I just read this article in the South Bend Tribune by Gene Stowe about architecture student Matthe VanSoest.

Architecture student Matthew VanSoest plans to design more than buildings in his career. He wants to design better schools, better communities, better downtowns for a better life, especially for struggling small towns such as his native Bremen.

VanSoest, who graduated from Bremen High School in 2004 and earned a bachelor’s degree at Ball State University last year, will graduate with a master’s degree in architecture from Ball State next year.

He has interned at Ancon Construction Co. during summers and other breaks for three years and expects to work at the company when he has finished his education.

VanSoest’s broad interest — far from “trophy architecture,” designing skyscrapers or monumental buildings — traces to his observation of job loss and downtown decay in Bremen.

“It’s just a small town,” he says. “You see more and more people going to Mishawaka or Plymouth or Nappanee. There’s a lot of programs at Ball State that are nationally known for community revitalization. These programs have gotten me interested in it as well in using architecture as a way of helping people, helping small communities.

“I think they’re being overlooked,” with more focus directed to on larger cities, VanSoest says. “Architects can almost become urban designers. That’s what I’m concentrating on.”

The architect can brainstorm with the community, find strengths and weaknesses, and propose changes. “In a lot of cases, it’s not just one building,” he says, but rather a block of buildings, town center or gateway to the downtown.

For example, redesigned town centers could increase interactions among residents. “There’s a loss of a sense of community,” VanSoest says. “Neighbors don’t know their neighbors. Architects think in that way. It’s not just one building.”

Last semester, he was part of a team that worked with leaders in Topeka, a community with a significant Amish population and ties to the RV industry, not unlike his home area.

Among other things, the team proposed buildings to fill vacant lots and a trade school to improve the education level in the community, which hopes to develop a high level of energy independence and expects to have the largest wind farm in the Midwest.

“The level of craftsmanship is there,” he says. “The question is, how do you use it? The architect, I think, has to think outside the box and not just focus on aesthetics and function.”

This semester, he’s on a team that is working to revitalize a section of Muncie, Ind.

“I’ve done some work in Muncie with urban design,” VanSoest says. “Right now, we’re looking at 10 houses in Muncie that are deemed unfit.”

The team proposes to save the houses and retrofit them to be sustainable. The plan includes shared yard and garden space for the neighbors. A grant will support construction for one house according to the plan.

“Maybe that model can serve for other houses in the area,” he says.

Charter schools, like urban planning, are a big concentration for VanSoest. His work with Ancon has included consulting with a school in St. Joseph County.

“It’s thinking of new ways you can design a school,” he says. “It’s not just the architecture.”

As a Ball State University Business Fellow, on an interdisciplinary team that includes education, finance, economics and other majors, he was part of a two-year research project, “Charter School Patterns of Innovation: A New Architecture for a New Education,” sponsored by Eli Lilly.

“The team researched exemplary case study exemplars throughout the country in order to understand the unique ways charter schools operate,” VanSoest says. “Because charter schools have more freedom in how they teach, each school can take a different focus with their curriculum.”

The team applied the results of their study to Indiana partner charter schools, interviewing teachers and students, conducting building assessments and providing hypothetical designs. It will present its work in Portland in March and is writing a book about the project

“The group finally created 50 design patterns or principles that would become useful tools to actively engage school administrators, designers, parents, students, teachers, communities, and businesses in the development of their school,” he says.

“The patterns or ideas go way beyond providing solutions for a facility of learning and teaching, but begins to look at ways buildings themselves can actually be learning tools, creating an image of the educational environment that creates pride in the students’ and a presence in the community, or identifying ways to supplement the school’s funding needs.”

In a design competition sponsored by Cripe Architects and Engineers, VanSoest proposed a Charter School of the Dunes in Gary, a middle school that includes space that would be useful for parent-student nights and community events as well as classrooms and a cafeteria. His design placed first, and some of the ideas will be incorporated into a new school in the Gary area.

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Jon Stewart calls this the Greatest Depression.

Michael Cannell of the NY Times tells us that design loves a depression.

An Excerpt (with my favorite parts bolded)

Now, given that all those slick Miami condos are sitting empty in the sky, designers like the Campana Brothers, with their $8,910 Corallo chair, and Hella Jongerius, with her $10,615 Ponder sofa, might have a harder time selling their wares. Already designers are biting their knuckles over the damage reports. The American Institute of Architects reported that last month’s billings index, a gauge of nonresidential construction, reached its lowest level since it began collecting data in 1995.

The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”

…

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II.

Will today’s designers rise to the occasion? “What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “This might be the time when designers can really do their job, and do it in a humanistic spirit.”

In the lean years ahead, “there will be less design, but much better design,” Ms. Antonelli predicted.

There is a reason she and others are optimistic: however dark the economic picture, it will most likely cause designers to shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Designers are good at coming up with new ways of looking at complex problems, and if President-elect Barack Obama delivers anything like a W.P.A, we could be “standing on the brink of one of the most productive periods of design ever,” said Reed Kroloff, director of Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Also, he mentions my favorite architect:

One way or another, design will focus less on styling consumer objects with laser-cut patterns and colored resin and more on the intelligent reworking of current conditions. Expect to hear a lot more about open-source design, and cradle-to-cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.

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I just came across a blog post by an architecture student from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Sunday, January 04, 2009
Goodbye Architecture
So after 4 years I have decided to say my goodbyes to architecture, and Im thrilled about it. It takes a while to admit when something is wrong for you- but I refuse to wake up everyday with a deep sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I know plenty of people go to work everday, doing a job that they’re not happy with, but stick with it because of financial security or a comfort zone - I am not one of those people! Even though I havent a clue what I’m going to do now, I feel as though a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I somehow have faith that things will fall into place. In the meantime, Im going to start a new blog, that hopefully will be updated more regularly and will probably focus on photography which is really the one thing I can probably say that I’m passionate about. I do however have the utmost respect for architects! Its a challenging job, and takes amazing people to do it well.

She posted images of her final project. You gotta see them.

So then here’s a comment somebody left:

This post showed up in a Google alert for me on architecture. I must say that I do find your buildings to be very interesting and active. There are many elements in your work that emphasize your sensitivity to the terrain. I would certainly like to see the plan of some of these, it is much more important than the exteriors.

One thing that school doesn’t teach you, and they actively lobby against it, is that focusing on exteriors disregards the reason for a building, what is happening INSIDE. Exterior aesthetics are important, but only to the person that views a building as an object, rather than a building, which is constructed to offer protection from the OUTSIDE.

I too hated architecture school with an unabated passion, but after getting out, the job is nothing like college. It seems that the only people that try to teach architecture students are the people that were massive failures at performing the work. In other words, they are useless to the world other than removing the desire from students to do good work. They place emphasis on theory, rather than real world concepts. Drawings and models are nice, but the built environment is the end result, not a bunch of pretty stuff in the studio.

That said, architecture is honestly the most fulfilling profession that you could possibly find if you actually like studying the built environment. Hopefully, the professors have not killed that for you because your exterior designs are very engaging.

Good luck!

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I love this. Some UH Architecture students are going to build on Fiji.

Fiji will receive help from UH architecture students
A group of eight UH architecture graduate students will help design buildings for the island of Batiki in Fiji. According to Adi Asenaca Caucau, former minister of housing in Batiki, Batiki is the most economically depressed island in Fiji. Students will have the chance to see their building designs go from concept to completion. Each student has been assigned a specific building to design. Buildings that they’re working on include: a community center, a church, a school and a library. The designs will be built within the next two years and will benefit the 2,000 people of Batiki.

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My thesis is still a couple of years aaway, but I already know what I want to do.

I want to build.

Truong Minh Nhat had the same drive. While his fellow students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture were producing renderings, he built his design.

A folding electric bicycle. And it actually runs.

OMG. How cool is that?

Capella, as Truong Minh Nhat calls his creation, is an electric bike made with light composites that the Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture student says can be folded and put into a backpack.

Capella can have its wheels, chain and chain-ring bolt folded into the body.

Users can take the bike along when traveling and escape the crowd anywhere, Nhat says, adding that it can travel at 30 kilometers per hour with a battery that will run for 12 kilometers after it is charged for two hours.

Nhat says most of the designed components are not available in the market, like a semicircle top bar.

“I had to convince and explain a lot to bike component makers, although I was making only one and offered them high prices,” he says.

Starting the project more than half a year ago as his graduation thesis, Nhat put a lot of time and effort into it.

He spent one month sketching out the design, which was inspired by the Unicorn that controls the star Capella in Greek mythology.

“My product targets teenagers who want to ride bicycles, so I paid due attention to its stylish design,” Nhat says.

To ensure that all the parts followed the design, Nhat had to stay with the people making them all the time and because they were more than 30 kilometers apart, he had to shuttle back and forth many times everyday.

Two days before the deadline, Nhat was overwhelmed with separate components, electricity systems and batteries.

He invited some workers to his house to assemble the bike. All of them then slept for only two hours each night until the bike was complete, Nhat says.

Although he submitted his product just two hours before the deadline, he obtained high marks for it.

“My application for intellectual property right has been approved,” says the graduate of the university’s Industrial Design Department.

“I am now studying ways to improve the bike’s eminent functions before seeking partners to launch the product in the market at a price reasonable for Vietnamese people.”

Since the first bike was made manually by assembling separate components, it still has certain shortcomings, he says.

Nhat expects to replace some of the bike’s components with even lighter materials to reduce its weight to around 10 kilograms.

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A lot of grad school deadlines are past, but if you still have a few left to go, well, honestly, it’s probably too late for this little essay on designing your portfolio.

But

if you’re not applying until NEXT Decmeber, take heed.

This essay comes to you from DesignIntelligence

An Enviable Design Portfolio
Harold Linton

Great portfolios assist in our understanding of not only individual designers and their work but also their larger design vision and contributions in allowing us to see the familiar in an unexpected way. One recalls the story of the arrival of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth portfolio in Peter Behrens’ office and work stopping for the rest of the day as the office staff of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, et al. leafed through the pages and saw their modern world anew. A quality portfolio is like a garden, constantly being watered for future nourishment and beauty.

What might be the most appropriate format for your portfolio? Is your work best presented in a clean, well-organized wire-bound pamphlet design with an accompanying CD or DVD or as a personal Web site that is continually current and updated frequently? Do you prefer the drama of opening a beautiful boxed set of individual plates or do you envision an elegant hardbound book made with the artistry of a person knowledgeable about the craft of handmade paper and the book art form. No matter which format you adopt, Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the school of architecture at Yale University, has carefully chosen words of advice: “Among the many ingredients that help define an excellent portfolio, coherence and modesty are paramount. Plain is better than fancy; simple much better than complicated. The portfolio is a tool for conveying a sense of the work; it should not be an advertisement for itself.”

A finely tailored portfolio is the most important tool you can bring to an application for admission to a graduate school or for a design grant, competition, job interview, or to a potential client. Like a well-tailored suit, the portfolio is critical in establishing that great and lasting first impression. Recent graduates from pre-professional degree programs (B.A. and B.S.) and professional degree programs (B. Arch and M. Arch) enter the field through the interview process, demonstrating their talent and abilities with portfolios in hand. As one progresses in the profession, an up-to-date portfolio demonstrates accomplishments from position to position.

Your vision of the world has something of value to offer. Invest in a design presentation that clearly communicates and supports your vision. Through careful planning and rehearsal, decisions regarding the character, content, visual weight, material sense, size/scale, and format are all selected to meet your vision. The portfolio itself may be executed in one format such as a print booklet or may incorporate many forms, including CD, DVD, Web site, or PDF files. Going digital means designing a Web site not only to promote personal and professional work globally but also to act as a resumé, giving an introductory statement of background and professional expertise in anticipation of presenting a full portfolio during the interview process.

Regardless of its format, the portfolio design should set in motion a well-conceived visual discourse, one that will capture, arrest, and hold the attention of the intended audience. An increasing number of students and young professionals are linking a PDF of a well-designed print portfolio to their Web site, thereby establishing a coordinated design format as both an online presence and a leave-behind print piece. The need for portfolio media to being cross-platform (PC and Mac) is a necessity. Recently, the trend is toward all-digital initial contact, such as an introductory e-mail containing a PDF file of a resumé and PDF teaser/mini-portfolio sent to potential employers. Advantages are that they can reach a larger audience quickly, and they will likely connect with the more technologically savvy design employers.

Architecture students are inventing teaser portfolios or mini-versions of full portfolios. These 4- to 5-page preview portfolios, together with a letter of introduction and resumé, are useful to introduce oneself in request of a formal interview. Students are also attending large career day events, at which a career day sheet of their work is the status quo. A career day sheet is basically a single page with a well-organized grid of sample images of one’s work on the front, and background resumé and contact info on the reverse. These brief snapshots of one’s work seem at first blush far too brief to explain the accomplishments of the designer, but conversely, they speak reams to the employers who sit in review behind tables in the hall. These employers see numerous students and samples of work; the career day page is portable and easy for them to take back to the office. There, they can use the page to aid discussion with colleagues, which may lead to an invitation to the new graduate to present a full portfolio and interview for a position.

Since buildings, landscape designs, and interiors are impossible to transport, and even models and renderings can be large and impractical to carry, the print portfolio is the enormously practical instrument and still the standard in the industry. In the course of a career, a designer will likely prepare several portfolios, each one adapted to a different purpose. In each case, your portfolio needs immediate and dramatic impact to distinguish you from others with whom you are competing, and it has to clearly answer the questions in the minds of those reviewing your work for whatever purpose. The portfolio is a graphic history of skills and accomplishments, and it must be seen not only as a problem in design but also as a tool to promote you to prospective employers and clients. Each year, architecture and allied design students (landscape, interiors, planning, and the like) enter the job market, and the competition grows increasingly intense.

Cesar Pelli, writing in the book Portfolio Design states, “The portfolio tells me about the abilities of its designer to communicate ideas and images in graphic form. Much like in a building, there is a great deal of freedom within the physical limits set by the medium and the cultural limits set by convention, and I can tell about the judgment of the designers by how constrained they have been by these limits or by how much freedom they have taken with them. I can even judge how well they have managed their time in either overdoing the portfolio design or in having established an efficient process for preparing it.”

The challenge of proper self-promotion through portfolio design is assessing one’s own strengths and accomplishments objectively. Preparing a portfolio requires you to take a step back from your own design work and make an evaluation as unemotionally as possible. Learning to be observant about the strengths and weaknesses of your work encourages the development of a critical and unbiased eye useful to the portfolio design process and to your professional career generally. Inviting the opinions of trusted advisors and colleagues also helps eliminate the initial fears many people have about putting together a portfolio.

Planning a portfolio presentation also requires a keen sense of organization and an ability to arrange various written and visual materials into a unified graphic package as well as the ability to maintain a focused vision throughout the development of the presentation. It is important to consider the audience and the skills and elements they may be attracted to or looking for. In general, all of those people who review portfolios will be looking for a businesslike attitude and a pragmatic soundness in the work as well as creativity and pure grace and beauty. Creativity is important, but employers want designers who are able to solve problems economically and quickly. Architects and designers are proposing to spend other people’s money, a lot of it, and a solid portfolio presentation will go a long way toward persuading others that you can be trusted with that responsibility.

Student designers with a creative future will have a natural curiosity about life and the world. Assembling a portfolio is an exercise that prepares them for future accomplishment in the real world by teaching how to evaluate one’s own work and to understand how that work will appear to other professionals. A good portfolio illustrates one’s strengths and demonstrates an understanding of format, graphic design, typography, concept development, problem solving, and business communication. A portfolio not only represents a body of work acquired throughout academic and professional life, but it displays this work in such a way that a design philosophy is made manifest. Of course, most undergraduate students have not chosen a specific area of design philosophy and tend to be generalists. This is not a drawback because many good designers are generalists; they can solve any problem. Having a focus too early in your career can limit possibilities for growth and development. One’s portfolio represents an evolution, not an end in itself. The educational experience involves growth, and growth, as in the cultivation of a garden, often requires us to set aside prior knowledge to consider new concepts and directions. As noted architect and educator Max Underwood says:

“There is not a single formula for assembling a good portfolio. Not only will the thinking of architects and designers change in the course of their career, but also portfolio objectives change. In applying for advanced study or a professional position, the goal may be to demonstrate a variety of interests, or a process of growth and learning over time. In applying for a specific grant or competition, the goal may be to demonstrate knowledge and expertise in a specialized area known to be of interest to the grant or competition administrators. Some professional portfolios are prepared only after considerable consultation with a client and present the designer’s ideas about how a single project might be carried out, complete with a specific cost analysis. How focused the portfolio presentation is often depends upon what the recipient is looking for. Remember, you are selling yourself or your ability to execute a particular project or work in a particular environment. You will want to demonstrate ingenuity and uniqueness to make a strong impression, but you must also demonstrate sound judgment.”

If you are enthusiastic about your work, you will find portfolio assembly an intriguing and creative activity. But it also involves hard judgments. You must act like an editor as well as a creator. Consider your audience. Get your point across with a limited number of images, demonstrating an ability to be selective, critical, and concise. Extracting the essence, every page or plate must build on the previous page by adding new ideas without redundancy, by expanding concepts, by taking a fresh approach to how the material is presented. You will then have a portfolio that sets you apart from others.

Harold Linton is a professor of art and visual technology as well as chairman of the department of art and design at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. He is the former assistant dean of architecture at Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Mich. Linton is the author of Portfolio Design, a best-selling book in the field, and he is currently at work on its fourth edition. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader on portfolio design topics.

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My favorite project on Inhabit’s Top Ten Green Architecture Projects of 2008 by Mike Chino is the The World’s First Energy-Generating Revolving Door

Harvesting the kinetic energy generated by crowds of people is one of our favorite approaches to renewable energy. Recently Netherlands-based Natuurcafé La Port installed an energy generator in a rotating door, so every time someone walks in for a cup of coffee, they give just a little bit of their energy back to the coffee shop. We keep saying that solving the problem of global warming will require that we open up new doors in the field of renewable energy, but we must admit that we never expected to mean it literally!

The door was part of the refurbishment of the Driebergen-Zeist railway station designed out by architecture firm RAU and built by Boon Edam. The door is expected to generate around 4600 kwh of energy each year, which may not sound like much - but every little bit helps. To enhance the design, the team decided to include a transparent ceiling to show how the system works, and LEDs display the amount of energy that it is generated each time someone walks in the door.

Read about the other 9!

As I BS my way through this paper we’re supposed to write over break, I thought I’d share something I found by a fellow architecture student.

Architectural Terms

Sense of Entry
The front door is big and far away.

Human Scale
Less than 400 feet tall.

Skewed Grid
The design looked too boring with a regular grid.

Pedestrian-Oriented
Doesn’t have enough parking.

Contextual
Is surrounded by a lot of other buildings the architect couldn’t tear down.

Theoretical
Nobody in their right mind would ever consider building the crazy thing.

Signature Building
You can’t afford it.

Less Is More
The designer ran out of ideas. Cheap Skate.

Classically Proportioned
Traced out of a book of Greek architecture.

Postmodern
Traced out of a book of Roman architecture.

International Style
No country will take responsibility for it.

Deconstructivist
The backhoe ran into it during construction—and they liked it.

Seismically Designed High Rise
In an earthquake, the structure will not collapse, but will drop all of its glass and stone panels into the street turning pedestrians into a stew-like mush of pureed flesh.

Jury
Firing squad.

Design Review Board
Failed architecture majors.

Architecture Student
Egotistical masochist with no money.

Thanks to Nor Khairul!
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