Archinect - UIC SOA

What we did this summer.

2012-09-30T14:39:00-04:00

This summer, UIC students completed two pavilion projects in different locations in Berlin. One project was a part of the annual StudioBerlin, which takes UIC students to Berlin every summer. The second project was part of an Artist-in-Residence program called HomeBase Berlin that I took part in for 3 months.

Pankow. A neighborhood in the north, and former East Berlin. Axonometric view.

Study model

The permanent pavilion constructed during the Residency at HomeBase Berlin is a space for Working, Performance, and Leisure(and a variety of activities in-between). The residency is host to creatives from around the world who represent different disciplines(visual art, writing, performance, etc). The pavilion, which is situated in the inner courtyard of a former brewery which the residency now occupies, acts as a condenser of these activities in a semi-public space. The summer residency culminated in three days of festival programing, which included exhibitions, lectures, performa...

Repetition & Amnesia.

2011-10-27T09:50:00-04:00

So aside from our Aldo Rossi centric studio, we've been super busy with the rest of the first semester curriculum at UIC.

Our Technology course has been rivaling our studio workload with a series of structural studies. The course is lead by Lluis Ortega, who is also new to UIC, coming to chicago via Barcelona. The studies usually look at one pre-digital project/building and one more contemporary response dealing with a same set of issues or techniques. Those of use new to the discipline had to learn very quickly ways to represent techniques, materials, architectural intent, etc.

Here's David Mulder's and Anh Pham's pavilion/installation in response to Greg Lynn's Blob Wall and Aalvar Alto's brick facade variations.

I think this approach to production by first looking back to a historical precedence, then looking at contemporary responses to the issue, then finally positioning our design or arguments within that genealogy, is typical of the working order around ...

ROSSI'S WITHOUT ORGANS (RWO) pt. I & II

2011-10-09T12:42:12-04:00

So it's already mid-term review time at UIC SOA. The first half of our first semester has flown by. This is probably because of the unrelenting pace we've been working at, and the concentration on deadlines that's consumed us. But we've produced a lot of work in a little over 8 weeks. About half of us first-year MArch's are new to architecture(myself included), so the work of the first half of the semester shows a huge amount of progress in our drawing and modeling skills. Personally, I wouldn't have thought it was possible to learn so much in such a short period of time, but I guess the round the clock drawing, modeling, and thoery has paid off.

So here's a quick run down and some thoughts about our first studio projects at UIC.

In our first semester studio taught by Paul Preissner and Kelly Bair, we are using 12 Aldo Rossi sketches from A Scientific Autobiography as, more or less, an instrument for drawing and 3D modeling with different programs.

We started b...