All right All right, here you go!

My mid review is tomorrow, and somehow I managed to send my (ENORMOUS) drawings to print this afternoon and I am on my way to bed.  I must not have done enough architecting... Anyways, I think I am going to let the drawings speak for themselves, and give you a link to them.  Also here is a drawing summarizing the research I did as groundwork for the project.

I will give a few details on the assignment:  This is the corner of a Climatology lab and research center that as adjacent to the high line.  We will be designing the full building during the rest of the quarter, this is just an opportunity for us to "test the waters" of our concept.  And I will leave the rest to the drawings.  Enjoy!

Watching Ice Melt.

For those of you who haven't experienced it yourselves, initial projects in architecture school have very little literal connections to architecture.  They are often abstract experiments concerning our perceptions of space and time, and test our capabilities to represent them.  Above all, their aim is to get you accustomed to staying up all night and doing a week's worth of work in a weekend.  

The project that serves as the groundbreaking of a GSAPP (that stands for the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation if I didn't make that clear, and it's said "GEE SAP") student's education is the documentation of the melting of a 1.5 liter block of ice.  No, I'm not kidding, the first thing you do is freeze ice and watch it melt.

Why ice?  Why melting?  Observation of environmental effect and specifically climatic effect will go on to play a central role in our first studio, whose theme is "atmosphere." The project gets us to ask how does atmosphere affect and change a body?  How do we observe and record those changes?  And it makes us conscious of the usually invisible body of space that we will interpret and edit throughout our careers as architects.

For my ice experiment extravaganza, I wanted to leave a physical artifact of the melting process that represented the very end of the thaw.  To create this imprint, I stacked the 9" cube of ice on a bed of photographs printed with water soluble inkjet ink.

     

The water creates a striking ink wash on the bed of paper.  The paper begins to warp and wave as it's saturated, finally leaving a colorful topography as a record of the now absent ice cube.

full size drawing

In representing the event, I linked the initial and final states of the melting process through a timeline of sections tracking the ice's profile.  At each end contours map the growth of the wash and the decay of the cube.

After a pinup of initial thoughts on Friday the 11 of September, I melted, drew and printed this project between Saturday at 12pm and Sunday at 2pm.  The ice took a staggering 8 hours to melt.  Ugh.  Stay tuned for project 2, a climate regulation backpack.

The calm before the storm: From (dis)orientation to a miniature Dutch nation

I wrote this post just before school started... it wasn't complete so I had to write some from memory... I'll try to keep this updated more frequently in the future.

This is it.  My last days before returning to starving student life.  I feel as though I was shot from a catapult after graduation in June 2008.  At blistering speed I helped designed a proton beam therapy center, watched the world economy crumble around me, orchestrated 12 graduate school applications, chased every potential hospital project in the western United States, partied it up in Cabo San Lucas, watched my gorgeous girlfriend snag two degrees at graduation, chased even more potential hospital projects, rode over 2000 miles on my bike, went to FIVE weddings, started my own business, helped design a cabin, missed a flight, moved to New York, and ate the goat my father bought for two zuzim, Chad Gadya Chad Gadya.

And now, more than 420 days later, I find myself in a lecture hall listening to Mark Wigley, dean of the GSAPP, talk about storming off of a metaphoric diving board with reckless abandon into the torrential pool of contemporary graduate studies in architecture.  Mark is an incredibly inspiring man.  The speed at which he presents ideas reflects the ethos of the school: hungry, enthusiastic, and relentlessly optimistic.

The GSAPP is a large group, almost 1000 of us across all of its programs, but our dense quarters ensure the reverberation of all happenings inside the school.  All 93 of my classmates occupy a single studio space, which is smaller than the space shared by my 48 classmates at UW.  But it's not as though we're sardines, there is incredible efficiency in the studio layouts, I feel like I've got just as much room as ever.

Orientation was punctuated with an architecture school tradition very close to my heart:  6on6, or the GSAPP's version of Happy Hour.  We were gifted pint glasses and let loose in a room with ample social lubricant and free snacks.  I was surprised by the diversity represented in our incoming class.  We have students from Ireland to Taiwan, from perceptual psychologists to phd candidates in philosophy.  But we all share one thing: that curious hunger Mark Wigley is always talking about.  Somehow the admissions committee has managed to put together a group of unbelievably motivated and capable individuals.  I am excited to exhaust our potentials, and create our own legacy at the school.

This all happened on Friday the 1st of September.  Labor day weekend was my last chance to soak up some freedom.  Tiffany and I decided to take the Staten Island Ferry to... well you guessed it, Staten Island.

On the way to the ferry we happened across a unique celebration of the city's history next to Battery Park:

A miniature dutch settlement?  But why you ask?  Ohhhhhhh could it be that in September of 1609, exactly 400 years earlier, dutch explorers decided to make a new Amsterdam very near this spot?  

Yes actually.

There were cheeses, clogs, and windmills abound, but one facet of dutch culture that I find so endearing was missing.  And that was some good ol' Droog design!  Oh well, I hear there's a Dutch design festival out on Governor's Island.  But I digress.  So Tiffany and I finally made it to the ferry (after being stuck on a train for around 15 minutes because of switching problems) and we had a nice ride to Staten Island, where we ate sandwiches and looked back towards our gorgeous city.  

We didn't stray too far, and quickly made our return trip, the ferry darting between massive container ships headed for New Jersey.  

  

Living Architecture tutorial 1!

// Count how long it takes the diode to bleed back down to a 
logic zero for ( j = 0; j < 30000; j++) {

if ( digitalRead(LED_N_SIDE)==0) break;

j < 100000 - too slow    j < 60000 - too fast    

j < 67000 - juuuuust right

Follies, Foibles, and Henry Hudson.

As promised, another installment, and if I'm ambitious and manage to finish this in the next few days, less than a week after the first!  Believe it or not, we have been in the Big Apple for 2 weeks.  With most of my random work projects finished up, and with Tiffany out saving the world 3 days a week, you might be wondering, just what is it that I have been doing all day?  (Besides waiting for Verizon to miss multiple scheduled appointments anyways)

Well, frankly, I have been exploring this new frontier, the city of New Amsterdam, attempting to discover as many things as I can before they handcuff me to my desk in studio.  There have been trips to contemporary urban parks perched on old railroads:

This is The High Line.  It used to be 1.45 miles of elevated freight rail servicing Bell Laboratories and Nabisco in the Meatpacking District.  It had sat abandoned since 1980, and was in danger of being demolished to appease developers who wanted the valuable property it was occupying, when a group of urban activists and designers got the brilliant idea to turn it into a public greenway.  The park opened this spring, receiving rave reviews, and has been teeming with crowds ever since.  It also provoked the development of some impressive new buildings in the area designed by starchitects from around the globe.  The park itself was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (with Field Operations), which just so happens to be the firm Tiffany is working for.  Pretty cool, no?


There have been excessive and extravagant dinner parties:

And there have been expeditions to places like Trader Joe's, deep in the heart of Union Square, where the cash register line winds up and down all of the store's aisles.

It's fascinating how even the simplest of chores become adventures in the city.  Each new objective brings unexpected results.  For example, this morning Danny and I tried to rent him a road bike so he could discover what will surely become his new favorite activity.  We walked the 4 blocks to the bike shop, only to find its gate lowered and nothing written next to "Wednesday" on the business hours.  The shop's website said nothing about being closed on Wednesdays, and yet, there it was, just out of reach, just for today, with no justification.

These kinds of follies and foibles in the city tend to make me feel like Henry Hudson himself, so determined to discover something new and extraordinary, only to find that in fact there is no direct passage to India through the North American continent, or that walking around the World Financial Center in a skin tight cycling outfit is quite embarrassing.  But it's important to remind ourselves that these  hiccups are not failures, they are successes in their own right.  Hudson may not have discovered what he was looking for, but he paved the way for the colonization of New York.  If it weren't for his valiant efforts, I would probably be going to school in some former Spanish colony instead of a former Dutch one.

In the same vain, perhaps I'm not exactly where I expected to be one year ago.  But I embrace fortuity, and I welcome the unexpected twists and turns that lay ahead of me in my education and ensuing career.  This is a city built on serendipitous interactions, a city essentially built on autopilot.  New York City as it stands today isn't the result of a single vision, a comprehensive plan.  It's a fantastic powder keg of activity, constantly creating the right environment for explosive and brilliant combinations of people, ideas, and even architecture.  I want to contribute to this fabric of collaboration, someday I will build architecture that will forge these unexpected interactions.  I don't yet know how, but I know if I focus on the quest, rather than the destination, the cues leading me to new and surprising discoveries will be much easier to find.

-Kyle

    

Greetings people of Earth

Saluti famila e amici!  Tiffany e io abitamo in Roma por tre--wait a second.  

Wasn't Rome a few adventures back now?  

Yeah, yeah it was... Then what the hell is this?  

Could it be that we've embarked on another epic journey of self discovery, fraught with new experiences, cultures and the faint smell of financial destitution looming on the horizon?    

As a matter of fact, we have.  This spring I was accepted into Columbia University's Master's of Architecture program.  Turns out Columbia is on the frenetic isle of Manhattan, the heart of the city Rem Koolhaas is so damned obsessed with.  And So, Tiffany and I have boxed up our clothes, books, and even my Cervelo, and crash landed on the upper west side at 81st St and Amsterdam Ave.  This blog is (optimistically) a way to document our misadventures in Gotham City, organize my thoughts and schoolwork, and, most importantly, to complain about stuff.  But seriously, I'm probably going to have posts dedicated to the hard working individuals at Alaska Airlines and Verizon in the coming weeks.


Our New Home (and familiar roommate!)


Somehow back in spring I managed to convince my good friend Danny to casually tilt his [substantial] resume toward New York City in the hopes of coercing another cohort into crashing this town.  I don't think he made it a week before Factset, some big wig financial analysis company on Park Ave, managed to seek him out and arrange an interview for a position that was, well, $ati$fying to $ay the lea$t.


And so it was time for the apartment hunt, or as I like to call it: "You have got to be F*cking Kidding me."  If you're not familar with the YHGTBFKM process, I'll let you in on a little secret:  Apartment brokerage services that have the [non]sensibility to name themselves "Best Apartments," will show you, as a matter of fact, Manhattan's worst apartments.  And they'll attempt to charge you several extra months of rent as service fees.  And they smell bad.  (Well that's not entirely true, but they are smarmy folks)  So after we let four brokers waste our time and money galavanting up and down the UWS looking at the same two dungeons that not even this guy would approve of, we figured all hope was lost.  And then, miraculously, Tiffany convinced us to "Don't Stop Believin'"  and invoked the power of Craigslist on her iPhone, scrolling fortuitously to a "True 2 bedroom, UWS, with XXXposed brick" posted only minutes earlier.  We "called Howie," and after a grueling 1.5 hour wait, we had a Manhattan apartment that would foster comments like "Oh, what a perfect little apartment!" instead of "Oh, your only window is in the bathroom?" and "What's with that garbage smell?"


Here are some (now outdated) snaps of the new digs and our sparse Ikea furnishings:

I think I've done enough rambling for now.  Stay tuned for upcoming episodes like "Tiffany goes to work for a Starchitect" and "Someday we won't have to steal the internet from our neighbors."  


-Kyle