Studio- 3D Print

I took these quick shots the morning of the presentation. The print took really well but ended up taking over seven hours to print which exceeded my time slot and blew the schedule a bit. Luckily everyone was still able to print ok. The scale is 3/32" and because of the size of the site it had to be printed in two pieces.

Studio- Final Board

The second project of the Denari Studio ended up being a three week sprint. The final review consisted of 3d prints and presentation boards with plans, sections, etc. Given the formalist approach I adopted I focused my board on line drawings and capturing the performance of water in the design through showing the contours of the forms along with a few vectors analysing water flow. The jury consisting of Jason Payne, David Erdman, Olivier Tourraine and the new chair Hitoshi Abe strongly disagreed with my approach to the project and so i had a hefty 4 versus 1 defense to maintain. Needless to say my lack of sleep failed me and I mostly took what they dished out. I did manage a few exchanges with the new chair disagreeing with his characterization that the project was chaotic. if anything my project is highly intentional, starting with a troughing system that peaks and descends in a helical manner downward from there. Overall the critics didn't buy the fine line I was riding between a postmodern collage methodology and methods deriving from topology. I did draw some nice comments from Denari who saw the project as a valuable contribution to the overall variety of dialogue in the studio.

Tech- Other Groups

There were seven groups total each with 3 or 4 individuals. As you can see in the photos some groups strayed further from the form of the flower than others.

Tech- More Night Shots

Here are some more pictures of the Tech project taken at night right before it was disassembled.

Tech- Final Board

Our final board got very good reviews from a number of professors. Jason made it very clear that he wanted drawing to be an important part of the quarter and not just a secondary counterpart to the model. A motivation for the drawings and board layout was also the starting point of the quarter, the botanical illustrations of Arthur Harry Church and his working sketches. From his layouts based on localities and organic growth as well as his use of shifting scales and base units of measure driving entire content- we developed our drawings exclusively with linework showcasing the linear transition of the form through multiple cross-sections. To capture the affect of the work- we employed color to the line drawings- using older techniques of drafting infused with colors through manipulation in autocad and illustrator.

Tech- Dark Shots

I took these shots after the reviews and need to take some more at night to capture the full effects. Lighting strategy was to provide points of light and the rippling ends and move to more of a general glow at the inflated center. Lighting detail at the end turned out pretty cool as we used the three layers at each pedal to create a mini light bulb type effect. The middle layer pinched down to hold the LED diode while the outer layers inflated to catch the wires on the inside and the glow on the outside.

Tech- Final Project

Final Reviews were in the main hallway which will give them some public exposure but was difficult to show off their lighting because it doesn't get very dark. Critics included UCLA professor Richard Weinstein, two professors from SCI-Arc that also run the firm Materials and Applications, and a few others. Time got kind of short towards the end so our review wasn't as long as we would heave liked. Most presentations focused on presenting their morphology, ensuing effects and for those that dealt with overall affects. We tried to begin with Affect and present details and forms through those themes. Our themes included androgyny as the form was both male and female, axial and linear as well as promiscuity in the presentation and withdrawal of sensuality and lastly I talked about the choreography of the parts to one another and the changing relationships in each composite layering. Critiques came from a few angles, as one questioned the obviousness of the color choices for the androgyny theme while another brought up the hardware and its foreign nature. Its so easy to get burned on color when you have little experience working with it, but based on our tests they still seem to be the right hues. The hardware thing came from the jury's bias against using hardware in general and we tried to fire back a little bit to point our that not every project needs such "pure" connections.

Tech- Assembling Final Project

Our final review for Tech class was Friday morning. These are some shots from the night before as we worked to finally get this thing together. Its always difficult to predict the time it takes to assemble and wire these things which is why we finished minutes before the review. The pictures show the painted pieces fully disassembled and then three petals assembled and lastly a shot of my partners putting the petals into their spiraling final configuration.

Studio- Network Theory and Hydrology

The subject of topology continues to come up not only in studio but also in our theory and tech courses. Topological dialogue in architecture is borrowed from mathematics and theories concerning networks, catastrophes and chaos. Since the schedule for the studio project is extremely short I decided to research these theories but limited to a visual survey of their diagramming. Many parallels seem to exist between branches of non-linear dynamical systems theory and hydrological types. In fact, a major application for chaos theory is the understanding of collisions in fluids.

Studio- Hydroscape Renderings

Friday consisted of informal pin-ups with Neil. Less than two weeks are left till the final review December 14th. While my presentation renderings came together hastily at the last minute, my review went pretty well. This project is exploring pretzel-like intersections within a linear system and maintaining differences of parts which is a bit counter to contemporary approaches of smoothing out seams and joints. Earlier I had presented the upper half of the design, this week I made only minor revisions to that part and focused on the lower half of the water's trip down to a collecting pool. The "mountain" as Neil calls it, carries water down at an accelerated pace through a troughing system where it collides with the pavilion roofs on the left and right of the site. This collision is also a switchback turning the flow of water 180degrees back down in to a slower, lower profiled flow. Green roofs have been added as a cross grain to the site creating pockets for the water to flow into and be stored. Because the green roof is absorbent, it also connects the water distribution system back to the sidewalk without having to slope up and create a perimeter wall around the site.