Quote: Roger Sherman

Perhaps, rather than assuming stability and explaining change, one needs to assume
change and explain stability. Elastic planning strategies are needed to facilitate surfing the
highly unstable and unpredictable evolution of the contemporary city – that…hinges on learning the ability to operate at the cusp between control and disorganization.

Texts

If anyone wants to post their three sentence statements as comments to this post, I'll be happy to return comment and suggestions here too.

Give the project a name.

Quote: Everything & Withholding Judgement of It

I am refining the design and preparing a presentation of the 34th Street Design that I'll do in Albuquerque in the Fall. I have been rereading this book and ran into this relevant quote.

Denise Scott Brown
"A SIGNIFICANCE FOR A&P PARKING LOTS, OR LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS" (1966):

Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. Not the obvious way (but) to question how we look at things.
...(to) take a positive, non-chip-on-the-shoulder view. Architects are out of the habit of looking non-judgmentally at the environment.
...There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward. And withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.

Catalog Samples & Cladograms

Use the index cards to build your catalogs. That should be obvious from the description of the assignment and the time spent buying index cards but...Why do the obvious when there's so much more to complicate, complain about, and obfuscate before you just get down to it and make something of it? The way the sum of the index cards are arranged and related makes a very easy and simple diagrammatic set of relationships.
Grant and I had a discussion just before he left over "Can't see" vs. "Haven't been shown how to see". Today, "Can't see" won today after we prepared very carefully for helping to see. It is so disappointing that everything you do has to have an example to "trace" before it will get done. You've fought the drawings, you've fought the foam, you've fought the paper, and now the catalogs. No invention. No initiative. No innovation. Just meeting the requirements.
Only an example satiates. Explanations do little or nothing. So, here's some examples from people at TTU who have before imagined how to do this and found their own way, here's some example catalogs to "trace":



You go to the site and you write down each thing you see onto a card. You COLLECT the totality of the site. Your bias comes through of course but you don't force it and cater to it. You let it find its way through the seeing. You KNOW everything that is there. You categorize, rationalize, organize, and taxonomize EVERYTHING there. Yes, you do have a bias but a bias is not a right to skip whole matters of the place. That's ignorance, something a professional cannot afford to be accused of. You then build an analysis of EVERYTHING there because you KNOW EVERYTHING there.

Be working at the site at 10h00.

Catalog

Here's an overview of the catalog on which we'll base our speculations:

Catalog of Urban Elements

M1 Massive Conditions (masses)
M1.a, M1.b, M1.c, M1.d, M1.nth
units: XX,XXX ft3 and counts

S1 Vertical Surfaces (surfaces standing on the earth)
S1.a, S1.b, S1.c, S1.d, S1.nth
units: XX,XXX ft2 and counts

S2 Horizontal Surfaces (surfaces of the earth)
S1.a, S1.b, S1.c, S1.d, S1.nth
units: XX,XXX ft2 and counts

E1 Vertical Elements (objects standing on the earth)
E1.a, E1.b, E1.c, E1.d, E1.nth
units: XX,XXX lineal ft and counts

E2 Path Elements (vectors on the earth)
E2.a, E2.b, E2.c, E2.d, E2.nth
units: XX,XXX lineal ft and counts

M2 Mass-Less Conditions (no point points)
M2.a, M2.b, M2.c, M2.d, M2.nth
units: XX,XXX lineal ft and counts

Friday Assignments

By 10h00 everyone needs two things done outside of class:
1) 3 three sentence project statements written out and ready to read to the class
2) 3 new folded paper models

We'll present these at 13h00 on Friday on site along with the catalog we'll make in class on Thursday and Friday.

Schedule for Thursday & Friday 25 & 26 June

THURSDAY
10h00
Meet on the steps of the architecture building. Bring measuring tools if you have them. Bring a camera if you have one (mooch off someone else if you don’t). Bring some index cards, a pencil, an eraser, & a fat sharpie (we’ll stop at a office supply on the way).
We’ll introduce a cataloging assignment we’ll do “in class” on Thursday & Friday on the steps. Then we’ll walk and ride through the city from McGill to the Studio Site on Thursday. We’ll break for lunch on the way. You can bring your lunch if you want. In the afternoon we’ll look at buildings and urban situations around the city and categorize them according to the given catalog. Then we’ll go down to the site and make catalogs there.
18h00
We’ll go to the CCA to see the exhibition there and break up at about 20h00. The exhibitions there are free on Thursday evenings.

FRIDAY
10h00
Meet at the site for site work and further cataloging.
11h00
The site class will meet briefly at the site to talk about progress and the next work. No drawings needed.
13h00
Present three different three sentence project statements and three new folded paper project models at the site.
18h00
Finished

Notes

We have two class days in June and two teachers left for the rest of the semester. Grant left impressed with the amount of work most of you have done, your attentiveness, and your interest in the subject matter. We've worked hard to evaluate you all evenly and fairly and we've worked hard to adjust the lessons to what you all know and don't know OR what you can or can't do.

Working this way this semester has also gotten me to think about how I was taught and what we did to learn "urbanism". I was taught at UTA in a very different way from your design education. I never had a studio that focused on it because every studio that I took assumed that inside and outside are the same thing. The location, scale, shape, and function of a building was interrelated with everything around it and inside of it. I was taught a rigorously ontological approach to understanding my work and its surroundings. We had to make sure everything we did FIT into a specification (categorical description) of the project. Architecture started not at the envelope but where you could tell one thing from another. It always included the grounds around it. Architecture was projective both in how its practice impacted its surroundings and in how we were free to imagine what could be.

We're asking you to look carefully at the surroundings and be ontological in one particular way- the formal context of buildings- and we're asking you to ontologically specify other aspects as well but we preference this one. You're projecting the site out into the city, you're projecting the surroundings into the city, and your projecting (specifying) what the of all these forms, shapes, edges, boundaries, screens, traces, and flows can become.

Just as buildings can be considered as definable agglomerations of something like brick or rooms, you can think of urbanism as conglomerates of buildings and other urban elements such as streetscape, landscape, infrastructure, and traffic. Its no difference. How I work in making a lamp is the same as when I work on five miles of street (34th Street).

Building Hours for the next few Weeks

Dear Texans,

We have some funny holidays and closures coming up:

· Wed. 24 June (tomorrow): St. Jean Baptiste day – prox access good
· Fri. 26 June: Summer Friday – prox access good
· Wed. 1 July: Canada Day – prox access good
· Friday 3 July + Sat. 4 July: electrical shutdown in Engineering complex – NO access to building at all

DK

-------
David Krawitz
Administrative Officer
School of Architecture
McGill University

Folding Paper Assignment

Class starts at 14h00 today as we discussed on Friday. You should be working on three formal foam models for your Final Critique on Tuesday. These three models include concepts discussed on Friday and ideas you have been working through these past two weeks. We are looking for excellent craft and clear intentions in these models. All three models should have integrated access to the old underground sewer and thus a subterranean access to the Archeology Museum. You should also be progressing with a cross section, a transverse section, a planar section, and an isometric (all angles adding up to 120) all completed at the scale of your models. Use construction lines and many lineweights in these drawings, they will be beautiful if you do.

The second part of the assignment includes three folded surface models of your three final formal models, that is a total of 9 surface models. Folded surface models are constructed out of one piece of one-ply museum board, the scale here stays the same and the size of the paper is not regulated. You will have to do lots of experimentation with the size of the paper and the material itself. Your operations for these models may include folding, bending, scoring, cutting, tucking, pleating, etc... These models should take ideas from each formal model and explore the notion of surface within these concepts. Take ideas and concepts you have been talking about this semester and really investigate their potential.

At the beginning of this post there are four examples of folded surface models. Each one is very different and yours should be inspired by your formal models and concepts not from the techniques used in the samples above.

Pecha Kucha Night

Wednesday the 17th is Pecha Kucha Night, a night where designers of all types- game design, animation, urbanism, architecture, robotics, graphic design, industrial design, etc. - come together and each present 20 slides each for 20 seconds (4'20"). It is at SAT (St-Laurent just south of Ste-Catherine) and costs 5$ to get in. They sell drinks. You can bring food.

Last year we met a reporter for the NY Times there and were interviewed for a story on the growing Pecha Kucha movement in design. Two years ago we saw a guy make a presentation on super low resolution gaming entitled, "How low can you go?" They were trying to see how few pixels they needed to make a great game.

It is fun, crazy, and occasionally a little boring. It is defintely cool to see different kinds of designers, the work they do, and the way they present. All the architects never have enough time to present. They gamers don't have enough to say to fill their time. We could learn a lot from them.

We'll go to St-Sulpice pour une pichet aprés la soirée Pecha Kucha.

The Way Studio Works

Focused making, review, editing, adjustment, and improvement are the key part of studio culture and performance, not getting it done. These are not tasks, they are lessons- etudes or canons on urbanism. We're not the sort of teachers who gladly shirk from teaching because you choose not to take the criticism and review necessary for you to improve and professionalize your work. We're not satisfied or relieved when you don't engage us. We have things to teach you. Just doing it is not learning. Diligently, persistently, curiously, and personally learning about the making of architecture is what we're doing. It is how we professionally train. Focus in the studio on your work. Quit making distractions for yourself. Shut off the IM, videos, Facebook, etc. etc. In fact, shut off your computers when in class unless accessing project information.

Schedule for the Rest of June

We're going to make some adjustments to the schedule based on Grant's leaving date and the Québec national holiday, Fete St-Jean Baptiste, which is Wednesday the 24th.

Wednesday, 17 June: Studio Reviews from 10h00 to 12h00 and 14h00 to 18h00. No drawing class. Everyone present and all work completed so far ready to pin-up at 10h00. Late people will not present.

Thursday, 18 June: Optional trip to the Expo Islands. Start at McGill at 10h00 for a presentation, lunch, then meet at 13h00 at Métro Station Jean Drapeau for a tour. Tour will be a loop back to Station Jean Drapeau and will finish by 17h00. It will be a walking tour. I will ride to the station rather than take the Métro. You are welcome to join me on the ride across Pont Jacques Cartier (the big green bridge) to the meeting place.

Friday, 19 June: Regular class schedule of Drawing at 10h00 and Studio at 14h00.

Weekend Grading

Monday, 22 June: Studio at 14h00.

Tuesday, 23 June: Grant's final studio reviews from 10h00 to 13h00 and 15h00 to 18h00. Everyone present at 10h00.

Mercredi, 24 Juin: C'est la Fete St-Jean Baptiste! There will be concerts, fireworks, and fun all over the city. Go work in the morning and then enjoy yourselves in the afternoon and evening. Don't be lazy! John the Baptist wasn't.

Thuesday, 25 June: Regular class schedule of Drawing at 10h00 and Studio at 14h00.

Friday, 26 June: Regular class schedule of Drawing at 10h00 and Studio at 14h00.

Next required meeting is on 6 July. The class is finished on the 27 July.

Ottawa Cost

Reservations are made at Carleton. Everyone has a double room except one lone wolf. For all but the loner the cost is right at $45CDN. The lone wolf pays $65. Pair up and identify the lone wolf. They take plastic and cash.

Ottawa Schedule

Things that you all will need to do are in bold.

Schedule for Thursday:
1) Brian pick up rental car on St-Laurent at 11h00.
2) Go home and load own stuff.
3) Go to Solin by 12h00. Pick up Lauren, Carrie, and Grant.
4) Go to McGill at 13h00. Truck goes to McGill. Load truck with bikes.
5) Car and truck leave Montréal for Ottawa at about 14h00.
6) Arrive at Carleton in Ottawa at about 16h00.

Schedule for Friday:
1) Car and truck pick up students at 08h30 at bus station and shuttle to Carleton.
2) Group check in and assembly by about 10h00.
3) Touring from 10h00 to 18h00. (there will be a meeting of the people in the drawing class)
4) Stanley Cup game 7 is on CBC TV. Everyone in the town will be watching that. It is like their Super Bowl.

Schedule for Saturday:
1) Touring from 10h00 until about 18h00.
2) Shuttle students to Bus Station for 20h00 bus.

Schedule for Sunday:
1) Leave Ottawa at about 14h00.
2) Everyone come get their bikes from the studio at about 17h00.

Tuesday is a Work Day

It is supposed to rain cats and dogs on Tuesday. Therefore, there will not be a tour scheduled. Today's 10h00 tour and our tours in Ottawa will suffice.

I am OK with the fact that you all have decided that these tours are not valuable enough to participate in but it is perplexing. I'm sure you have your reasons. I'll keep doing them throughout June but will not do them in July.

These are the same paths and points that groups from TTU have gone to for 10 years now. These events have always been tacitly "your choice" and the class workload this year is no different than in years before, but this is the first year that the majority have not taken part.

I've taught many, many studios now. I've always sensed that your class year was a very intelligent group and that there are some very interesting personalities at play in the collective. That's why we keep after you all and aren't satisfied with what you've done so far, regardless of what obstacles that you've felt have been put in your way. There is more to university than getting the coursework done and satisfying the instructor. There hasn't been a lot of example of that for you to observe. This doesn't always seem to be a faculty of wonder and joy in our presentation of professional content. But you're knee deep in this thing now and you've got to generate your own wonder for what you're going to do for the rest of your life. Otherwise, its going to suck. You'll treat it like a job, not a full profession with civic and moral responsibilities in matters of designing and managing the built environment. Give up the sense of efficiency and become more curious and engaged- to a fault try being more of a tinkerer and less of a scientist in your work. The work is the investigation, not theh result or manifestation of it. If studio meetings are like an athletic or musical practice then the goal of the event is not finishing but growing and engaging.

Access to Building

Access to the building has gotten even more complicated. According to a kind engineering student that led me through a back way into the building (ten minute maze of a walk), even his magnetic card doesn't work on the interior side door as of yesterday.

So...

To get into the building, go to the side entrance and yell up to the third floor to your left. That is where your fellow students are working and they will come down and let you in the door. They should be able to hear you easily.

It is important today that someone be in the building to let people in so you all can work tonight. We will sort out the magnetic card problem tomorrow.

Monday Walking Tour of Vieux Montréal

I will do a walking tour of old Montréal Monday morning for you and for our newly arrived colleagues. The tour will be about 2.5 miles long. The timing is to be determined.
Here's the general path, starting at the Place d'Armes (the Cathedral) and ending at Square Victoria.

View Tour de Vieux Montréal in a larger map

Sunday Studio

I will be in studio from 12h00 - 13h00** Sunday to discuss work for the coming week with anybody who is interested.

See you tomorrow.

**I may be running a bit late**

Ottawa Particulars

So, here's Nichole's notes on Ottawa:

The bus is cheaper than the train, by far.

The bus leaves almost hourly from:
Station Cenrale d'Autobus Montreal
505 boulevard de Maisonneuve Est.
Montreal QC H2L4R6
(This is at Station Berri-UQAM)

We're going to carry bikes down in a truck. We'll ask you to get your bikes to a common location on Thursday morning. Ottawa is a great biking city and we'll be able to see three times as much in our two days in the city. It is a unique city in North America. It is the only purely Victorian city (made by Victoria) in North America. It is trés Anglais but on the edge of le Nouvelle France. When Ft-Worth and Austin were laid out Ottawa was becoming a capitol city.

The joke is that English Canada went from Victorian to Post-Modern directly.

Ottawa is the city of Dan Akroyd, Tom Green Alannis Morrisette, Peter Jennings, and others.

I got my professional degree there in the best architecture school building I've ever seen. Carleton's building is a unique construction made the very same year as our architecture building- 1966. We'll tour it as well.

The best bus to Ottawa is the Friday morning bus leaving Montréal at o6h00 and arriving in Ottawa at 08h20. From the station in Ottawa we'll pick you up at the bus station and take you to Carleton to get your accommodation and bicycle.

Saturday night you can get the 20h00 bus from Ottawa to Montréal and arrive at 22h20 in Montréal. You all should try to get on to the same bus.

I'm booking all of you for one night's room. You'll pay Wednesday or upon arrival.

Make sure to select student discount on the bus purchase. Everyone thaink Nichole for doing this research.

Greyhound.com
Montreal- Ottawa

Sunday Ride

Carrie and I will bike up to an archaeological park on the north shore of the city Sunday. All are welcome to join us. We'll leave at 11AM on bike from the the western corner of Parc Lafontaine (where Cycle Pop is at). We're going about 15 miles round trip and almost all of it on bicycle paths. We'll stop on the way up at Marché Jean Talon and get some lunch at the farmer's market, then eat it up at the parc archaeologique. We will be back BEFORE 4PM. I'll go straight to McGill from that trip and make sure there's a way into the studio for you all. That will be between 4PM and 5PM.

Let me know by commenting on this post if you want to go with us.

View Larger Map
Time permitting we'll go look at this nearby Phalansterie (Fourierist Prison, as Foucault writes about). It should be interesting to you. Its the last place they executed a woman in Canada (hanging).

Review : Thom Mayne's New BLDG in NYC

There's a well written and relevant review of Thom Mayne's new BLDG for the Cooper Union in NYC. Watch how in the writing facts are arranged to both explain (describe, reflective and empirical writing) and expound (dialog, projective and intuitive writing). NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF explains it well and makes good points about how it might otherwise be.

The article is HERE.
A slide show of the BLDG is HERE.

Then think about how the BLDG is described as an urban event or element in the city, just as yours could be. Try to consider in your drawings a civic sense to the place. Where do people pause, congregate, collect, disperse, etc? Where is the space vectoral and where is the space non-vectoral and static? What is it about the architecture (BLDGs) at those places that makes the space operate in these civic ways? Why doesn't anyone stand outside of the Customs House except smokers who'd rather be inside? Maybe that has to do with all those lines that surround that building? There is a relationship in all of this between the way things are shaped, formed, laidout, and otherwise constructed and the way they operate. There isn't a necessary relationship or a universal way that things have to to associate with events. But in every situation in architectural thinking there is a way they do relate. The associations are always situational, never universal. As the Ft. Worth art critic Dave Hickey says, "Architecture only has to work where it is."

Studio Syllabus Excerpt

course schedule

Week 1 Site Graphical Studies
June 1 First Class Date

Week 2 Site Graphical Studies / Form, Surface, & Use Models
June 8 Major Review of Site Graphical Study

Week 3 Form, Surface, & Use Models / Models, Diagrams, & Planimetric Projections
June 17 Major Review of Form, Surface, and Use Models (First Grade)

Week 4 Models, Diagrams, & Planimetric Projections
June 23 Major Review of Models, Diagrams, and Planimetric Projections
June 26 Last Class Day Before Break

Week 5 Models, Diagrams, & Planimetric Projections / Form, Surface, & Use Models
July 6 First Day of Classes Back

Week 6 Form, Surface, & Use Models / Site Graphical Studies
July 13 Major Review of Form, Surface, and Use Models (Second Grade)

Week 7 Site Graphical Studies
July 22 Last Class Meeting
July 27 Final Review (only projects that are A and B grades after 2/3)

August 5 Final Submission (Third Grade)

Schedule for Wednesday 3 June

10h00 to 12h00 - Drawing class meets at studio.
14h00 to 18h00 - Design class meets at studio.

Studio

We've been in the studio since 09h00 and have some keys for you all.  We'll be here until 12h30.  To get a key you will need to give us a 15$ (CDN) deposit, refundable when we return the key later this summer.  Magnetic cards for getting into the building after hours are 10$CDN (refundable deposit).

There are three t-squares up here.  They are first come, first served.

1) Site Graphical Studies

This diagram shows the approximate extents needed for your study.  The area to be included in these drawings is represented approximately by the inverted area.  Each drawing should show evidence of an individual investigation and interpretation of the site.  The drawings should not be merely a documentation of existing conditions and should engage the particulary palimpsestic conditions unique to the location.

A. X-ray Plan:  Beginning with the physical conditions of the site, develop a layered representation of built and un-built realities of the area.  The drawing is not limited to a single normative elevational datum or set of drawing conventions.  One or more notational strategies must be developed to synthesize various types and layers of information in the drawing – the emergence of unrealized relationships in site will be dependent on the successful (legible) interaction of the layers of the drawing.

B. Site Section MRIs:  Draw a series of sections through the site and immediate context at 10’-0” intervals.  The sections should be oriented perpendicular to Place d’Youville and should include spaces below ground.  The sections should each only convey the things that are at the cut, nothing beyond.

C. Unfolded Elevations:  Draw two “unfolded” elevations, comprised of both the elevations and facades (all vertical surfaces) engaging the site.  Each drawing will begin with a façade of an adjacent building facing Place d’Youville, proceed to the interior of the site and end with the opposite façade facing Rue Saint-Paul.