Archinect - UCLA (Scott)

Jason Payne / Hirsuta, "Rawhide: The New Shingle Style" at SCI-Arc

2011-09-13T12:38:10-04:00

photos by Joshua White, courtesy Jason Payne

In honor of its closing Sunday, I wanted to post some thoughts and reporting on the opening of Jason Payne’s (my final research studio professor) installation at SCI-Arc. The installation in SCI-Arc’s gallery was titled “Rawhide: The New Shingle Style” and focused on Jason’s Raspberry Fields project for a house in Utah. Included in the show were the scale model of the house as well as a full scale 1:1 construction of an important segment of the house’s roof. Originally plans were to include cow hides surrounding the 1:1 installation, conceptually “refigured as abstract bodies” to reinforce the connection to hair and hides in the work. Inhabiting the space with these flattened forms would have helped the exhibition succeed more thoroughly as an installation in a gallery; however the 1:1 segment of the house is absolutely successful as an affecting object of interest, and it’s only slightly less so at filling the specific SCI-Arc gallery...

A SCI-Arc Review Review

2011-04-21T05:52:05-04:00

Our research studio prof Jason Payne invited us to the final review of his studio at “crosstown rival” SCI-Arc last week, and as the discussion turned out to be pretty interesting I thought I’d relate some of it here.

The studio used animal hides as both site and as driver of form through material qualities. Jason ran pretty much the same studio at Knowlton/Ohio State; as fellow schoolblogger Greg described. The work itself included an animal hide, I believe mostly from cows, somehow altered by operations including stiffening with resin, or with formworks of metal, wood, or plaster. Small wax models were used to test operations on the hides, and surprisingly for a Jason studio, very few drawings were presented, mostly only one per group. The work was very interesting when compared to what we’re doing for Jason at UCLA; the slightly viscerally disgusting hides at SCI-Arc made our work at UCLA look anemic, stark and cerebral. As Jason pointed out though, the reviews for both b...

UCLA Munich Studio

2011-04-04T21:37:56-04:00

I thought it would be good for me to resurrect (not too strong a word at this point!) my archinect schoolblog in order to chronicle my final year in UCLA’s M.Arch I program. The beginning of the school year, fall quarter 2010, was our second topic studio - the studios we get to choose by lottery. Three of the four studios were offered at UCLA, and the fourth was a traveling studio under Peter Ebner (and Friends), based in Munich, Germany the entire quarter and partly sponsored by 3M. I of course chose the studio that would let me go back to Germany (though Munich is most definitely not Berlin). Munich is actually a great city, if a bit too rich and comfortable to be truly exciting.

Some shots of Munich:

Marienplatz, Munich's central square

some awesome trompe l'oeil rustication on one of Munich's oldest buildings

the hanging garden in Herzog & deMeuron's Fünf Höfe shopping mall

the pretty River Isar, which has a permanent tube wave in one spot, giving rise to the odd concept of Germ...

UCLA’s end of year show “RUMBLE” today and tomorrow

2010-06-07T11:37:59-04:00

I know I’ve been a bit of a total schmuck with this blog, but this year was NUTS. I have a bunch of updates I’ve been planning for months, but school just didn’t let up. So before I post any real updates about this year I wanted to put up a quick note about UCLA’s end of year show - Rumble. Everyone is putting the finishing touches on the work and it looks really great, so stop by for the public (i.e. ‘party’) component if you’re in LA today (Monday June 7). The day begins at 3pm with a symposium featuring some pretty amazing speakers (Sylvia Lavin, Thom Mayne, Jeff Kipnis, Monica Ponce de Leon, Greg Lynn and Neil Denari to name just half of those participating) called “The Disappearing Hand”, about the broad cultural impact of digital tools after the initial excitement around their possibilities has worn off. The official exhibition opening of Rumble begins after the symposium at 6pm and runs to 9, and will feature the work of course, but perhaps more importantly the chance to...

Back (Finally)

2009-10-09T07:26:35-04:00

I guess I’ve waited long enough to post (five months or something!) so I’ll take a little time (out of studio work, oops!) for a hydra-headed update. The quarter has now been underway for two weeks (and I've 'only' had two all-nighters so far!). I think I might finally have figured out my schedule; the first week and a half was a stressful process of not getting into any critical studies seminars I tried for, despite three of them being required before graduation and that this is one of the few quarters I'll have room in my schedule for one. I'm taking the last of the core studio sequence - the Major Building Design studio - which is coordinated with the other required course, Programming. My studio prof is Kevin Daly of Daly Genik whose work I actually really like, which is always nice. I actually live a block away from his three-part charter elementary/middle/early learning schools, and mentioned his great Camino Nuevo Charter High School in one of my first posts, which I was d...

Rumblings of Rumble

2009-05-18T19:11:01-04:00

The beginning of the last few weeks before the much-hyped (both within and without Perloff) second annual all-school exhibition called “RUMBLE” were marked quite literally with an actual earthquake last night. My building shook around a bit but apparently there was no serious damage done. Physical analogs of Rumble notwithstanding, the administration and faculty have us running scared in the ramp-up to Rumble. We’ve basically been told we have to finalize our designs this week in order to meet the rigorous production schedule. I actually think it’s a good thing, because a lot of us (well mostly me) need to be ‘shaken’ out of our complacency this quarter. Wow I really need to quit it with the earthquake metaphors, sorry. Anyway, if you’re in LA on June 8th or 9th, you should stop by and check us out:

SCI-Arc All School Exhibition + UCLA Awards Day

2009-04-29T08:21:46-04:00

Undergrad exhibition

I went to SCI-Arc’s All School Exhibition with studio face-mate Joe last Friday. It’s basically their version of UCLA’s Rumble (also see ACfA’s pre-Rumble description from last year); or maybe Rumble is our version of their All School Exhibition. Anyway, the exhibition was somewhat weighted towards undergraduate work, probably due largely to the fact that undergrad theses were displayed, where I believe grad theses will be finished after summer. What was (perhaps undeservingly) surprising about this was that the undergrad work, even some of the non-thesis work, was kind of better than some or much of the grad work. I think that speaks to the apparently excellent undergrad curriculum and faculty more than any deficiency in the grad work, which was also largely quite well executed. I say ‘well executed‘ specifically because while the boards and models were really expressive and even beautiful, the actual design proposals were not super impressive (in my very...

Where I Was When I Should Have Been Working On Studio...

2009-04-21T02:13:56-04:00

Palm Springs! My friends’ band was playing a show at a fancy hotel in Palm Springs yesterday, and invited me along. I wasn’t TOO far behind in studio, and besides, how could I say no to an all-expenses-paid trip to the most insane town in the world! I knew the hotel we were going to was fancy, but I had no idea just how; we got there and were literally in a pool being fed frozen grapes and margaritas by models. Yeah, I was uncomfortable too. More on that later.

The drive to Palm Springs was great; my friend’s car doesn’t have air conditioning so we kept the windows down, which was probably good as it made the ramping up to desert heat gradual; and there was no traffic. There are some great sights on the way:

Le Mont Garbage

We didn’t have time to stop at the Pee Wee Herman dinosaurs in Cabazon, which are now bizarrely occupied by a creationist gift shop, but here are some pictures from my last time there:

Bront

T.Rex

Dino-urbanism siting relationship

Entry

Dino escape infrastructu...

Never Say Neverland

2009-04-14T17:47:41-04:00

All of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch possessions (including even the gate, and creepy children lawn sculptures) are coming up for auction under the terms of an agreement that postpones imminent foreclosure, as the New York Times reports. My new buttmate in studio Amelia said something poignant like “If even Michael Jackson is getting foreclosed, the rest of us are fucked.” The auction exhibition includes so much crap (I mean “Jacksonia”) that it fills up the former Robinson May department store next to the Beverly Hills Hilton (coincidentally right across the street from the site of Eli Broad’s future vanity contemporary art museum, his second on Wilshire; which is also the site one of the UCLA studios is using this quarter). The Jackson auction show opens to the public today (for a $20 entry fee, of course). Despite the steep fee, this seems like a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience, so we’re organizing a “studio trip” to the exhibition.

The three items I’m most hoping...

An Archinerd's Spring Break

2009-04-03T05:45:54-04:00

It’s been almost a full week since the end of spring break and I’m still mourning its passing. And I know you’re probably sick of hearing me say “I went to some interesting lectures recently”, but I thought I would recap the ones I caught while on break. And yes, I am now admitting to being a total nerd, but I DID have actual fun during my break as well; I just can’t tell you about it because it would blow your mind. Well okay okay I just sat around and ate stuff. Anyway... While I was visiting my old friends/hood in NY I actually did end up making the kind-of-crazy trek by train from Brooklyn to Princeton for the Caroline Bos (UNStudio) lecture; but it was a fun diversion.

My New York aunt once drove me to our cousins’ beach house on the Jersey shore when I was a teen, and I remember thinking Jersey looked a lot prettier than it was fabled to be, bogs and all; but pretty this train ride to Princeton was not. This was largely the Jersey of my imagination: less than two minu...

Postopolis!

2009-03-31T22:23:21-04:00

Today is the start of the Postopolis! “live 5-day blogathon”. In true blogonerd fashion, I’m actually writing this from the event, on the rooftop of the Standard Downtown.

The Standard Dowtown

My roommate and I were excited to actually be able to walk to something in our neighborhood, so we took our time and dawdled on over and unfortunately missed the first talk, artist/gardener/animal architect Fritz Haeg. But the event is very exciting, despite everyone freaking out about how “cold” it is. Anyway, if you’re in the LA area you should check the schedule and come on down, there are lots of really interesting people talking. If you’re not in LA (shame on you) it’s also streaming, at the above Postopolis link. PS - there’s also free alcohol!

The "Two Davids" interviewing Yo-Ichiro Hakomori Principal of wHY Architecture, with the Bonaventure in the background - someone tell Jameson

I’m also very excited about being included on a panel of archinect schoolbloggers (with Emily from U...

Spring Break 2009!!

2009-03-22T01:03:12-04:00

Winter quarter has come and gone, and I’m now in New York on spring break. And yes, now I realize that I’m supposed to go to Acapulco or somewhere warm for spring break; but I don’t know anyone to mooch off of in any of those places, ha ha.

"Spring" in New York, from the J train crossing the Williamsburg bridge

Final reviews for our structures studio were tough; as has become custom, I spent too many nights at school, mostly in the room we call the “skank tank” (I think I picked up pink eye) and so was probably not in the best frame of mind to represent myself to the jury, but I don’t think it went too badly. Though the jury did kind of hate one of the aspects of the project that I really liked. I’ve been working on a new scheme for the skin, which is unusual for me - usually after the crit I never want to look at the project again, but I feel like this project might deserve more attention.

Final studio review

My final model

One of my boards - they could use a lot more work too!...

Recent Lectures

2009-03-07T06:48:28-05:00

I’ve been a bit slow on the posts recently, due I think to a sense of malaise in both life and school. It might be due partly to the fact that I’ve convinced myself that I got salmonella poisoning at the beginning of the quarter and I STILL feel pretty sick, almost at the end of the quarter. But don’t start thinking I’m a hypochondriac; I ate a few peanut butter Clif Bars that were later recalled by Costco, so I think I have a pretty good case for poisoning. Anyway, pretty sure you don’t want to hear more about that! So instead I’ll talk about a few of the recent lectures here, which cover kind of an interesting spread.

The first lecture of the winter quarter was Chris Bangle (former Director of design for BMW) on Feb 6. This was easily the most crowded lecture of the semester, probably due to the fact that it drew curious architects and designers as well as a bunch of car geeks, including a bunch of Art Center car design students (where Bangle went); the first group from Art ...

Contemporaneity of Real Estate Ads

2009-01-31T22:29:57-05:00

I was at the MOCA gift store today flipping through a mens magazine called Fantastic Man, which is put out by the creators of the fabulously gay Butt Magazine, when I was amazed to discover UCLA professor Neil Denari full-page staring back at me. It was apparently an ad for his under-construction HL23 (kind of a nice site actually) condo building on the High Line in Chelsea.

"Advertisement in Fantastic Man, the magazine’s first ever real estate advertisement." - Pandiscio Co - brand creation & design for Denari's HL23

They really did an ad JUST for a gay mens mag? The shot IS very Fantastic Man... Congrats on being an object of gay desire Neil! I kind of want to show this to my theory teacher Sylvia Lavin so we can deconstruct its contemporaneity in class.

Even Kanye loves it:

He even had a very erudite critique of it, even discussing the merits of the structural system. Maybe an intern wrote that.

Also, I'm going to a funny "mixer" at school tonight called "Drape Me". The...

Winter/Spring Quarter Lectures/Events

2009-01-25T07:07:05-05:00

Ooo, gold!

The spring quarter lectures were added to the new poster which was released since I last posted about winter quarter lectures, so I'll post all of them together here to recap:

Feb 6 - Christopher Bangle (Director of Group Design for BMW)

*CANCELED* Feb 10 - Winy Maas (MVRDV)
We just heard from the department that this lecture is canceled, but that they're going to try to reschedule for Spring quarter.

Feb 23 - Enric Ruiz-Geli (Cloud 9 architecture studio)

March 4 - Billie Tsien (Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects)

March 9 - Peter Ebner (Ebner and Friends Architecture)

April 13 - Jean-Louis Cohen (who I don't know anything about but who appears to be a writer on modernist architecture?)

May 4 - Jun Aoki

May 11 - Ben Ball (of Ball-Nogues Studio, who gave a nice lecture at SCI-Arc a year or so ago; and I love that their studio is in my former (and favorite) hood, Echo Park)

There are also a bunch of lectures at SCI-Arc, of which I'm probably most excited about ...

Leak Life

2009-01-24T04:50:57-05:00

We've entered Los Angeles' rainy "season" today (last year there were like three days total of noticeable rain), and have discovered some more delightful qualities of our studio in Perloff Hall: leaks. I don't know if institutional buildings in Los Angeles are just not waterproofed (is it cheaper to clean up after leaks three times a year than actually pay for waterproofing?), but these leaks are a bit disturbing because they mostly don't seem to be coming from the wall of windows, but instead from the joints between the columns and beams. This was made a bit more disturbing tonight after a small earthquake that felt and sounded a bit like someone dropped a car on the floor downstairs. I'm sure the leaks couldn't have corroded ALL of the beams' reinforcing and that we still have enough shear strength to withstand the Big One... right?

The official solution; yes, draining into a small trash can. I'm told I have weekend emptying duty.

Leakstop or installation art? (nice work Alex)

Op...

Fall Quarter Postmortem

2008-12-28T23:11:57-05:00

My first quarter at UCLA went by pretty fast of course, but it also feels like life before grad school is a distant memory. I guess that's what trauma does to its victims?

Studio final reviews

The final crit for studio didn't go so well; I vastly under-budgeted my time and presented some woefully undercooked material. I think the fundamentals of my project are still strong, but I'm pretty disappointed in how I ended up presenting them. If I wanted to be comfortable enough to include it in my portfolio I would have to put a few more days of solid work into the boards and physical models, but I just don't want to look at the project anymore. Our section instructor was pretty disappointed in all of us as well; the last several weeks of the quarter he actually seemed depressed when looking at our work. Not the most encouraging thing when you're unsure of what you need to do to improve! I do think we put up some good work, most of which could be improved of course, but I think our ...

Andrew Zago Lecture

2008-12-15T21:22:19-05:00

Zago at Otis

A few weeks ago (before the start of finals hell) I was able to catch a lecture at Otis College of Design given by Andrew Zago. This was a treat as I worked with Zago on a competition and a few as yet unrealized projects for actual clients during my time at my last job before school - my boss had run Zago's Detroit office before starting his own office in LA. Andrew is incredibly smart and a really great designer, and is even fun to work with, but I didn't know much about what he was like in a more academic context. He had been the head of the New York City College architecture program until coming to LA last year to teach at SCI-Arc, which he was doing when we were working together. At the office I had seen some of his previous projects and bits of what he was doing with students, but the lecture was fun as it pulled everything together.

The Otis campus is very strange; I had never been before but it's so close to LAX that I see it from the runway almost every ...

Lord of the Flies

2008-12-05T04:10:53-05:00

What happens when we forget how to cut things by hand:

The unruly mob waiting to sign up for laser cutter time a few days before final crits

In a scene tonight that would have been more funny had I not been in one of the lowest rungs on the caste-based system that governs assigning a day of time slots for laser use at 1130-12 midnight the day before, we saw a few of us first years waiting hours (I now realize foolishly) for just six open non-priority time slots, that were swiftly snapped up by a few third and second years who waited 5-15 minutes. But don't worry about us poor untouchables - there is equity in this system - First years have two dedicated priority blocks that we can sign up for at midnight tomorrow. I'll either be gunning for those, or going back to the Dark Ages (undergrad) and cutting my stuff by hand (gasp).

The midterm crits for our Donovan gallery project in studio a couple weeks ago were okay. We were reviewed by our section's instructor, Jason Payne, alon...

Steel Tour - LA Live

2008-11-23T05:27:10-05:00

My Intro to Building Construction class visited two building sites on Tuesday, to illustrate our unit on steel construction techniques. One was a medium scale mixed use project in West Hollywood, and the other was the Ritz Carlton hotel and residences tower that's one of the biggest parts of the huge LA Live project Downtown.

Sierra Bonita Mixed Use Affordable Housing

Architect Patrick Tighe explaining the project

This project is by Patrick Tighe who went to UCLA with our instructor David Montalba and was on site to explain the project and show us around. I only caught bits of the explanation as Tighe is somewhat soft-spoken, and in a very active urban construction site it wasn't easy to catch what he was saying. The project seems like a nice one; it's being built by a non profit developer in concert with the city of West Hollywood using many sustainable features, with retail on the ground floor, a city parking lot underground, and four floors of small residential units above f...

Los Angeles in Late Fall

2008-11-21T08:35:34-05:00

Please permit me a moment of indulgence:

I was walking to get some food on campus a few days ago, and something about the warm November air and the way the setting sun hit a lush bed of roses made me realize again that I really do love Los Angeles.

Actual moment of discovery

It wasn't just framed as 'in other places it's freezing and snowing right now' (though that was definitely part of it!), and it wasn't just UCLA and its landscaping; the moment was like a dream where you understand a wider picture from one small scenario (i.e. "I was in this room, and it was totally my childhood bedroom, but like totally different, I just knew..."). Maybe I just haven't been sleeping enough, and was maybe ACTUALLY DREAMING as I walked. I think it does mean though that I'm adjusting to UCLA, but it also felt as though there were wider implications speaking for my increased adjustment to this bizarre heterogeneous megacity. That this sudden feeling of fondness for Los Angeles occurred at UC...

Jan Edler/realities:united Lecture

2008-11-21T07:22:08-05:00

Denari, Abe, Edler

I went to the Jan Edler/realities:united lecture in the department on Monday. He has done and is doing currently some very interesting work, collaborating with firms like Herzog & DeMeuron and BIG. Edler's interest seems to lie in making design more communicative, and mentioned exploring a concern with "what makes an 'architectural pixel'" and the firm's projects appear to be almost exclusively in facade lighting/animation schemes. It sounds like Edler would like to branch out into other types of projects, but the success of the animated facade of the Kunsthaus Graz has seemed to pigeon-hole the firm into facade commissions. However, the only project I saw that wasn't mainly lighting was a very minimal cladding of a historic modern facade and lobby, which Edler said was his favorite, but was probably my least favorite of his work. Some of the really amazing work we saw included the aforementioned Kunsthaus Graz, with its circular fluorescent bulbs animating ...

Philip Beesley lecture

2008-11-13T22:09:07-05:00

Philip Beesley

In another lesson in how great it can be to be part of a major research university, I attended a talk last Friday given by University of Waterloo architect and designer Philip Beesley, at the California Nanosystems Institute on campus that was part of the Body Art Disease symposium last weekend. Beesley has completed many pretty typical building projects, but seems to focus a lot of his energy on experimental installation projects. A major defining interest appears to be in what he calls “mechanical empathy”, or a mechanical construct's ability to respond to human interaction. He spent a significant amount of time showing slides of renaissance paintings of bible scenes, and focused specifically on how textiles are represented in the works. This was apparently to highlight how something inert like textiles can respond to or resonate with emotional context, or how the material world echoes human conditions. Beesley apparently considers his installations as somethi...

Week in Review

2008-11-10T05:07:11-05:00

I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I should put up another potpourri post of everything that's been going on.

The vacuum former tutorial

In my tech course, where we're modeling and vacuum forming 'Washbasins of the Future' (my trashy catch-phrase, not the course's), we've progressed into better drawings, and specifically better technical drawings, and have fabricated the most complicated and difficult half of the basin at half scale on the vacuum former.

Our 3D prints - prep for larger-scale fabrication

The vacuum forming process is fairly complicated; we first have to model the surface in Rhino, then split it in a way that makes sense for fabrication and take it into software for translating its curvature into tool paths, then mill out the rough shape in MDF on the Techno router (with a low clearance it's really only good for cutting sheet material).

Milling our rough form

Then we glue the rough form together and mount it in framework as we have to mill out the detailed ...

Greg Lynn - Book Talk

2008-10-30T02:54:20-04:00

New book

Greg Lynn gave what he called a “book talk” - he went through the books he's had published so far, from Animate Form to Intricacy to the new 'non-monograph monograph' Greg Lynn Form. I did not end up buying the new book; at $55 it seemed a bit too much of a strain on my alarmingly dwindling student loan pile. It looks very nice though – much more balanced and well rounded than his previous efforts. I'll give you a sense of each book project from Greg Lynn soundbites (and I'm probably misquoting, so consider these illustrative rather than direct quotes):

Animate Form:
“I didn't know it, but everything I'm doing now I was doing then … I haven't had a new idea since.”
It was “too focused on vocational aspects” of architecture.
“I'm deeply embarrassed by Animate Form.”

Intricacy:
It “captures what makes architecture architecture” - that the “expression of component with the whole is unique to architecture” and doesn't appear in other fields.

Greg Lynn Form:
“Pop cultu...

Theory Talk: Jasbir Puar

2008-10-26T23:51:51-04:00

theorist Jasbir Puar spoke in Royce Hall on Wednesday

I went to an afternoon lecture in the English department on Wednesday on recommendation from my ex, who is working on a PhD in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. It turned out to be a great suggestion as the lecture was incredibly engaging and brought me out of the M.Arch thought bubble, at least for a bit. The event was hosted by the Center for the Study of Women on campus, which I believe has been expanded, despite the name, since the days of early feminism to include gender and queer studies. The talk was given by Jasbir Puar from Rutgers, and was entitled “Prognosis Time: Towards a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Her recently published book is entitled "Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times"; after this lecture, I’d really like to find time to read it.

Puar is clearly operating at the cutting edge of critical theory; she often talked over my head, as I’m someone who’s barely given Del...

Break for Culinary Camp

2008-10-19T07:23:05-04:00

I took a little break from work-work-working today, and walked Downtown from my apartment with my roommates to go to Clifton’s Cafeteria. It’s a redwood forest-themed cafeteria style diner that’s been there since the ‘30s, and is amazing. Never in my wildest dreams did I think a redwood forest could be fodder for camp, and I don’t mean the smores kind. I encourage anyone who loves living kitsch (yes, that’s a problematic term, but it’s just oh so enjoyable) and is in Downtown LA to check this place out. It’s not the most delicious or even the cheapest place, but that’s not really the point.

The tiers remind me of a woodsy Harvard GSD

There's even a little cave chapel with spiritual audio/visuals - not to be missed!

Also, I did make it to the morning half of the USC conference I mentioned earlier (at the bottom of the post), and caught a great lecture by Marcelo Spina of Patterns. He showed some great projects, but it seemed very materials and process-focused, to the detriment ...

Nader Tehrani – “Material Pedagogies”

2008-10-17T06:05:02-04:00

I went to the Nader Tehrani (Office dA) lecture at USC tonight, but due to the twin LA curses of traffic and parking, I was about 20 minutes late. Who knows what goodies I missed! What I did catch of the lecture was an impressive array of projects with a clear thread of a similar sensibility in regard to materiality and process throughout. One major theme that kept coming up was the use of simple geometric profiles parametrically shifted into other simple geometric profiles to create a deformable unit used throughout the project in different iterations to create a dynamic whole. I definitely hadn’t realized that this concept was used in the only built Office dA project I’ve visited, the Helios House BP gas station in LA. Each vertical member is apparently built from the same unit, distorted to form column, paystation, and “sign-less signage” (his term for the wide panel section facing the street that though it doesn’t technically have signage, helps “transform the brand into ...

"Loads" of Concrete

2008-10-17T04:16:54-04:00

On Tuesday the first years went out on a site visit for our Building Construction course. We got a hard hat tour of a huge new ultra luxury condo tower in Century City, called “The Century” by Robert AM Stern with HKS Architects. No, we were not there to get design tips (yikes) – we were there as part of our unit on concrete structure. The tower is 40-something stories tall already, and we went all the way to the top to watch the concrete being poured. Pretty exciting stuff actually. We all bonded in fear of the rickety construction elevator, and climbing the last three stories on precarious painters ladders to the top, where construction workers snapped photos of us cowering in terror under huge steel structural members flying around hung from giant cranes. I guess it wasn’t as dramatic as all that, but it sounds more fun that way.

The ladders were only really scary when they were leaning over a several-story-deep hole in the slab...

Waiting to be smothered

Basically all steel...

Crit Crazed

2008-10-17T03:29:18-04:00

I had two crits on Monday (yeah, fun weekend): the first was for my “Basins of Attraction” tech seminar, and the second was for studio. The tech seminar crit was more of a progress report, so it wasn’t as stressful as the run-up to the studio crit, which was the last for our units project.

In tech, my group is still working on two different schemes to approach the problem of applying catastrophe theory models to water basin fixtures, to be fabricated by vacuum former. For the crit this week we worked more on representation than on advancing the model, and I think the boards we produced looked pretty handsome.

Early draft version of one of our boards

But there are definitely some changes I’d like to make for next week. We came out of the review still not 100% behind either option, but we’re going to concentrate on developing one of them for next week, with the other as a fallback in case we don’t like where we’re headed. The biggest new issue I think we’ll have to tackle befor...