san antonio pictures-well, my apartment building. a renovation project done by LakeFlato architects. I'll get the "professional" photos too. these we're taken in the usual mad-dash fashion, as im still a rather jumpy person that cant stand still for anything.

Independent Project:
Prelims for house remodel in everett, wa.
sketch-book scans again.

Erik Olson Cemetary, Salem SD.
prelimary schematics for a landscape imnprovement plan. discussion to follow. sketch book scans for now.

Arch 702 Studio Project- Process to final presentation

Left-overs

I'm hoping that this blog will be a platform for discussing design and its relationship to ethics and aesthetics in relation to derelict sites: leftovers.


the incentive for this blog sprung out of wanting a platform to discuss design issues while away from the academic community. Until now I had been in architecture school for 5 years, and had been in constant sponge-mode, never taking time to digest. As i was nearing my last year of school for my M.Arch degree, i struggled with the idea of finishing my entire education straight through, without ever getting the time to work and then come back with a broader perspective.


So i jumped ship on my graduate degree, and started a year-long student internship at Lake | Flato Architects in San Antonio Texas. Having worked for only a month now, I am starting to see why some class-mates of mine looked forward to going back to school. Architecture is still a business, and the business model of most firms cannot be successful if they allow their employees to piddle around "re-inventing the wheel" for the wheel's (or their ego's) sake. This does not mean cut& paste from the last project into the new, but rather working from a foundation of experience that is earned over time. Being 23 with little practical experience in the field, it knocked the wind out of me to realize how little i had to offer to this firm.

So I'm using this blog as an opportunity to post about things that inspire me outside of work, and am hoping these interests can start to effect what I learn this year, and how this year of work can inform how i feasibly go about tackling these issues.


So, on the note of left-overs.

1. Being an intern. Interns work on jobs that have been pushed to the side by their firm, as other tasks take precedence. This is normal, and for someone with little experience, it still proves to be a tremendous learning opportunity. Red-lining, door tags, archiving, etc...
2. Food. Pizza, casseroles, turkey, they all take on a different, but good taste the second time around.
3. Empty buildings. Unsold real-estate. 18.6 million empty houses in america.(http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/qtr108/q108press.pdf)
4. Salvage Yards and discarded materials from construction waste. (http://www.epa.gov/waste/conserve/rrr/imr/cdm/pubs/cd-meas.pdf)

So in summary, expect to find things related to this, though i am making no promises that it will all pertain strictly to what i mentioned above. Sometimes I'm going to need to just post something pretty.