Installation for "Denied and Underexposed"

I have been hoping to do a large-scale installation for a long time. I finally found the opportunity with the Denied and Underexposed Art Show that happened Friday night in the Kress building downtown.

The Kress is basically one giant room that stretches all the way through its city block from the famous Dexter Ave to Monroe Street. Because of this, I decided to create a ceiling plane that would offer a sense of intimacy and enclosure that could not be found elsewhere in the space. My first decision was materiality. I quickly picked card stock paper mainly because that's all I could afford but also for its potential to reflect and diffuse light. One intention for the installation was for it to create juxtaposition between itself and the space. Against the Kress' strict structural rhythm and derelict finishes would be the prestine-ness of white paper arranged in an expressive, organic form. I experimented with card stock sheets using cuts and folds to create a module with shape, structure, and opening.

I decided on a pattern that creates a smooth curvature, a defined crease, and a system of notching to hold the pieces together. I created four iterations of the module pattern that vary in the degree of curvature and consequently scale of opening. I used 390 of these paper modules to create a 14'X16' surface.

  

I took on a little more than I should have, which I have a tendency to do, and spent every spare moment of this last week trying to finish the piece. Thanks to a couple nights of less than 3 hours of sleep, some vacation hours from work, and the help of my friends Mike and Scott, I actually finished in time. The show was a blast, and I'm already looking to the next opportunity to do another installation.

Splish Splash

Yesterday evening we wanted to have some *free* family fun so we headed down to our riverfront splash pad park and had ourselves a great time! I feel like we're one of the few who take advantage of this fabulous play place, or at least we're some of the only ones who take advantage of it in the evening hours. Really though, that is the best time to go. It's the perfect temperature, and you don't have to worry about sunburn! Sometimes we just go down there to let the kids play in the water, but last night we brought our swim suits too! There's nothing like feeling like a kid while you're playing with your own kids...especially when there's water involved! The evening was complete with the riverboat cruising off into the sunset...

FiN Submissions

These were my submissions for the Future is Now.  This first one is a proposal for an "incremental" urban park the City has been talking about.  Replacing a parking lot with a public park is a great idea, but the images the Development Department had put out were uninspiring and unresponsive to the human needs for which the park should provide -- like shade and seating.  Click the image below to see the actual proposal with diagrams and explanations.

The next is an idea of how to reuse some of the unsightly parking decks around downtown.  The concept is basically 1) to infill the bottom with leasable space that would activate the sidewalk with pedestrian life while still providing parking above 2) clad the parking floors to make the building feel more like part of the urban fabric.



Finally is a proposal I did with a Mike Shows for the riverfront entry.  We heard the City was wanting to improve the entry and give it prominence (with very little money) so we showed some simple changes to make the underground entry noticeable and more inviting.  I think of it as a temporary solution... maybe soon we can design a more inspiring and permanent intervention.

A Temporary Move

Today we are moving from our loft apartment to a little rental house in a nearby historic neighborhood.  We hate to leave downtown, but we will be back... soon, I hope.  In fact, this move is the repercussion of our trying to buy a space downtown to turn into a live/work -- Unit A.

It boasted 14' ceilings, fantastic brick walls, and a ton of well-detailed windows to the sidewalk. So sure it would work out, we decided to go ahead and put in our sixty day notice to end our apartment's lease.  I even did some architectural photography of our apartment for the owner to aid them in finding a buyer. Our plans for Unit A were thwarted, however, when the owner decided to increase their asking price by fifty grand.  It was a fun design project, nevertheless, and eventually it could work out.  Here are some drawings of how we would have turned Unit A into a tight 2 bedroom condo with a small retail space to the street (the kids would even have a lofted play space):

After Unit A fell through, we had to find another place to live while we await the right opportunity to arise downtown.  Brooke quickly found a small, cute square house in Cloverdale, still biking distance from work and walking distance from some restaurants and shops.  Better yet, it has lower rent, no lease requirement, and no deposit.  I'm hoping this is part of God's plan for us to find our place in downtown, but I am trying to be patient.  In the meantime, I am really going to miss our casual family walks to 2Cities church, the Riverfront, the Biscuits baseball stadium, and all of the fountains around downtown.

Graduation Present... to myself

So today I bought myself a little graduation present... a brand spank'n new vehicle! More precisely: a bike, bought with graduation gift money. We currently own one car and do not want another, so we are very grateful that our new home is only one and a half miles from my work.  Thus, I will be able to stroll in through downtown Montgomery on this bad boy...

...sweaty but sleek. And on rainy days I'm sure my wonderful wife will give me a lift. She'll just be grateful for what pedaling will do for my glutes. On that thought, I think bicycles are pretty brilliant: they use the age old technology of the wheel and gears to increase the efficiency and efficacy of man-power, which is not only free, but clean and renewable! Thankfully they are coming back into fashion as a serious mode of transportation.

Anyways, this bike has great customer reviews and has been ranked at the top for commuter bikes, plus it is gorgeous. What sealed the deal for me was, of course, the classic lines, the integrated bell and lights, and the avocado fenders... so I decided to go for it, even though I couldn't take it for a test ride.

Its expected delivery day is my first day of work. I was hoping to have a few free days to practice and regain my 5th grade biking skills, but I'll probably just go for it as soon as it comes in. Now all I need is a helmet, a new pair of Tom's, and a couple toddler bike seats for the kids.

A Tid-bit on Architecture

I’ve been meaning to post some architectural design work on here for a while now, so this is at least a start.  Now in my fifth and final year of architecture school I’m currently working on my “thesis” project — “thesis” is in quotations because it is a little different from what it is in other professions.  It is basically an idea/understanding that arises through our investigations on a particular architectural subject matter.  Mine, so far, is about the intentional manipulation of light and perception through boundary (more on that some other time).

The medium of investigation is the design of a building in downtown Montgomery, a once thriving city devastated, like so many, by the advent of the car.  With the car came glorified suburbia, and out went people.  As pedestrians disappeared so did storefronts… empty buildings were torn down for parking lots/garages, and streets were widened to speed traffic.  This left the urban fabric in shambles and pretty unsuitable for pedestrian use.

You can see in this figure ground map of downtown how sparse the street frontage is– pretty much all the blank space (other than the streets of course) is parking.  I color coded the heights of buildings to show the lack of density: the lightest shade represents 1 and 2 story buildings while darker is taller.  Thankfully, now that people are beginning to realize these flaws and the beauty of good urbanism, the city is working hard to revitalize through proper planning.

 In small groups we researched the city and their overarching planning proposals to make our own proposals to revitalize specific portions of the urban fabric.  Out of these proposals came our individual building projects that we are working on for the rest of the year.

Mine (represented by the small orange dot on the map) is basically an observation tower that serves as a terminus for a major street and the backdrop of a new public park/plaza a classmate and I are designing across from the baseball stadium.  Above are  just a couple little images from earlier this semester.