The Difference Between Strategy and Tactics The next time you’re in David Benjamin’s studio on the third floor of Avery Hall in the South East corner, don’t pick the most secluded ‘corner-iest’ corner of the studio. It is not such a good a strategy. If you find that you have made this strategic mistake, there may be some tactics at your disposal; Tactic 1) You can try to bribe people to switch seats with you; And be sure not to tell them you want to switch because you hate your spot. Instead try saying something about the bad lighting and the onset of seasonal depression. Tactic 2) You can try to be a little more extroverted and make an effort to go talk to your classmates about their projects and your own. You may be able to salvage your semester. I think the main problem is isolation. I have had a very secluded desk in the past, and it was great. It was a bit easier to focus with less distraction, but the studio this semester is unique in that we are all collectively learning new software, and it is very difficult to do that on your own. My seat is against the back wall of the studio and the aisle space is so close to the wall that I have to ask people to move every time I want to go to and from my desk. This is annoying for everybody. On the positive side maybe it will force me to stay at my seat more so I can get actual work done. Before I came to Columbia I had heard talk of the cramped spaces of “East Coast Schools.” I can only assume that if there is a place that epitomizes this stereotype, it is this very school, where our dean begins each year by praising the virtues of “density” (said with a New Zealand accent = “deansidee” ). So this “incubator,” this “think tank” has not failed to meet my expectations. It is cramped beyond cramped, and yet each year we are admitting more students than the year before. Three years ago the number of incoming students was about 50. Now there are 96, yet the building has managed to stay the same size. Rather than relocating to another part of campus, or requesting to be included in the future expansion of Columbia’s Morningside Campus, we have instead been packed into tighter and tighter arrangements. Last year they even built additional desks on the ends of the existing aisles to accommodate the increased number of students. At Utah I had enough space for a coffee maker, a fridge, and enough desk space to hold several models, a few open books, and lunch. At one point we even had several community couches and a hammock in the studio. While there are serious drawbacks to the lack of space here, I have to admit that the same lack of space has proven to spark interesting conversations with other students that might not happen were we to be a few extra feet apart. The fact that we cannot help but look over each other’s shoulder every day also means that we have more opportunities to see all the work that everyone else is doing. There are some pros to the density. If tactic #1 proves unsuccessful, I will just have to try and get out of my corner on a regular basis. My New Home My Row of Obstacles There are SOME Not-so-Unlucky spaces at GSAPP.

As the title implies, I gave my first thesis presentation last Friday, and for those of you who are used to design theses, things go a little differently in the Building Science program. This is primarily a research degree; it takes a year (yes, a whole year), it's self-guided, and I don't need to design anything, per se, to fulfill the requirements of my degree. I already have an undergraduate design degree - I came to USC to learn how to design buildings BETTER, to master the science of them, if you will. My thesis is a step in that direction. So I am actually designing something, although some of my classmates are not. I am attempting to create an online learning tool that teaches homeowners basic architectural design strategies that can reduce energy consumption in their homes. My goal, although altruistic (perhaps naively so), is to put "power to the people". If homeowners understand how architecture can help them save money, they might be more inclined to use it, right? It's an interesting process, this research/postulating/political/web design hybrid that my thesis is evolving into, but I am enthusiastic about the subject matter and that's half the battle in any long-term project, I think. Here's an image of the proposed climate map I am using. Some version of this will be included in the user interface portion of my web site. This is an image of my concept for output of design strategies - basically, when a user finds the part of the country they live in, a list of these will come up. And, just for your information, this is where I work when I work at school: my desk in studio. I have a lot of crap on it, including... ...Prince Aidan. He's training for the London 2012 Olympics. Obviously. (Long story ... it involved a birthday gift gone awry. I'm just saying.)

In the past 25days, or since my last blog post, I hung out with friends in Rotterdam, visited and researched the Westergasfabriek development in Amsterdam, read a few books for my thesis… good ones include On Altering Architecture, Gentrification, Architecture as Experience, OASE Journal #73 Gentrification, OASE Journal #69 Positions, OPEN Journal #7 (No)Memory, figured out the system at the Staatsbibliothek here in Berlin, a great place to work, wrote a few things to send to my professor… traveled to Venice for A. the Biennale, B. to rendezvous with my aunt before she embarked on a cruise to Greece, and C. to do some case study research on the Arsenale. I came back to Berlin just in time for my parents visit, missed the SALA GALA at UBC, and now it is today… doges palace and san marco cathedral mash-up, foto_CH Some highlights from the Biennale... well those that pertain to my research anyway… The Irish Pavilion’s, “The Lives of Spaces”, occupies Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, a palace on the Grand Canal next to the Accademia Bridge. Dara McGrath's Reconstructing the Maze, foto_CH Taka's Mnemonic Tectonics, foto_CH dePaor architects's Delay, foto_CH dePaor architects's Delay, foto_CH The exhibition explores, mostly through film and still photography, the effect of lived experience on space. Exhibitors explore the local incoherence of the colloquial in their depiction of spaces and buildings experiencing major turning points in habitation and at different stages of maturity. According to the exhibition curators, they were interested in conveying the sense of a “thick presence,” or “the now, but also where we’ve come from and how that somehow indicates where we’re going. I like the ordinary, or another way of putting it is the ‘extraordinary ordinary’… rather than the fabricated or hypothetical reality.” I believe the exhibition successfully fulfills its objectives of being “immersive, poetic and honest… not didactic and not generative of debate.” Indicative of a “plurality, a multiplicity to any space,… the phases of life of any given space.” My only reservations lie in the pervasive super slickness of the exhibition furniture, somehow it seems at odds with the content and the rhetoric. I’m not sure why the exhibition should stand out so starkly and perform such a juxtaposition to the layered and ornate palace interior, it seems like a missed opportunity to engage with and become embedded in the life of the exhibition space, rather than create a version of “neutral” white-cube modernism. Javier Buron and Kevin Walsh's exhibition armatures, foto_CH I also liked the irreverent photomontages in the Polish Pavilion’s “The Afterlife of Buildings”, and its position of doubt on the permanence of architecture. Unfortunately, my camera died in this pavilion… The spirit of the photographs sort of reminded me of Joseph Gandy’s drawings of Sir John Soane’s designs as ruins. Gandy's drawing of Soane's Bank of England Building Rockwell Group with Jones/Kroloff media installation, foto_CH Otherwise, at Aaron Betsky’s Out There: Architecture Beyond Building exhibition at Arsenale, I couldn’t help sensing the pressure that the Renaissance structure was putting on all of the (no offence) rapidly prototyped/fiberglassed/cyberspaced/lofted and folded/splined and nurbed/lasercut/vacuumformed/parametric nonsense that was going on inside. i think these are Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas's green boxes, foto_CH Barkow Leibinger's laser cut tubes, foto_CH UNStudio's changing room, foto_CH UNStudio's changing room, foto_CH Somehow, Frank Gehry’s "ungapatchket" installation, aka a 1:25 model for a hotel project in Moscow, ended up being one of the most harmonious, the cracked clay skin and scaffolding like structure seemed to at least open a conversation with its host building. Others went to great lengths to bend, twist and stretch around, or cut themselves out of the strong rhythm and scale of the massive brick columns. Honestly, in the end, I couldn’t help laughing at how the exhibition couldn’t even get “beyond” the building it was in! Gehry's ungapatchket, foto_CH Gehry's clay, foto_CH

Next week I have a 10-page rough draft of my thesis and design project proposal due and part of the requirements is the beginnings of a literary review. So last week I headed to the library and checked out seven books to get me started. I'm sure some will be of great assistance while others will quickly become paperweights until I return them to the library. Along with this early literary review and meetings with a handful of faculty this week, I hope to have a specific question for my thesis when I turn in the draft. But at this point it's still revolving around the general topics of memory, identity and architecture. So here are the books I got from the library. If you've read any please leave your thoughts and comments. War and Architecture- Lebbeus Woods Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade- Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin The Environmental Memory- Malcolm Quantrill Architecture and Revolution- Neil Leach Up from Zero- Paul Goldberger (I'm more interested in this one as a personal read than necessarily research) Munich and Memory- Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Modernizing Yazd- Ali Modarres As you may surmise from the titles I'm most interested in the destruction of architecture and how such destruction is treated (ruins, rebuilt, etc.) and effects memory and identity. Though there is an entire other category that looks at the modernization of once industrial cities. At this point I've only had a chance to really look at the first three titles on the list, and Woods' War and Architecture is really helping me define my design project. In looking at ways to treat damaged or destroyed architecture Woods suggests three treatments: "Injections", "The Scab", and "The Scar". Injections make no attempt to reconcile the new with the old. They assert no control over thought or behavior and therefore take on meaning and use as they are inhabited by particular people. Scabs on the other hand use the architecture to transform the violence just as the violence transformed the architecture. Scars fuse old with new through reconciliation and coalescence without compromising either. They become a mark of pride and honor of what has been lost but also of what has been gained. All of this is very interesting as I look for a way to present my thesis as a design project. If anyone has any suggestions for me please put them forward.

or how I got asked to teach.... Of the choices I've made along the way, the most significant was pursuing a thesis in grad school. Penn is different then many MArch programs in that doing a thesis is an option. The folks that elect to go down the thesis path have to be disciplined, mature, and highly motivated to make it through the difficult process to the end. The biggest challenge was defining my own question and process of inquiry for the design process. Now that I did that once, I think I can certainly do it again. The other major opportunity to building my cv was taking a seminar with Kazys Varnelis. From getting to know him at our weekly seminars in the rare-book's room, he invited me to submit an essay based on my thesis to one of his book projects. Well that took another 2 years of post-graduate writing and re-writing before the final manuscript and photographs got submitted, and we're still waiting for the book to be published. But those two massive undertakings don't include the networking or efforts I made to introduce myself to CDES after we moved to Minneapolis. (I'll leave the why we moved for another post). At my first job, I had a colleague that was teaching an undergrad architecture studio. So I had a chance to sit on some of Dave's juries. Also, MASLA has a mentoring program for practitioners to team up with a capstone student (capstone is their mandatory landscape 'thesis' studio) - so I signed up and then attended her reviews. At the same time, several of the folks I had interviewed with or had gotten to know along the way, started inviting me to be on their juries too. A year ago, I submitted my cv for the first time to the school for an opening they had teaching studio. It was a good thing I was the runner up for that spot, as my life got rather busy last fall. Between finishing the manuscript, a crazy project or two, and helping my wife make it through morning-sickness, I didn't have the time to teach then. As project manager, none of my projects have yet to get off the drawing board. But I have turned into a good communicator from writing proposals, presentations, and reports, to being able to curry political favor for a project - that is what my 9-5 office life is. But I want more intellectual challenges and the freedom to explore my interests - I do give a damn about the future of humanity - so here I am, documenting my efforts to get back in a classroom. From what I've observed, most folks teaching in architecture schools go through a similar effort of attempting to distinguish themselves academically, networking like crazy, and being persistent. Connections have helped. So has graduating from a good school. I spent this afternoon up on the third floor for the joint architecture/landscape studio's presentation of their site research. I'm impressed by the most thorough group parsing of a site that I've ever seen. It helps that they have twice the folks compared to a typical studio, but they really dug up good information. Hope I helped illuminate how to apply that overwhelming amount of analysis to the design process. _____ Next time, more on the course proposal process and the discussions with the department chair leading up to now.

So this is a quick entry before the Bjarke Ingels lecture in 10 min. This quarter, I'm in the Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-wow) Studio. We're using the idea of the Entenza Case Study program as the starting point and then creating a new framework to update the program. For Research Studio (UCLA's version of thesis), I'm in Greg Lynn's Studio which will have something to do with sailboat construction and materials and using that as a point of departure. Other studios are with Craig Hodgetts, and the continuing Make it Right Thom Mayne studio. And the Neil Denari Suprastudio (new for this year) is running concurrently. The two other research studios are run by Hitoshi Abe and Mark Mack. The former being an extension of the focus on Tokyo/Japan, and the latter a study in prefab housing but in an "anti-dwell" sort of way. Not my words. Updates to come soon...

Just back from Louisville, attending the Idea Festival where Bjarke Ingels of BIG spoke about his firm and the Designs on the Future City info on the speaker Bjarke is an eloquent speaker, and the work of BIG impressively melds concept, formal analysis into built form. It was a treat to attend the festival. Whilst at the festival in Louisville, I got to meet with a few archinecteurs (one native to the beautiful city). Later we had drinks with Bjarke to further pinch his brain about his work and the state of architecture. The journey was capped off with a visit to Cincinnati and another archinect meet-up, this time with Tunamelt. More photos on my flickr page.

Our Fall lecture series is out!!! Looks pretty good...

On Saturday the AUD held a 10 hour long tour of Los Angeles architecture for incoming students, focusing on work produced by LA-based architects. It was led by a 5th year phd student in the department, Todd Gannon, who was very personable and directed the tour with a highly irreverent tone. We saw a pretty shocking number of projects covering a lot of ground in a huge 12 mile radius from UCLA, which we did driving around all day in a hilarious topless double decker Hollywood tourist bus. Our bus in front of Frank Gehry's house Yeah, it was a little embarrassing, but I got into it. The most fun was dodging the low-slung branches of trees in residential neighborhoods that probably don’t see too many double decker buses. It was also pretty funny to see the variety of people who waved at us from the street as if welcoming us to LA. Despite the cheesiness, it was nice to see that people in LA could still be friendly to strangers. If it was somewhere like New York for example, I’m quite sure we would have gotten as many middle fingers as we got friendly waves in LA. I know when I lived in New York I would have flipped off people in a giant double decker tourist bus with an ad for a vampire tv show plastered on the side. And I would have had great fun doing it, so I guess it all balances out in the end. Anyway, we started in Culver City with some older Eric Owen Moss projects, and moved on to the later Conjunctive Points development, which has a brand new EOM project going up. Then on to Venice and Santa Monica to a bunch of old Frank Gehry projects, including the office building with the Claes Oldenberg binoculars in front: then we passed Lorcan O’Herlihy’s house: to the Edgemar Center for the Arts, which is basically an early Gehry minimall. Nice “Italian hill village” feel though. Then past Gehry’s Santa Monica Place mall (which is apparently being demolished to extend the Third Street Promenade) to the famous Gehry house, into which we got a pretty great (and highly invasive) view from the second floor of the double decker bus. I hope Gehry doesn't walk around his kitchen naked... Then we drove along the beach to Pacific Palisades and the Eames house. It had all of Ray Eames’ knick knacks, and smelled like an especially ripe thrift store (from the outside, as visitors aren’t allowed in). It was nice to see such an icon, but tough to really connect with the intimate details of the house when being made to feel like breathing wrong would destroy it. After that we drove by two projects by AUD faculty Mark Lee – the Hill House and the Martin Margiela store, on to much more “accessible” architecture than the Eames house, in the form of Rodeo Drive and the Prada store (well, I guess you still need a credit card with a pretty high limit to truly ‘access’ it). I was hoping for some good views from the double decker, but it’s still basically non-architecture from the outside; probably just as Rem intended. I skipped Prada as I’ve seen it a million times, and instead peeked in the Starck-designed Taschen store a block over. Maybe it was because I gave it such a cursory glance, but it didn’t seem as exciting as I would have hoped. Just like any fancy store with dark woodwork. The only exciting feature to me were the wavy gold book display shelves in the middle of the store, which I’ve already seen at the Taschen outpost in the clocktower at the Farmer’s Market, where I think they’re put to slightly better use in the teeny space. After Rodeo, it was straight down Wilshire all the way to downtown. We passed by the new LACMA addition by Renzo Piano, which I pretty much hate, except for the huge double height glass elevator inside, with a shaft wrapped in a Barbara Kruger installation (suitably called “Shafted”). But I probably only hate the addition because it was built in lieu of an OMA scheme that would have tied LACMA together in a much more satisfying way. Oh, and it’s clad in beige stone. YAWN. Ha ha. Yes, that is an enormous iPhone featured prominently on the face of the building. The rest of the day was spent downtown, which we reached after passing some of my favorite buildings in LA, on Wilshire in Koreatown (the Wiltern building) and Westlake (the American Cement Building), as well as the building in which I’m moving into a big loft soon (we get the keys tonight!). Once downtown, we went through a tunnel I love that’s featured in countless movies shot in LA, which was really fun in the double decker (but not so fun to bike through, as I know from experience). We ate lunch at the Grand Central Market and checked out the interior of the Bradbury Building (made famous, to me at least, by Blade Runner). Then it was on to the CalTrans building, which I realized I’ve never actually walked around in. It was almost as cool as when it was depicted in Southland Tales as the headquarters of a near-future government agency dedicated to spying on every action of LA citizenry. Then we checked out the courtyards and exterior of the Moneo-designed Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. We couldn’t go into the lovely interior with the oddly bondage dungeon-looking side chapels (oh wait, is that just me?) as there was a wedding going on. The Coop Himmelblau high school across the freeway through the cathedral courtyard's windows Then we walked past the Music Center (where my friend visiting from New York happened to be watching the LA Opera staging of The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg – so LA, ha ha) to Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall. The nice little exterior garden areas on the rear plinth were strangely also closed for a wedding, but we checked out the (very weirdly shaped) lobby a bit. I was glad I had already been to a show there (Grizzly Bear, playing with the LA Philharmonic, in case you were wondering) so I’ve seen the better moments of the interior, which we were not able to see as non-ticketed visitors. Then, we exhausted travelers returned to campus. Shooting down the 10 in a topless bus is fun! Overall, the tour was great fun and a good way for entering students to bond, and I got to see a few great projects I hadn’t seen before. However, I preferred the format of the tour earlier this year for prospective students to the department, which was more compact and gave us much more access to featured projects by architects teaching in the department - we got to speak with Neil Denari at his just-finished private home addition and tour Morphosis’ offices. I guess the stakes are higher with that tour (it did help convince me that AUD faculty and administration actually cared about convincing students to go there, unlike Columbia, where they basically said “We’re in New York City. Heard of it? Yeah. See you in the Fall.” Which actually IS pretty convincing, ha ha). But I would highly recommend this tour to incoming students next year if they don’t have much experience with Los Angeles; it’s a great crash course. Much media was generated by all

Between these parameters, however wide, is where I am. My latest studio project is all about trying to personally resolve this issue. A week ago, someone wanted to clarify the difference between drawing and mapping. This was distilled into data vs. perception, then how to connect the two. Eventually, this turned into the notion of specificity and ambiguity. To fill you in, the project is to design a space for a climatologist to spend 12 hours observing weather conditions. It must be comfortable, efficient, urban, and based on my own personal dimensions. Yes, specificity and ambiguity can exist in the same time and place. The problem is, I cannot seem to get past the fact that I have been given almost no concrete detail (not saying that’s a bad thing). Or maybe that’s not even it. There is some unexplainable barrier I cannot seem to pass, or even adequately describe. It’s like I am right there, right on the edge of figuring it out, but just can’t get everything together working at once. It is frustrating on one hand. I try to define the details I am lacking, believing that I need them to progress, but then I step back and look and it just all seems like I am moving off on the wrong path. Our projects, our discussions, assignments, lectures and designs all embody this on-again-off-again meeting of ambiguity and specificity. In an earlier post I unknowingly touched on this when I said one thought leads to another until I lose track of the original idea. The whole mess of the process and analyzation is like a big soup where different elements bob to the surface every now and then, each taking a prominent place for a specific bite. At the end of the day, I am usually just left thinking that I lack a certain critical ability that so many other people around here seem to never turn off. Then I remind myself that this is why I went back to school. I wasn’t looking to keep coasting along the same path, I wanted to shake things up and struggle.

Just got back from Chicago for WIRED's NextFest. Monday, drove up to Chicago in a Uhaul with 14,500+ Components that would become the Suitcase Pavilion 2.0. Tuesday morning, we started constructing the pavilion which serves as the gateway for the Festival, exhibiting technology of the future. 12 VT + C U P Architecture students (3rd, 4th, and 5th years) and faculty had Tuesday through Thursday at noon to complete the pavilion, to be ready for opening night. NextFest is held in Millennium Park, and is now open to the public until October 12. Images from WIRED NextFest Opening Night. Pillow Cloud in Millennium Park My professor, Terry Surjan, with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife, Maggie, in the Suitcase Pavilion 2.0 with artwork by Eric Natzke. I am in the Suitcase Pavilion 2.0 with Bruce Mau of Bruce Mau Designs. BMD is exhibiting part of The Chicago Project at NextFest.

And then I realize I decided to actually make money with my interests. Don't worry - you're not alone - I had to google "dilettante" as well. It's a good word, right? ...Your grandma could definitely cross-stich that on a hand towel and sell it... ______________________________ Time: 9:17pm Hours of Sleep: 12 Coffee: 1 Grande w/ milk Destination for today: Library Website: www.reiser-umemoto.com _______________________________ This past week has been an amusing and frustrating week... It's a strange combination, I know. On the outside, it seems like our studio could have a lot more work to do... but, on the inside, it's difficult to know which way is up and when to put down one class to start working on another. Each project seems to be endless and one can get lost in it's idiosyncrasy. We all have different patterns to our work schedule and different interests to divulge when we find the time. For instance, some of the guys play soccer together... Catherine goes to yoga... Zehra reads the news... Katie watches theatre performances... Whatever it is that we do, we must get the heck out of the studio... even if we do have a pin up approaching quickly. We did have a pin up on Friday... Well, not so much a final review of our project, but what Paul (studio instructor) called a Review Up... which is somewhere in the middle. From what I understand, this current semester with Paul we are working on the idea of control... The control of scale, texture, repetition, etc. while using digital mediums to generate a new set of drawings that allow us to move forward and create something new. ...does this make sense? I don't know how else to describe it because I don't fully understand it either... It seems easy when you're talking about it and typing it out in a blog; but actually doing it is another thing completely. The cliche: Easier said than done... For me, one of the reasons why I am struggling with the idea is because it is lacking intent. During my undergraduate degree, when we designed something we started with research, typically not from the Interior Design field. From that research we found something with value and built upon it layer by layer until we had a final product; usually a well-informed interior. For my review up, my inital Maya model was arbitrary. I created it and used it to further my project because I liked it... not because it was informed by anything other than my hand on the mouse, the complacent mood I was in, and the music I was listening to. We took sections of the model and began to see what types of spaces were created... From this we were to generate a final drawing that took the sectioned Maya model into a new realm where we can begin to see the potentional for something else. I am having trouble because I don't know where to begin to harvest the information... for me, the drawings don't mean anything other than a way to catalogue the movements inside of my Maya model. How do I decide where I want to go beyond the sections? It seems like it could be personal choice and one could go in whatever direction one wanted... but where is the intent behind it? Is it meant to only be informed by personal preference? My drawing was just that, a composition of personal preference. I gave myself very little rules to work with, which could be where I went wrong... but, then again, how do you decide what your rules are? Which leaves me with no talking points, just a quick explanation of what you're looking at. My panel of UIC instructors wanted me to speak more about my project but I couldn't because I didn't have anything to say... What I wanted to say "It's an arbitrary mapping of personal preference and has no other meaning than that..." But what I really said "...". I feel like I'm swimming against the current... grasping in the dark... chasing my tail. ...The real question: How does one find meaning? *****Please do not misconstrue this explanation of my class as an open attack on the curriculum or on my instructor as I am very excited to learning everything I am; I am just merely attempting to explain my current status in class. __________________________________ On a different note: Sanford Kwinter came to lecture the same day as our review up. He seems like an odd man... He's an extremely intelligent man. He gave a lecture appropriately titled "What is Life?"... I enjoyed his lecture on Chreods and how their existence changes everything. How it changes our understanding of form and how it is generated... But I particularly enjoyed his critique of the current status of the architectural world. I wish he wouldn't have stopped himself because he was fearful of pissing people off. I wanted the unadulterated version! I want to know what others think about my generation... the good, the bad and the ugly! From my above remarks, one can understand when I say that I agreed with him when he was talking about how it is necessary in our tiny A&D world to allow for the cross-pollination and researching of other fields to better the final architectural outcome. ...Does that put Sanford Kwinter on Rem Koolhaas's side... or Rem on Sanford's side? hrrrm... I guess it doesn't matter. What I also found to be fantastic... Bruce Mau was in the row in front of me... I really like his hair. www.brucemaudesigns.com http://www.brucemaudesign.com/work_massive_change.html One section of my Maya model My Final Product Real Print Size: 24" x 66" The sections of the Maya model ran horizontally across the top of the print. And then the sections were multiplied, rotated and scaled to creat my arbitrary mapping of personal preference...

Fractal 23 by Takeshi Miyakawa - see here A cabinet that uses the entire volume of a cube by using corresponding drawers.

I've never seen an architect (let alone a world famous one) lecture inside his or her own building. What a treat this was, the day before the California Academy of Sciences was to open to the public-- a few hundred students from CCA and UC Berkeley were invited to see Renzo speak in the 'piazza' of his newly completed building. What follows are some excerpts of the lecture and perhaps the pictures will speak even more to what a magical experience this was. It was wonderful to see the architect so humbled within his own building (which is really the product of so many people and he reiterated that several times). We got to wander around a very limited area before the lecture began: I was sitting front row, about twelve feet away from Renzo. That didn't make it any easier to hear through his accent and all the echoing off the glass walls. In spite of what he said, I'm not convinced it would be a great place to hear a piano (a real one). What a charming guy though. One of the most amazing moments was when he opened the roof of the piazza, all the gears screeching and revealing a beautiful gradient of light as they retracted. My favorite thing was watching Renzo's face--he was like a kid inside of a Christmas present. some of the best quotes: "I call this a Piano lesson." "The places talk... the architecture should be good enough to listen... the voices are subtle" "The sketch---this is mythology." "A piazza is by definition empty. You don't have to design everything." "At 10 o clock you are a builder, pragmatic. 11 o'clock, a poet... at 12 o'clock you are a humanist, at 1 o'clock an anthropologist." "A good client is not necessarily obedient." "If they are not irritating discussions [with the client] they are not discussions." "You will never do something like this alone...We have a good builder (Did we pay the builder?)" *laughter* "I have five or six wives in my office--we don't even talk" *gestures with both hands up in the air* "You need obstination to keep the idea there. I call this sublime obstination." "If you make a mistake it's there forever." Question: Do you ever compromise aesthetics with a 'green' choice? Renzo: "Don't do that." "You can make things better by spending less money (but don't tell the client right away)" Question: Can you talk about the beginning of your career. Renzo: "I don't remember... It was last century." "Richard was the big one. We were bad boys looking like the Beatles... teaching at the AA in London, a mad place for mad people. Everyone starts in a different way, so good luck." Question: What kind of vision do you have for architecture? R: "Utopia is not a bad word. If you don't believe you can change the world you should change your job. Build good strong safe structures--it gives you dignity." "I hope this building will feed a generation..immense quarry of beauty and pleasure." Question: Do you ever visit your old buildings? R: "Up until [the building] is complete, it is yours... As an architect you never leave the building" "I like to hide myself behind a corner and I watch faces." We left enchanted (I have to say I was skeptical before, having seen some presentations last fall by the local architects). As a last gasp I tried running up a set of stairs when I thought no one was looking, halfway up only to hear a "Sir SIR! You can't go up there".... Outside, the fog having rolled in, we wandered around the park and took a last look back at what seemed like a UFO...landing or taking off?

Alright, so I'm finally getting around to posting this semester's lecture series. I haven't been able to find a jpg of the poster, so I'll have to type it all in. KATHRYN GUSTAFSON Landscape Design in a Changing Environment Thursday, October 2 6:00 pm B1 Meyerson Hall BARRY BERGDOLL The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA Delivered Home Thursday, October 2 6:30 pm Logan Hall MARILYN TAYLOR & JERRY SWEENEY City Building in the 21st Century Monday, October 13 6:00 pm Meyerson Hall, B1 JOAO NUNES New Landscapes Thursday, October 16 6:00 pm B3 Meyerson Hall MARK ALAN HUGHES & SANDY WIGGINS Sustainable Philadelphia: The Road Ahead Thursday, October 30 6:00 pm Meyerson Hall, B1 JEANNE GANG Recent Work Thursday, November 13 6:30 pm B-1 Meyerson Hall CHARLES WALDHEIM Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscapes Monday, November 17 6:00 pm B3 Meyerson Hall There are actually a few more lectures that I haven't listed here that are more City Planning related. See all of the events here. There are also two conferences sponsored by the Penn Institute for Urban Research that are coming up this fall. I'm really looking forward to both of them. First up, from October 24-25, is The Shape of the New American City. Some of the highlights for me will be Kenneth Jackson, and Saskia Sassen. This conference will " discuss the latest social science research on the nation’s cities and suburbs" and will "highlight current research that outlines the trends, identifies the problems and frames areas for federal response." A few weeks later, from November 6-8, is Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the Age of Oil. There is an incredible roster of speakers for this conference including: Diana Balmori, Jonathan Barnett, Bill Braham, Doug Kelbaugh, Stephen Kieran, David Leatherbarrow, Ali Malkawi, Jonathan Marvel, Bill Mitchell, Charles Waldheim, Marion Weiss, and Robert Yaro, among many others. As the name suggests, this symposium has been organized to "address the role of urban design in the face of one of the most profound and important challenges facing global society: the need to re-imagine and rethink how cities are designed and organized in a future without the plentiful and abundant oil upon which prosperous urban economies have been built."

We had final reviews on Monday + Tuesday so life has been in a bit of recovery mode this week with all third years on travel for advanced studio. Travel week also equates to no drawing due for Peter's class this week which gives us some a bit of free time. Although that free time is quickly absorbed by our beaux-arts water color class. Hooray for mimesis. My review was constructive, although overall I'm pretty disappointed in this project. I think it has more to do with time and adjusting to life here at grad school. Project was completed in three weeks, so it is what it is. Conceptually I was trying to mediate a project that was about programatically contested zones....i.e. kayak boat Launch space is the same space as event space is the same space is path to water's edge so that when different user's come to the space they are in conflict over who and how exactly it is used. There's enough program space for all, but it translated into a pretty tight corridor that runs through the site. The canopies [ultimately way to symbolic] serve as wall/roof/wall and are the public faces of community and neighboring sculpture center and collide right at the contested program zone. Maybe their was some other things i was thinking about, but it was a three week project so you know... In other news I'll be editing Retrospecta this coming year so I'm pretty excited for the summer. It's a paying gig, but only enough to make it through the summer. We've got three other all star editors and a huge interest in staff so hopefully we'll be able to accomplish quite a bit. It should be a pretty interesting Retrospecta due in part to the return to the building [now called Paul Rudolph Hall] although that doesn't seem to roll of the tongue quite as nice as the A+A. I've never edited a publication but I have to say that last years Retrospecta was really fantastic and so we're hoping to stay on that level. Also, since it's been a while since I've posted, Walter Hood Lectured here last week. I love this guy. Incredibly interesting, great speaker, really innovative ideas. He currently teaches at Berkley so for those who have him, your lucky. The lecture was last week and was mostly about his work, with lots and lots of projects and him just talking about them, so if you don't know whom he is I suggest you look into it.

So, this first week of class is just wrapping up, a few hours to go until the welcome back bbq, and i've got a better idea of what this quarter will entail.... My schedule is fairly open - our studio instructors are visiting professors Dan Wood and Amale Andraos of WORKac, who will be here for crits around 6 times this quarter. So, studio won't be a typical monday wednesday friday ordeal, but rather a free-flowing independent study sort of thing, with work presented when Dan or Amale are in town.... Dan will be here this coming sunday, so we've already started researching the site & context. The project? A cultural and arts center for Beirut, Lebanon. It's a competition. As we haven't met with WORKac yet, I'm not sure if we'll actually be submitting this, but the competition schedule seems to indicate that we *could*.... more on that later.... So, for starters, we've divided into groups of 2 to research various aspects of the site and context - urban development, population, economics, architecture, history, etc. My partner and I have been saddled with Geography, and this is a first stab at a more analytic approach.... we'll also pin up something on tectonic plates, climate patterns, soil types, topography, etc, but i thought this was good to get a sense of scale. More on studio as it develops, obviously, but I'll continue posting work-in-progress to flickr, even if i don't have time to describe it here... Other classes - I'll be taking a seminar with John McMorrough on Urbanism from 1986 to present, and the Baumer Visiting Professor course (also with John) in which we'll study the work of Gregg Lynn, culminating in an extended visit from the man himself. In addition, I'll be working as a GA for this year's LeFevre fellow, Nick Gelpi, on which more later.... And finally, I'm going to try to sit in on this quarter's introduction-to-architecture course, which will be taught (in a suprise move!) by Jeff Kipnis... it's shaping up to be an exciting quarter....

Why is it that once you break the seal on your first all-nighter of the season, from that moment on you can't free your schedule of them? In awake-hour NO. 34, I realized that I definitely forgot it was possible to fantasize about a sip of lukewarm day old coffee, that you can fall asleep with your eyes completely open in a sustainability lecture, and what its like to know how your great grandfather feels trying to climb stairs. The familiarity of these events reminded me that there is no turning back now, how far I've come and how far I still have to go, and that I am excited for the challenge. Particularly, I am excited for the challenges offered in our studio project, as I managed to stay awake long enough to briefed on some specifics... We will be working with a "client" to guide our programming and project goals. My client is the organization SCEED (Students Concerned with Environmentally Efficient Design), and I will have to develop a relationship with the organization as their hypothetical architect in order to discover their specific living needs, and then design accordingly. I am excited about the client-architect scenario being fused into our project yet, sometimes a requirement such as this makes me dream about a school that lets you play around with forms all day and produce beautiful objects that have almost nothing to do with inhabitable space (do those exist?). Its a love-hate thing for me, I definitely respect the practicality and realness of our projects at NJIT, don't get me wrong. However on occasion I wish that the only time as an architect I will potentially be liberated from requirements I didn't have to fight for beauty and innovative design against such intense programmatic elements, ADA issues, height requirements, lot coverage, social/political restrictions, etc. NJIT brings the entire arsenal into every project from first year day one, and they are strict about it. On the other hand, slowly molding yourself into a graduate student who is able to not only live with these concerns but embrace them as challenges and use them to create beautiful design is a beautiful thing in itself. Learning to manage these issues early on when mistakes don't result in serious consequences, is something I will forever be thanking NJIT for. It has led me to be a firm believer of the idea that if you are a good designer, the proof will emerge regardless of restrictions. It was tough to come to this realization during my first year, however, when I really just wanted to recklessly explore my own design abilities. Perhaps the school should have slowly eased us into all of these architectural issues, after we were more familiar with our own style of design, or maybe their assumption is just that as grad students we can handle both. Regardless, I think I am growing accustomed to it, and when I look at it realistically, if I wasn't I would have to start when I graduate. So I am going to be optimistic about this client-architect aspect of our studio this semester. Maybe SCEED will offer some interesting challenges, or remove some banal ones from the usual mix...

Season 5 of The Office starts tonight. There is no one in the building. I have watched it before, but don't really follow it like my roommates do. Tuesdays and Thursdays are always good days because I only have one class and it doesn't start until 2pm. Our integrations section with Matt Hall is awesome. He really understands what we are trying to accomplish and isn't to nit picky. We use "The Architect's Studio Companion" (Allen + Iano) for sizing, rules of thumb, etc and that is it. For more complicated stuff we have to go to Kelso or Rabun (the other integrations professors who also teach the Environmental Control Systems and Structures course) but for the most part our section does it own thing. Hopefully I'll have a plan and some sections down before the night is over. I didn't talk to Professor Shelton (my studio professor) on Wednesday, so I probably will tomorrow. I got some books on the Civil War today. Shelby Foote's "The Civil War: A Narrative" - which is considered a definitive source on the entire conflict. Also, Eddy W. Davison's and Daniel Foxx's "Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma." published 2007 I have been particularly troubled lately trying to get some honest information about Gen. Forrest. I talked to my grandfather today who was a American History professor, but he concentrated more on labor rights, etc. He only had some broad information which I already knew. It seems like every thing I find is either very anti-Forrest or very pro-Forrest. This book was written by two University of Arizona professors, but was published in the south. From what I have read so far, they have dealt out both criticism and praise of the man - so we will see. Anyway, how about this election? I bet Obama and McCain will debate tomorrow. McCain's plan looks like it is backfiring on him - because Obama is going to hold a townhall-style nationally broadcast meeting by himself rather than agree to postpone. At least that is what i heard as of this afternoonish. anyway, time to get to work. victoria's birthday tomorrow. woot! Sending my ETH application off soon.

This is a blog about teaching - the good, the bad, & the ugly of the pedagogical process. It's taken a long time to reach this point (14 - years since undergrad); now the opportunity to dim the lights and flash slide after slide to a room of sleep deprived design students is dangling in front of me. Over the next few posts, I hope to weave the tale of how I've arrived at this point, that I - along with most of my classmates - have often dreamed about. My next few evenings (or more) are going to dedicated to preparing the course proposal between caring for my son, so I'll post when I can. First, for those that don't know my archinect presence, I'm a '05 MLA/MArch grad of Penn and a '94 BS Arch grad from the KSA. My first thoughts about wanting to teach emerged in the fading days of my undergrad experience in Ives Hall as I was completing my honors thesis. Didn't happen. I spent the next 7 years in the trenches of hollywood as a set designer and art director. Life happens. Recessions happen. Upon graduation from OSU and moving to Los Angeles on a whim, there were NO architecture jobs to be found. But those years designing spaceships, sit-com apartments, prisons for Robert Redford, and other visual detritus gave me my first guest lecture gig. A friend teaching at the Temple University film school, invited me down to philly a few times to talk with his cinematography students in my days of unemployment following september 11th. -jump cut back to the presence- I've gotten the department of landscape architecture interested in having me co-teach a graduate seminar. We've been discussing what this course might be for over a month. Now it's time to put some words on paper and make a formal proposal to the dean. Last Friday I ran into Thom Fisher at a tour of the Minneapolis City Hall green roof. After giving him my elevator speech about the seminar, he suggested that we seek cross-registration with the department of architecture. So now we've been asked to create a 2 to 3 page course proposal to run up the flag pole which is my home work for the next few days. I'll be on a jury monday with my co-instructor, so I have until then to hash out my ideas before passing the baton. I've strung you along for long enough to finally reveal the seminar's subject: Infrastructure, Urbanism, & Landscape. (to be continued)