Not Built in a Day

Last year I had the luxury of visiting the annual GSAPP End of Year Show (EOYS) after the opening night, so I could spend some time looking at the projects and thinking about how they represented the work of the school.  This year, with graduation and moving directly after the opening, I didn't have that opportunity, but I have a few images of the set-up and projects from opening night and the previous day. My own studio decided to go for a minimalist approach, painting our area dark grey and hanging seven identical screens, one for each project.  We built out a shelf for models, painted the inside neon green, and installed an LED strip to illuminate the models on the shelf.  I helped install the screens, which took much more time than it should have!  I think it looked pretty classy.  Our location was in a short hallway leading to the cafe, which was great for getting lots of people to see it as they went by, but terrible for people who wanted to spend...

The GSAPP End-of-Year-Show (EOYS), or final student exhibition, is what you might call a Big Deal.  This spring, the EOYS ran from May 12-19, 2012.  After grades are due, after papers are done and reviews ended, all students are expected to stick around for another week, more or less, to design and build our one shot at giving normal people (read: our family and friends) a chance to see our work.  Studio reviews are usually esoteric, confusing, or just plain boring to outsiders; the EOYS is supposed to make our work look exciting and impressive.  There seem to be two schools of thought on how to present our final work.  One is to treat the work like artwork: slather it over the walls, sans explanation, and overwhelm the visitor with visuals.  The other school of thought is to try to explain the work, condense it, and make it accessible.  This latter route usually results in lots of boring text.  The projects are often so complex that they can't b...

(The final post in a three-part discussion of the Columbia Building Intelligence Project.  See my other posts: Part I and Part II .) In this final post, I'd like to propose some ideas about what could make C-BIP better if the studio continued, and to share some of our final output. As I wrote last time, I thought that the two-part development of the studio had some major flaws.  Not allowing students to re-use their own elements in the building strategies meant that some of us tried to adapt similar elements designed by others to align with our goals, thereby distorting the elements to an unworkable extent.  Alternatively, some groups designed "modules" composed of several elements together that could be plugged in to their buildings as independent units, thereby avoiding the problem of how to adapt elements to buildings.  I think every group had to choose a limited set of problems to solve, because the studio proposed so many different issues: workflow/cooper...

(A continuation of thoughts about the Columbia Building Intelligence Project - see my earlier post for more commentary.) C-BIP Studio has now ended, and we're working on our final exhibition materials (more to come).  So now I'd like to look back on how the second half of the semester went.  In this post I want to get into more detail about the actual structure and methodology of the studio.  As I said before, I think the studio had really interesting goals and an environmental ethic that matched up well with current thought in architecture and planning.  The workflow proposed to achieve these goals, however, I found much less convincing, and in fact I think the studio "system" was poorly designed.  In the language of our critics, the design of the studio workflow was a "missed opportunity" to achieve some really interesting results. To briefly summarize the mandated workflow, in the first half of the semester we were asked to design parametric buildin...

 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Retrofit A current architectural fad (if I may call it so) is to tout the advantages of retrofitting older buildings for new uses, rather than tearing down and building new.  Many reasons are given: saving historic buildings is inherently valuable or preserves our history and culture; 80% of the US building stock was built in the past 50 years, so it's important to address these (mostly energy-inefficient) buildings; it's more environmentally sound to retrofit than to build new, once you account for embodied energy of materials; and it's often cheaper than building new.  One of the philosophies of my current studio, the Columbia Building Intelligence Project (or C-BIP), that I appreciate is that retrofitting buildings in NYC is taken as a given: your project is a retrofit, end of discussion.  Further, most of us have taken the view that energy savings is at most a bare minimum, a minor issue; of course the retrof...