Archinect - Pennsylvania State University (Arthur)

I am a horrible blogger

2004-11-25T23:50:50-05:00

So I'm a horrible blogger.

Haven't been posting as much as I want to...but in the past few months if I had some extra time I'd head straight to the bed and catch up on sleep, if you know what I mean. Plus nothing exciting was really happening.

The Penn State Arboretum (as mentioned in the post before...3 months ago.) project had been dragging on for TOO LONG...and I'm getting a little sick of it. Sometimes I wish that I can switch back to 2nd year when you get two projects to work on in one semester, instead of working on a signle one this year. But, since the theme this year is 'the building throughoutly considered', having a semester to work on it is in fact appropriate.

I studied the water flow patterns on the site and decided that the design of the building is to follow how the water flows. At the first few presentations the critics kept asking me, 'are you sure about if that's how's the water is going to flow on the site?'. Eventually I had to do a contour model, pour water...

The man who lived in a sand castle

2004-09-20T00:50:08-04:00

Studio is finally being split up and assigned to different professors. And I'm pretty happy about being in professor Barbara Voight's section.Having gone through a presentation last wednesday, Barbara seems pretty helpful and nice. Looking forward to see how it goes...

Our project this semester would be to design an education center and its surrounding landscape for the Penn State Arboretum. The Arboretum is not built yet, but plans are being finalized. The site is pretty much a gigantic piece of flat land on the north side of campus. This is a project that is strongly related to the site itself. I'm researching a bit on the Eden project and underground architecture...I don't really want to get into talking about my project yet, 'cause there's something more fun to talk about...FIELD TRIP!

The field trip to University of Pennsylvania's Morris Arboretum and the Henry Mercer house last friday was quite a blast. At 5:30am I braved the dark and rainy streets, lunch box in hand, and a...

We shall be whipped

2004-09-09T17:34:13-04:00

Now that the lovely summer days are over, it's about time to get ready for some serious learning experience.

But there's still some time for a little dancing and boozing and lying around doing nothing, right?

Apparently a lot of my friends in studio think so. The first project of the school year would be the Corbelletti Competition Charrette. Held in honor of Professor Ramiero Corbelletti who served as the head of the Department of Architecture at Penn State University from 1968 to 1988. Students from all years participate in it. This year the topic is a 'Space for Spectable', located at the new Architecture and Landscape Architecture building. (Note to potential PSU arch students - the building is near completion which means you the lucky ones will be getting a brand new studio!) After reading an introductory packet that is pretty much Greek to me except for the part about Marcel Duchamp, Peter Greenaway and the analogy of mechanism and change, off I went to generate some ideas....