candy store

Dog Detail

THE REVOLUTION BEGAN

foot soldier

My Painting

Thesis 2007

Image from my thesis project

Amazonas- El Pulmon del Mundo

El recurso de vida mas abundante del planeta. La fabrica mas poderosa de energia, con hojas gigantes y el rio mas enorme que los demas.

Life is blasting away at us, nations, cities, homes

WINDSTORM

filmed and posted on youtube by Greg (sciarc alumni)

Self-Reliance 2008

Wetlands




Re-Adapt and Connect

“In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants.. though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter... the rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all”

from Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Images from my thesis project at midterm.

East LA!

Strength


Ron Paul for Self-Reliance on Jay Leno

Los Angeles Oasis

Compound-site scouting is risky-business.

First Thesis Pinup

School is well under way, studios are pinning up, kids are staying up, and my first presentation is on Friday. Watch out, creatures will hijack your home.

Fall Semester

Need to get my home back to Sciarc.

RON PAUL 2008

On the Youth and Freedom and the campaign experience:


If you have thirteen minutes, watch him debating:

Chaos in my Room

Summer Sandwich

This summer started with a trip to the desert and was promptly followed by four productive months of working with x-lines and x-refs in 2d and push/pulls in 3d. At the office I have worked on a variety of projects, a single family home, a remodel of a house, a few 14-20something unit apartments, two small-lot subdivision buildings (5 and 6 unit), and an office building. While working on them I was exposed to all the phases of architectural services, from schematic-design development-construction drawings.

Sciarc starts next week and I’m ready for thesis. For design inspiration my friend Harold and I went back to the desert over the weekend. The Joshua Tree desert landscape is vast with clusters of welcoming rock formations. Because of its apparent openness, the systems that give the desert life are visible if you look twice. The ways created by water on the boulders over thousands of years are not only observable; they were our paths of escape/circulation in risky situations. And the effects of the nearby San Andrea fault lines are visually dramatic.

Native Americans often used this land; it was amusing to look for zones where we could imagine humans and cities inserted into the cave-like spaces created by the formations. There were huge cantilevering rocks overlooking cliffs, very flat hang-out areas at different altitudes, “pods” to rest in, alleys, welcoming wells, constant-blasting cool winds, and mazes all easily accessible to us and the animals that live there.

The landscape reveals how its eco-system forms it, and all the living beings there live by the rules of those systems, all working hard to survive in a place of extreme weather and ruled by the sun. My summer began in the desert and ended in the oasis.

(R) everse

Today:
I became part of the team at Jay Vanos Architects; on Monday I will start making some renderings for a 15 unit building. Like to many other schoolmates at sciarc Jay Vanos has been an inspiring teacher, his seminar Environment and Climate showed me some powerful achievable relationships between our imagination and built structures, the local eco-systems and space, the sacred and home . .



Anyways I'm glad to get to work here; those above are some screenshots from his website.

Two days ago:



I brought Danielle a new fish from the store for her tank; it's a Black Moor Goldfish, common pet in China and can live up to 25 years, his name is Boggler.




A weekend or two ago:




We head off to Joshua Tree to hang out with Stephanie Smith (Right after finishing her studio, it was a SUMMER FREEDOM kind of trip)



The desert's sounds, vast fields, its playground clusters, rabbits and coyotes are fun to experience.



Stephanie's place was the perfect place to relax and have a good time,
it was cool walking around her land and finding some older experiments,



the sunset there was about 125 times longer than mine.




Three weeks ago:

I finished the Spring semester, this is my final for studio, Oasys




More images of it click here at Yuki's blog who I designed this project with.

SCIFI

Hydroponic Farm Lab in Mumbai


I went to this film event; so here's my SCIFI work from last fall with Jeffrey Inaba.

Force be with you,
David

Finals Week

Last week was challenging; but now it at all feels smooth again. Yesterday I presented the Boyle Heights project for the Thesis Prep final. This drawing represents a section/moment in a larger network of interconnected and modified residences; all with the goal of integrating buildings with the natural ecosystems and detaching them from current methods of production and distribution.




In 20 minutes I will take a 100 question Business, Contracts, and Liabilities final exam; tomorrow I have to present the Oasis project in front of product designers (architecture as product theme); Thursday will be the last meeting of Rotondi's class Visual Imagination, and finally next Tuesday will be my studio's final presentation; piece of cake.

Studio Update

Next week is the beginning of the final two weeks of school; things are moving smoothly. My studio space has become a gallery with the accumulation of this semester's projects.




So the Oasis project has began to more seriously engage the systems it promised earlier in the semester. The enclosure is being designed as a hydroponic system. Over one hundred individual plants are grown in these nodes connected by pipes that feed the network.






We are interested in designing the connections and perhaps allowing the user to use his own "nodes" as containers to grow. This experiment shows this Recycle Version section of the wall. The model is missing a couple pumps, so I'm curious to know whether or not these plants ( from left to right, lettuce, beans, and tomatoes) will survive. I will manually change the water/food every couple days to substitute the water pumps; as for the oxygen and sunlight issues, I will just pray hard.

Power Walking

During this past week I chose Boyle Heights as the site for my thesis semester (fall 07); I briefly worked with this location last fall and have found a few things I like:




First of all, it is located just east of downtown on the other side of the river. Before the river structure was built the river used to overflow on to the land; the Heights used to produce all the food for the Los Angeles area during the 1800s with agriculture. The city feels like an oasis within its surroundings.







Second, the Golden State (I-5), Hollywood (U.S. Route 101), Pomona (CA-60), San Bernardino (I-10), Santa Ana (I-5), and Santa Monica (I-10) freeways all meet here, you can see it in the map. The gold line will be running through First St. in the Heights by the end of 2009.



Third. Boyle Heights has always been a starting point for migrants, land has always been cheap here and families move out when they can afford to. Large populations of Jewish, Japanese, Russians, Armenians, Yugoslav have all stayed in Boyle Heights, now 95% of the 100,000 inhabitants are Mexican.



And Last for now, the suburb has a strong sense of community, hardly found anywhere else in LA. Activities and use of space is super dynamic, houses are lots of times occupied by more than one family, structures are always evolving to conform to these situations.





And now to the subject of the blog, while looking for ways to design a community that begins to integrate production and work into everyday life and activities, these shoes harvest the power generated by your walking into energy, here they power a wireless device. The city's lights are powered by your beat.

Hanging Out

my two awesome rats

Studio Midterm

in collaboration with Yuki


From the Urban Nomad metaphor we carried on the idea of an unexpected object in the city, Los Angeles is a desert so we focused on the oasis.

These next images were topics for designing.

EFFECT:



TECTONICS:


EARTHSCAPE:


PROGRAM/ACTIVITIES:

Oasis

Alley: The perfect home for a ninja. This "bridge" is only accessible by someone who knows how to get on rooftops, the entrance is from above. Ivy grows on the exterior and stitches itself to the surrounding buildings as camouflage. Like in all three scenarios: solar panels above provide the energy to power the living machine's pumps, a system of mini-ecosystems that decompose human waste into reusable water for irrigation of the stealth vegetation and the hydroponic garden for crops.




Rooftop: A 150 sq. ft. self sustainable garden; can be placed in public spaces.





Side: This can be packaged as a backyard for people who live in buildings with no backyards. Just pop out of your now shaded and protected window into an oasis that filters the air from the traffic below.

A rats world

... is a completely different experience. This website has some really nice articles that go deep (visual stimulation) into how a rat sees the world it lives in.

http://ratbehavior.org/

"A rat perceives its immediate surroundings through its whiskers: long, sensitive hairs growing from the rat's cheeks, eyebrows, and chin, more sensitive than our fingertips. They rapidly whisk back and forth, brushing everything close to the rat, detecting every tiny detail and irregularity. The rat lives in a world of textures. He can navigate largely by touch."

"Adult male and female rats leave drops of pee everywhere to advertise their sexual availability. Pee contains a lot of information about the rat who made it! It's like a personal resumé. It tells another rat one's species, sex, age, social status, reproductive status, and individual."

"A rat lives in a galaxy of smells. Every object, every surface, every breath of air contains different smells and information for a rat. His nose is unbelievably sensitive. Their smells are as varied as their colors and their textures, but we can barely detect them and cannot name them. Yet this is the perceptual world the rats live in, an enormous, rich world we can only faintly detect. "


My rat (Rats):

Pears and Beans

This summer I'll be enjoying pears and green beans; I planted this tree about a month ago and the peas a couple weeks ago. Below are some other images of the spaces that wrap around my house, from front to back.

Spaces Around my House

good movies

My interest in film has been floating around the back of my mind for the past couple years, hopefully I can start working with my brother soon. I started a list with the IMDB links to the right of the page of good movies I've recently seen, I'll update it regularly (as long as I see good stuff.)

Nice Sunday

Wake up, play with rat, go to church with Daniela, hang out and eat, relax under the sun.

The Urban Nomad metaphor

Andrew's Reel

2006-2007 REEL

Rats!

The rat and my brother Andrew

Intro to my Vertical Studio

Stephanie Smith's Reinvention of the Yurt

• The Nomad
• Small Dwelling (150 sq.ft. housing)
• Green Design, ecoshack

These are themes I'll be working on this semester, as a plus the studio will also focus on design as a product... marketing, branding, manufacturing, project economics... Looks like an exciting semester!

disneyland

1.3.2007

urban rogue

out of stealth, fridays @ 5

Workshop; Last Day

Los Angeles Housing 1 week Workshop
Proposal for Boyle Heights Neighborhood
Presented Dec. 2, 2006

studio this week

Last saturday students from Tsukuba University outside of Tokyo and ETH from Switzerland joined my studio for a one week workshop; we are investigating housing types of Los Angeles. The presentation of the proposal for a new typology will be tomorrow morning.


Along with the housing project, I'm also back to work on the City of Women in Mumbai. Today I'm working on the agriculture district of the city. There's a very good project that is being developed and planned called the vertical farm. It is what it sounds like, a farm in a skyscraper; it produces enough food to feed 50,000 people. Read about the urban farms!

San Marco, Venezia

pidge mischief

Venice Biennale

I went to Italy with my studio at the beginning of this month to participate in the Venice Biennale.
Sciarc, along with a dozen other schools from around the world, was chosen to investigate one existing mega-city and propose a new urban plan.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/

We stayed in Venice for ten days; all 17 of my studiomates took hundreds of pictures each = thousands of pictures total. I'll post more later.

No Face Shots, all body

boxing update: I've been feeling some rib-cage pain after fighting Sky last week, here's the only fight i have ever won.




Check out Sky's Blog on the links to the right to see me get knocked out.

The Living Curtain

Muscle wire, also known as memory wire is a titanium nickel alloy that returns to a preset shape at a preset temperature. When the wire cools, it goes back to a non-programmed shape.

Harold, Sky and I used muscle wire to make a curtain that "breathes." We wired the memory alloy into a pattern on a fabric called alum-glo. When its hot outside, a 12 volt current runs through the each of these flaps on the curtain and closes them to block sunlight; when there's no direct sun the curtain begins to open up again.

We're still working on this prototype, I'll post up any significant updates on the Living Curtain.