Archinect - University of Michigan (Colin)

Fall '07 Studio

2008-01-13T12:32:15-05:00

The Studio
This was a successful studio. Some people might say that all studios are successful because they are all learning experiences. Those people are either lying to themselves or are not paying tuition.

Everyone’s skills and drive to work progressed throughout the semester and I think all of us were, in the end, happy with the work we did. Still, wherever the work stood at the final review, the collective sentiment was that we wished to have another semester to continue with it. Nobody wanted to walk away from what we were doing.

I learned new ways of working; methods of thinking, generative and decision-making techniques. I can’t say specifically what I learned, it’s too hard to step back and really understand that yet. But I sense that I learned, or picked up, things this semester that I’ll be able to draw on significantly in the future.

We had a great professor. Good teachers leave a certain part of their ego at the door. They listen to students and are heavi...

represent

2007-12-08T22:57:01-05:00

acknowledging that i'm supposed to use this space to give people a sense of what school here is like, i'm gonna share some of the work i've been doing this semester:

Representation, a sort-of intro class for grad students, has come to an end. It's one of those classes that has painless, but useful assignments and great lectures. Five professors split the teaching duties- they all lectured on different days and then each headed up a section. In Malcolm's section, our final project required modeling an italian renaissance building in rhino, relying on geometry and proportion instead of measurement. It was an interesting way to work. I took on the tempietto maser; a smaller, half-palladian church outside of venice.

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earlier projects:

posters exercise:
"visual gestures that depart from overused icons for some cities"

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data graphics exercise
finding the compelling in information through clear representation

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proce...

I’m a bit fed-up- in a bit of a fed-up mood.

2007-11-30T11:13:42-05:00

Here at Michigan, we have a bunch of required classes- classes that you must take in order to graduate. They’re not required for any arbitrary reason- they cover topics that the accreditation board considers essential to the education of an architect- fine. These classes are taught in a large lecture hall, with a professor (sometimes more than one) at a podium, and usually rely heavily on powerpoint and quantitative evaluation- probably the most efficient way to teach. These classes; construction, history, structures, intro to theory, environmental technology, site planning- are often taught by professors who are hired and evaluated based first on their record as researchers or practitioners in their discipline and second on their ability to educate. We have a lot of great innovators, researchers, and designers here at TCAUP, most of them are good teachers too. Still, we have a few severely-challenged teachers.

If you asked students who they’d prefer to introduce them to a...

for Kurt

2007-04-13T21:36:52-04:00

So, our final project in first-year construction was a kite. Or, as the assignment sheet said, "Moving from heavy mass to lightness is a longstanding arc across architectural desire inspiring numerous technological developments and processes in theoretical and applied forms of knowledge construction".

My group (Jacky, Phil, Matt, and me) decided that we wanted to work with transformation, specifically transfromation through combustion. (FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!) - whatever happened to Beavis?

Over the past few weeks, we designed a kite, in two parts, which would rise as a fire-powered lantern, then break apart after a time-delayed fuse ignited, transforming into a circo-flex type kite. Yeasterday, when we found out that Kurt Vonnegut died, we decided to dedicate our craft to him.

At first, things looked good, the kite filled with hot air, form the fire-ball at its center. It rose a few feet into the air- we were elated, our calculations had predicted that we were over-weight and ...

render me orange

2007-03-19T16:51:46-04:00

so, um... charles (addictionbomb) and i have been working together in studio. at this point we're using catia to try to develope spanning surfaces or structures that can adapt to the environment in which we lpace them. but this post is really about rendering. charles told me that some people have questions about rhino 4 + maxwell. i think the new plugin interface that next limit has come up with is a bit easier than the old one. i havn't had any problems with renders yet, although there's a 10 second delay now after you enter the render command before maxwell pops up and gets to work. slightly annoying when you'r edoing quick renders to set up a longer one.

Motor City Motor Trip

2006-09-05T15:10:18-04:00

So, I've neglected this blog a bit... and I know you all want to know about the work we did throughout july and august, but i'm gonna hold off on that for now. Instead, I'd like to share with you a few pictures from our incredibly awesome field trip to detroit.

This is John as he exits a super-fancy (they would never take me as a client) hair salon that Christian's firm designed... for me it represented something important, after all academic work we do, some day we might be able to design something that is actually built.. some day.

Tom and Reiji on the road, Reiji loves american culture, Tom f@%#ing hates it.

I liked the warps in the roof.

We visited the Heidelberg Project, an ongoing work by Tyree Guyton. Matt (pictured above) transforms into godzilla and wreaks havoc.

A really flat shopping cart. (photo credit: Tim)

Zago's pavilion... Mika is fed up with architecture.

Like a cloud in our sky, grab your things let's fly away....

We're all Meising it up in lafayett...

t-minus

2006-07-13T11:40:05-04:00

we're about to have our first crit. i've burned through the past week working on the "model space" project. i like it, i'm not sure that it really deals with what they wanted us to deal with, but there's nothing like a crit to set you straight. we started with a pre-designed "site", the large construction of mdf boards, and then had to manipulate it and build around with using a fixed budget of mdf, masonite, and bass wood. it's been amazing watching the projects develop. everyone's approaching it a different way. it's been fun, now on to five hours of sitting and listening.

Bootcamp

2006-06-30T22:13:38-04:00

on tuesday, one of our professors told us that this will be like running a marathon for the next 3 years.

the past few days have been long. it's been 4 days (i just had to do the math in my head) but it does seem longer. i can barely remember what i was doing a week ago, just that it was different. did i have a job? did i live somewhere else?

the assignments have piled up quickly. the bulk come from the studio component of the program. we've built "sites" out of mdf for the project we'll start next week. we also had a guest instructor in for the past two days who taught us a number of model building techniques and led us through a cutting and gluing project. tomorrow we start experimenting with one piece each of mdf and masonite to explore addition and subtraction.

we've spent a lot of time in the shop in the past three days, first learning about rules/tools/methods -we all now know not to sand plastic on the belt sander and that the jointer would chew off our finger befo...

School's In For Summer

2006-06-27T20:31:47-04:00

"I'm Colin, nice to meet you."- said over and over today.

Orientation was today, it started at 1, which was nice, no need to wake up early. It reminded me of the open house i went to a few months ago; scheduled but not excessivly organized.

We were introduced to the 3 faculty members, Christian, Dawn and Juan, who will be teaching us a lot in the next few months. There are ~35 students in the class, more than i'd guessed would be there. It seems like more than half of them have studied art, design or engineering.

We got to pick our desks, i got one next to a wall, which i think is a plus, but there's only about 30 inches between each pair of back-to-back desks, it's a bit of a crunch.

The schedule they gave us is a bit cryptic, but it looks like we'll have 3 main projects over the next 6-7 weeks: Model Space, Digital Space, and Paper Space.