mOrphosis

Today was my first day of employment at the Santa Monica architecture firm Morphosis. The principal Thom Mayne was my professor for the Madrid studio at UCLA and this position at Morphosis looks to be the perfect extension of my research in graduate school. I'll be there part-time till teaching at USC ends in December and then switch over to full-time. Until December, I'm excited to be playing a large role in a forthcoming Morphosis book. For those less involved in the architecture world, you can get a sampling of the firm's work at the website: http://www.morphosis.net
(You can also look for me in the webcams.)

Madrid Project- New Titlepage

For our section of the publication, I created a new title spread that quickly introduces people to the central idea and its relevance to the broader issues of the city. We were critiqued in the final reviews for not linking our ideas to a larger story and not explicitly stating our values. This spread is our response. For those wondering, the text is doubled because there will be two bi-lingual editions: English and Spanish, and English and Mandarin.

New Madrid Renderings

Two new renderings for the book publication using the V-Ray engine

Joining USC Faculty

As of today, I have joined the undergraduate faculty at USC. I will be teaching a first year studio for the 2007-2008 school year. We had a preliminary faculty meeting today and the students start next Monday. I'm very excited and looking forward to building upon the teaching experiences I had at UCLA this summer.

Studio- Final Boards

studio- full board layout

I would still like to post all the individual boards, but in the meantime here is an image of all of them assembled together. They were designed to flow a certain way to lead the presentation. Grey areas are analysis with the design proposal in the center.

Thom Mayne Interview

For those not familiar with my studio professor from this year, here's an interesting interview done last week at a Starbucks outside his office. It has an interesting casual tone and he mentions our studio.
http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=61129_0_23_0_C

Fizzle video

An exciting thing about the projects I have been a part of is the life they have had post graduation. The installation on Hollywood Blvd will continue to be on display through Labor Day. In addition, it has been selected to be in a forthcoming book about digital fabrication by Lisa Iwamoto and was recently selected to be in an exhibit in a gallery in Washington DC. The video above was assembled by my partner Jono, and the exhibit in DC will feature a similar video.

The After

And now comes the after. I'm currently fortunate to be able to teach this summer at UCLA. Its a post-grad school digestion period. Work on the studio project continues in preparation for two publications: a book this fall focusing only on our studio and then another book next winter put out by the school on current research projects.

Superglow Installation Update

A few of my teammates had a chance to continue on the installation since it was not complete for the opening. Its not quite done, but enough to put it aside till after studio final reviews next week. The theater manager has promised to keep it installed now until Labor Day. Its a great project to see in person, but even better to capture in photographs as an open shutter seems to really draw out the glow effects.

Superficial Superglow Opens

Here are some shots from the Superglow opening Friday night. Both pieces were on display as well as presentation boards and study models. Our piece was only partially finished due to its complexity. We hope to finish soon as it will be on display for a large portion of the summer.

Studio Model

Here are two shots of the 3d print we presented at the midterm. It represents the southern portion of the site where we are constructing a large transit hub that spurs a zone of commercial growth.

Studio Midterm

Our midterm for studio found us once again trying to clarify the argument enough to present to the jury. An ongoing problem for such a complex scale and scope is to reduce the ideas down to enough clear diagrams to present to outsiders. This is the challenge not only for the jury at the final review but the life of this thing beyond as a publication.

We also took some stabs at giving shape to the development of the site. With every review the photographic renderings tend to dominate so we also need to present the typologies and perspective views of the site in way that describe performances and not merely gestural blocks.

Studio- Loose Knots

Over the past week we have had a series of reviews with Thom and now have ten days to crank for the midterm review. It hasn't been easy presenting the material due to its scope and scale. Typically we've allowed one aspect such as the infrastructure to progress past the programming, sustainability, open space, etc.


The ideograms above, while overly basic, proved very helpful in communicating the core ideas to Thom. Our 3.5 mile long site is a strip in Northern Madrid stretching from the inner ring M30 to the outer ring M40. On top of this, their is the possibility for a major transit hub on the site that could control automobile access in to the city as well as connect multiple transit networks including bus, metro, regional rail, the airport and a high speed intereuropean line.

A major strategy is to loosen the interstate exchanges at both ends of the site to obtain spatial opportunities out of the infrastructure and allow for a high degree of programming over top a major intersection of systems and routes. It goes back to the ironies of Koolhaas's Delirious New York- the simultaneous drive for congestion and access.

With a site so imbued with infrastructural connections we are using it to guide the site and trying to figure out how to program as much by time as by space. The past few days we have obtained commercial density measurements from comparisons with downtown (spatial densities), now we will return to questions of time and attempt to describe temporal densities such as traffic congestion and urban flows.

Studio- Infrastructure and Sci-Fi

Our urban design project in Madrid has focused thus far on large infrastructural moves, examining how parts of the city can be unplugged and reconnected. In part we are thinking of the site as a great automobile extractor for a downtown core that is over congested with traffic. As the scale of infrastructure increases in our world it becomes more viable to inject additional program enabling them to be routes as well as destinations.

Many of the cities pictured in science fiction have this densification of infrastructure, projecting the interactions of the city upwards- conceiving urban relationships in section more than plan. This massive vertical layering of the ground plane seems outrageous and unfeasible but it should be remembered that in most major cities today the accepted ground beneath our feet is both porous and artificial.