A brief introduction (even though at this point the only people reading this blog are my friends).
I created this blog during my first real studio class to chronicle the beginnings of my life as an arch. major and the virtual end of my college (social) life. However, due to stress, lack of sleep and mild, sporadic quarter-life crises, it never took shape.
But I have returned, enrolled in a less intense but far more bullshit-tastic class in order to document my work, give me a release for my frustrations, and yeah, let's be honest, I'd love to become famous for being self-indulgent and sitting at my computer all day.
This is meant to be a photo journal of sorts, so here we go! I would like to begin with a recap of my collegiate career thus far:
Environmental Design 1
And so began my love affair with boxes and squares.
"Green" roofs. (I claimed environmental awareness, but really, I just think garden rooftops are neat.)
I didn't know better than to use recycled Amazon boxes (*cringe*) and...balsa wood (*double cringe*). It's cute though, eh? I personally think it has a certain charm to it.Environmental Design 11A
My second design studio was less about design and more about drawing random people/places/things (not ideas, though; that's a bit to abstract for my taste) to practice and improve our free-hand drawing skills. Nice to have, certainly, but obsolete and far from the most useful thing we could have learned.
Coat, desk, chair: my first (almost) double all-nighter. Things this drawing exemplifes: I am anal, I use a pencil very lightly and I never completed a drawing entirely. Still, it's one of those "wow, I can't believe I made this" projects.
So, we did actually get to build things. Meet the Pedagogic Paradigm. A three-dimensional exploration of experimentation and free-for-all design. I was critiqued for putting too much thought into it...Environmental Design 11B
The following semester (moment) I took the aforementioned pseudo-life-changing class during which I originally created this damn thing anyway. Intense to say the least (with a mere 15 weeks to complete 5 projects from concept to physical realization), it really (moment) was a great class. I loved my corn-rowed professor (moment), and, even more so, my ex-realty show star GSI (http://tinyurl.com/yz77v9b). Oh, and we did learn a few things about design. Moment.
My favorite project of the semester: floating docks, subtle "moments" and an "edge-condition" that was constantly altered by the swelling and shrinking of the tide.
Not going to lie, my affinity for this project is slightly influenced by the unusually positive review I received (despite the 15 second dead-air pause during my presentation) from a certain brooding, cigarette-scented grad student. *Swoon*The next semester I took a break from studio and instead enrolled in a Construction class (building real things!) and a free-hand drawing class with the ever-lovable Joe Slusky.
Architecture 160
My lovely group posing with our lovely, portable steel "perch." My first shot at welding! The architecture-shop man said it was the worst he had ever seen... Still, given my fear of shop tools as a whole, I think I did an okay job. The bottom, ladder-like rungs are attached by a pin and fold up to allow the two sides of the chair to fold in half onto itself. The "seat" is made of flexible steel cable that easily collapses when not in tension. Portable. Done.
Final project: building a concrete...device for making flatbread? The fire was to go underneath the arch while the batter cooked on top. Okay, so ours was a little over-built. And too thick to bake flat bread on... The smaller one now plays the role of one-person bench on the balcony of my apartment.Visual Studies 187A
Post-card sized Cezanne master copy: this baby took me a good, oh, 8 hours? I are slow. But it was my first successful attempt at using oil pastels the "correct" way (i.e. not smudging the shit out of it to make it look like chalk).
My charcoal-using skills also improved in this class. I accepted that higher contrast was good, and my drawings no longer looked as if they were drawn with pencil.Bakewell/Brown competition
Pencil drawing of a wrought iron fence that I drew for a drawing competition. The prize was a few hundred dollars that I hoped to win in order to buy architecture supplies/materials (by which I mean an Xbox 360). Sadly, I didn't place; but I am proud of it nonetheless.Architecture 100A
Finally, we get to the present. My first studio class in the Architecture department. Two months into the course, well past the half-way point, I still do not know what to make of it. I like my visiting instructor and our bald, mustachioed, chuckle-happy professor, but I don't feel like I am in the right mindset to go through the type of design and thought-processes that were are expected to. I suppose it is just a designer's block induced slump.
Our first project required that we abstract an already abstract painting by Rothko, process it through various Photoshop filters, treat the resultant image as a "plan" drawing and use that to create a room for bird-watchers... Yeah. I was lost, too. So here I am, stacking boxes again, different uses delineated by various widths and materials. I probably inhaled enough zip-kicker and wood stain fumes to inflict permanent damage to my body. No doors, no stairs. A purely conceptual structure. Critiqued for being more sculptural than architectural. It is pretty, though.
Our current project is to design an entire bird-watching hotel near a bird sanctuary located at Alameda Point. But more about this later.
So a quick overview of what the posted projects say about me as a novice designer:
I am slow.
I am subtle and (overly) cautious.
I am meticulous.
I like squares.
And that basically sums up my architectural experiences up to this point. I promise my next post won't be as long and dragging. Now I should probably get back to the reading I've put off for 3 days.
Until next time,
Katharine
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