Not Built in a Day

This is part 2 of a multi-part description of my trip to Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan, as part of my Kinne Traveling Fellowship grant through my studio at GSAPP.  You can read the first post here .   To see all my photos from Kyoto, visit my Google+ album here . March 13th Our second full day in Kyoto. This time we checked out the southern/southeastern part of the city, visiting  Fushimi Inari Taisha (Grand Shrine), Tofuku-ji, and then back in downtown, Nijo-jo (Nijo Castle). Fushimi Inari is a Shinto shrine dedicated to the deity Inari, whose messengers are foxes ( kitsune ). There were fox statues everywhere! This shrine is the chief shrine to Inari, and is distinctive for its thousands of vermilion torii , or sacred gates. Torii are present at every Shinto shrine, but here it’s traditional for families and even corporations to donate them, so there are tunnels of torii lining the pathways. The shrine grounds encompass a mountain trail lined with smaller shrines and re...

Every year Columbia GSAPP releases a yearbook of sorts , full of student work from the previous year.  This year's Abstract , designed by Stefan Sagmeister ,   has been setting the school a-buzz, but not for the usual reasons.  Because this year's  Abstract  was a decoy. Inside the flimsy plastic case that resembles a book is... nothing, just a web address spelled out in block letters, like the packaging for some alphabet toy.  The actual  Abstract  is an electronic-only affair, downloadable from this website , available as an application only for desktop computers (Windows and Mac) and iPads (sorry, Android).  There is no web version.  So far I've only seen a limited preview, since I don't have an iPad, and I don't spend much time at home.  I've heard numerous complaints that the application doesn't work at all, but I hope to find out for myself... eventually.  From what I've seen by looking over the shoulder of someone ...

This spring, all my fellow third-year GSAPPers and I have the privilege of traveling as part of our studio, thanks to the William Kinne travel grant provided by the school.  My studio is traveling to Tokyo, Japan!  The trip traditionally takes place the week before spring break, allowing students to extend their stay in the visited location through their break; my trip is taking place during spring break, this week, so instead we were excused from studio last week and allowed to head out a week early.  Justin came with me, making this our first international vacation together.  We've been having quite an interesting time so far!  I'll try to break up the trip into a few posts.  We started the trip in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, and home to most of the important sites from Japanese (architectural) history.  After four days there we went to Tokyo, where we are now, and will remain for the rest of the trip. *** March 10-11th We left Newark at ...

I finally finished reading YES IS MORE: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009), which is the monograph by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) in Denmark ( company website ).  My overall feeling from reading the book, which is in comic-book format, complete with endless images of Bjarke Ingels himself speaking in speech bubbles, is that it's like watching a train wreck: terrifying and somewhat sickening but you can't look away.  It's organized into a series of apparently chronological chapters, each of which covers one design.  I understand that this book is directed to a general public, not to architects, which accounts for some of the vast oversimplification that occurs in its descriptions of the architectural design process; and that it's a manifesto of sorts, which explains its overly enthusiastic tone and sweeping generalizations.  And yet, there were many points at which I didn't want to continue reading any further, didn't want to look at any more of the...

Today I am pleased to report that I have passed the LEED® Green Associate exam, so I am now officially a LEED-accredited professional.  I have a few thoughts on this process that might be helpful for others looking into getting their own LEED Green Associate credential.  While I'm certainly in support of sustainable building practices, which is why I went to the trouble to get the credential in the first place, I don't think it's inappropriate to take a critical stance toward the whole enterprise in order to challenge the profession (and the industry) to be more self-aware. The preparation: I passed the exam by using only resources that were freely available to me through my school library, including an e-book version of the LEED Green Associate study guide by Michelle Cottrell and the USGBC LEED Core Concepts Guide.  (Although I asked the library to obtain a new copy of the official USGBC LEED Green Associate Study Guide since the one they had was lost, they still hav...

The Sequel! This year for Christmas, I decided to reuse some scrap material left over from a school project to made gifts for my family.  The project was a parametric desk organizer, milled with the CNC router from plywood, and we had lots of extra funky-shaped pieces of wood from our failed prototypes.  These seemed to be the perfect size for picture frames, so I sanded and painted them, ordered prints, cut the prints to size, and voila! For myself, I traced, cut, and painted some images of the Rebel insignia and TARDIS to make cheap Star Wars and Doctor Who earrings from chipboard.  The earring hooks and wire are from Michael's.  I also made mini 3D TARDISes out of clay, but I'm not quite as happy with those.  (Dinosaur below for scale.) This next project was really Justin's, but it turned out fairly well so I thought I'd share.  He was thinking about getting a standing desk for quite a while, so he did the research to find cheap option...

This post is based on research I did for "History of the American City" taught by Gwendolyn Wright this past fall. As an undergraduate in architectural history I was encouraged to think critically about my home town as part of an exercise in historical writing.  This past semester, for a course focused on the history of American cities, I decided to take this further and research the history of the city as a whole.  I was surprised to find that Sarasota, Florida , has a much richer architectural history than I had understood from living there as a teenager.  Settled as a frontier outpost in the 19th century, it grew thanks to tourism, the circus , and real estate speculation, resulting in an incredible expansion in the 1920s that died with the Great Depression.  The city grew again after WWII, and in the 1950s was home to the Sarasota School of Architecture , a nationally-renowned architectural style and movement (not a physical school) that produced early attempt...