Archinect - Dreaming Of The Present

[mis]remember me. pt.2/?

2016-02-24T13:29:00-05:00

Site Selection/Program Selection

The DMV is not intrinsically exciting. Banal and boring might be some of the first ideas that even come to mind at the mention of those letters. Or, of course, the agonising wait. The goal of the proposal is not to make the DMV exciting, although one would hope that would be an automatic byproduct of successful architecture. The goal is to explore memory as an architectural process, lifting it from its accepted place in recollection of an architectural experience.

The DMV provides a framework to explore these implications of memory because of the large component of waiting. Waiting, stopping, going, moving, sitting. All aspects of time, which allow it to be framed as a collection of reference points. The same way memory exists.

The DMV conventional elements will not be shifted and alters beyond recognition. Exploration will come through reconfiguring the typical waiting environment with views and user/building relationship.

the site exists along the free...

Wine + Design

2016-02-15T16:42:00-05:00

In fall quarter studio of fourth year I took a studio with professor Bob Alexander. We explored how different program pieces can occupy the same space and what relationships they could develop. What made this situation unique was the inclusion of a Winery program, which we would learn could not be largely intruded upon. The production of wine has very specific program and mechanic requirements which move in a linear process. I immediately began to look at the project as integration of a secondary more flexible program, a library of wine and wine knowledge, into the rigid and linear winery. The library would become a new mechanism of observation through punctures into the existing system without interrupting the wine making process.

The site was the historic, but dilapidated, Guasti Winemaking facility in Ontario, California. The one hundred year old building already took on the linear form that could house the wine making process. Diagramming the library program over the existing bu...

[mis]remember me. pt.1/?

2016-02-14T18:51:00-05:00

“Reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign . . . compensating what’s lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one’s self” - Frederich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History. (1)

“[A] memory of this unanimist collectivity, a montage of recollected features, rather than the scene as directly observed” - David Cottington, Cubism. (2)

“Can a man who learned something not know it when he is remember it?” - Plato, Theaetetus. (3)

“¿Por qué no los dos?” - ‘Old El Paso’ Taco Shell Girl, TV Commercial

Architecture exists in three dimensions, but human experience of space includes another dimension: time. This notion of time as it relates to architecture is unique because of how we, as human beings, understand the concepts of time, history, and memory. Memory separates us from beasts. However, if not adequately dealt with and classified, our memories and inability to forget will ultimately be our demise1. Our ability to remember puts time into perspective. We familiarize ourselves with...

Cirque De Triomphe

2015-12-14T15:18:02-05:00

Second year in my english writing class my professor gave us a prompt on why we liked our choice of study. I remember writing “I like architecture because I like poetry”. I thought it was pretty odd thing for me to say because I had never really thought of it like that before. When others would ask me why I decided architecture I would just say it was always something I wanted to do without thinking much more of it. But that day I did have some realization, not of the relationship architecture has to poetry; I didn’t like the two of them because of their connection to each other. I liked, and came to love, architecture because of the ability, like poetry, to tell abstract and meaningful stories with means of representation that exist in ordinary forms. Poetry takes writing forms, sentence structure, word connotations (one of my personal favorites), and other devices and turns them into something beyond itself. In architecture we have three dimensional spaces and object and can use o...

The Many Arches of Minor Triumphs: Midterm Review

2015-11-06T11:14:00-05:00

"Useless buildings and pointless landscapes, you know: monuments and plazas. through a series of experiments we will develop architectural prosthetics to apply function to existing civic or sacred structures. These augmentation will create a complete, if however incongruous, symbiosis of function and meaning.

Like the fundamentalist they were, our modernist forefathers exalted rational function over the itchy visceral prurience of feeling. Their dictates demanded that form should follow function exclusively. Their edicts excoriated those guilty of the transgression of ornament. Members of the Bauhaus saw their factories as monuments and autobahns as their plazas.

Yet monuments persist exactly because they provide something other than utility. from the Eiffel Tower, to the Statue of Liberty, to our own Hollywood Sign. From New York's Grand Army Plaza to the Kaaba in Mecca, monuments provide a locus wherein people attach memories and beliefs. Useful buildings only augment our naked in/...

The Informal City

2015-10-07T00:40:00-04:00

It is easy to get lost amongst the cheaply made products that line the endless shopping aisles of giant chain stores. These over scaled super stores filter out character and quality in exchange for mass production. The white tiled floors and the overstocked shelves are identical to every other store, save the small scuff marks left behind by the hoards of people who trudge from aisle to aisle.

I refuse to accept this world of banality. I will not settle for monstrous parking lots, enormous warehouses, and disconnected, faceless consumers.

My 2015 Spring quarter presented a project to analyze a larger portion of the way society functions. In interdisciplinary groups (three architecture students and one landscape), we worked tasked to generate a system to accommodate a hotel, retail environment, and office spaces off on Sunset boulevard in West Hollywood, CA.

After a case study on the lavish stores on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, my group and I retaliated with an interest in more natur...