studio with Reinhold Martin. It was long but worth every minute. I got at last the impression that he has as much fun with our projects as we have and when he admitted that the task to create an utopic Gugenheim is pretty much impossible that was the breakthrough of the day: A lot of worries of being inadequate to the task were gone in the same instant and the work on the project could begin with renewed energy. Now there can be a repositionig that was impossible before with the split between the two opposite positions that we tried to bring together in the projects. Everybody is now rethinking in terms of whether the building should be more utopian in nature or more "Gugge...

Midterm confusion (I got myself lost by design and still am...)

2005-10-29T00:33:51-04:00

The following text is a repost from my origninal blog where all my images for studio and the other seminars are. If anyone wants to see the images that go with it have a look at nummer5.blogspot.com . I would rather post them here but as there seems not to be a sensible way to do it I'll have to split my blogs into text and images. But well - its only one link away.

midterm presentation studio
although the title was sadly missing at the presentation i don't want to go without one (i wasn't sure about the sarcastic and humorous flexibility of the guest critics and didn't want to overtax them). the only bad thing is that there are so many titles that would fit - "begegnung der dritten art", "alien", "they have landed", "game over" or "what is the matrix?" are just some that come to mind. whatever the title should have been, one thing has gotten clearer and clearer in my mind: the design is not so much about guggenheim or utopia anymore but more about "should this be built? can it ...

Midterms coming up...

2005-10-19T13:40:25-04:00

Now the midterms are coming up and i hope to contribute on a more regular base to this blog. I still have to figure out how the stuff with the images works but I thinks I can post at least writing more often because finally the new laptop arrived after my old one fried itself after an excessive render orgy... :-)

The studio is going well, after producing three projects in three weeks that were concerned with getting the visitor lost by design in a positive way in the museum while using strictly geometrical architecture I switched over in the fourth week onto a more non-linear design. Now I am happy and want to see where that takes me. I am applying a system that was developed for buildings with a lot of activity inside them by Gregory Martinez de Riquelme and me under the tutoring of Sulan Kolatan in our second last year at TU Darmstadt back in Germany. The result has a similar topology than the last two projects that I experimented with in with this matrix but the differences are...

getting started...

2005-09-28T16:36:54-04:00

i received today the email with the log in for the school blog project and decided to start right away. there is a lot of work being thrown at us this semester but the topics are promising. in studio the design revives the defunct notion of a monumental guggenheim museum for new york city. this time the place for the design is governors island in the direct vicinity of manhattan, renamed "utopia". the task is to design an iconic building that has "[A]rchitecture" with a capital a written all across. to support the studio i chose to just sit in two historical and theoretical classes in addition to the one i am taking for credits. the subjects are "traditional japanes architecture" (prof. kunio kudo), "the history of architectural theory" (dean mark wigley) and " theories of self-organization and the dynamics of cities" (prof. manuel delanda). the practical lessons this semester are photography with prof. erieta attali and later in the semester material potency with prof. alisa andras...