A Great Day

Today my intro class volunteered at the Pine Street Inn in Boston. Pine Street is a homeless shelter that serves about 1000 people per day. That's around 14% of Boston's overall homeless population of 7000. Around 400 beds provide overnight accommodations to men and women each night.



My classmate Yuki and I (hairnets are quite becoming, aren't they?) helped make 250+ sandwiches and bagged lunches to be distributed in outreach efforts to people remaining on the streets. It's amazing what the kitchen at Pine Street churns out - breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday.



Our final project for this semester is to design and built an interior element for one of Pine Street's transitional houses located in Jamaica Plain. The site is a converted convent that will have 28 SROs (Single Room Occupancy) for people transitioning from homelessness into steady employment. The eight person class has been divided into two groups, one for the SROs and one for common areas. I'll be working on one of the common areas (pictured below) with a partner - and another group of two will take a second common area. For the common areas, the directors of the housing project have requested a space that will bring people out of their single rooms and create a sense of community. The median age of the men and women living at the shelter will probably be early 50s - some of whom have been homeless for decades and some of whom have a mental illness.






The house is currently under construction, so unfortunately when we visited today there weren't any residents to speak with about what we could possibly design for our respective spaces. Touring the Pine Street Inn shelter facilities earlier in the day gave us a tremendous amount of insight - but it's not the same as speaking with the user. To that end, I'm looking into shelter facilities in Providence and NH that I might be able to visit and volunteer at to look a bit closer.

This project is going to be awesome. Classes in previous years have worked on many different versions of it, donating furniture and installed pieces to Pine Street Inn and their satellite facilities. I'm excited. We're presenting our ideas to the class next Tuesday, to the clients next Thursday, and then we build until December.

Ready...go! Take this squirrel just in case - he knows the neighborhood.

Field Trip Tomorrow!

We're starting a new project for Intro class tomorrow that involves a field trip to Boston. I'm very excited. I'll be back tomorrow to write more about it!

Collections Project Part: DONE; Emerging from the Void

Five 20+ hour work days in a row takes a toll. Even my eye sockets are aching. The worst is not being satisfied with the finished product. I just ran out of time. The most important thing mentioned during my project's critique today was the shape of the forms. Push, push, push, explore, explore, explore. And they're absolutely right. Thankfully it's over and we're on to the next project - to begin Thursday.
Here's the rest of it - I think the picture of the boards is a little hard to read.

















Tomorrow is a midterm for History of INTAR at 1pm and an axonometric rendering for drawing class due at 6pm. My head would be spinning if it weren't in a state of dense jelly uselessness. I'll be back tomorrow with some renewed enthusiasm.

Model Update

It's 2am. Lately that seems to be a good stopping place. The model is coming along. I'm disappointed it's not finished. I was hoping to have it done today. Still needs about 4-6 hours of shop time tomorrow.











I just deleted an important file for this project by accident. I think that means it's time to go home.

Collections Project Part 4: Model Building Time

I used to dread model building in undergrad. Now I'm really excited to see what I can get out of our woodshop in the basement of the CIT building. These are the cut sheets for the collections project model I'm working on today. Thanks to a 7am HD trip, I've got the poplar I need to get working. I'm also going to be reusing some of the redwood from The Gropius Project (presentation yesterday went great).











Working out these sheets took forever (last 5 hours of the 20 I spent in at the studio yesterday) using the floor plans and elevations. I can't wait until we're fully into computer based drafting - once we get to that point, machines can do a lot of this tedious work.

Brrrrr

The communal computer area in the rear of the studio is freezing. It's past midnight and I have the redbull jitters.



On the bright side, our materials board for tomorrow's Gropius House presentation is looking good and the powerpoint is complete. We just have to rehearse in the morning (or a few hours from now).

On le palette

Here's the workload INTAR has served up for the next week or so.


Studio: Final Presentation Collections project materials due Tuesday including
Collection itself, represented by at least 10 images of individual objects
Significant design drawings (pencil on paper)
Final presentation drawings by hand or digitally created
Plan. section and elevation drawings at 1/4" = 1'0" (quantity as required)
Detail drawing at 1"=1'0" (minimum of one)
Composed drawing sheets
Two paragraph synopsis of design
Scale section model of design 2/4" = 1'0"

Drawing: Axonometric of Studio project due Wednesday

History: Midterm Exam on Wednesday. Study session Sunday

Building Materials: Gropius Final Presentation Friday; Quiz on properties of Glass Friday

Assistantship (more about this in another post): Concept sketches to working plan set for studio space entrance

For fun: Submission to Sitings competition for RISD Museum of Art.


Now that I've exhaled, these are pictures I took of the RISD Fleet library in a relaxed moment last week.

Collection for One: Part 3

Floor plans and sections are progressing. I logged about 17 hours of work yesterday.

The 7am Home Depot Trip

Design school and the 7am (6am if it's finals) Home Depot trip go together like peas and carrots.



First you return the materials you didn't use from the last 7am visit.





Then you shop for the new materials you need whilst commandeering free paint chip samples because they're the closest you can get to having your own set of Pantone chips.



Shameful? I purchased about half an aisle of spray paint from HD this summer. That has to count for something.

Sweet Nectar of the Gods

Today marked the inaugural grad school Red Bull. I enjoy mine on ice.

Sometimes

Sometimes I work at home with movie commentary tracks playing in the background. Today it was Apollo 13 with Jim and Marilyn Lovell voiceover. I love this movie. I hope NASA needs an interior architect in t-minus 31 months.

Yum

I got lunch from the amazingly delicious AS220 FOO(D) restaurant this week. Fresh local greens, cherry tomatoes and pumpkin seeds with Naragansett mozzarella and a side of roasted spiced chickpeas. It didn't even bother me to eat it at my desk, in the studio, among instruments of measure.

Usually my lunch is a mound of leftover veggie rice/mac n' cheese combo from the night before. This was a real treat.

Visit FOO(D) here

Collection Project: Part 2

The Collection for One: Shavings Edition is moving swiftly towards the due date of Tuesday 10/26. Originally the scientist persona I developed was studying the increased surface area created when shavings are removed from a larger object. This has changed a bit to focus on the preparation and cataloging of a shavings library in conjunction with a think tank library sharing the same space.

I need to post some pictures of the existing site here - I missed class the first day we visited so I need to beg some pictures off classmates. Here's a look at the floor plan.



It's a fifth floor edition to the Providence Journal building in downtown Providence. The interior space is basically empty with some temporary partition walls creating offices. Our class divided into teams to measure up and photograph the interior and exterior spaces. From there we created plans, sections and keyed photo diagrams. Once the plan set was established, we moved into design.

For my initial parti diagrams and sketch models I worked with circle and rectangle shapes - corresponding to the two forms created when looking at the shaving cylinders from different viewpoints. This led to researching patterns in morse and binary code. Both of these diagrams express the word "shavings". I glued them onto chipboard and punched holes through the zeros to see how light would move through the void pattern. This was last weekend.



On Tuesday our 8 person grad class sat in a room without windows for four hours and ran through each person's concept. These critiques are incredible. They also have a tendency to lead us in completely different directions, quickly. For mine, we discussed how surface area could be increased within the space (relating back to the shavings) by having the space create it's own volume. I'm not explaining this well. Think of a museum storage hold that's a system of bookcases stacked horizontally, running on a track. When all the bookcases are smushed together, a single surface area exists. If you pull them apart along the track, the surface area increases exponentially.

This new idea halted me in search of a fresh approach after the Tuesday class and on through my two classes on Wednesday afternoon and night. Guess what brought down the floodgates? A trip to IHOP close to midnight - all it took was pancakes, a sketchpad and a sharpie to get the create syrup flowing.

From those sketches I revisited my parti models and came up with these:









After meeting with the professor today, I have a definite direction! On to floor plans. Final materials due are a plan set with sections and elevations, concept summary and a final model.

Bathhouse for One

Our first substantial drawing project was to design a space for a single person. My class visited an existing site, which is actually where our INTAR department building meets up with another building - there's a five story volume in between.





Then we did a parti diagram based off that visit. A parti is an idea sketch created from the initial visit to a site. It's the basis of the architecture to follow. This parti shows a salvaged grain silo attached to the side of the building. My idea was a Bathhouse for the Modest, for one.



The grain silo(s) would be attached to each side of the building. One silo would create a plunge pool and the other would serve as an elevator well. From our parti drawings we moved into floor plans and sections:







Then to final drawings:





At class last night we pinned up and reviewed everyone's drawings. The major problems are marked with the circles:



It's safe to say I learned a lot.