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