The studio space we are working in this term is really a nice break from the studio spaces in Lawrence.
Its getting warmer, the Urban Farm is in full production just out our front door, and we have a south facing patio that is a joy when the sun comes out.
I’m working with a bunch of friends in the studio, and finally working with my hands is a nice break from a regular studio production.
I decided to make a mortise and tenon joint with a few modifications. The idea is that the join would be expressed along the side of the piece, although hank suggest that it be split to give it more structure and surface area. It was difficult to cut, and I had to pick up a 1/4″ router bit to make it happen. The end of the joint isn’t as clean and elegant as I initially designed it, but this is nice because it serves its purpose without needing to glue it. Its a rack for hanging herbs to dry in the kitchen. I’ll post pictures of the final piece when I get them.
Hover over the corner to either drag the page, or click to go to next page. . This is a presentation I gave in my furniture studio. I’m experimenting with .swf files and adding flash to my blog.
Konstantin Grcic’s work embraces the industrialized process. He see’s very little difference in creating by hand using simple tools, and using sophisticated fabrication techniques. He treats them as equal partners in the process of design. He got his start under Jasper Morrison, which translates though his functionalist approach to design. Function and form aren’t two sides of the rope that are pulling on eachother, rather, they work together. He doesn’t make any decisions that compromise either.
He works within a fairly narrow vocabulary using pure geometric forms and a traditional furniture typology, but the results are fresh designs with interesting behavioral implications. The chaos chair is fun because it doesn’t allow the user to ‘get comfortable’ as his point is often times switching between uncomfortable postures often provides more comfort.
Pedro M Cruz’s Master thesis on Visualizing information is really quite nice. I enjoy the little anomalies in the video… little patterns that spike into existence in what seems at random intervals. Makes me wonder about the life of the city and what is making them.
I was recent place into the furniture studio. I don’t have much experience building furniture, but I’ve done quite a bit of woodworking, so I’m excited to see where this term takes me. I’ve been assigned to study Konstantin Grcic (pronounce that!). He has some interesting stuff, although I have yet to be won over any of the designs. I’ll have to read a bit more about him.
I think the first one, 555 KUBIK, is more profound of an experience, and is working in the context of “video art installations”, but has a more direct interaction with the architecture. The lumitectura video seems a bit more predictable given other video’s i’ve seen, exerting better aesthetic judgment than christmas lights gone crazy. Both were created using time laps video and overlaying/masking editing techniques, but neither happened in real time.
What I think is really interesting about 555 KUBIK is that it is architecture using cinema as part of its architecture. Cinema is being passed of as built environment. If you think about its “mise en scene” (elements of the production), the architecture and the cinema are working mutually towards a spacial experience as the desired end. Limitecture is cinema using architecture as part of the cinema. Granted we watched both of them on vimeo, it still raises some interesting questions about space and virtual space.
Arif Hasan’s lecture was a excellent! I currently am most interested in architecture and planning of rapidly expanding cities in developing countries, and how architects engage marginalized people groups who make up most of these cities.
Arif Hasan is a Pakistani architect / planner who did a project in the city of Karachi. It’s a city of over 15 million people, out of which 7 million live in informal settlements or squatter towns. The Orangi slum of Karachi is the largest in asia, even bigger than Mumbia’s Dharavi slum, which has over 1,000,000 occupants. Just the sheer amount of people who live in these slums are far more than I can conceptually grasp.
In Karachi the local government often compulsively displaces hundreds of thousands of people in the name of city planning and progress. Mr. Hasan described one particular highway project that unnecessarily displace over 500,000 people. This goes to show that occupants of these informal settlements have little political control or influence in their own destiny and are regularly abused by the government.
Mr. Hasan went into Orangi with the intention of mobilizing the people to act on there own accord to better their environment. Proper sanitation became the main goal and it was imperative that it “came from the people who lived there”.
Much of his lecture echoed what I had learned in school and in my experience about third world development. His principles emphasized empowering the people to better there own lives. His role was merely as a facilitator rather than a dictator. He worked with the community to come up with an affordable system that dealt with sewage infrustructure, defying standard engineering practice. The communities initially paid for the improvements themselves, without gov’t assistance, nor financing from foreign organizations.
While there were psychological, social, technical, and economic barriers, education and facilitation of means really mobilized the people to take on the challenges themselves. The youth of the community were trained to survey the neighborhoods and create maps that were necessary for planning water run off and sewage treatment. Of the 539 informal settlements in Orangi, the youth created maps for 337 of them. The entire process of creating sanitary sewage and water infrastructure soon started happening on its own, and with little assistance people were upgrading the neighborhoods themselves.
The project improved the sanitation for over 3 million of the Karachi inhabitants. Infant mortality and disease significantly decreased as a direct result of there efforts.
I lived and worked in Ecuador on water systems for indigenous communities in rural and urban areas in early 2007 for about 5 months. It was a short time but I learned a lot about the program, and I ended up taking some graduate level classes in development, and I can’t help but point out one important commonality between my experiences and Mr. Hasan’s project. If oppressed peoples are then given the tools and access to the resources they need and have proper facilitation, they have, in a sense, been given control over there own destiny. This can motivate people to act on there own behalf and make things happen out of which their quality of life drastically improves. This breaks traditional models that the power comes from the developer, rather than from within. In essence, the restoration of relationships between organization and marginalization brings about a higher quality of life.
I had my midterm a little over a week ago, and we did our final revisions to our buildings this past week. Our schedule moving forward is to develop materials and fixture specifications and design built in furniture and cabinetry. We are basically zooming in and developing our building to the utmost detail possible. I have mostly hand drawings which aren’t documented, but here is a taste of what I tried to represent of my building in a night of sketchup and CAD
One of my observations about our internet culture is that it seems to revolve around social networking and and the sharing of ideas. This may sound vague but I have a point. Its that it seems that internet technologies die if they are too good at isolating some one from the rest of the world, point being that there needs to be some sort of human interactivity for it to flourish. Whether or not it physically isolates us from people is another debate, technologies I believe catch on if they enable sociability.
In the realm of architecture education there are very specific social interactions that people gravitate to. From what I have observed and notice about myself, is that I’m constantly seeking information about what events are going on around the department (student organizations, lectures, projects, etc.), and what my friends are doing in there studios.
The internet, and the uoregon architecture website should satisfy some of these needs, which I believe will lead to a more informed and connected student body.
I think three things are imperative for this to work:
1. Time efficient – students aren’t bogged down the layers of unnecessary techno hub bub, rather, all desired outlets lay right near the surface or at least in an intuitive and predictable manner.
2. Continuity – School is meant to prepare you for your professional life. In the case of architects using wepages and blogs, school is a staging area for these dialogues to start, and professional practice is where the rubber hits the road. This is where the transfer of ideas, and social networking really effects the built environment. If what is developed in school extends into the profession, then a school can really say “job well done.”
3. Individual representation – This is especially important to a design profession. When you put yourself out there for people see and judge, the technologies must be doing there best to represent you accurately. In being a design profession, people care about how there work is displayed and viewed. We know that the entirety of the package is being judged. Here are some websites that I think represent the body of work in an appropriate way.
