Freshman Year in Review

Here are a few things I learned about architecture school in the past few months:

1) Even if you think you're a morning person, you actually aren't.
2) Architecture is like being a doctor on call. Meetings can be held at any time of the day, and on any day of the week.
3) It is more acceptable to create a ballsy design and fail, than to always stay on the safe side.
4) You will learn to cope with stress. Some cry, some yell, some shut down, and others stab themselves in the leg with Xacto knives, but everyone copes.
5) Showering, eating and sleeping schedules become somewhat more sporadic.
6) Generally speaking, architecture professors think they are God.
7) Flexibility is important.
8) The 3-D modeling program Form Z is pure, unadulterated evil.
9) Be humble, but don't be bashful.
10) Don't judge a man by his beard.


One of the biggest lessons I learned is that failure actually doesn't result in death.
I have failed engineering exams, art history quizzes, model reviews and rendering assignments, but I lived to tell the tale.

Because it's amusing and gratifying to review other people's failures (admit it), I'll post my most disasterous works here:

The worst digital rendering in the history of architectural renderings.

Actually, I take it back... This one is probably the worst.

Better, but still bad.

Yes, I scored a 37% on my second Architectural Engineering exam.

Go ahead and laugh. It's ok. I'm doing it, too.

I don't actually have a photo of the model I made for my full-scale room, but trust me,

it looked for all the world like this plant. Ask anyone.

Inexplicably, I thought it perfectly acceptable to make a base out of styrofoam.

Also, clay house models are a terrible idea.

There was also a video to accompany the adobe house project, and it was a doozy. Sadly, the file is too large to upload here. Oh well.

Now to appease my parents (who are paying exorbitant amounts of money for me to be here), I will show you that I learned a lot, too:

Here's a scan of one of the projects we did for Visual Communications -

plans and sections of the Rufer House by Loos.

Our VisCom study of perspective (plan and section of Uffizi superimposed).

This "sketch" somehow worked!

Here's one of my first projects done in the model shop. This is my take on the

grain room shown in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly."

The model of my proposed wind-powered grain miller to be

installed in the grain room stood about 2.5 feet tall.

And it actually worked much better than I had expected!

 I passed AE!

Here's a digital topographical model I made for Visual Communications.

The full-scale room I built last semester.

This is a slightly-less-terrible 3-D rendering of the flat-pack

bookshelves we made for VisCom.

Later I'll try to upload some AutoCAD drawings, construction documents and photos of my finished bookshelves. That was an interesting assignment... Stay tuned!