Archinect - Untitled_WIP

I have an air mattress at my studio desk.

2018-03-21T14:24:55-04:00

At Taubman College, the studio occupies the third floor. The third floor is studio, the third floor is architecture, the third floor is Taubman. Architecture school can’t happen without the studio. Pedagogically, it is entrenched and just as much, culturally entrenched as well. Peter Zellner might disagree, but that’s okay.

The college shares a building with the art school, so the distinction is relevant. The third floor is a big box, rectilinear, thirty thousand continuous square feet, and a ceiling height of probably fifteen feet. There is a new addition, completed by Preston Scott Cohen, and while he added a second heart to the school, the original never left CMYK on the third floor, though that furniture really helps make the space habitable.

This post is an ode to the third floor, and if you don’t go to University of Michigan, it is an ode to the studio.

I remember my first day in studio. It was my second day in Ann Arbor. It was the end of June for 3G orientation. I was fre...

State of the School Address 2018

2018-01-28T13:25:37-05:00

A few weeks in into the start of the semester, we’re still in that magical and transitional time, the beginning of a semester. Or more precisely, because it is the start of a new studio, things feel fresh. These sweet moments are paralleled only to those that immediately follow being done with final review.

But as the days count down to Donald’s first State of the Union address—to which I want to thank my congressman from Georgia, the 5th’s John Lewis, for boycotting—I would like to take this opportunity to make a State of the School Address. I certainly wasn’t asked, this might quite possibly be unwanted, but also like Donald, who needs an invitation when I have an open platform at my disposal. The address is as follows.

About a week ago, I attended the meeting of Taubman College’s restart of The Architecture Lobby. Discontinued a couple of years ago, the chapter has made its return to the University of Michigan—I would like to take the second opportunity to thank faculty members ...

I should probably stop drinking coffee.

2017-11-06T17:33:59-05:00

The coffee machine in the media center is broken. It’s starting to affect the students. Whether an architecture student enters architecture school with a love of coffee or not, the architecture student probably leaves this hallowed institution with some level of dependency. When the machine breaks, the system falters.

I walk by desks with a cup of it in hand. That cup has the power to stop students in their tracks; they turn, they gape, and they ask where I got that cup of coffee. “It’s from somewhere else,” I say. (I left the building and walked across the street to the nearest cafe.)

I take my coffee black. No cream, no sugar, just give it to me straight from the bean. I get a headache without a morning coffee. Tea is the healthier alternative. The rush isn’t the same. I only drink tea after having two cups of coffee.

My consumption of coffee has a direct relationship with the environment that I’m in. I even wear significantly more black than I entirely did in the entire two dec...

Architecture is in love with itself.

2017-10-23T01:28:00-04:00

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is a lot. I’m not the first to write about it, certainly won’t be the last, but maybe I’ll be the first to say simply, naively, unequivocally, that it is a lot. Every available space, hallway and corner is put to work in the exhibitional narrative put forth by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee. Even the building is a lot, a fine example of Chicago’s expertise on the Beaux-Arts style. And when the packed exhibition converges with the ornate building, the result is fairly overwhelming.

'Best Millenial Pink,' MAIO

There is an immense visual density of information. I appreciate it. It functions well as a blunt instrument to ensure no person could possibly leave without some lingering thought or question regarding at least one thing seen. The exhibition encompasses three floors of the Chicago Cultural Center. Each contribution ranges radically in scale. Unlike the previous iteration, Chicago’s first, there is a theme. Make New History, which proved to be a bro...

A Piece of Clothing, and a Piece of Niemeyer

2017-10-08T19:30:28-04:00

It's not quite groundbreaking to assert that travel is life changing. Of course it is. It’s equally obvious for me to equate traveling to being a better designer. Sure, there is a connection there. Sure, there are a thousand blogs and articles to attest to this fact, but I’m going to do one more.

I recently went on one of Taubman College’s Spring Travel Courses with Anya Sirota and law professor, Anne Choike. We did three weeks of site work and research in Detroit, followed by three weeks in Brazil -- Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

My first Niemeyer, the first project I was able to experience of his was in Rio -- his Niterói Contemporary Art Museum. It is a spaceship on a cliff that juts into a bay. An object of pure white, seemingly hovering, it has a way of commanding your attention. It is curvaceous and exuberant and not at all quiet, surprising for a building that isn’t big. Anya made sure we saw more Niemeyer than we knew what to do with.

Modernism in America became stale. It wa...

I'm in architecture school because of a barrel vault.

2017-10-03T23:14:03-04:00

I’m in architecture school because of a barrel vault

A barrel vault is the simplest kind of vault, essentially just a series of arches placed one after another. It was originally built from stone, but the barrel vault that I’m referring to consists of concrete framing, stucco, and plaster, an entirely classical design rendered in a modern aesthetic. It was built by Joseph Amisano, a thoroughly Atlanta architect, as part of the firm: Toombs, Amisano and Wells. Completed in 1961, the building--a white box in a sea of red brick--hosts the landscape architecture school of the University of Georgia.

At the time of experiencing it, I lacked the language to situate it in a historical moment. I couldn’t have said that the building is mostly modernist, that it is a box with glass curtain walls wrapped around much of it, but that it was built in the early stages of postmodernism, and so the building doesn’t neatly fall into the modernist category. On one half it, tucked away towards the bac...