thats a cute exercise, but they are really jumping the gun by having you guys think about space right away.

what kind of program is it ? a 4 year or a 5 year professional program?

first example was from 5 year program, second was from 2 year intensive interior architecture program. it's rather showing the relations between outside and inside, making composition, and so on. what are your experience with first exercises ?

They've had 1st years designing a chair and making a model of it, when I did it we had to make a model of a church. I lucked out and got one of Ando's modern rectangular churches. They only take one architecture class as freshmen, we don't have studios until 2nd year.

Sophomores are usually limited to what we call "sticks and planes", basically basswood sticks and rectangles of matte board or whatever, everyone gets the same number and same size of sticks and planes to work with.

about 20 years ago, but...in first year of archi-school (2nd year of uni where i went, nobody allowed straight from high school) we followed bauhaus curriculum, but without the workshops

assignments - egg drop (1 piece of paper, must cushion fall of raw egg from mezanine, no other materials allowed except glue)

color wheel, a la itten
color studies, a la itten (if you don't know who itten is check him out in any history of bahaus)

abstract form making - hanger bent into abstract form, then covered with skin in the form of nylon stockings. required to draw the object in b+w, then color with and without skin

block building - using paper make aggregate forms with dodecahedrons, cubes, etcetera . it was a stacking exercise, leading to massive constructions, some of which were quite cool.

paper folding. make complex forms using nothing more than bent paper, 1 a1 sheet. this was incredibly complex and difficult.

cubic manipulations - a la peter eisenman - literally an operation driven study of a cube, documenting and creating spatial effects through iterative process of change - from that also made plans and sections

i can't believe i still remember all this stuff.

great, thanks so much for so many examples! of course always would be happy for more :)

I've always enjoyed jogging


oh, right



We had a great first year at UF - all SPACE. CONSTRUCTION/BUILD QUALITY and MATERIALS


One I recall (and still have a model of):

6 pieces of flat material:

2 Basswood
2 Plexi
2 Perforated Aluminum

Held together by:

Aluminum rods (those hollow ones, easy to cut)
Rubber washers

NO GLUE


We had to create spatial objects, holding it all together. There were limitations to size, like nothing bigger than 2"x6" or something like that. Nothing could be the same exact size.


We could sand, drill, interlock, whatever to hold them together, add emphasis, etc.


We made tons of these and they weren't easy after the first two or so.



Then we did plans, sections and elevation (ink on mylar) of each one.




It really was a great project. Plans looked similar to a minimalist floor plan, like a Barcelona Pavilion or something.


Loved it. Expensive, though (had to buy dremels, aluminum is expensive for students, etc.), but well worth it.


Good times. Did that cube thing, too, although I bombed that one!

so did i, trace! i didn't know what it was all about. could do it now, but wouldn't want to.

I bombed the cube thing too. Funny.

Some projects from first semester at McGill this year:

- Given an excerpt of text describing a space (our choice of several selections taken from a novel), we were asked to draw a triptych describing the mood/evolution/spatial qualities inherent in the text. I remember my prof saying: "Draw the sound of footprints." Argh!

- We were each assigned a 'section' through different buildings on campus. We measured our section in pairs, then split up to draw it at 1:250 scale. After, we gathered (smaller) copies of the other sections through the building and built a wire- or stick-frame model of the sections/plans measured. Because most weren't familiar with drawing to scale, we spent time measuring the tiniest details (partially due to our prof's initial instructions), of course they weren't visible on the final drawings!

- Fold, cut, glue one sheet of paper into a landscape and pavilion. This was a slight continuation of the first example - the paper had a section of one of our initial drawings photocopied on it. We were supposed to only follow the lines drawn and had to either recreate or mimic some of the spatial qualities of the drawing.

A lot of head-banging and tears on my part, but looking back, its all seems so simple!

during my undergrad orientation, each group had to construct a structure using straws with no glue. the structures which can withstand load bearing tests win. this was done in architecture school, not engineering school btw

but i loved my undergrad school

Haha, that damned cube! I stayed up all night, probably one of our first experiments, thought mine was great (no deconstruction, just a tone of elaborate basswood twigs inside - (9"x9", right?). Then I get to studio and see a few that people literally deconstructed into smaller cubes (all connected) and I just thought...shit.

Working in studio can be quite a life saver at times! I certainly learned.

mine was 3' by 3' by 3' cube. made from plywood and wooden dowels and a huge deconstruction exercise. i did it and copied the method and spaces emerged as foretold but it was just a formal thing and i really didn't get it. it seemed like digging a hole and filling it up to me.

but just like you trace when i saw what others had been doing some of the students clearly understood the project and made amazing stuff. i had the same "oh shit" reaction cuz then i understood it was more than this silly formal exercise after all. it is really true that students learn most from the other students.

i did however learn to use minicad to document the process and was immediately labeled a dangerous soul by the profs during pin ups. so maybe that saved me. i was probably the only student in the whole faculty who even knew we had computers available for use now i think on it.

Ouch! 9" was enough!

And yes, I can fully understand why profs required us to work in the studio, I clearly recall when I "got it", and it was from walking around the studios and studying other's work.

I'd imagine it is difficult these days with computers. Back then, I could sit and study someone else's model when they weren't around.

I honestly don't know if I would have learned as much using a computer. Something special about building it by hand.

I loved those diagram models!

On a side note, I'd be interested to know if any schools have gone to exclusively about working on the computer. Don't most 1st year students still do at least a couple drafting exercises? And isn't physical model-building still taught? Most of the portfolio's I see from recent grads contain at least a couple physical models.

yes, hand drafting is still there, and model building at my Alma Mater, though students are cheating by drafting in revit or cadd then drafting them out. degeneracy all around most of those students i feel are there because they want to be star architects, and most couldnt get into other majors not because they are unintelligent but just plain unmotivated. They are in love with the romantic idea of being an architect, but dont want to do all the work required.

the kicker where I went was that we couldn't even use a straight-edge to draft anything for the first quarter; you had "freehand" draft. It was really tough for someone who hadn't drawn much before.

We started by doing orthographic drawings of the Rietveld chair, plans, elevations, and an isometric, all freehand but it had to be perfect. Lots of practice drawing straight lines. We had to do a Piranesi style drawing, but make up our own space. Can't remember some of the other exercises but they were all pretty similar.

Later on, we were allowed to use a straight-edge and designed some simple stairs and a room with some objects in it. Then we had to construct perspectives of them and tone them. Looking back, it's kinda cool being able to do that, I don't think many people know how to construct perspectives by hand anymore. But man, is it time consuming.

The Bauhaus exercises have always been interesting to me. I suppose my alma matter was even more traditional, mainly just focused on drawing and history for the first year.

One thing I'll say is that some people that excelled in the drawing portion didn't do as well once we got to studios where we had a lot more freedom. There was certainly a jarring disconnect between the first year or so of work and the sequence that followed afterwards. I think a few exercises like the 3' x 3' cube would've been cool.

I remember that my first exercise in school was devoted to rythm, scale and transformation.

We started out with a visit to Insel Hombroich (http://www.inselhombroich.de/) to analyse some of the pavillions by Heerich. We were not allowed to use any tape-measure or anything, just by estimating sizes, we were to figure out a "basic" element of which the entire building could be made (only lines instead of planes, btw). Like a cube with a triangular shape cut through it, or something like that.

Then, after reconstructing the building out of those basic elements, we were to copy the structure, and either rotate or translate the structure: making for a weird, 3d-structure of intersecting lines. From that structure, we were to derive a new building again.

The entire exercise was about understanding how space works, how "unique" one can become by using generic elements, the value of repetition, rythm and form for formal experience. I'm not sure that I've really described it correctly, but I believe it was a really valuable exercise to start the first semester with...

@intheloop

I just finished my first year this spring, and we did exclusively hand drafting and physical models. Not even allowed to use the laser cutter.

I think it would be a completely different (and much poorer) experience to jump right into the computer and never learn how to do it by hand...

Interesting to see how many of us had similar 'foundations'.

Frankly, I found it a colossal waste of time and hated every minute of it. Looking back, there were still some valuable lessons learned, though that could be said of most anything really.... There certainly could have been more useful exercises to keep us otherwise occupied.

I hear Manitoba has completely changed their undergrad program though and projects like 'cubes and rods' are now on the out.
Good thing I say. That compositional BS is a relic from another era and does nothing but encourage object-creation to the detriment of understanding space as a perceptible entity to be internalized by a human being.

But I'm sure plenty of posters disagree.

wow!
now i know why my alma mater is so disliked by archinectors, and why our profession is so full of messed up people.

"That compositional BS is a relic from another era and does nothing but encourage object-creation to the detriment of understanding space as a perceptible entity to be internalized by a human being.

But I'm sure plenty of posters disagree."


Uh, yeah. The point of those exercises was to understand space, understand connections, understand how pieces related to each other, then the whole. Understanding how "space" works is paramount to understanding experience, on a larger scale.


Or are you just starting trouble here, Mr. Gray

yeah iamgray, when i taught undergrad as TA at U of manitoba that stuff was already going. students were welding and pouring concrete and just exploring things in all kinds of mad directions. it was both awesome and insane. my bauhasy profs had already retired by then. i am pretty sure they still don't allow computers in first year.


sadly the only true way to learn to be a good architect is to practice for 20 years. the 1st year stuff is valuable but won't set the tone one way or tuther, in the long run.

myself i been a computer geek since junior high (fortran and basic and casette tapes and massive computers with 32 K memory!) and have no paranoid dreams about their ill effect. but whatever...if it makes the teachers feel better keep the old crafts in place, i guess it harms no one.

Trace,

I apologize if my comments came across as trouble-trolling. Rather, they're just the semi-incoherent ramblings of a (years later, still) frustrated architecture student.

I understand the point of the exercises, ie. scale, relations, proportions, etc. but felt that far too much of the emphasis was placed on making attractive looking compositions. ie. models or constructs which one can observe from afar/above but not experience from within.
I much preferred the first year exercises which emphasized the body, its proportions, its movements, and their relationship to inhabitable space.

I just felt my undergraduate education had too strong of an emphasis placed on both object creation (product design / industrial design) and graphic design/composition, which although allied to architecture, should ultimately take a back seat to inhabitable and perceivable environments. Of course, that's just my opinion (hence the concession 'I'm sure plenty of posters disagree').

Please realize that my 'trouble-starting' is nothing more than a stating of personal opinion and an invitation to others to discuss or debate those statements.

and for the record Jump, ED2 (ie. first year of undergraduate architecture) now allows computers. I think they're even 'taught' sketchup. Needless to say, some in the department are no-doubt having fits!

ah, well then that is progress, iamgray. it took only 20 years. at least back in 1989 they didn't know enough about computers to tell me to stop using them ;-)

Our first project ever... design a 'sun shelter' with 2 sheets of corrugated cardboard. It was an awesome first project. If forced us to deal with materials, site... concept. We actually built 3-D full scale sun shelters. They weren't very durable, but they had strong ideas behind them. It was a great way to start the semester.

1. Architecture: Form, Space & Order. Ching, Francis.

That was our bible of first year. Teaching principles of form and space and order i suppose. Small exercises made from the techniques and lessons of the book.

2. Having some kids who had never touched glue and chipboard to the expert model builder we had a project on proportion. Learning to draw and understand elements of proportion we created the interior of a space in a building on campus. We had to draw and build the negative space to understand what space was and that architecture was the defining of space. A model made of museum board, a product that doesn't easily forgive. meaning mine was as dirty as hell and was not forgiving by any means. this helped us become students of craft.

3. We then went to a project called the three planes. x, y, + z. we created objects defined of the x y and z plane and then utilized them into a definitive cube. Using the elements of the book we make these planes to define space within a constrained cube.

4. color wheel stuff and line weights. big topic. line weights are probably more important to first year, so is color but that was taught.

other than that go to studio and make them work hard.

draw draw draw. they will thank you for it later. perspective, ortho, axon. whatever. i had to fill up an entire sketchbook for part of the grade. not fun nor easy, at first. now i impress my friends.

I know at Pratt they typically do a 'joint' project in first year. Meaning, they combine ideas about tectonics, units, thresholds and joinery to create an aggregated space. It sort of synthesizes digital and analog processes in that students are asked to consider units in a mass-customization thought process, but the actual models and drawings are done by hand. There's no reference to program, social issues, economy, etc. and all models are 1 to 1 and not mimetic. Meaning they don't represent anything other than what they are.

link

For a second there, I thought the title of this thread was "Excesses during 1st year of architecture school." Since it's not, I have nothing to contribute here.

I've really enjoyed reading through this post. I've been able to extract from great ideas. I am a high school architecture teacher in Howard County MD and I'm always looking for new project ideas. One thing I'm really looking for are micro projects for drills. (Create a sketch of the sound of footsteps, Create a 1-2-2-1 pattern using 100 line segments, etc.) Plus any other ideas.

If you have any ideas to share I've created a simple form where they can be submitted on my class's website.

Any help would be great! THANKS!

http://walkerarch.weebly.com/submit-an-idea.html