Archinect - Columbia GSAPP (Sharon)

ninja - no income, no job or assets

2009-06-01T11:59:58-04:00

you know you want to know...

really, what is a just-graduated m.arch doing now that there is no longer the safety of school nor the assurance of at least a job someplace, somewhere?

all dressed up and nowhere to go?

it almost seems futile for my classmates and i to send out resumes when our friends out at firms as big as SOM and as small as Slade Architecture are going through layoffs, salary cuts, and 4 day work weeks. depending on how you look at it, hearing all the job issues is an advantage/disadvantage of being in new york where many of our friends and former classmates work all around us.

there was a general meeting of the third year m.arch's with the coordinator of the advanced studio sequence, laurie hawkinson, around mid april. at the time, she mentioned that the school is trying to ramp up their advice for "alternative" paths that we could consider right after graduation - ie a few new research positions were to be available with the different research labs that severa...

false hope

2009-05-27T15:34:01-04:00

a short entry in the midst of packing my life into little cardboard boxes...
(yes, i lived in very nice columbia university housing which kicks you out of your apartment about ten days after you've graduated)

way back in my first entry, i mentioned that the intro visual studies class had become a requirement in the first semester for all first year m.arch's. a good thing, and then a horrible curse.

so unlike other schools, you don't do your own plotting or laser cutting and must submit all your plots, laser cuts, and 3d prints to the output shop days in advance. especially near finals b/c the queues get ridiculously long and can take many days for you to see your laser cuts finished. but i've never seen the queues for laser cutting as horrendously long as this since before the woodshop crew made wooden shelving to put all of our output shop forms/materials. good to know that the output shop's resources are really being utilized by all three years. but wow... it was kind of a...

the economics of blogging

2009-04-22T10:32:53-04:00

this is not really related to columbia or being in architecture school at columbia per se. but i ran across this article during my morning read of the news and thought it was rather relevant to post seeing that... well, this is a blog.

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers For Hire

count on the wall street journal to crunch the numbers for you. the article was personally interesting since i do have a friend from undergrad who left a more traditional job with a large corporation in korea to work full time as a tech blogger. granted, this wasn't a gigantic lifestyle shift to "all of a sudden sitting many hours in front of a computer" since he was a systems engineer. but his blog has enough clout to have gotten him interviewed by cnn asia as a consultant opinion.

maybe a new profession in store for "MArch n' unemployed" and bizarro counterpart "m.arch n' almost employed"?

thomas demand lecture

2009-04-16T01:08:47-04:00

the last lecture for columbia this year hosted artist thomas demand. i actually was looking forward to this talk since the lecture series were posted on the website. mr. demand had a solo show at the moma back in 2005, from which i remember thinking that this man is incredibly smart about lighting to make his projects look so incredibly believable.

if you don't know much of his work, thomas demand recreates photographs completely out of cardboard and paper in lifesize sculptures that are photographed and then promptly destroyed. i still remember the giant print of "the clearing" that he exhibited at the moma show... it's really beautiful.

you can check out an audio description/commentary of this piece on the moma's website right here.

so about the lecture...

started with some highlights...
. explaining how he started creating paper sculptures - answer: because his first apartment was so tiny. so in order to not have piles of models cluttering his living space, he sought out...

hello, netherlands

2009-04-07T03:49:53-04:00

i mentioned in my previous post that our studio took a sponsored trip out to the netherlands. we saw soooo many buildings and walked more than i thought was humanly possible. here are a few of my favorite moments from the trip.

the funen, de architekten cie

the colored glass on this housing project is beautiful. seeing it pass by your window at night as your train rumbles into centraal station is even better.

parkrand, mvrdv
mvrdv said an office tour wasn't possible, but offered a consolation prize of inviting our studio into one of their latest housing projects.

the elephants in the communal kids area were cute. they've got groove marks like they were made from cnc molds. does anyone know if this is really the case?

wozoco housing, mvrdv

to ms. miljacki (if you happen to read this) - when we visited here, i thought of a comment you made about the happy old man on the yellow balcony with his yellow umbrella.

educatorium, oma

utrecht library, wiel arets
if you go to the ci...

manhattan dystopia (+ a bunch of other studios)

2009-03-24T03:02:15-04:00

this semester, there are 17 studios from which to choose. there were several good studio presentations during the studio lottery - a few studio briefs were in response to the global economic recession that came during the fall of 2008 (laurie hawkinson and jeffrey inaba, for example) with wpa-esque references to finance or infrastructure since president obama has promised infrastructural construction as part of the economic recovery plan. but if that was not your cup of tea, there were definitely very different studio topics to go for. here is the full list of studio critics (with links to their work) and the studio travel destinations:

. laurie hawkinson (smith-miller + hawkinson), hong kong and shanghai
. galia solomonoff (solomonoff architecture studio), mexico city
. juan herreros (herreros arquitectos), madrid
. scott marble (marble fairbanks), bhutan and india
. leslie gill (leslie gill architect), brazil
. steven holl (steven holl architects), la tourette and paris
...

building systems 2

2009-01-21T23:31:09-05:00

i spent so much time last semester on building systems 2 that i found this cartoon hilarious. you may find it as boring as sticks in mud.

http://pintday.org/guides/architecture/images/ash_bsi.gif

our final design has no wind roses or 50% photovoltaics. but it does tilt 15 degrees and shade itself.

views of the north and south facades

the construction sequence

a few of the plans and sections

details of our mechanical, structural, and facade systems

this class ran like a second studio. there were a few constraints: bldg type, overall dimensions, floors. but otherwise we basically designed a building and all its details with the help of an architect, structural engineer, and mechanical engineer working in nyc. it subsequently swallowed any bit of extra time. so yeah, forget blogging much last semester cuz sleeping really didn't happen either. in our final review, it was questioned if the foundation's massive amount of concrete would negate the environmental benefits of self...

mustaches vs cancer

2008-12-29T11:18:35-05:00

if you wandered through the architecture school in october and november, you may have wondered if looking like a royal british navy officer was the way to go, or if burt reynolds suddenly became a lot of guys' fashion hero.

so what was the reason behind the fuzzy upper lips?

one day posters were tacked around school that said "mustaches vs. cancer. kids can't grow mustaches, and they shouldn't have cancer either." it was a donation drive, similar to when people ask you to sponsor them for running a 5K for leukemia or another cause. the non-mustached would sponsor the mustached and could check progress on the website's photo gallery. you can still do this, if you'd like: www.mustachesvscancer.org. it's unfortunate that i really didn't fully understand all of this until the drive was almost over.

but, all in all, good to know that my sleep-deprived peers can still do some good for the world.

scripting and architecture

2008-11-19T08:44:43-05:00

what do you do when you have so much work for studio and very little time before the final review? you write a post, of course. ^_^ so anyway...

my school is known for embracing computers and being open to how they can affect potential futures in architecture. the past few weeks have been a bit interesting for me, as i kind of fell into the columbia stereotype, and had dug out from the depths of my brain as much programming knowledge as i could remember from undergrad cs classes i took like ten years ago. i was fortunate to get more help on this effort from a couple people, one being mark bearak who graduated last spring. he has be super helpful in getting me more bearings on the script beyond the basic logic/info i can remember. (thanks, mark!) unfortunately, though, the current setup of my studio plus the learning curve on the very powerful, very dense language of visual basic have taken the upper hand... and my few weeks of feeble coding effort are going the way of the tr...

an answer, red, and government benevolence

2008-10-12T01:28:39-04:00

better late than never
hello. the other columbia kids have been blogging away, and now it's time to catch up with them...

one: revision
a fellow blogger greg (hi there) wondered why the first year M.Arch students have a different technology/visual studies sequence. there are partial answers! apparently every few years or so, the faculty come together to reassess what's going on in the school, revising the curriculum as necessary. and after design faculty + several student evaluation comments about the timing/content of the requisite drawing and intro 3d modeling/visualization course, there has been a change. all you alumni who went through the thur-friday days where every first year student stayed up all night trying to meet both drawing and studio deadlines on friday while enduring the obnoxiously loud music coming from the business school's weekly happy hour - consider yourself dated. drawing has moved to 2nd semester, and moving into first semester is the intro computer/vi...