Architecture Addiction, The Official Blog of

In studio, we’re looking at the Odd Fellows Hall here in Cambridge, MA. The assignment is to “intervene” with an elevator.

(Which sounds like balsphemy once you’re inside the 1884 Romanesque building and you run your hands along the twin S-shaped stairwells. Ohhh, shudder.)

One thing we almost-architects like to do is diagram plans in order to deconstruct the logic of a place. There are plenty of ways to do this, and it’s interesting to see that everyone has a different method for approaching the problem.

What I started doing was I copied the building’s outer shell onto graph paper. I then cut out all of the rooms and re-arranged them according to global and local symmetry so that I could make room for the elevator. My professor said, nice, but back up a step. He wanted me to introduce a logic that determined these areas of symmetry rather than relying on what “looked right.”

So I autoCADded out all of the interior walls and everything. Then I made “ripples” around the three sets of stairs on the first floor to create some directionality of symmetry. It looked like a zen garden. And I was totally bored with it. It looked like what we called a “one-liner” at LAIAD. So forget that.

Instead, I noticed the relationship between rooms according to whether you had to push open a door, or pull it open. Based on these relationships and my detective work into the original intent of the rooms (and the psychology of what it means to push or pull a door open), I color-coded all the rooms according to Louis Kahn’s idea of Served and Servant spaces.

What I was trying to observe, more than anything else, was what the architecture was telling the visitor to do. Architecture is a language, and if it is used correctly, it will tell you how to move through a space. It will tell you where to stand, and in which direction to go. And if it’s good, you won’t even know that it’s telling you anything; you will just respond, and it will feel right.

This is called “legibility,” and I happened to find an article today on this very subject. But it’s copyrighted. Apparently I can’t even quote even a little bit of it without them wanting to charge me – per word. Hello, no. So here’s a link (those are still free, right?). For some reason, you have to (or at least I have to) reload the page in order to make the article appear. Another reason why I wish I could just quote some of it for you.

A bunch of people have asked me, “What’s up with the blog? Why haven’t you written anything in like, a whole week?”

Harvard is what’s up.

Last week was Week One at the Graduate School of Design. It was, oh how shall I say this? AbsoIncrediLicious.

In studio, we’re struggling with the “intellectually implausable” task of placing an elevator in the 1884 Romanesque Old Fellows Hall in Cambridge with it’s double S-shaped four-storied stairwells. (It’s at 536 Massachusetts Avenue if you want to go get initiated with its awe-inspiring ways.)

In Buildings, Text, and Context, I wrote a paper on “Classicism, Universality, Modernism,” a review of two readings about the interconnectedness of language, literature, architecture, and man’s relationship to every other thing in the world.

In Visual Studies, we took the T into Boston to draw a plan of this circle of townhouses, using nothing more than our powers of observation:

In Materials + Construction, we had a workshop on paper manipulations, sans adhesives. Here’s what I did:

(I feel like I have more classes than that but I can’t think of them right now!)

I think I’ve learned more this past week than I have during any given semester at my beloved University of Idaho, or any given year at my chummy Franklin Pierce College. Go fig.

I just got this email from my friends over at International Institute for Bau-Biologie and Ecology and I’m BUMMED! I won’t be able to make it to West Coast Green 2008.

But I hope you can go. Here’s the details:

Distinguished speakers join Al Gore and the International Institute for Bau-Biologie and Ecology at West Coast Green 2008

We are proud to announce along with our partner, West Coast Green, additions to the prestigious speaker line up already anchored by Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Al Gore.

This year’s program covers the breath and depth of green innovation in building, business and design at the third annual conference September 25-27, 2008 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.

* Chuck Reed, the 64th Mayor of San Jose, CA
* David Suzuki, award-winning biologist and broadcaster
* Sarah Susanka, bestselling author and architect
* Hunter Lovins, international consultant, professor and author

IBE is presenting a pre-conference workshop, Building Healthy in Today’s World: Bau-Biologie Principles in Practice - IBE 112, on Wednesday Sept 24th. Vicki Warren, BBEC, and Paula Baker-Laporte, Architect, are the presenters. They give a wonderful presentation! IBE also has a table at the conference with great information.

To learn more about the exciting 2008 West Coast Green speaker lineup and see clips of the speakers in action, please visit the recently-released video collection on the West Coast Green site at http://www.westcoastgreen.com/connect/video-directory.php

Never before has a conference and expo provided access to such comprehensive state-of-the-art resources as well as networking opportunities. See the daily schedule at http://westcoastgreen.com/program/2008/schedule-day1.php

The conference is filling fast – rooms at the Convention Center Hilton are now sold out! Be sure to register and use your IBE membership discount at http://www.westcoastgreen.com/register/

Have you heard of the reality TV show Tulane University did?

It’s called “Architecture School.”

You guessed it. It’s all the drama, the pathos, the blood, sweat, and tears of architecture school dressed up into convenient 25 minute episodes. And, if that wasn’t enough, it’s on the Sundance channel, so you know it’ll be extra-good.

The six-part series from creators Michael Selditch and Stan Bertheaud follows a group of students at Tulane University’s prestigious School of Architecture as they submit competing designs for an affordable home in Katrina-battered New Orleans. The stakes are high: the winning model will be built during the course of the school year and put up for sale, enabling one fledgling architect to begin his or her career with a high-profile splash.

ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL opens a window onto the art and science of architecture while telling a unique and uplifting story about the literal rebuilding of New Orleans. Filmed during the 2007-2008 school year, the series follows the construction of the third home in Tulane University’s URBANbuild program, which offers fourth-year architecture students the opportunity to design and build a low-cost single-family home over the course of the school year. Founded in 2005, URBANbuild is a partnership between Tulane’s School of Architecture and Neighborhood Housing Services of New Orleans (N.H.S.), a nonprofit agency that works to restore urban neighborhoods.

I’m game. But what if, like me, you don’t have a TV? Oh, they thought of that too. You can watch clips on the Sundance channel, or, if you have the time, you can watch a full episode on Hulu.

P.S. Read the comments on Hulu!

This post is a week late (That’s how long it took Verizon to hook me up here in my new near-Cambridge apartment).

All summer, I thought I’d be driving my friend Ernest’s truck from LA to Maryland via Boston. At the last minute, that fell through, so even though I had four interested buyers for my awesome ‘99 Saturn, I had to disregard them all, pack it up, and drive it across the country.

This was me and my Saturn’s fifth (and longest) trans-continental road trip. I thought I’d keep stats on the road trip, in part to illustrate precisely how awesome my Saturn is because I’m still selling it to any interested party, and in part because, man, that is a long trip.

Number of states crossed: 13
Number of miles: 3028
Number of gallons of gas: 82
Cost of gas: $316
Average miles per gallon: 37
Average miles per dollar: 9.7
Hours slept, uncomfortably: 12
Hours slept, comfortably: 3
Hours driven: 54
Length of trip, in days: 3
Length of trip, in hours: 69
Length of trip, in number of times I hit SCAN on my radio: 3240
Most unfortunate pre-trip event: Car’s CD player stopped working
Most curious thing about the Red States: Difficult to find a radio station that played songs less than 15 years old.
Song on the radio that made me miss my boyfriend the most: Hey There Delilah
Number of days before I started to smell like one of those people who live in their car: 2
Most difficult state for a car with a 4-cylinder engine to cross: Colorado
States that look identical from the Interstate: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio
Most beautiful state from the Interstate: New York

I got in to my new near-Cambridge apartment one week ago today. We’re on Day Three of Orientation here at the Graduate School of Design, and all I can say is, I need a nap!

I’ll tell you more about Harvard soon!