showing_seeing Gerhard Richter at the High

7-panes Gerhard Richter 2007

Arguably created by Barbara Stafford, Showing Seeing is a way of presenting a visual artifact from the world.  Usually under multiple lenses, this exercise dissects our visual understanding in this world in the context of the thing itself. In this version Gerhard Richter’s work at the High Museum is examined. What makes his work communicate on so many wavelengths and so many levels of understanding? “Look Dad, I’m 3d,” a 4 year old exclaimed while looking through the eleven paned installation. What have you said?

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the idea of the portfolio

For some undergraduates and graduates, the assembly of a portfolio seems to be the signal for some oncoming doom. However, there aren’t many classes that teach what the ideal portfolio looks like, and even less transfer the theory of architecture into the architecture portfolio.

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Inquiry: Sense of Site

We’ve all stood out there, when it’s sunny, rainy, warm, freezing, afternoon, in the dark, crowded, vacant, next-door, across the country, for fifteen minutes, for weeks, with sketchbook tucked under arm and camera slung across shoulder.

What are you looking at?
What does site context mean to you?

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Architects’ Homes: Consistency and Contradiction

In his life Louis Kahn built monumental works of architecture that exuded a sense of harmony and spiritual clarity. This oeuvre however, was in stark contrast to a turbulent personal life which included great debts and three different families/wives.  This nomadic lifestyle prompted questions after his death, and the seemingly contradictory nature of his life and work. Are an architect’s creations representative of their principles ? Do the values an architect embodies in his work translate to the values they have for their homes?

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The [un]Official Introduction to Design Computation

megan fagge | design computing

Design computation can be seen as a new field in two ways. The first view reveals that it is generally misunderstood by many architects, engineers, and most everyone else. The second definition, the more appropriate and mediated one, states that it is new because it is consistently redefining itself, creating limits while pushing boundaries simultaneously. Fortunately, the School of Architecture validates the latter, though it does not necessarily eradicate the former.
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Through New Eyes – Paris

Architecture must be lived. And for those of us who are students of life, experiencing a new one is perhaps the closest we will get to understanding. The Paris Program here at Georgia Tech is a yearlong study abroad that will teach you about the world, design, and yourself.  During my time in Paris, I decided to write down my observations and thoughts.  Enjoy.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Through the Looking-Glass and What Architecture Found There

Let us begin with this axiom:  experience is the primary prerequisite for wisdom. Literature is the writer’s education, movies the director’s, and photos the photographer’s. What of architecture?

Architectural education is transmitted through the vessels of other media. Photography, film and art are the media by which our disciple’s intravenous therapy is administered.   Visual stimuli combined with text, theory, and the occasional diagram are the building blocks for an ersatz education. Where does this leave architecture? As a discipline which understand itself by proxy. We understand light through photography, space through film, color through painting, and touch through text.  While this is somewhat natural, given that the products of an architect are in essence substitutes in themselves. Drawings, sketches and models are mere abstractions of a building. Even with digital media opening up the doors to creation, often scale is lost in translation, with the architect resigning himself to fabricating “objects”. However, this still does not sufficiently address the discrepancy between what an architect must understand and what an architect does understand. For the cognitive link to be formed between an architect and architecture, an architectural education must be accompanied with exposure to works in the build environment. Not only for a deeper understanding of the nature of buildings, or sensibilities, but to develop a heightened awareness of the fundamentals the profession holds so dear.

When we come to the question of what architecture can achieve we can approach it within the realm of architecture.  This is not to say that dreams must be hindered by the chains of reality, but to say that they can be augmented by a healthier subconscious and a deeper understanding. An understanding of architecture on its own terms.

Ali Karimi

Why are you in architecture?

Just about every time I meet a fellow architecture student, one question always seems to come up that’s becoming a pretty standard question in making these intradisciplinary acquaintanceship:

Why are you in architecture?

While it finds itself in small talk, I’m finding that the question is becoming increasingly important to me, perhaps because I’ve only begun contemplating exactly where I stand and what it is that I think I’m doing here. I’m speaking as an undergraduate student who has relatively only recently made the decision to get into the field of architecture.

I hope that this blog may become an opportune forum where this question may be explored. I hope to collect thoughts on what it is that brought you to architecture, what you wish to get out of architecture and/or architectural education, what do you perceive architecture to be able to achieve, or what you as an individual wish to achieve. I hope that by sharing each others thoughts we may better understand our own position in architecture as well of that of our peers. So readers, please leave a comment and share your thoughts!

not so bad

It’s 6 a.m. I’m not up early to go to the gym or to get ready for work. There are no 8 a.m. classes. I haven’t slept since I went to bed last night—at 5 a.m. This is what I need to do to finish, and more importantly, to remind myself of the importance of what I do. This is studio.

Often I tell people of the work I do, and how long it takes me. My sense of time is quite different from most others. When I say this step in the design process took me only 8 hours, my studio-external friends are aghast, terrified of what this process must entail. Isn’t it simply drawing a beautiful façade? Isn’t it working with fancy materials to create an opulent space? I need not explain the misconceptions and misrepresentations of my field. Postmodernism won’t be erased by my half-informed theoretical whims. I may try to explain my task at hand, but it will be to no avail. No, I’m quite alone in this undertaking.

This essay is no complaint. In fact, it is a message of optimism to those who “suffer” in studio. Our “architorture” is not real. It is simply the design process that consumes us, and we consume it.

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official Inaugural volume- Monday Feb 8

image by gvain johns