This Week's Work 04

I have technically finished 4 weeks, nearly 1/4th of my academic time here.

This week was slow and fast. The routine is shortening my week, extending my day.

-----------------Lectures-----------------
Ken Yeang, the green skyscraper designer, lectured on Wednesday. It was anticlimactic, and I was not that impressed with either his speaking or his presentation. I appreciate what he does, and think it's very beautiful, but his approach is not one of inventiveness or fun.. He has organized and summarized every possible obstacle and design process into 4 or 5 points. There were LOADS of these lists, with color coding that responded to charts and diagrams.
And herein lies the problem of "Green Design" for most designers. It is boring, it is technical, and there is no freedom. There was no passion. I keep coming back to a quote of Werner Sobek's from the last lecture I went to at IIT: "Don't talk about it, just do it." He was referring to Zero Energy, Zero Carbon, Zero Waste. He does extraordinarily inventive and beautiful buildings, and spends 90% of the time talking about the design concept, ignoring the impressive feat of producing a building with Zero Waste.
Sigh of relief!

I also attended Peter Cook's third lunchtime lecture, on How To Be An Interesting Architect. Not nearly as good as the first one, he showed images of projects he thought were good or refreshing. There was really no "How To" about it, but provided a nice substitute to studio-talk in the lunchroom.


-----------------Shaping-Seams-----------------
Showed work, have to make a model for Monday (CRAP!), and spent most of the time trying to understand what Mike had done.

-----------------The-Deep-End-And-The-Long-Term-----------------
Have to meet up with the class tonight (ugh) to perform/photograph our "concept" for our photos. I went out several times with friends this weekend to take photos, but unfortunately wound up being the model for most of them and not the photographer (thus the photos are not mine, and not what I would have taken). I just didn't think about it, really. Oh well.
Pretty nervous about this, actually.
This week I've focused most on light and the human form. I'm pretty interested in how kind of odd situations can draw attention to shape; the 'death' like poses punctuated with selective highlights.
They are kind of a mix between the "Do something you wouldn't normally do" and the "secret worlds" suggestions I got from last class.

A few of this week's work:








A few more are here: Photog Album

-----------------Architecture-To-Architecture-----------------
Brett Steele again. Interesting as usual. No one talked during the discussion part, which was painful, but the topic was understandable this time. We read part of Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi) + Fake Images (Corbu) and talked about the role of images and media in shaping our understanding of the New, using media and architecture to sell people stuff, etc.

-----------------Studio-----------------
LOts and lots and lots of drawing to do. I was in crit til 9:30 on Friday (not cool man.. not cool). But I like where my project is going. We have a bit crit next week, so it will be quite busy.