Archinect - USC (Joanna)

ID CARDS

2010-11-13T00:39:06-05:00

housing studio

2010-10-21T03:13:35-04:00

housing studio

Often times when someone outside the architecture realm finds out that you are studying architecture, the first thing that comes out of their mouth falls within the lines of "so... does that mean you are going to make houses someday?” At first glance, the idea of "making a house" seems like a simple idea. We've all live in a home of one form or another, so we all have an idea of what a simple home is comprised of. But ask anyone who has experienced the hardships of a housing studio and they can tell you right off the bat that it is not as simple as it seems. The intensity of the process that goes hand in hand with housing design has gone as far as job refusals in some firms and self-inflicted-hair-pulling/money-loss/lawsuits in others. It has taken us two years of designing everything-but-a-house to prepare for this studio and we’ve all been waiting to hone our space planning abilities to create these “dream homes”.

Lucky for us architecture students in Southern C...

architecture students turned furniture designers

2010-03-19T17:03:35-04:00

assignment:
design a bench that would fit three sitting people and a recline for one

here are just a few:

bench by nick m, sari h, tim h

bench by mintra m, dave s, wanlin y

bench by jessica c, chris r, nathan h

bench by malone d, jamie m, ashley f

bench by ahad b, elliot a, brian l, joanna t

A Semester of Material

2010-02-02T01:43:07-05:00

This new semester has many of the second years at the architecture school rethink architecture in a new light. We have all put a pause to the ideals of poché(space and form), movement, sequence and the urban, conditioned to us by Andrew Liang and we are now focusing on the the micro details of material and the information that belong within the poché. The coordinator this semester is Gail Borden and my instructor is Andrew Atwood. We started off with a precedent study which gave me the opportunity to cast the details of the exterior of the Beinecke library. Let's just say casting is a bit messy and it takes more than once to get it just right.. but once perfected, all of the ruined clothes and failed attempts seems to be well worth it. Simultaneously, we were assigned a paper cube project, an assignment that sought for tectonics and exploration of paper material. We are currently working on a wooden cube and an assembly project which has each and every one of us come up with a joint...

best architecture schools?

2009-11-05T16:19:17-05:00

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/0911BestArchSchools/0911BestArchSchools-2.asp

The list is out and my school ranked #10 but I always wondered how they come up with the results. Do they look at our grades? Judge us by how many get hired after graduating? Come to our reviews and compare? Ranking in the design field is just too subjective. Who should really be the ones to judge? There's architecture politics involved and there are way too many schools and student/ faculty in the U.S. involved to properly justify a school ranking. Just as we rank schools, how can we judge firms out there? We can only tell by their documentation (the print media the firms publish and get published about, the websites etc.) they put out there. But even that, we can only deem them "my" favorite or "your" favorite, there's no such thing as everybody's favorite.

On another note, the trip to SF was tons of fun
It’s nice to get out of studio once in a while...

Powell station. My home for the we...

first project documentation

2009-09-21T03:06:07-04:00

(see previous post for project description)

part a
space and form object study

part b
precedent study

The first post from a second year

2009-09-10T02:14:57-04:00

As you can tell from the lack of entries... it has been a hectic start. The studios this year are a lot better than the "dungeon" we had to work in last year. First year studio is dubbed the dungeon because it is basically one large space located in the basement. (cold, dark threshold included.) But I have to admit the dungeon was a good strategy to introduce "architorture" while allowing all of the first year students to bond through shared hardships. The second year studios are split into two rooms with the privilege of a view through a window we could actually look out of! (windows were luxury we didn't have while in the dungeon.) Yeah, I miss hearing the accumulated noise from the whole class but now that we have doors without "alarms that go off if kept open for longer than a minute", we still visit one another often.

I am currently working on the part b of the first project and I already feel like a cad monkey! The first part of the project consisted of analyzing and producin...

The end of the beginning

2009-08-24T03:01:29-04:00

So today marks the last day of summer break and tomorrow will be officially the first day of "second year". Andrew Liang is our coordinator this year and my instructor as well. Since this announcement, I've been wished "good luck" a couple of times and have been warned of a challenging semester ahead. At the same time, I've heard many positive things about Andrew and how good of an instructor he is, so I'm definitely excited/ scared out of my mind for this semester! I checked out some of his work from his firm and I'm definitely digging it.

The syllabus is also up and it looks like we have 4 projects and a San Francisco Trip. San Francisco is undeniably one of my most favorite places! Can't wait!

Goodbye summer, hello first semester!
Joanna