It's my first New England Fall in eight years. Celebratory white pumpkins were a necessity. I hope they're edible. I think they are.

Material Samples

I've been working on material samples as part of our group project on the Gropius House.

We chose nine of the materials used to build the home to include in our final materials board. They are:

1. Redwood Cladding
2. Vinyl Tile
3. Ceramic Tile
4. Polished Chrome
5. Cork Flooring
6. Tar & Gravel Roofing
7. Acoustic Plaster (sub Softwalls)
8. Caffelite (sub Caesarstone)
9. Columned Glassblock

The redwood stock is gorgeous - we purchased it during the class trip to Downes & Reader. I cut the 1x6 down on the circular saw, sanded it and applied an oil based paint to mimic the original redwood cladding.



The last three items on the list were particular to the time period when the house was build - the 1930s. In place of the real thing, we're introducing the class to some modern day alternatives. I'm just waiting on the last few to arrive from suppliers.

Registration for Wintersession is fast approaching. RISD has a mini semester between Fall and Spring classes. It's 6 weeks from the beginning of January to the middle of February and functions as a time for students to break free of their area-of-concentration shackles and recharge creative batteries.

We can travel, we can create independent studies, we can do internships. Or we can choose from the roster of classes RISD offers on campus. I have a feeling I'll be staying on campus this year. Exhaling. Rolling in the snow with my dogs.

Top choices (I choose two):

Design for Digitally Printed Fabric
Web Design
Intro to Typography
Intro to Screenprinting
Machine Knitting
The Woven Rug
Fiction into Film

Lumber Yard Visit

My building materials class visited the Downes & Reader Hardwood Company in Stoughton, MA. Downes & Reader stocks an amazing selection of lumber, including hard-to-find exotics and some reclaimed materials. The best part? They love selling wood to students by the board foot! Accommodating material suppliers are hard to come by when you buy in small amounts.







Downes & Reader planes and rips lumber on site in these machines. Parked adjacent to the building are two tracker trailer containers that receive the shavings from the milling machines. When the containers are full they're driven up to NH and the shavings and sawdust recycled into wood heating pellets.

I glance at this sign every morning on the way to my studio desk. Some days I invent new definitions.

Interior architecture is essentially ________

a. fun
b. torturous
c. exilherating
d. frustrating
e. an opportunity
f. painless in small doses
g. full of potential employers

The End of The Glean

I've been sitting on this "End-o-Glean" post for a week now. I seem to have misplaced one of the section drawings we had to complete. I was hoping it was buried in my mess of a studio desk. But alas, it probably went out with the rest of last week's 6th floor art garbage.

Anyways, the first part of this project went really smoothly. We had to arrange the objects gleaned. Mine looked like this:


The next part of the project was to cut two section lines and draw the section the slice created. This picture shows my two section lines. The arrow shows the viewpoint I was drawing towards.



Here's my unsuccessful attempt at those first sections and subsequent rendering of the space in between them.





The good news is that I sat down with my professor and drew out the section correctly on tracing paper (which is now lost, BOO) before moving onto the next stage, transformation. We had to choose a portion of the section and enlarge it, stretch it - manipulate it in such a drastic way that you wouldn't recognize it. The resulting space had to be designed as a contemplation room for one.

Guess where I wanted to go to contemplate? A gigantic room with an enormous pool filled with playpen balls!



What you're looking at is a close up section view of the front of the decorative molding piece, bowed paper booklet and the chestnut holding up the sheet of glass. That's me in the black. Enjoying my space. It took me about 6 hours to stencil out those thousands of little balls and shade them accordingly. Madness.

I'm so glad this project is over. I'm sure in three years I'll think back to how hard a time I had drawing the section and just laugh and laugh and laugh. Or I'll cry.

Just Keep On...

Just keep drawing, just keep drawing, just keep drawing, drawing drawing...



I have this idea that if I just keep going, knocking out assignment after assignment - I will one day be ahead on the workload.

Or maybe the earlier mornings and later nights are just part of the deal.

A Collection for One

Our new INTRO project theme is "A Collection for One". We need to collect 100 specimens from around the world to be studied by a scientist-in-residence at Brown and RISD. The scientist's collection and subsequent research is up to us to create. The persona and 100 items we collect will act as a springboard for the design of the space where the scientist will work for one year while studying their collection. The site for the workspace is an unoccupied rooftop addition to a building in Providence. My class is going to the site this Thursday to measure the space and create existing architectural plans.

Whew. I've been sick with a cold the past few days and just thinking about the amount of work ahead is making me want to go lay down. But I'm excited, too. With that, my collection is......SHAVINGS!

I took sample shavings of 100 everyday objects (think wood species and snack food) this weekend. There are multiple microplane cuts on my fingertips from this activity. Each sample is stored in a single vial and all 100 vials fit snuggly into a storage platform that I built in the CIT woodshop. The wood used to make the platform was salvaged from the "free to a good home" bin in the woodshop as well as from some scraps I had from assembling my RISD admissions portfolio. The vials I bought last month from an antiques dealer that specializes in vintage laboratory wares (I knew I would use them for something!).

Basically this project reeks of reuse.

Here's what I'm presenting in class today:

Can you guess what our new INTRO project is?

Final Concrete Sketches

We presented our concrete sketch models last Friday. It was great to see what everyone decided to stick-into and mold-out-of their concrete. This is a picture of my progression from the first form (which became the control), to the last form (at which point I was so frustrated with my shoddily rigged mold that I poured the concrete into a shipping envelope).



A. Control, no additive

B. Precast Forms: shot glass, candle votive and takeout container

C. Precast Forms: ice cube tray

D. Red & blue food coloring, sugar cubes (they dissolved during curing!), snack food cups

E. Tree Bark (I put plastic wrap as a barrier between the bark and the concrete and ended up losing the detailing of the bark

F. ::Conveniently:: Broken wine glass (it kind of looks like a big water droplet) and green colored sand

G. Fedex shipping envelope lined with bubblewrap