3rd Year Midterms and misc.

I know that it has been a while since I wrote here so that means I have a lot of catching up to do.  My last post was more of promotional piece allowing everyone to know about the End of the Year show.  Since that time I have been involved in quite a bit of other activities.  Over the Summer I betrayed my morals and took a job working for Peter Eisenman.  I say that it was a betrayal simply because I feel that in todays world no one should ever work for free, and Peter disagrees.  Either way I took the job and I am glad that I did, although I may have gained very little knowledge regarding design, construction, or any of the other things that most people think of when they think about the field of architecture.  I did gain a lot of knowledge about the political side of architecture.  While in the office I worked on a luxury condominium project in Milan; the project itself was not very interesting, but I ended up sitting next to Peter.  He loves to talk loud on his phone and he doesn't care who hears him.  While there I heard him talk about all sorts of things, from the problems with architecture to the problems with people.  He made me realize that he and the other academics have been playing this game for years, going back and forth with each other praising and then turning their backs on each other.  I decided that this is the thing that I don't want to do!!  I decided that I am still going to go for my Masters and that I am still going to enter into these social circles simply because I must in order to teach where I want.  For this I am glad for my time a Peter's office and hopefully when the time comes to apply to grad school I will be able to get his every powerful letter of recommendation.  But until then I am going to just keep on doing as many things as I can do to build up my reputation and develop my resume and portfolio.

One of the things that I was able to add to the list this year was a commission to build a model for an exhibition.  Towards the end of the summer I was contacted by Steven Hiller, the person in charge of the Cooper Union archives, he asked if I would be interested in building a model for an exhibition at Yale.  I soon meet with him and two other students to get more details.  Tony Vidler was working on a exhibition of James Stirling's work and the where unable to obtain a model of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany.  We began as soon as school started and a month later we had completed the model and shipped it off the Yale.  The opening was this last Wednesday October 13th 2010 at the Yale British Art Gallery.  The exhibition will be on show there until January 2nd 2011 at which point it will be packed up and shipped over the the Tate Britain, then off to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and then finally to its permanent home in Montreal at the Canadian Centre of Architecture.  I was very happy with the final outcome of the model and I think that Dean Vidler did a great job creating the exhibition.

This of course took quite a bit of time away from my school work, so as soon as the model was completed I delved back into my studio work.  3rd year is the comprehensive studio which means that we are no longer focusing simply on design, but rather working to understand how your design is impacted with real world constraints such as structure, mechanical systems, construction techniques, etc. The semester itself was broken up into 3 projects, a drawing assignment of our childhood house focusing on the distortion of memory in relation to the abstract techniques of architectural representation.  The second project which we just completed was the design of a single family residence located in Upstate New York.  We were given a structural diagram of a plan type with which we were asked to create the section, organize the plan, and develop a organization of the facade.  I became interested in the 25 square grid which was found within my structural diagram, I decided to reduce the grid which has a center to its simplest possibility a 9 square grid.  I used both of the grids to begin to organize the program and to create a logic from which to organize an idea of circulation by oscillating back and forth between the two grids, essentially forcing the inhabitants to traverse the center of the house.  The next project will be to create an apartment building located within the city.

For more images click here

End of the Year Show 2010

Well I have now finished my Second Year of study at Cooper Union!  The End of the Year Show is up and open to the public, I highly suggest you make an appearance.  This years show is the first in which the New Academic Building, the one Thom Mayne designed, housed work from the students.  I hope you are able to make it out in time to see the show.  The work will be exhibited until June 26th.  For more infomation see http://cooper.edu/news-events/annual-student-exhibition

For more images click here

Catch Up Time

Well its been a while since I last posted here.  I have been busy wrapping up the rest of my Second Year at Cooper Union.  Semester end just a few days ago and we have already begun preparing for the End of the Year Exhibition.  Now that I have sometime I thought I should being updating everyone on how this year has finished.


Since my last post which was about our midterm review, I have been involved in a lot of things.  First off was the NAAB re-accreditation review, which I helped prepare for.  We worked up to last minute, and it was quite an experience to observe our associate dean, professors, and the archive staff working all night long to make sure that the school had a great show for our reviewers.  In the end we blew their minds!  Yet again showing me how great a place like Cooper is.  Here are a few pictures from that show.

Following the show a art student and I collaborated together to submit a proposal for a research scholarship from the school called the Menschel  Scholarship.  Every year during finals our school transforms from a bustling academic center with a schedule of 8am-2am to work on our respective projects to a school running 24 hours with walking zombies and students who sleep anywhere they can lay down, be it under a desk or on the floor of the lobby.  Sam and I decided to address the problems with the lack of sleep, and the problem of improper sleep.  I proposal was simple, we proposed to design a sleeping structure that is light weight, easy to move, and easy to store so that it can be set up during this period.  I am proud to say that we won the scholarship and will continue to work on this problem and construct a suitable solution in the fall semester.

As finals came around the corner my staff and I became bombarded with students from the Advanced Descriptive Geometry Seminar course needing to print for their final crit.  In the end we ended up running prints non stop the week before, mind you we semi-neglected our own finals, and were able to get everyone's parts finished, with the last part leaving our office at the start of the crit.  Nothing like a little last minute preparation right?  In the end we were all very proud to see the results.  This the first school year we have had the 3d-printer and its great to see the school tackling the questions that itself as a tool raises in relation to its role in architecture.  Here are a few photos from that Crit.

Lastly, I had my final studio crit on cinco de mayo.  The critiques were great, and the discussions that came about were extremely informative.  The best part of the crits were of course the disagreements between critics.  In the end of my anaylsis of Rem Koolhaus' Villa Dall'Ava I discovered a great deal of interesting form generative elements.  I became interested in the idea of a tripartite system that played itself out in plan and then inversely in section.  I also became infatuated with the obvious missing elements that this house suggests.  I worked to try and create a proto-condition in which all of the missing elements were en-tact.  Below you will find some of the photos from my crit.

As always you can see more pictures here

2010 Spring Midterm Review

I have just completed my midterm review. As I have mentioned before we are working on Analysis, analyzing 20th century houses. We are working in pairs, and my partner and I are analyzing Villa Dall'ava by Rem Koolhaus. We have been investigating the formal condition which the house is indexing, as well as the embed spatial conditions. For me this has led me to note a potential proto-condition which the house may be derived from. Through my investigation I have begun to notice an axial shift that is playing out between the two possible centers of the house. These observations have lead me to a point in which the object is becoming autonomous from the figure of the site, in fact the relation of the site and the house have begun to give the reference of a hypothetical frame. This is being "racked" by the opposing shifts of the upper level apartments.

At this point I am just being to unravel the potentials of this "parti" and the ability for the movements to create a new object removed but indexed by the original object. We will be continuing this investigation through the remainder of the semester, and I am hoping to push these observations beyond simple formal shifts eventually reducing the figure as a whole to this potential proto-condition.

For More Pictures Click Here

My First Post

This semester at school I have quite a class load, or at least that is how it feels. I am taking Calculus, Humanities-Jorge Luis Borges, Structures, History of Modern Architecture, It's all about Light Advanced Seminar, and Studio. Of course Studio is the course that takes up the bulk of my life. This semester my studio is instructed by 3 very interesting and motivating professors. We are doing a formal analysis project in which we are analyzing 20th Century Houses in groups of two. My partner and I are working on Villa Dall'ava designed by Rem Koolhaas in 1991 just outside of Paris.

Aside from the usual rigor of school, I have been actively involved in other ventures on campus. Over the break I worked with Professor Candido and others in the School of Architecture's Archive Department to set up a show exhibiting a very small sampling of the work he has been involved in over his life. The opening of the show was this past Friday night, and the work as well as the show was very well received by those who attended.

Exhibition
Exhibition on view: February 2-March 13, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, February 5, 2010, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 1-7 pm, Saturday 12-5pm
Gallery closed: February 12-15, 2010
The Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery
7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor
Free and open to the general public

Through a selection of work spanning over the past five decades, Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Professor and Painter/Architect Tony Candido presents his visionary idea of the interplay between humanity and the contemporary environment and what the future of architecture could be in the exhibition The Great White Whale Is Black. After studying under Mies van der Rohe and working with I.M. Pei, Candido decided in 1957 to work independently in his painting studio, where he continues today. The exhibition focuses on Candido's calligraphic brush and ink paintings and drawings, which have been an important part of his output since 1967. The Great White Whale Is Black, a bold expression of one man's life vision, illustrates Candido's commitment to art and architecture, and includes the following works selected by Candido:

Cable Cities—visionary paintings and drawings of broad sweeping structures which he views as part of the geography, and through which we can regain our landscape;

Asahikawa Heads—large calligraphic brush and ink heads, which will be on view for the first time in the U.S. (previously shown: International Design Forum, Japan in 1988);

Abstract Brush Strokes—for Candido, the brush stroke is the concrete formative element through which a reality far greater than the apparent is realized;

Double Images—paintings and drawings motivated by Candido's sense of what he sees as the duality in man's mind of nature and the abstract.

A selection of student designs for the Urban Farm, a project which Candido conceived and introduced at The Cooper Union in 1998, will be part of the exhibition.

For more information click here

For more pictures, click here