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.
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