Diagrams for final project

UVa Arch 8010 : Preview of final presentation-diagrams!

these are on their way...just to update this blog with something

architecture of the everyday

This book, as strange as it is, really has some good insight to how the common or mundane are not as ill informed as they appear, but rather just outside of the narrow, or short reaching radar of design professionals. I think its still a bit weird that things that are common and plain are written about by people whose writing style is anything but commonplace or easy to understand, but im sure my ramblings are also hard to follow (though only because of poor grammar rather than fancy wordiness). ill try to be concise on what i have been thinking, and how design of the public realm could be open enough to consider our current "american vernacular."

the essay called "tom's garden", by Margie Ruddick, accounts the design decisions of a neighbor, Tom. Issues on aesthetics and landscape are brought up, and the nature of how landscape architecture is portrayed.

Tom's garden is "only beautiful when people use it, not when its empty (when those spaces best shown empty often alienate people)."

The beginnings of the essay nobly describe her own garden, where her long island beach home's landscape is designed to appear native, and natural, which to some would seem strange to spend all this money so that a landscape can appear like nothing had been done. its funny, but is it more appropriate or honest to display that you did in fact "improve" a landscape, or hide the work you did. I know my non-architect parents dont warm up to the idea of spending money to make things look like you did nothing at all. (i almost said non-designer parents, but just like tom, design happens whether some one is trained or not)

tom's garden is a garden of program, a landscape with overlappings, shifts, interruptions, signs of matter that show inhabitation (daily events). Sound too effects how this landscape is perceived, something that landscape journals can't really represent. Its good that this reading didn't have images, because the nature of this type of garden is one where the only way to come into contact with a landscape describes as this is to go and experience, and inhabit it.

this is similar to my own house i grew up in. the landscape is not one you would find in journals, but one that has so much meaning to me as person, more than as a designer. Overly articulated, or exaggerated drainage ditches are signs of how my dad and i tried to fix hydrology issues of our river-bluff location. Though a civil engineer or landscape architect might have done some things differently, the actions my dad took were one's informed by an innate experience with the site, rather than a generalist's education. his actions were more site specific.

i like how most design falls outside of idealized conditions, and how we're going to be faced with the left-over sites, once marked with past actions done by "tom's", and other property owners. Looking at conditions in this light, work is no longer a clean slate, but a palimpsest layered with actions done over time by inhabitants. I'd like to explore how a process can accounts for this as if our design propositions can be considered as marks on a time line, rather than for an end-all solution. Landscapes should be able to adapt to future additions, and be open enough for new types of program.

more to come on the essays by Joan Ockman and Deborah Fausch.

OK, just like every new stage of life i end up in, i often find myself reminiscing about what used to be, and to my detriment, often paint the past a prettier picture than it deserves. Not to say that my past has not been good, or even fantastic, but it also has always been real. This trait of looking back only to the good things allows my expectations for the present to soar, and to come to the conclusion that the NOW is not as great as it should be. Then i come upon Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and a passage that hits upon the traveler's condition with place and memory.

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: "You always advance with your head turned back" or "is what you see always behind you?" or rather ,"does your journey take place only in the past?"

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining, or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what what you no longer are or no longer possess lie in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city, he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago, or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. by now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question that could have been formulated "Journeys to recover your future?"

And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have."

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.