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.