Unbuilt Architecture Awards

Here in Portland, Maine we have a Portland Society of Architects, just like Boston has the BSA. Now of course we're not as big scale here, but it's a great organization from my experience. This Spring I entered my thesis from 2006 in the PSA's Unbuilt Architecture Awards Competition in the "Intern" category. . . and I won!

I didn't make the award ceremony because I was volunteering for HOBY, but the board I submitted will be on display this coming Friday, June 5th at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies which is now at 561 Congress Street.

I haven't seen any of the competition entries, but I'm sure there will be lots of good ones on display. Here's the board of mine that you will see if you're there. (Click here for the full PDF.)

I am excited to have my thesis on display. It will be during the First Friday Art Walk so there are sure to be tons of people walking around. The Salt Institute is also a fantastic institution, so it will be great to be able to hang out there for an evening. It will hopefully be a warm summer evening full of art and conversation.

I am looking forward rubbing elbows with friends, family and colleagues all night, and I will have something of my own to talk about for a change. I invite anyone interested to come!

6pm, Friday, June 5th, 2009 at Salt (561 Congress Street)

School "Cube House" Project

This was the only house I designed in school. The assignment was to use the 20' x 20' x 20' cube. . . assumed to be rigid. I like the feel of it. We also tried to encorporate passive heating and cooling. The water side of the building is North, which made things more difficult.

Wind Energy Survey

Last spring I was lucky enough to be able to help my professor with a survey on wind energy. The goal was to get a set of statistics about what factors are important to people when considering wind energy. With this knowledge supporters of wind farms would have a better idea of how to educate communities. I work on this project a bit a year ago, on specific slides, and again this spring. This spring I did the recording of the audio tracks for the automated survey. I then edited down the audio and added it to the powerpoint presentation. This presentation was later converted to the PDF that you can download here:

Survey with audio (large file, but worth it)
(I would recommend right clicking and doing "save link as."_

Thesis Document

My Thesis Document is Done!!!!

Here are the first five pages of my document, including the contents page so you know what you're missing. I you would like the whole document feel free to email me for the full size PDF. I would love to have people read it if they are interested.

Click the pages to be able to read them.

PS The full PDF is now available for download here.

Self Proclaimed Graduation Speech

Hello everyone. I am an architecture student. We are soon to be architecture graduates. Proud to have succeeded in one of the most rigorous academic programs in any undergraduate school anywhere. We are soon to become architects. How did we get here though? And where do we go from here? The two most cliche big questions, and yet quite obviously the ones I should at least try to answer.

I dare say we got here in a bubble, and we are about to enter a bigger bubble. We have been at this school, not even that though, we have been in this building for five years, and we are about to enter the world for the rest of our lives. I think I just made another cliche statement, but to us it means something, because we, our charge is to work in space. We have spent 12 years sheltered and shaped at this school and now. . . The world is our pallet. Nothing short of that. We work with spaces, and out there is plenty of space. Maybe in our lifetimes our pallet increases beyond our gravitational boarders even.

We need to think about this though. The world is our pallet, what are we going to do with it? We may have gone to school for architecture, but I can assure all of you, we are not the only ones with opinions about this great canvas we have to work with. Ask my mom, she likes the town next to mine, where every commercial building must be colonial. Ask my friends, who are concerned about how much driving we all do. Ask you grandparents who really don't want to go to a nursing home, and I don't blame them. Ask the mayors who don't know how to handle the homeless. Ask the terrorists, they have an opinion too.

We have, so far, only occasionally chosen to ask any of these people anything, but I'm sure each of us have become increasingly aware of these "opinions" every time we say "I'm in architecture school." Every time I say "I'm going to be an architect," I get two comments. The first we all know and laugh at, and I'm sure many of us have stopped trying to explain that we are probably not going to be rich. There is the second comment though, it's not characterized exactly, but always the same sort of thing: the inevitable suggestion, opinion, or comment. Things like, "Well I bet you're never gonna build a sky scraper now." or "What do you think of that ugly new building on main street?" We have a tendency, at least I do, to want to dismiss this stuff saying, "I have an education in architecture, and you can't possible see things the way I do." I can't continue doing that though. We definitely cannot continue doing that. We are about to enter that society where everyone has an opinion, and everyone is a potential client. What are we gonna do then?

We're not going to go around dismissing what everyone says. Some of us will swallow our pride, others will try to convince them to see things our way, others of us will just keep on walking till someone says what we want to here. These people, everyone, their comments and their idea will be our world whether we like it or not. And its time we stop sniffling about it.

What I'm trying to say here is this. We can, if we so chose, dive into the fray. The built environment, you could say, is a hot topic but even THAT would be a huge understatement. It deals with identity of communities, it deals with personal pride, national identity. Cities, and this is no news to us, have created a new kind of living environment that we still don't fully understand, love, or hate. There is so much to be learned about how we box ourselves in. And basically, that's what we do, and when said that way, "we box ourselves in," It makes me want to do it right. And "doing it right," is not a known thing, it's more of a question. What is the right way to build boxes for ourselves? Some people say "not a box." If they are right, then we have a hundred years of boxes to correct. That's just one example.

Dive into the fray though. We need to. We need to better understand why we don't communicate so well with the rest of the world. It's not something to be shrugged off. We need to start making changes. If we believe codes suck, then dammit we need to quit saying "codes suck" to our peers when we go out for coffee, and we need to walk into city hall and say, "codes suck, and hers why!" We have an education. That does not make us separate from the rest of the world, it makes us responsible. If people do not understand us we need to teach them. Some of us will teach our clients one by one. Some of us will choose not to teach at all. I for one, intend to teach the people who make the rules, and I don't want to be alone. We can all do little things in this respect. There are planning boards, and we should all try to be on one. There are redevelopment committees, and we should know what they are up to. There are conferences on codes across the country, and we should go to them.

If this sounds boring, or way out of line for an architect, fine. If you don't want to get involved, fine. You've just never been into politics, fine. If you are saying these things and not listening to me then you're missing the point. Listen to me now. We will build things. We will effect communities with the buildings we design. We will make enemies and friends. We will have to defend ourselves sometimes. We will have to back off and just make people happy sometimes. If that is not politics, if that is not being involved then I don't know what is. We are about to embark on a new great journey. When we graduate today we will be stepping for the first time on our rightful canvas, this world. Its our canvas, but we're not the only ones holding the brush. When its done we won't be hanging our paintings in the living room, we will be putting them on a billboard on the freeway. That's all I have to say. I guess I ended with a funny metaphor. Our work has only just begun.

Thesis Studio

I have been working on thesis in studio since the end of January 2006. At this point though I don't have any finalized drawings so I am going to show a variety of things.


This site plan was basically my first sketch of the project. The brown shading shows the areas that can't be directly seen from my site. The green and red line shows the boundary that I thought I would be building in. The yellow shows that I want to have a continuum between the quad (center) and the bay (right). The arrow path shows the student path of travel between the dorms. I am still using many of these same concepts.
My current design has my building placed to the right of the library (building with the clock tower) but behind it further.

This diagram shows what my building program was at the beginning of the semester. It has changed a little. Namely, there is no longer a dining hall.



I have designed other spaces, but this is the only one modeled. It is the central space of my student center, and it is meant to work as a theater of sorts, a gathering space, and circulatory space, depending on the need.

Sustainability

I am taking a class with Patrick Charles called "Sustainable Paradigms." We study weather data and use it to aid us in energy efficient building design. We have been learning a couple of good computer programs as well. One of the programs is "Weather Tool." This one is something that anyone can fool around with. Here are some diagrams on sustainable design that are loosely base on my current thesis design.


This sketch shows a room of my building during a summer day and a winter day.

The section sketch above shows a summer day and the one below shows a summer night.

Thesis Proposal

Theses are the first few pages of my thesis document (excluding the table of contents) and they basically speak for themselves.

RWU Campus

Since I live at RWU I end up with a lot of decent pictures of the campus. These sunrise pictures were taken before I had slept for the night.

These other two shots are my dorm and the new architecture building.

Yearbook: RWU Arch 2006

This is it! This is the final cover! Made by Jeremy Jamilkowski, with initial help from me and Ken Cahoon.

This year I have been working on the architecture yearbook with a bunch of others from our archie class. The whole thing is basically being led by Erika Barko and she is doing an awesome job. It is going to be great to see things finished and published next month. There hasn't been an architecture year book from the graduating architecture class in years, but ours is going to be a full blown example in color! I have been working most on the cover of the yearbook.

This my personal piece. We each got the third of a page to do whatever we wanted. Next to that would be our picture and our name. I imagine that I am jumping out of the cavish tunnel and onto better things.

We are also going to be selling sweatshirts that we designed! The idea is that we are going to sell the sweatshirts to cut the expense of the year books. This will only really work if we sell them to the underclassmen who aren't buying the yearbooks.





So here is my favorite cover that I designed. We ended up deciding to go with a version that has a little more to it, and it is better than this one. I will post that as soon as I get it from Jeremy.Here is the picture that we took to make the design. There is a bit of a story atatched to this picture. The hands belong to Ken, and I took the picture. The writing is not either of ours because I was afraid of messing up and Ken could not physically write on both of his hands. We recruited Tony to do the writing and he did a good job. After doing this we realized that Ken, being left handed, would be blocking the word "architecture" if he used his left hand to "write." The result is a picture that looks cool, but is totally fake.


Last thing: Here is my yearbook picture. It was taken near the town of Enna in Sicily.