i'm baaack

Hi All,

After the tumult of getting the draft of my PhD ready and off to RMIT, I'm back and going through your submissions. I will try and have them all assessed by next wednesday. In the meantime, keep going with the next phase of studio.

ideals for modern living

(rome, one of my favourite cities)

Today was a good day to see how most of you had progressed in your design work. I have a number of things that I want to make sure you are all aware of and are going to respond to in your modelling assignments.

Firstly, be aware that you are being asked to make two digital models and two analogue models. If you do the modelling sequentially then the transistion between the designs goes digital-digital, digital-analogue, analogue-analogue. If your design is developing in sequential fashion, then you will become aware that making a shift between the mediums involves understanding how that medium works. For example, going from digital to card does not mean you are just making a 'copy' of the digital version. It is expected that you will try and improve (or further explore) aspects of the design that are unique to the medium.

Secondly, remember to try and capture aspects of your character in the house design. You don't have to turn the house into an architectural version of the character, but their 'presence' should be there somewhere in your design decisions.

Remember to think about scale. In digital models you can be infinitely close or far away from your model, so it is possible to attand to aspects of you design that are quite small (or even monumental).

Finally, the fact that you are asked to post 3x4 images on your blog should be thought of strategically. maybe you will show the same type of 'photo' of each of the 4. But maybe also you may wish to use the images to tell a story, develop a theme, explore a process, etc.

Overall, good work. Maybe we should watch a movie next week. Any suggestions?

faces in the crowd

(image credit: prabhat photo@ flickr)

OK, the short essays on your characters are coming in and, as they do, whole worlds are opening up. As I hope you can see, when we begin to imagine these people as a collective community their differences, their appearances, their private obsessions begin to create a rich landscape.

When, as we will, we take these people into the housing project, the opportunity for imagining a suburban landscape that is formally and culturally rich emerges. Good work.

A couple of people have emailed me asking if they are 'right' in creating a profile. Of course there is no right answer to this, just as no-one has a 'right' personality. Its just about depth, real and apparent. Probably the best way to advance is to scan through the characters of your colleagues and gain inspiration from those descriptions that you like - from the impressionistic to the analytic.

This is a studio about communications and, as I hope you are beginning to see, there are many ways to communicate ideas about architecture.

lost prophets

(image credit: troutfactory @ flickr)

ok, i know there isn't much time to make this, but if any of you happen to read this post this evening, make sure you see gus van sant's film 'gerry', which is on sbs tonight at 11.30 ( i think). lots of amazing existential issues to be sorted out here.

in some ways a film like this is a good way of further fleshing out your characters. i've had a couple of good comments about the characters and it seems a number of you are becoming deeply involved in this. this is good as it gives you a depth of material to work on in conjunction with your architectural design.

in many respects this is entirely in keeping with Hejduk's encyclopaediac interest in different 'types' of persons. in hejduk, people embody their profession and perform the functions of those tasks in an almost ritualistic fashion. hejduk imagines a universe of architectural persons that populate a city in the same waythat buildings populate the urban fabric.

like a number of his erstwhile literary influences, franz kafka, elias canetti, jorge louis borges, the world is composed of persons and forces that are never fully comprehensible. there is a mystery at the heart of all relations that allow for the chance of the fantastic to occur.

remember to look for images to illustrate your study. find out what this perons or persons might look like. try to avoid caricature. choose images that have a sense of drama to their subject matter, that they are about something. the best place to start looking for this is here. just try to avoid images that are overly cute, overly pretentious, immature, badly composed, off the point, or involve babies or cats (there seems to be a lot of these). or go take your own.

keep writing and keep reseraching.