Archinect - Harvard GSD

And Now It Is Done (thesis and all)

2008-08-04T01:34:28-04:00

Stepping into these first days of August I finally find myself with some free time. I spent the entirety of my last year at the GSD completely enmeshed in my thesis work which was the design of a new US Capitol Building. I expected my life to get a lot more simple as soon as my thesis crit was over, but of course that didn't happen. First there were post-thesis parties, then there were portfolios to be made, graduation (oh yeah, that), and a family wedding to attend.

For the first half of the summer I was a studio instructor in the Career Discovery program here at the GSD. Exciting and exhausting and a great way to end my time at the GSD. The students are super excited about having their first taste of architecture and it gave me some time to work on my portfolio and start to sort out my job search.

As a last post to my school blog I figured it was fitting to share a bit of my thesis project (This conversation on thesis projects in general is also interesting).

A note about process...

In Which A Forest Shutters

2008-05-05T14:11:17-04:00

This gem comes as an aside in a longer email from the GSD listserv:
"in the 36 hours from Friday 5/2 - Monday, 5/5, ~1000 color plots were printed in preparation for this week's presentations.
Exactly zero of those were mine. Thesis reviews are (mercifully) still more than a week away...

Elite Modeling School { Special Stairs Edition! }

2008-03-16T07:43:00-04:00

Dear internet,

I'm sick of making stairs and auditorium risers by hand in Rhino. Easy enough if you're working with a continuous width per tread/riser but when you want to step an irregular plan shape it becomes a nightmare of trimming and clean up. No more!

As per my usual warnings, this script is provided totally and completely without warranty. In fact, since I'm a little preoccupied with making stairs on every inclined plane in my rhino model, I'll have even less time that usual to respond to problems. Lucky for you, dear archinecter, we have a community of helpful people who are here to assist you in resolving any problems that may or may not arise from these scripts (or what will surely be your newfound love and appreciation for irregularly plan shaped stairs).

To get the goods, go to here and download riserMaker.rvb. Once you've done that all you need to do is load 'er up in Rhino and follow the prompts.

The click order is something along the lines of the sequence in this image. ...

Neufert Vs. AGS: Cage Match

2008-03-06T02:34:22-05:00

Uh, yeah, excuse the absence. Little busy working on my thesis right now.

My desk is lodged between two bookshelves so, as you may imagine, the books that are close at hand tend to matter to me a bit more than the ones that stray to the outer limits of the shelf. It's this immediate access that brought to my attention the curious name of a book that I frequently refer to, Neufert Architects' Data. I've preferred it over Architectural Graphic Standards, the more common book here in the US, for some time but was never quite sure why.

In its own right this name is interesting for the fact that the architects are plural; this is a book for the use of a discipline. It's not an architect's book, it belongs to the whole lot of them. Can the simple title of a book bind a profession? But it's also revealing to compare this, the European standard for typical dimensions and other fundamentals of building design, to the North American equivalent, Architectural Graphic Standards.

By name alon...

Zombie Eyes

2007-11-02T19:28:43-04:00

Last night I was in Providence, RI working in the Graduate Graphic Design studio down there with a friend who is doing the identity for the Space Rocks! event. It was nice to be back at RISD for a bit, but it always sucks to be up all night. So here's the question, what do you call it when you've spent all night awake? I call it being a "zombie." One of my classmates calls it "wasteoid." What are the sleep deprived walking un-dead called at your school?

As promised, here's a bit more information about Space Rocks!. Here's a snip from the statement on our website:

We're interested in how people communicate ideas about space. As spatial ideas seep more and more into popular culture, this event is a way to think about the construction and representation of spaces in both 2 and 3 dimensions. SPACE ROCKS! is an event- we'd hate to condem it to the status of a symposium- that will attempt to illuminate the productive overlaps between architecture and related art and design disciplines.

...

Space Rocks, DARPA & Student Orgs

2007-10-30T02:06:12-04:00

I'm taking a break from Elite Modeling School while all sorts of other things are taking my time. The great thing about being in thesis prep is that I only have one class and ostensibly that would leave me with a lot of free time. However, the magic of grad school is that your workload expands like steam to fill whatever amount of free time you have. Thus, it still seems like I have little free time and find myself always running between tasks.

Lately one of the things I've been focusing on is a conference that AsiaGSD, a student group here at Harvard, is organizing for next Saturday November, 10th. We have been working on this since last Spring so it's pretty exciting to see everything actually coming together. One of the interesting parts of the experience for me has been to learn a little bit about how student groups work at the GSD.

Whereas other schools fund things like receptions after lectures, the GSD takes a more distributed model by passing a decent amount of cash to stu...

Elite Modeling School { Day 3: Rhino }

2007-10-18T00:40:00-04:00

Once again, welcome back to Elite Modeling School. We hope you've been following along, otherwise you may want to jump in the time machine. As a reminder, we're not focusing on extreme cases: this tutorial is about optimizing your workflow in Rhino. In fact, this is the last day of Rhino tips (for now, at least) and subsequent days will focus on Illustrator and Photoshop.

The instructions here will be fairly brief. Please download the scripts and give them a whirl; everything covered here will be pretty straightforward. If you have further questions or suggestions to share you can post them in the comments below.

All scripts mentioned below are available here.

Looking Good

So far we've covered important things like optimizing your keyboard usage, some replacements for general commands like DISTANCE, even a little Boolean magic, but now it's time to get frivolous. Let's talk about making Rhino look better. Since we spend too much time staring at the screen anyways, you may as well take j...

Elite Modeling School { Day 2: Rhino }

2007-10-12T01:28:00-04:00

Welcome back to Elite Modeling School. If you missed it, day one would be a good place to start. As a reminder, we're not focusing on extreme cases: this tutorial is about optimizing your workflow in rhino and later maybe we'll cover other programs.

In general, the instructions here will be fairly brief. Please download the scripts and give them a whirl; everything covered here will be pretty straightforward. If you have further questions or suggestions to share you can post them in the comments below.

All scripts mentioned below are available here.

Keep it Clean

I am a bit obsessive about having clean geometries in my rhino files. Generally I despise having isocurves turned on for my surfaces unless I'm working with a complex curved geometry.

Left: Three cubes with isocurves turned on. Right: Three cubes as separate objects but isocurves turned off.

This issue can become especially obnoxious when working with booleaned solids because, by default, the faces of the original solids are main...

Elite Modeling School { Day 1: Rhino }

2007-10-09T19:32:00-04:00

Today I'm going to start a small series of posts summarizing some basic software techniques that will make your life easier. These have been accumulated over the past three years at the GSD and are not groundbreaking, but hopefully it will help someone (especially students who are just beginning).

Since it's so central to our work, we'll begin with Rhinoceros. Usually when I see someone mention Rhinoscript they're talking about some of the awesome computational geometry stuff, but it's also a powerful way to optimize your workflow. These three things will dramatically improve your Rhino life by making navigating around the file quicker.

Interface & Speed

1) Get used to working with one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse. This can be odd for people who do not have CAD experience, but being able to quickly hit both escape and the space bar will massively speed up your Rhinoing.

2) Change the middle mouse button macro to "ZS" which will zoom to the selected object when you click it....

Open Letter to the ICA Boston

2007-09-27T11:01:34-04:00

Dear ICA,

Congratulations on opening your Design Life Now show last night. It was excellent to see local faculty like Howeler Yoon, Scott Cohen, and surely others that I didn't even know were from the north east. As far as I can tell this is the first design show that the museum has hosted and it suits you well. Having visited the show in its original home at the Cooper Hewitt, I was excited to see that you grabbed this opportunity to redesign the installation itself and bring it to a level of quality that equals that of the things on display. Of course I'm a little partial to MOS given that they're affiliated with my school, but the Marfa-minimal exhibition design maintains a stealthy edge. Actually, it could be a model for your institution.

Left: MOS does Marfa. Right: yk behind the wall of reactive blue LEDs that she worked on for Howeler Yoon.

Let's face it, you have formidable competition if you want to be a major art museum on the east coast, but who owns American design? Wh...

Personal Infrastructure

2007-09-26T01:13:57-04:00

Tonight at MIT Saskia Sassen lectured about the possibility of "cutting edge, state of the art architecture" behaving in the role of infrastructure to facilitate global capitalism. In summary, that there are certain qualities of space which cater to the needs of and assist the development of knowledge economies. It was an interesting, if peripatetic, lecture and it made me start to think more carefully about my own personal infrastructure. That is, each semester we make- implicitly or explicitly- decisions about how we will conduct our work. How do we shape our immediate environment and why?

Schools all have their own unique studio environments which probably have a subtle effect on the way we work. Although it seems that most schools have outlawed the creating of substantial booths to envelop the desk, people nevertheless develop elaborate structures at their desk to provide shade, storage, or simply to show off. Other choose to work at home and only show up to studio for reviews....

Oh, hello.

2007-09-21T00:21:40-04:00

Tap tap tap. Is this thing on?

Well, that was a blur. In the past year I had one of the best studios of my life with Wes Jones, designed a Zeemonster during my second option studio with Francine Houben of Mecanoo, TA'd both semesters, and then spent the summer working in Spain for F451, a great young firm with an office in the center of Barcelona.

Left: Box of models on their way to Rotterdam. Customs man asked me to declare their value. Response: "Don't worry, no one is buying these." Right: Goal!!! at Camp Nou

Oh, I also traveled a bit, made a new website for Toshiko Mori, participated in the Rotterdam Architecture Biennial, started eating eggs (have always hated them), and developed an excellent serve in Wii tennis.

From an awesome weekend in Porto. One of the best things about working in BCN was the ability to visit other (relatively) nearby cities like Porto, Valencia, and Rome.

Entering my final year at the GSD I've decided to resurrect this blog in an attempt to give people ...

Is it Fall already?

2006-09-15T04:14:23-04:00

Summer was nice and while it's great to see all my friends here at school, being back in Cambridge is a little less than exciting. This summer I worked for Toshiko Mori on Varrick St. in NYC. Varrick is an interesting place because it's stuffed with architects and designers. Our floor had Hargraves and OMA (before they converted to REX), the building also houses Sorkin, 2x4, and others. Down the street is Asymptote, Vinoly, etc, etc. It was great to live and work in NYC as I had never spent more than a week there. I already miss the buckwheat noodle salad from Mooncake Foods on Watts.

Being a 3rd year M.Arch I student I will be in option studios this semester. Options are a big to-do. In the morning all of the profs pitch their course with a short introduction to the project, the site, and-- importantly-- whether or not there's a funded trip. This year there are studios going to Tokyo, Mumbai, Detroit, Paris, Istanbul and maybe Dubai. Once the presentations are over everyone races ...

End Of The Year Mess

2006-06-12T02:00:51-04:00

Commencement has come and gone, so this is a bit late, but here are a couple images of the devastation left after the end of the year. Not pictured are the piles and piles of models, drawings, and assorted crap that people heap into, onto, and near the trash cans.

The semester ended well and I'm looking forward to a year of options studios in the fall. But first: summer. Working in NYC and enjoying life in a city where everything can be ordered by delivery. We got delivery watermelon juice in the office last week. This is surely a sign that the world is coming to an end.

More in September...

Zoom Extents

2006-04-29T06:48:45-04:00

I'm interetsed in how the UI in various programs informs our way of seeing. People often lament the 'lack of scale' in autocad and rhino-- a symptom of the ease with which one can zoom in and out-- but I think it's just a new way of thinking about the relationship between 2d and 3d, scale and detail. Sometimes when zooming from a detail at the scale of a door to a view of the whole building I like to imagine actually experiencing that journey-- how many Gs would you pull when flying way up in the air like that? How high would you be?

One also tends to have bits and scraps of drawing strewn across the digital ground. The frenzy of creative production that used to be measured in rolls of trace may now be analyzed by zooming extents. What lays at the fringes of your drawings? Half drawn sections, fragmented plans, a stock of furniture, maybe even entirely abandoned schemes? Details? Reminders and to-do lists?

So here's a little experiment: If you use rhino stop reading this and go to ...

That Time of Year Again

2006-04-26T17:41:15-04:00

Yes, final reviews are a mere thirteen days away. What am I doing with my time? Photographing the collection of beverage containers collecting on my desk. What's your favorite procrastination technique?

Yikes

Random, unexplained diagram. The best kind.

GSD Begins Green Roof Initiative

2006-04-21T14:20:51-04:00

Students in a course organized by Katrin Scholz-Barth recently installed a test patch of green roof on the top of the trays in Gund Hall. I believe that the intention is to cover the entire roof, but right now it's one column and one bay of green. Anyone in the class care to weigh in with more info? I think this is a project that even people outside the GSD will appreciate.

I didn't take these pictures. They were borrowed from nettmp, our shared network drive. If they're yours please let me know so I can credit you.

Chad

2006-03-12T11:59:27-05:00

How many ways can you pronounce "facade" in English? There's the standard way of saying it with the middle "ca" pronounced as "saw." Another typical way of saying it comes from native Spanish speakers who say "fuh-chad." The other day I added a new one to my collection: "fuh-sad". The speaker was Quebecois. Heard any others?

The Good and The Bad

2006-02-27T23:23:03-05:00

The good news is, I finally figured out how to get usable surface geometries out of Cinema4D in such a way that Mastercam will let me make toolpaths for them. The (not really) bad (at all) news is that now I get to spend a lot of time in the basement routing said surfaces. Good thing these earphones and protective eye wear are so stylish!

Barcelona! [and] Want a fellowship?

2006-02-06T00:53:58-05:00

With the fall semester finally over (Harvard has this weird hold-over system wherein finals are completed in late January after returning from the holiday), YK and I got out of Cambridge to clear our heads and, most importantly, thaw our toes for a while. Neither of us had been to Barcelona, so it was a bit of an adventure.

Images from our trip to the cemetery in Igualada. See all the pictures from the trip here.

Dinner at 9-10pm is a fantastic idea. That's about all it took to convince me. The fantastic food, bars, and everything else was just icing on the torta. In between rosemary chocolate bars and langoustines in oil and salt we made a few trips to see the local Enric Miralles projects, a faceted garden of corten by Carlos Ferrater, and even visited the wasteland known as Forum 2004.

Since getting back the semester has started-- but just barely. This will be our first full week of classes and what an exciting week it promises to be. The semester is filled with the delights of ...

Current Strategy

2005-12-20T04:26:18-05:00

The current strategy is: drink so much water that the need to urniate urinate keeps me awake.

a.l.m.o.s.t.

2005-12-13T20:37:13-05:00

We're down to 7 days till final review. Last night I drew out some sketch elevations and tightened the plans. As usual, I haven't gotten as far as I would have liked with this project. Have you ever been truly happy with the level of resolution of a studio project?

EH came through studio a couple weeks ago brandishing a bottle of whiskey and forcing everyone to drink with him. Life is tough. LB cast a banana in rubber: Creepy.

Graffiti on my model desk. There are a lot of marks from classes-past around here. In one of the halls I found an access panel stuffed with magazines from the 70s and old models. Anyone else find caches of old work in their buildings?

The joy of floor-area calcs.

Are these models spawning?

Spent a good chunk of thanksgiving designing, printing, and binding a portfolio for one of my professors... Turned out nice, but that and another project knocked me out of my rhythm and I've been struggling to regain it.

Apologies to whomever actually took this photo-- I stole it...

Not on Such a Roll Here With the Posts

2005-11-04T08:11:12-05:00

I'm not even going to fake any sort of narrative, all you get are some random images collected over the past few weeks.

Every studio needs a rubber banana, doesn't it? The object that results from pouring casting rubber into a taped up banana peel is not only surprisingly realistic but also quite creepy.

Having been barred from using blue foam in both of last year's studios I'm now embracing the foam.

Pre-halloween festivities.

That's a 2x4 duct taped in-between two panes of glass at the new Pei, Cobb, Fried beaut' next to Gund Hall. Nice detailing.

More excellent tape details and AB's love of buckets as an organizational method.

One day this armless torso-neck-head mannequin showed up on LB's desk and the studio has taken quite a liking to it. She gets new adornments on a regular basis.

Sauerbruch + Hutton have decorated the lobby with an array of painted MDF panels and drawings routed into hanging acrylic sheets. Colors.

Oh No, Not Again!

2005-09-30T18:12:29-04:00

Today is the end of year two, week two at the GSD. My head is still on vacation and I'm slowly getting back into the groove of school.

I spent the summer working at IDEO in San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA as part of their "Smart Space" group which deals with architectural and environmental commissions. It was fantastic to be introduced to IDEO's process, especially their approach to user research, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Who knew IDEO did architecture?

This was my workspace at IDEO SF most days I was there. There wasn't enough desks to give one to the interns, but I'd take this table by the bay any day.

At the end of August I checked out of IDEO and hopped on a plane to London where I took up a brief research station in the archives of Sir John Soane's House & Museum as part of my fellowship. The staff there were extremely helpful and welcoming and I basically spent 2.5 weeks wearing white gloves and examing original drawings. Of course, now the real work begins as I try to ...

Goodbye Sweden, Cambridge; Hello San Francisco, London!

2005-06-03T02:09:44-04:00

Student Forum sponsored three days of free massages during finals. I did not partake.

The semester has been over for weeks (?) and I'm just now starting to recover. Lots of ice cream and sleeping in until noon every day have helped this process immensely.

At least we only had to pay them $100+/hr for their "skilled labor."

Although the Swedish cloud was designed so that it could be disassembled and reinstalled in a new location (the exhibition it was part of is going on tour), thanks to the ever-so-delicate hands of our mandatory union laborers the entire thing ended up in the dumpster. Goodbye, Sweden.

We had the cherry picker run over it for good measure.

The exhibitions dept. at the GSD is preparing the end of the year show which gives all graduating students a chance to show off their work.

This desk has supposedly been cleared out for the end of the semester.

Clean out in the trays happened much quicker than I expected. So quick, in fact, that someone availed themselves of my l...

The Real Inspiration Behind HdM's Munich Stadium

2005-06-03T02:05:30-04:00

Left: Pierre De Meuron's shoe during thesis crits @ the GSD. Allianz image from the Guardian.

Now the secret's out.

7 people, 17 hours, 1 cloud

2005-05-15T00:51:20-04:00

Wednesday morning we had our final reviews, which went fairly well considering the minimal amount of time I spent on studio. At 5pm that day we started working in the shop to finish up some last minute fabrication for the Swedish project. At 3am I went to logan and rented a mini van which we packed up with the remaining materials and drove to NYC arriving around 8am. By 3pm we had finished assembling the 10 4'x16' bays of polycarbonate panels and began lifting them. Seventeen hours of straight work later and we raised the final panel into place. So much pain. More of an actual description of things once I'm a bit less of a zombie.

GAC was kind enough to come and document the assembly process a little bit. His photos are much better than mine, but only these two are online.

Assembled bay visible standing on end in the distance.

We assembled most of it at 3-7' off the floor before raising it to the final height of 7-11'.

Worked even when the lights went out at 1am...

View from above.

In ...

Swedish by Inflection

2005-05-08T16:33:28-04:00

4pm on Sunday with a final jury rapidly approaching at 9am on Wednesday. Plans done? Nope. Sections? Nope. Model, renderings, animations? No to all. Yet, what we're learning today, if nothing else, is that even when you're not being productive there's still room for procrastination.

Portion of final cloud form showing the varying, disparate thickness of the ribs

Initially, to find the form of the cloud we started with a flat NURBS plane and then began distorting it to create curatorial zones on the floor of the booth. The result was a highly curved magic carpet-like plane floating in space. This plane provided the ruling lines for the structure. The schematic design rendering depicted a cloud of consistent thickness, but we wanted to push the idea a bit further by developing it into a thin, more cloud-like volume. Moving from a plane to the actual thin volume of the cloud required an act of inflation that would address assembly, structural integrity, and preferably result in somethi...

Shelves for Sweden

2005-05-07T01:39:49-04:00

We have our final presentation in studio next week and I ended up spending two days in rural, central Vermont getting polycarbonate panels waterjet cut for the Swedish By Design project. Trust me, when you're on deadline there's nothing better than eating two whole days. There's a lot to talk about with this project but for now I'll just trickle out a few more images. Below are some concept renderings for one of the shelving walls that will sit in the middle of the booth and then a shot of the final piece mocked up here at the GSD. It's constructed from waterjet cut, interlocking 10mm and 6mm polycarbonate panels. Somehow the cutfiles ended up 90% of actual size so the wall is now just under 6' tall instead of somewhere around 6'6" like it should have been... eek.

Love those render artifacts from low radiosity settings. The splines on the ceiling are standing in for a 'cloud' made of similarly interlocking polycarb panels that follow those curves.

The booth is comprised of three prima...

Vaseline? Proactivity?

2005-04-30T17:21:30-04:00

This week the trays were terrorized by gobs of vaseline smeared onto desk drawer handles and hand rails. Thankfully I haven't personally experienced this yet, but apparently one of the studios on the 3rd tray was the primary target. What are you people doing up there to inspire such acts? Student announce has been atwitter with discussion and speculation.

Kate Feather, a second year student victimized by the attacks, discussed the incident in an exclusive interview with Archinect. "Just the word 'dollop' is gross," she explained, "but if that dollop is vaseline all over your desk it's not only gross it's just rude." Despite the initial shock, Kate claims she will be saving the petroleum jelly for a "dry moment."

According to GSD study body president Chris White, the primary suspect is currently something called the "GSD Pro-activity Club." However, no one seems to know exactly who this club is or what they really do. I remember seeing a poster for the aforementioned club but have...