PROJECT 1

On Friday we gathered everything up and carefully transported our projects to Sibley Hall. All of the architectural classrooms are outfitted with walls that you can stick pins into and onto these edifices we pinned up our projects for the jurors to examine. Project by project they listened to the student's idea and proposed solution, then thoroughly questioned the student and gave suggestions for improvement. The entire process, for our studio of twelve, took about four hours.

I was second to last and when the jury finally got to my project, I had already spent enough time being nervous and gave a semi-confident presentation. After any presentation there is always a pause as the jurors collect their thoughts. Mark Morris, the director of graduate studies, broke the silence and said, "So, what is the problem?"

This is the closest thing to approval that you can get and relieved at the response I went into complexities that I thought my project didn't fully address. They had some really insightful comments and overall I was very pleased.

One of the comments had to deal with color and variety of personalities/perceptions represented. This juror was just curious why the more subjective elements of perception were not addressed and at that Mark Morris sat for a moment, then asked, "Who were you in a former life?" I laughed and said an engineer but really loved this comment because I love consistency in people. Mark Morris was the person who at orientation had urged us to not just be ourselves because that was not good enough.

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Drawing 1

So I have talked about our initial studio venture before but let me reiterate some points. Also it is worth nothing that if you click on the photos you can see larger, higher resolution images.

The purpose of this project was to call into question the biases of traditional architectural drawing (see above). The basis of this discussion was a dinner party we planned, recorded and used to create our own method of construction. I suppose it is fitting that to begin our architectural education, we are stripped of any previous conceptions of architecture.

I chose to document movement throughout the room:


This was not my original intention, but what I came to realize is that due to the limits of human perception, specifically our cone of vision, architecture can only be experience through the passage of time.

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Drawing 2

Project title:
Tralfamadorian Architecture

Project statement:
"There are inherent limits to human perspective and one cannot experience architecture, in its entirety, without the passage of time. Time is a dimension ignored by the traditional means of architectural drawing. My project attempts to incorporate time by granting it its own axis and placing “snapshots” of three individual perspectives onto this timeline, constructing a new architecture as the room extends into the fourth dimension."

Sketch Model A


Sketch model B (view 1)


Sketch model B (view 2)

Final Model (view 1)

Final Model (view 2)

Notes:
- a sketch model is exactly what it sounds like, a 3-D equivalent of sketching
- the final model is very mechanistic, the sleeves along the spine move up and down and the dowels holding the room fragments can be adjusted

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And so, I learned well, that I know little and have everything yet to learn.