Advanced Representation was a short summer studio structured around entering into a competition, taught by Chris Grimley. I worked in a team with Tom Neal and Tim Valich throughout the entire project. This studio was both an introduction to competitions and to more advanced architecture programs. By entering a competition, we were able to engage a part of architecture outside of the academic world and learn the process of design through alternate means. The MarketValue Competition investigated possible alternatives for an underdeveloped site in Charlottesville, VA. The program called for market vale housing, civic space, and a space for a farmer’s market. By look at each typologically then reinserting them back into the site, we were able to create a project that worked in a short amount of time.

Studio 2 was our first time taking a single project throughout the whole semester. In this case, it was a design of a K-8 arts magnet school in the South End of Boston. Taught by Conrad Ello, it began with the design of a typological classroom prototype that dealt with programmatic zoning on a small scale and an emphasis on the “thick wall.” We then produced an analysis of an existing school, in my case Mahlum’s Benjamin Franklin Elementary, in Kirkland, Washington. Then finally, after a site analysis, we jumped into our final project.  The focus of this project was to design a school that reacted to its surrounding site.  Our analysis was done by looking at different site characteristics, both in plan and empirically.  We worked through our analysis to make decisions within our project. This resulted in a project that was woven into the fabric of the neighborhood and was crafted to respond to what was going on around it.

A true gingerbread house is not just a product of sweets, warmth, and friends, but also of talent, inventiveness, and raw courage.  Realizing that we had none of the latter, a few friends and I decided to embark on a journey that would attempt to prove our worth to gingerbread community.

Beginning with just a single idea and a glimmer of hope, Nirav Patel, Meg Blake, Peter Martin, and I set off to create a gingerbread house that we could be proud of; one that would solidify our place in the holiday season.  It all went downhill from there.

I suppose now is a good time to talk about Northeastern’s architecture program. Its emphasis on real-world Boston-oriented design pushes us as students to think critically about what we do as architects. Architecture schools have a tendency to press certain pedagogies, whether it is abstract experimentation, theoretical analysis, or mathematical exploration. At Northeastern, the push is to produce architects who can design.  But unlike most schools, Northeastern teaches its students to be architects, not to be designers.  Instead of learning how to generate complex curves in Maya or build trusses that will withstand 2012, we instead research market values for South Boston and draw through sill details for our designs.  Coupled with the co-op program at Northeastern, we come out of school understanding how to build a building. I don’t know if this style is better or worse than other schools, but it at least makes sense.

Studio 1 was taught by Chris Genter, and was our real first immersion into architectural design. We had three different projects that went up in scale as we moved through the semester. The first was a proposal for a café in the Christian Science Center that worked us through fully integrating a building into a site. The second was a house analysis of Victor Horta’s house in Brussels, which allowed us to understand the spatial and material relationships of the house. The final project was a proposal for a Map Center for the Museum of Fine Arts.  This project’s site was a very awkward 30’x100’. So, by totally embracing this narrowness and designing a project with two 10’ buildings inserted into the site, I was able to push the relationships of scale, space, interior and exterior, circulation, and volume. I also built a model that I am still in love with to this day, despite its simplicity.

The first day of freshman studio is something like being thrown into a bull ring naked. It is unbelievably difficult, frustrating, time-consuming, and sometimes downright painful. But you always secretly love every second of it. Our freshman year studios were intro courses that dealt with the fundamentals of drawing and design.

We began our first studio, Manual Representation with Mo Zell, by studying Dürer and his alphabet in particular, with an emphasis on pure, grounded representational skills. We moved on to studying Lissitzky, diving into color, form, material, and the abstract. As hard as I tried to push Mo during this project, she would not let me experiment in pure abstraction, and insisted that I had a reason for every move I made. Spoken like a true architect; it was a task to follow, but one that was ultimately valuable. The third project was a blind study of the Barcelona pavilion, with a “kit-of-parts” design project where we dealt with composition and space. And finally, we designed a “room for repose,” a mini-hotel room for poor souls at an airport on an extended layover, which combined everything we had studied previously.

Digital Representation was the second freshman studio, which involved an in-depth study of a Corbusier project (the Pavillon de l’Espirit Nouveau) through the computer. It was nice change from man rep which was all hand drafting.

Because this site has a late start, there is going to be a few posts dealing with the past rather than the present. I will try to keep them to a minimum.