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.