There are many ways of categorizing architectural styles. One way is to use a spectrum on which one end there lies a kind governed by logic; one that is practical, realistic, engineering, systematic, sustainable. On the other lies one of emotion; the abstract, artistic, sublime. In our society, most architecture contains both to varying degrees. But it is important to remember that beauty is not found in the combination of both, but in the relative balance of the two.

I argue to all architecture students to be careful when they design. We are always told by society to “step outside the box.” The goal is always to be innovative and forward-thinking. But when the student asks about innovation, he or she is pointed to the starchitects; to an iconic, superficial architecture dominated by fluff.  To the layperson, “outside the box” is defined as flashy, rendered innovation with expensive materials and a stress of form over detail, of quantity over quality, breadth over depth. It is a box that is defined and governed by values found in our modern society. It is a box where speed, efficiency, and money are valued above emotion, beauty, and art.

If you are a regular follower of architecture blogs, you have probably already seen this.  But if not, and you want to add a bit of mainstream architecture/design to your daily life, Archi-Ninja has made an amazing comic review of the top 9 architecture blogs.  It is a good top list.  Check it out.

In Environmental Systems, our main project was to design and produce a complete set of construction documents for a small 1800sf house. The house needed to be environmental, sustainable, and cheap. It also needed to have different options for different climates.  Throughout the class we learned about a wide range of topics, from passive and active solar strategies, to thermal envelopes, to the pros and cons of HVAC systems, to how to use and draw psychometric charts. I wanted to produce a building that took advantage of simple passive techniques that applied to all kinds of climates without too much change to design. The most obvious is the large overhanging roof that shades the strong summer sun and lets in the winter sun, protects from northern winter winds and directs southern summer winds, and shelters an outdoor living space. But beyond this, I worked to incorporate sustainability into every scale of the project, from the window placement to the corner stud details.

Studio 4 with Tim Love was by far my most academically stimulating studio at Northeastern.  Studio 4 is the housing studio at Northeastern, and this semester we worked on wood frame courtyard housing in Boston while dealing with all of the code issues that plague and inspire architects every day.  But the brilliance of this studio was not entirely concentrated in the design problems we faced, but more through the academic approach of the studio.  Instead of following the traditional practice of getting a site and putting a project on it, we instead did the reverse.  We developed a courtyard housing prototype, aggregated it to form a block, and then placed it along with the rest of the projects in the studio into a mock city in South Boston.  The end result is an instant city where we could literally count the number of pillows throughout or do FAR calculations of each block.  The profoundness of this studio is pretty obvious when you put it into this kind of perspective.

Studio 3 took place in Rome, which is almost all I need to say about it.  The program was treated less as four distinct classes and more as one entire experience, which is the best way to treat studying abroad.  That being said, our studio was a complete engagement with Roman history and architecture, and the result was incredibly stimulating and profound.  Our project was to design new space for the school’s architecture program in a ruin of a boathouse (the Arsenal) on the Trastevere bank of the Tiber dating back 500 years.  Instead of inserting a form into the Arsenal, I instead chose to strip down the building to its raw structure.  By doing this, the building embraces the Roman tradition of the piazza, but in a way that is unlike any other piazza throughout the city.  Each other piece of program (an auditorium, café, classrooms, dorm, dock along the river, and administration) was designed as a reaction to the Arsenal, the site, and Rome itself.

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.

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.