Building of the Week

The Polish Pavilion for the 2010 World's Fair in China. The design was selected in an open design competition from over 300 entries.

Chronophotography

Bring your camera to class on Tuesday. You need to be able to manipulate your shutter speed on your camera. If you do not have a camera, you should find a partner as soon as possible that is willing to share. You will need a partner to do this assignment.

The chronophotography assignment follows the projection drawings of your room. It will be due on Tuesday February 5. This should give you ample time to either check out one of the few cameras they have upstairs (the SLRs from Denny or the commercial grade digital cameras from Johnny) and or to develop your images if you decide to use a 35mm film camera. Remember if you develop your film get Matte prints not glossy! There are 200 of you, so be kind and return the cameras as soon as you are finished.

You should perform at least 15 events in your room for this assignment. It will take a couple of tries to get to know the technology. You will need to experiment with the effects of chronophotography. Do not rush this, we are giving you this time to have fun and create something beautiful. There are many ways to do this. But you are the creator. You can flash the room with a single on and off switch during the shot, use single light records (single LED lights on both hands are an example of this technique), or you could use draped lighting (white christmas lights are an example of the drape effect).

You will find more details in the assignment located in the left column of this blog.

Step by Step Process for Projecting

(click on image to start animation and ignore the last step so that you leave all work)

ERASED DEKOONING

In lecture tonight we'll talk about Robert Rauschenburg's Erased DeKooning. Rauschenburg is a Texan, of course. DeKooning was a Dutch master of abstract expressionist painting. In 1959 Rauschenburg was a young punk in NYC. Rauschenburg asked the master DeKooning for a drawing. Rauschenburg took the drawing home, erased the whole drawing, and retitled the piece Erased DeKooning.

More Manifests

You need to reprint your spreadsheets for tomorrow as well. There should be two manifests, one for the extents of things and one for the duration and then two sets of four graphs one set documenting the extents of your room and the other set notating the events that occur in your room and or the frequency of use of the objects that occupy your room. These spreadsheets are physical documents used to understand how you live in your room and how your things affect that space.

Drafting Supplies

I have rearranged the materials list to the left so that everything you need for tomorrow is above the X-Acto knife. If you don't have some of the secondary things then we'll be able to make do. I keep my drafting gear in an old tackle box.

Quote of the Week

From the late 1960s until very recently...architecture has been very "process" driven. That is to say...architectural form is the outcome, or registration, of a series of design procedures. These procedures are in control of the architect, carried out by graphic means, and have their own internal logic. That logic in turn is seen to be embedded in the architectural object as meaning and formal organization.
Stan Allen, "Trace Elements" in Tracing Eisenman

e.g. - Eisenman Architects
e.g. - Morphosis

Drafting Tuesday

Don't forget to bring your drafting gear on Tuesday. We'll do an in class drafting assignment.
Bring at least one 24 by 24 sheet of vellum.

Chronophotography

To the right you'll find an image bank of chronophotographs taken by students in their dorm rooms.
Below is an image I made myself in my apartment in Manhattan. What you see is the whole kitchen. The action being recorded is getting a glass out of the cabinet, reaching into the fridge, and pouring juice into the glass. It was done with slide film .To the left is also an assignment you'll start in one week doing chronophotography documenting the events that occur in your room. Please start reviewing what you'll need, checking if your camera will do these sorts of photos and where you'll get one if yours doesn't.

One of the first conceptual decisions you should make is whether you'll record trajectories of individual lights or if you'll find the "clouds of occupied space" otherwise shown with rope lights and light strings. How can you make the data gathered transition? Can you interpolate and translate the recordings?

We'll draw sections through these results, we'll make wire frame models of each of these, we'll make combinations of these things, and we'll model the aggregate in foam.

Art With Excel

I did not mention it but the first reading is available to the left (RDG#1). It is two very short excerpts from a book about mereotopology. (6 pages total)

Here's an interesting visual artist that uses MS Excel spreadsheet application technology to generate her art work. Click on her name to visit her site.

Danielle Aubert

Ex.#2 Charting Things

You make two excel spreadsheets.

• One has all the things that are objects in your room listed, categorized and measured in extensive and material ways. (Color, volume, location, relationship to other things, etc.)
• One has all the things that happen in your room listed, categorized and measured in durational, and situational ways. (frequency, duration, intensity, area, relationship to other things, etc.)
  

Make sure you record the size (volume) of everything. Use the calculations tools in excel, use cell shading, and grouping to complete and refine the two charts. You should be crafty with excel, as you would any other medium.

Print them each to fill an 11 by 17 sheet of paper.

________________

That's the most important part above. Spend most of your time there and less on this next part. You'll use these charts above a WHOLE lot in this project.

Then, using charting and graphing tools in excel, make four graphics of the findings in each of your spreadsheets (% breakdown of colors, etc.) Print each of these 8 graphics individually on an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. (make sure that all graphics are oriented on the sheet the same way)

The TWO printouts of the spread sheets PLUS FOUR graphics of your chart of object things PLUS FOUR graphics of your chart of event things EQUALS 10 IMAGES.

You can include images of your room contents in the spreadsheet, if you wish but that is not a requirement, just a suggestion of one way of accomplishing this exercise.

cad class

Students signed up for the cad mini course will be released from those courses to attend our lecture this evening.

From: Snowden, Christopher
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 11:11 AM
To: Key, Brian; Perkins, Patricia
Subject: RE: AutoCAD

If they are only going to miss an hour on Tuesday I can work around this. I will be giving them a small assignment to do outside of class. Please make sure they know that they must be there at the beginning of every class. I will be allowing them to miss ONLY the 6:00pm to 7:00pm hour on Tuesday. They must be in attendance at all other times.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Chris Snowden
Research Associate/Instructor
Texas Tech University
College of Architecture
806.742.3136
christopher.snowden@ttu.edu

Assignment for Day #1

a) Read the Bounding Space Introduction (linked to the left).

b) Complete the Photomosaic Exercise (ex.#1- linked to the left) and have it ready for presentation at the beginning of class on Tuesday, January 15th. Have aluminum straight pins and binder clips ready to pin the document up.

c) Review the Course Syllabus (linked to the left) and the course website (you're on it) before the lecture on the night of Tuesday, January 15th.

David Hockney & Photomosaic Photography

I may seem to be passionately concerned with the 'hows' of representation, how you actually represent rather than 'what' or 'why'. But to me this is inevitable. The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.

Perspective is a law of optics... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.

People tend to forget that play is serious

It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.

But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well.

Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.


David Hockney

Materials Information

To the left is a list of tools and consumables we know that we'll be using this semester. It is recommended that you buy the tools before the first day of class. We're working with a new store in town, RENDr, which is at the corner of Canton and 26th Street (in the same strip shopping center as J&B Coffee) to get you all these supplies in a timely manner. Crissy Griswold, the owner of RENDr will be watching this class website from time to time. It would be a great help to both Crissy and us if you would inform us if you think that the majority of the class already has one of these tools and we will not need to order it. You can do so in a comment on this post.

If you click on the material listings to the right you'll find we've linked a picture of the element for familiarity. Again, if you have a question about an item, make it a comment to this post, don't email us just yet.

The tools for the course, if you buy sturdy professional quality tools, will last you for your whole career in architecture. We still regularly use tools we bought in high school. There's a huge difference between student and professional quality and there's going to be a difference in the way the tool operates, just as with musical instruments or sporting goods. Many of you know what you get when you buy a guitar at ToysR'Us. The same is true here. RENDr stocks professional quality gear, will have competitive prices, and will be very convenient for you.

It is recommended that you buy the consumables only as you need them. The studios will be crowded and you will not have your own desk. You'll share desks. RENDr will have the paper materials as we need them. Home Depot and other building supplies will have things like paint, polystyrene, sandpaper, and spackling whenever we need them. Part of the course is simply sourcing all the tools and consumables you'll need as the semester progresses.

Questions made as comments to this post will be answered promptly.

Bios on the Instructors

Marti was born in Omaha, Nebraska and spent her childhood in Bennington, Nebraska, which is a farming town just beyond the reach of Omaha. She lettered in track and volleyball and was her high school class salutatorian. After high school she studied architecture at the University of Nebraska where she was an honors student, was the editor of In.Form, a peer-reviewed architectural journal, and was an exchange student student at the University of Hannover, Germany. After completing her her architecture studies for a B.Sc. in Architectural Design she studied printmaking and filmmaking at NU. She worked professionally for Keith Dubas Architects in Lincoln before coming to Texas Tech to teach for the last two years in second year studio, third year studio, the Montréal summer studios, and now in the first year studio. In the coming Fall Marti will be working in some advanced studies in architecture.

Brian was born in Warren, Ohio and moved at an early age to Texas. He lived as a boy in Killeen, Austin, Montréal, Quebec, and Garland. He graduated from North Garland High School. He played soccer, was a national bible quiz champion, and two time state drafting champion. Before going to university he worked as a civl engineering draftsman (he drew the parking islands at TownEast Mall in Mesquite), a high rise curtain-wall shop drawing draftsman, was a metal building designer (he designed the horrid Custom Cleaners building at Forest and Greenville in Dallas), and was self-employed as a residential designer doing houses in Dallas, Allen, McKinney, Garland, and Sachse. He attended Dallas County Community Colleges, the University of Texas at Arlington (B.Sc.Arch.), Carleton University (B.Arch.), and Columbia University (M.Sc.Design). While at Carleton University he spent a semester at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. He's worked professionally for Cooper Robertson + Partners in New York City, Humphries Poli in Denver, and Hildinger Associates in Dallas. He's taught at the Universities of Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dublin Institute of Technology (IRL), and now TTU. He teaches foundation design, urban design, and site design courses. He designs and researches on "-grounds", as in campgrounds, fairgrounds, and other land based architectures.