Archinect - Knowlton School of Architecture (2005-2009) (Evan)

KSA 360°

2016-09-29T14:21:00-04:00

I was back in Columbus last week, and took the opportunity to revisit my alma mater, with a new toy, the Samsung Gear 360 camera. I've compiled the resulting panoramas into a virtual tour, at the address below. With a new batch of relatively cheap, easy-to-use 360-degree cameras now coming on the market, I expect to see a lot more "immersive" photography and video; which is especially promising for the documentation of architectural space (just don't call it "virtual reality"!).

More to come!

https://roundme.com/tour/78590/view/197255/

KSA Japan: Okayama Orient Museum

2014-04-01T21:01:00-04:00

Some thoughts on the Okayama Orient Museum, one of the trip's unexpected surprises. (Originally posted at the author's blog, evanchakroff.com)

As previously noted, I spent most of last December in Japan, leading a group of students and professors (from Ohio State University) on a tour from Tokyo down to Hiroshima and back. I’ve already posted my general day-by-day travelogue, and now as I continue editing my photos, I’ll be selecting a few buildings for somewhat deeper analysis. In recent months, I posted some thoughts on Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, and on the famous Ise Shrine. Today, I bring you the Okayama Orient Museum, designed by Okada Associates and constructed from 1979 to 1980.

Okayama is probably best known as the home of the Korakuen garden (one of “Japan’s top three landscape gardens” if one believes the hype), but has a handful of significant works of architecture, and is definitely worth a visit if one is in the area. We were a little rushed during our half-day in the city; ...

KSA Japan: Postscript: Ise Shrine

2014-01-27T16:55:00-05:00

Over the past few weeks, I've been slowly going through my photos from the Japan trip, and posting, bit by bit, to my Flickr account.

Today I edited photos from the Ise Shrine, where I took a few matched shots of the new and old shrines, for comparison. The new shrine is constructed (and consecrated) only once every 20 years, and after completion, the old shrine is disassembled and its components are shipped to other shrines across the country for reuse. We were lucky to be there during the few months when both shrines stand side-by-side.

Seeing the two identical shrines, one freshly built, one aged to an ash grey, really reinforced the cyclical nature of this sacred site... and makes one question perceived aspects of permanence and authenticity in architecture. Here, the 'architecture' is the process, the maintenance of traditional skills in service of preservation of a sacred site. It was incredibly moving, one of the most anticipated stops on the trip, and one with the greatest pay...

Constructing Modernity (KSA Japan Wrap-Up)

2013-12-24T22:45:00-05:00

Well, it’s over. The whirlwind 17-day tour of central Japan went even better than expected, thanks to our excellent driver, and to the kindness of the many Japanese folks who let us into their buildings when they could have easily turned us away, and especially to the students who came along, contributing essential research to the program book in advance of the trip, and bringing their insights to each building presentation and to our bus discussions (not to mention excellent karaoke skills).
I’ve been on a number of these trips, through Europe, China, and now Japan, and I can’t overstate how important these tours have been for my own education as a designer. Seeing buildings in-situ may seem unnecessary in these days of rapid digital communication and ubiquitous imagery, but there is still immense value in the unmediated* experience of a building – or city – that imagery cannot alone supply.
*unmediated; not counting my prescription glasses, or ever-raised camera, ready to fram...

KSA Japan Day 15-17: Kanazawa to Tokyo

2013-12-24T19:38:00-05:00

Day 15: Kanazawa to Takayama

Rainy and miserable, we trudged through Kenroku-en, one of "japan's top three landscape gardens" - it may have been the weather, it may have been garden fatigue, but few of us could really appreciate the garden's charms at this point. Too bad (and maybe worth revisiting). We stopped breifly at Kanazawa's Higashi Chayamachi historic district, and visited the Shima House (Edo-era Geisha house) in small groups. Again, nice enough but at this point in the trip many were feeling burnt out on these historic sights....

From here, we went on to one of the most highly-anticipated items on the itinerary: SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum is organized as a number of gallery boxes, serarated by large corridors, and wrapped at the perimeter with a circular enclosure (housing... milling-about space, apparently). The basic organization is similar to the traditional japanese house, with the galleries taking the place of the dwelling space...

KSA Japan Day 12-14: Kyoto

2013-12-24T17:56:00-05:00

Day 12: Kyoto

First stop: Ryoan-Ji, a Zen Buddhist temple most famous for its dry (rock) garden: a mysterious arrangements of rocks that's been the subject of speculation for centuries. It's been said the rocks represent a family of tigers swimming across a river, or mountain peaks piercing the clouds, or simply islands in the sea... Whatever the symbolism, for me the garden only reinforces my view that Japanese gardens can, in general, be characterized by their emphasis on difference and separation, with each distinct element clearly delineated from its neighbor (compare to Chinese gardens, which take a more synthetic approach). Here, we note the stone frame around the rectangular gravel bed of the dry garden: beyond the frame, a drainage channel is cut, separating the horizontal plane of the gravel bed from the rear wall, and from the steps of the temple's viewing platform. Even within the dry garden, the larger black rocks are kept distinct from the white gravel - not just by...

KSA Japan Day 11: Hiroshima - Okayama - Kyoto

2013-12-22T01:05:00-05:00

KSA Japan Day 11: Hiroshima - Okayama - Kyoto

After departing Hiroshima, we headed towards Kyoto, picking up a few sights on the way. Our first stop was the Kurashiki City Museum (former government offices) by Kenzo Tange, 1960. A massive, solid block of a building, it lacks the subtlety of Tange's Kagawa Prefectural Office Building (which we saw earlier) but continues several of its themes in interesting ways. Earlier, we noted Tange's riffs on Le Corbusier, such as the raising of a building on piloti to free the ground plane for public program, his 'honest' use of materials, for example revealing the texture of the board-formed concrete. Here in Kurashiki, the Corbusian riffs are more explicit, and their integration into Tange's project - of finding an architectural language that operates within the framework of international modernism, yet draws on the craft traditions of pre-modern Japan - is less successful.

Here, the massing and form is pure Chandighar brutalism, with a ...

KSA Japan Day 9-10: Takamatsu - Naoshima - Hiroshima

2013-12-21T16:38:00-05:00

KSA Japan Day 9-10: Takamatsu - Naoshima - Hiroshima

On Day 9, we started with a quick stop at Kenzo Tange's 1958 Kagawa prefectural office building. As in other postwar modern projects in Japan, we find Tange engaging history explicitly, and searching for a synthesis of modern and traditional architecture. Here, post and beam wooden construction techniques are referenced in the concrete structure, and the setbacks at each floor seem to reference traditional pagoda construction. While we didn't get into the interior, it seems to draw a lot from Le Corbusier's work of the same period, with a open public zone on the ground floor, and the main office program elevated on piloti. Tange is said to have designed the entry garden as well, which is a serviceable version of a classical garden.

From here, we went to Risurin Garden, dating back to the 16-1700s. This was the first traditional Japanese garden we had encountered, and it certainly lived up to our expectations. The densely woo...

KSA Japan Day 8: Osaka to Awaji

2013-12-20T08:12:00-05:00

in Osaka, we took a quick look at the Open-Air Farmhouse Museum, another excellent collection off vernacular architecture from around Japan. visiting this museum/park, it's easy to see how the refined minimalism of traditional Japanese arc extrude developed. in one farmhouse, straw mats covered the packed-earth floor, in another later (or richer?) home, these had become tatami mats with a more refined construction. in almost all cases, a sequence of spaces unfolded from the packed-earth floor of the stable or storeroom, to the flat plank boards of the entry ways and exterior perimeter corridors, to the slight rise to internal tatami rooms, just as we've seen in the merchant's house in Nara, and will see later in the imperial villas in Kyoto. Similarly, in the thatched roofs of the farmhouses, we can find elements that reappearing n more refined form on temple roofs. The columns in the farmhouses rest on flat stones, another similarity to the temple architecture we've seen.

We w...

KSA Japan Day 7: Nara to Namba

2013-12-19T10:56:00-05:00

The morning after arriving late in Nara, we toured the historical sites in the city center. None of the temples or restored merchant houses in Nara are really "must-see" but as a dense collection of traditional architecture, it's hard to beat. the highlights here are mostly around the Todai-ji temple complex and surrounding park, populated by thousands of tame, sacred deer. In the historical Naramachi district we toured several other temple compounds and a few merchant houses. the clear standout here was the Imanishike Shoin, a small merchants house on an urban site, illustrating the great potential for integration of architecture and landscape in Huegel traditional Japanese home. this was of course a wealthy family, but the lot is small, and the layering of space within the complex is quite astounding: as sliding shoji screens are pushed and pulled in different directions, the entire layout of the house can be reconfigured at will, creating a truly, literally dynamic space. A co...

KSA Japan Day 6: Ise Shrine

2013-12-19T04:54:00-05:00

Though it was a significant detour (on the way from Yokohama to Nagoya) there was no way we could pass up visiting Ise Shrine.

Ise shrine is widely lauded as the best extant example of Shinto architecture, free of the influence of Buddhism. Given the syncretic nature of Japan's traditional religious architecture, it's not always easy to distinguish Shinto Shrines from Buddhist Temples, but at Ise the Shinto approach becomes incredibly clear. The structures here are unpainted and apparently untreated, allowed to express their tectonic truth through expert craftsmanship and honest revelation of material. There is no ornament to speak of, only the refinement and subtle elaboration of construction techniques from vernacular building traditions. (As we would see later, the "horns" of the shrine, the stone column bases, the woods tile roof, all have direct precedent in the Minka farmhouse typology).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Ise Shrine is its temporality. The Shrin...

KSA Japan Day 4-5: Yokohama to Nagoya

2013-12-17T04:57:00-05:00

Day 4-5 Tokyo to Yokohama to Nagoya

From Tokyo, we drove to the Yokohama Port Terminal, which is looking even better than it did when I visited in 2010, as the wood decking continues to age to an ash grey. While still impressive in concept and execution, the building does now seem a bit a pre-recession relic, it's formal exuberance completely unnecessary for the program (though we did see a few wandering locals, using the roofscape as intended, a public park with a spectacular view of the bay.). (In a few days, we'll see SANNA's Naoshima Ferry Terminal, a minimalist response?)

Passing Toyo Ito's now-unimpressive Tower of the Winds, we speculated on the state of the industry in 1980s Japan, and the impact of responsive, digital architecture that we now take for granted. After visiting Tod's, Mikimoto, and ZA-Koenji Theater, we're left mostly cold on Ito, questioning the architect's place in the canon of Japanese architecture.

At the Kanagawa Prefectural Youth Center, we were...

KSA Japan: 'grams day 4-5

2013-12-11T10:37:00-05:00

Instagram impressions, day 4-5: Tokyo and Yokohama.

KSA Japan Day 2-3: Tokyo

2013-12-09T05:20:00-05:00

KSA Japan Day 2-3: Tokyo

The tour continues. For the past 3 days, we've been exploring the city by subway, and on foot, stopping briefly in front of each building on the itinerary, to chat a bit about the design, the architects, and the historical context. In our curbside discussions, a theme has emerged: what does it mean to be "modern" and what is the role of tradition in contemporary society? While Tokyo is (rightly) seen as a technological wonderland with its sights aimed firmly at the future, the past has been surprisingly present in our explorations.

Yesterday, we started at Asakusa, visiting the Senjo-ji temple. A buddhist temple, we compared the ornamental program and decorative painting to the relatively austere Meiji Shrine we visited on the previous day. Though the architectural traditions of the Buddhist Temple and the Shinto Shrine are not aways clearly distinct, we were able to, for now, note the relative minimalism of the Shinto shrine versus the elaboraion of ...

KSA Japan Day 2: more Tokyo impressions.

2013-12-08T04:23:44-05:00

Day 2, Instagram impressions. More here: http://instagram.com/evandagan

KSA Japan Day 1: Tokyo

2013-12-07T08:05:15-05:00

Tokyo day 1.

From our hotel in Akasaka, we took the subway (and a brief walk)to Meiji shrin, walked through the park to the 1964 Olympic Gymnasium, on to Shibuya Crossing (viaAtelier Bow Wow's Miyashita Park), then backtracked a bit to the luxury boutiques along Omotesando-dori (hhstyle, Gyre, Tods, Omotesando Hills, Louis Vuitton, Coach, the Spiral building, and Prada), then went on to the Nezu museum, Aoyama cemetery, the National Art Center, 21 21 Design Sight, the Suntory Museum, a brief walk to Roppongi Hills, and wrapped up the day with a visit to the Mori art museum and skydeck at sunset.

A long day, but we did manage to see a cross-section of Tokyo's architectural history. Though the Meiji shrine is a fairly recent construct, we were able to start a discussion on temple typology - the influence of Chinese planning principals, propagated through japan via buddhism, and the subtle (to our untrained eyes) differences between Buddhist and Shinto temple/shrine architectur...

KSA Japan Day 0: Tokyo Impressions

2013-12-06T04:45:00-05:00

Students arrive tonight. I'll have some more thoughts on Tokyo later, but first, a few photos.... Instagram impressions from the last two days in Tokyo.

KSA Japan Day (-2): Nikko

2013-12-04T10:24:00-05:00

After about 20 hours in transit (including some jet-lagged confusion on the Tobu Line out of Tokyo), I've arrived at my first stop in Japan: Nikko. The city had been cut from our official itinerary fairly early in the planning process, and I wanted to see what we'd be missing (and, I admit, spend a few peaceful nights in a traditional inn before the frenzied tour officially starts).

Nikko is justifiably famous for its collection of UNESCO-listed temple complexes, nestled in the cedar forests a few miles from the modern city. Nikko's temples are considered the best of Japan's Edo-era architecture, and as late as the 19th century they were widely considered the apotheosis of Japanese architecture in general. Essentially, the Nikko temples take Chinese-Buddhist precedents, and crank up the volume. These buildings are gaudy and ostentatious: no surface goes undecorated, and the riot of ornamentation and visual collision of myriad materials can be shocking, if one was expecting seve...

KSA Japan 2013: The Book.

2013-12-01T23:53:00-05:00

Students at the KSA are putting the final touches on the guidebook before sending the files to print. Compiled over the past three months by our team of ~30 students, this could well be the most comprehensive book of its kind ever prepared for a study-abroad tour at the Knowlton School. The book will be 300 pages when printed, with the 180 individual building pages (each student researched at least five buildings) complemented by the full itinerary, 50 pages of maps, and 30+ pages of history, theory, cultural information, and a glossary and index.

While this might seem like overkill for a two week trip, we will in fact be visiting most of the buildings we've included, where having access to the drawings and relevant project information will not only heighten our appreciation of the space, but will be essential as we discuss the buildings later: we can refer directly to the plans and sections. Having a record of sites visited will be essential when sorting and taggin...

KSA Japan 2013: The Maps.

2013-11-14T19:58:00-05:00

In December, several OSU professors and I will be leading a group of 30 students on a two-week architecture tour of Japan. With over 400 buildings on our "master list" and over 150 assigned as student research, we would obviously need some maps.

On similar tours in previous years, we've used Google maps to locate buildings and plan out our daily itineraries in advance, but we had nothing but printed copies once we were out on tour. In China last year, we discovered the benefits of bringing a working cellular-enabled iPad on tour... with live navigation we were able to move more efficiently and reroute on the fly if we encountered traffic jams, road closures, or if certain buildings took more or less time to see than we had planned. (This may be fairly obvious... but of the 6+ tours of this kind I've done - as student or guide - last year was the first time I brought an internet- and GPS-enabled device on the trip.)

In planning the trip this year, I culled GPS locations from...

KSA Japan 2013

2013-11-04T15:35:00-05:00

::tap:: ::tap::

is this thing on?

It's been nearly five years since I graduated from OSU with my M.Arch, and though I moved away - to Rome, and then to Shanghai, then Seattle - I'm still very much connected to the school. Professor Jackie Gargus has been kind enough to invite me - again and again - on her legendary European architecture tours, and together we organized and ran two tours of (eastern) China, in 2011 and 2012.

This year, we're doing Japan.

We've hired a charter bus, booked hotels, and hammered out an itinerary. Starting December 6th, 30 students and a handful of professors will land in Tokyo, tour central Japan city-by-city, then fly back in time for Christmas. While this type of whirlwind tour isn't the ideal way to appreciate, say, the zen-calm of Kyoto's gardens, it does pack in as many sights as possible in a short amount of time, and leaves each student with an amazing archive of photos, a first-hand sense of the distinct urbanism of a unique cul...

Ciao!

2009-08-09T14:40:14-04:00

So, first off sorry for the lack of posts... I've been busy.

Immediately after graduation, I flew to Basel to see some old friends and check out Art Basel 40, the annual contemporary art fair (accompanied by numerous other loosely-associated fairs).

After 5 days there, I flew to Berlin to begin the KSA's 5-week study abroad trip through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Basel, Munich, and everywhere in between. I had done this trip before, but this time I was hired on as a TA, making it well worth a second try....

Before the trip started I had received a job offer (internship) from Fuksas in Rome, and after the trip ended in Munich a few weeks ago, I flew to Rome to scope out apartments and do some sightseeing (and save some money, as galavanting around Europe isn't cheap.)

It's odd that this was the only offer I received, and I had only really applied on the recommendation of my good friend and former KSA blogger, Marc Syp, who worked there for about a year after graduatin...

Art | 40 | Basel

2009-06-15T18:02:54-04:00

As far as I know, I graduated, and am now the proud owner of a Master degree in Architecture from the Ohio State University.

I assume, because I left the states before the graduation ceremony to come to Art Basel, the international contemporary art fair held annually in Switzerland.

Conveniently, the organizers decided to hold the fair the week prior to KSA's annual study-abroad tour, which I'm joining this year as an auxiliary professor, and which kicks off tomorrow in Berlin.

I'll be flying out in the morning, and I hope to keep up with the blog at least for the next six weeks on the trip, after which I'll be following in the footsteps of former KSA blogger Marc Syp, and moving to Rome for a position with Fuksas.

So, expect at least a few more updates here from me, here or on my [url=http://chakroff.blogspot.com/]dormant blog[url]. Until then, here's a selection of images from Art Basel and several associated fairs.

Created with flickr slideshow.

full flickr set here (still u...

Kipnis Final Exam

2009-05-31T21:01:33-04:00

"you will receive tomorrow our official proposal"

2009-05-28T09:39:17-04:00

this job hunt stuff sure can be cryptic.....

Words: Exit Reviews

2009-05-26T14:45:47-04:00

Today, tomorrow and thursday are the Knowlton School of Architecture's annual Exit Reviews, in which the graduating M.Arch candidates present a powerpoint developed over the last quarter, in an attempt to unite contemporary theory with examples from recent and historical architecture, and position their own work against this backdrop. My presentation is in a few hours, and I hope to re-format it for a later post here, but for now, here's some words. The clouds below were generated from the texts of the presentations, and should give you an idea of the kind of topics being presented over the next few days.

flickr set

Here's the full schedule:
TUESDAY MAY 26
9 AM - Jeff Squire, "Past, Present and Future Tension: Flailing at failing, or simply ailing, the problem of contemporary cities"
10 AM - Arienne Longstreth, "Towards A Nude Architecture"
11 AM - Liz Lagedrost, ( no title at press time)
12 PM - Katherine Eberly, "mixing [remix]"
1 PM - Tongsue Ly, "Repurposing Environment...

EXHIBITION: "MOCKUPS"

2009-05-19T16:03:13-04:00

EXHIBITION: "MOCKUPS"
05/13/2009 - 06/05/2009

Mockups is a collection of work from the past year of research focusing on the general condition of the relationship between materials and architectural scale. Less about the way things look, and more about the concept of “Something which does something,” the projects in the gallery exhibit how a found characteristic in a material, in this case plywood, can be integrated into the various scales of architecture construction. Preceded by curious material investigations, the discovery of plywood's ability to 'Feather,' becomes a constraint for productively getting architectural objects to behave a certain way as opposed to only looking a certain way. Inherent within the behavior of these material objects is the potential for "Failure" which defines a limit to the range of possible configurations. Many of the objects are broken or pushed past the point of the materials ability to accommodate what's drawn in the abstract. These instance...

Re:imag(in)ing Scale - Draft #3

2009-05-19T10:04:10-04:00

At OSU, we do a kind of mini-thesis - 10 weeks to prepare a 35 minute powerpoint presentation as a summation of our graduate education.

Our final drafts are due this friday. Current state of mine? 6000+ words (needs to be around 3500), 0 images organized (needs to be about 120 slides).

So far:

Quite a ways to go, but I think it'll work out in the end. Larger images available here but if I were you I'd wait for the final...

In news from the job hunt, it's been about 6 weeks since I started sending out portfolios. I have a telephone interview this week with Fuksas (you may remember that last year's KSA blogger Marc was hired there a few months after graduation), so wish me luck.

No other news aside from that - but I have decided to go on the KSA's Vienna Study Abroad trip (again) -- six weeks on a bus tour through Europe with stops in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Venice, Ljubljiana, Milan, Zurich, and most major cities in between. I'll fly out to Zurich on June 10th, spend a few days ...

Plan B.

2009-04-23T11:52:43-04:00

I got a call from my mother yesterday, for my birthday. Shockingly, their small house on St Croix (US Virgin Islands) has doubled in value in the past two years, confirming my suspicion that the Virgin Islands exist in some sort of bizzarro-world, or possibly are simply jumping through time like the island on LOST. With the job market looking pretty grim, I've already been considering moving down there temporarily to work on my portfolio and study for the ARE (there is no IDP requirement in the Virgin Islands, though getting reciprocity might be difficult without it), but this news opens up a new possibility. My parents are now considering selling the house and buying a plot of land, with the intent of eventually building a new house...

Obviously this would be quite an endeavor, but there are certainly worse ways to spend ones time while unemployed, so I'm feeling a little better about my worst-case-scenario. To make things more interesting, St Croix has a surplus of used tires, w...

25 lb. Sugar / 24 lb. Shortening / 5 c. Water / ¼ c. Vanilla

2009-04-13T12:21:29-04:00

Last quarter, my friend Casey Parthemore created this piece for visiting professor Lisa Hsieh’s seminar.

This piece consists of a chair, reupholstered in cake frosting, and a lamp, its shade covered in the same. While her use of found objects immediately recalls Duchamp’s Ready-Mades, this is not a mere rehashing of the historical avant-garde. The material treatment brings to mind the architectural models of late-60s Viennese architectural collective Haus-Rucker-Co, whose cake models were devoured as a dynamic treatise on the fleeting relevance of all avant-garde art and architecture, whose radical newness can never be permanent.

Material transposition can be aligned with numerous historical and contemporary art practices. Here, her use of frosting-as-media deals explicitly with domesticity and consumption. That the chair is a comfortable wing chair rendered functionally useless by its material construction is a comment on the utility of aesthetically-driven furniture design. This...