Drawn and Architectural (well maybe not so much)

Part of our architecture program has been training us to see the world through our pencils, seeing in a whole new way. Here are a few sketches done over the past week, experimenting with medium and taking contour drawing (not letting the pencil leave the page, or at least try for one continous line) into my daily practice.

Two Views

More snapshots from within the GSD... maybe this will be a weekly feature?

Week 2: Down and Up again

This week, thankfully, we started a two-week project. The first week had been a little frantic and quite disorienting. This week we began to think about housing but from an abstract perspective.

We began by abstracting a relationship from pop culture. I picked Carl and Russell from the most recent Pixar movie, Up. I deduced the absence of a loved one brought the two characters closer together. From that I abstracted the idea that void brings together. Sort of like a central piazza, or a building's courtyard.


After quick sketch models and watercolors exploring the relationship, we plunged into the task of constructing 19 rectangular cube volumes. We would then have to put them together putting smaller volumes around two bigger volumes in two contiguous sets, all the while keeping our abstract idea in mind.

From this model we then tried to draw the space between the two volumes and formulate a diagram of our idea that would serve as a guide for the development of our project. The idea of void as a force to bring together developed further into the process of contraction and expansion (which makes sense since narrow streets expand into large open city squares.



Then we drew axonometric drawings of our cube compositions. As if learning plans and sections wasn't enough, this week we ventured into three dimensions! It was a wild ride, and I was seriously confused for a long time. Trying to use my T-Square and my triangle to figure out how to do things... But in the end I came out with a lovely drawing and a cool overlayed diagram done on vellum.



From here, we were instructed to build models of the exterior spaces and the interior spaces, keeping our idea at hand, along with the distilled diagram and the cubes. I came up with a model showing exterior spaces in foamcore and interior spaces in chipboard. I tried to use the ideas I had developed to push my design idea further.


Along with this design process, I also had very strong emotional reactions to the whole process. The first week had really tired me out and I was feeling drained, physically, emotionally and mentally by the whole process so far. It's a rigorous program. There's no doubt about it. They really try to show you how architecture school will be. Some people can handle it, others can't. At a certain point in the week I was just resistant to all tasks set before me. I am the type of person who wants to understand the way things work, who wants to understand how to do things. This program has really thrown me into things and it can be very overwhelming because you don't always have the time or the know-how to complete tasks to the best of your ability. Or at least you don't have the time to really reflect on what it is you are doing. So far, it's all super fast-paced (although it is slowing down somewhat).

But I rose above. My instructor was very encouraging. I took two nights off to myself. I found inspiration in So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD), dancers who have to face new styles without knowing anything and having to perform like pros. I adopted the acronym SYTYCD and substituted Design for Dance. It will be my inspiration. I will breathe, I will do my best, I will learn how to not take things too seriously, have fun and do it all with a smile.

Drawn and Architectural

My first attempts at sections, plan and elevation. The line weights are all wrong, but you've gotta start somewhere. Trial by fire... more like trial by inferno.

Two Views

I turned around during our critiques last Friday and noticed lovely views of Memorial Hall and the Science Center. Very geometric sectional views. And I love the overlay effect of the light reflections on the windows.

Coop Living

For these 6 weeks I am spending in Boston, I managed to find a nice cooperative house located between Harvard and Porter Squares. It's fun to come into a living arrangement where there are 8 other people milling about and where we share things. There's always good food in the fridge and plenty of grains to choose from. You never know who is doing what, or where you'll encounter your next conversation. It is a lovely little micro-community and I definitely feel safe and happy to return to the house after long days at the GSD.

Part of my routine is packing a lunch for my day in design. This past week there were massive amounts of 4 bean chili and rice and beans prepared and so I paired those with salads and fruit and granola bars to complete my lunches. I don't think I have ever eaten so many beans in one week in my life. Beans, beans good for your heart...

Part of living in the house means taking part in communal dinners on Wednesday. Right in the middle of my very hectic first week, I made the resolve to come home and eat with my housemates. It was so nice to have a sit down dinner, a moment of silence and gratitude beforehand and just be surrounded by the din of dinnertime conversation.

That's all for now, more news, photos and adventures to come as they unfold...

Week 1: Career Discovery Boot Camp

Last week was my first week and first foray into architecture. Only it wasn't a foray so much as a full blown waterboard immersion. Initially I was inspired; here we would be introduced to architecture and its design process, go on a wild ride. Over the course of one short week, we had learned to construct a cubic-shaped model (first image below), talk about the quality of spaces, and construct an architectural project consisting of a stair connecting two spaces. This last project involved everything from initial conceptual work in sketch and watercolor forms to building miniature sketch models out of bristol board to making a final model and its accompanying plans. Some days lasted longer than intended (I was at the Graduate School of Design [GSD] for 17 hours one day this week), and I definitely had multiple moments where I felt clueless and lost and also had one moment where I just broke down sobbing, anxious, restless and trapped. But the week culminated in a day of final critiques where we were exposed to other people's projects and we got to learn a little more of the process of design and how we could refine our own.



Welcome to the GSD, trial by fire in architecture.

I definitely consider myself to be a person who likes to know how things work before I plunge into a project. Thus, this week has been thoroughly disorienting. But I have learned a few things for sure.

The greatest lesson from this week that I have learned is that of knowing when to throw away your ideas and move forward in the design process. Previously, in my writing, I had always done very little editing, waiting for the moment of inspiration and forging ahead with clarity. In architecture, or at least in this process of design at the GSD, I am learning that you have to try things out, throw them away, forge further ahead, ambling through the jungle of design, every now and then stepping back to see your work, your ideas and try to be objective.

Let me show you/walk you through this week's project and tell you what I've learned through it.

We started with a task: bring in a staircase done by another architect. From this staircase we were instructed to extract an idea of the space it created. My staircase was the organically-winding one designed by Frank Gehry's for the Art Gallery of Ontario. The idea I extracted from it was the concept of intimacy. When you use this circulation device at the AGO, you feel surrounded, almost enclosed by the ascending space.

From the idea inspired by the staircase, our group leader, Quilian Riano, asked us to sketch the idea abstractly, explore it conceptually, let loose. We subsequently tried to continue looking for the idea in real spaces around campus. While Quilian loved the sketches I did, I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing, I felt lost, suspended in a conceptual space I didn't understand, without a view of where I was heading.





From these sketches, Quilian further asked us to explore the conceptual world of our idea and create a watercolor and three sketch models from that watercolor. I meandered into my watercolor, trying to follow the few guidelines given and reinterpreting my creation into 3D mock spaces to see what they created. I was captivated by my little yellow squares in my watercolor, thinking that they represented the moments of intimacy because they were sided closely by variations of the same colour. I then created models that mimicked those moments in the watercolor.





It was only at this point that we were given the real-world prompt for our staircase project. We were to build a staircase or circulation path from a tall space to a long space. I struggled to make the 1/8 scale model (1 in. = 8 ft.). I wasn't really sure how to create an architectural space. I wasn't sure what questions to ask so that I could build such a space. So I designed a little path but it didn't really inhabit the tall space, so I started over, and failed and then had a break down and then went back to the spaces in my watercolor to start again.


I then had a moment of inspiration to create small enclosed spaces of intimacy to be juxtaposed against larger wide-open spaces. I created a few little corners juxtaposed with wider spaces/landings. The little enclosures were meant to hold artworks, with the final moment at the top of the stair looking into the long room which would be a long gallery salon-style, filled floor to ceiling with art.




So the week brought me from foamcore to bristol to bass wood, from exacto knives to olfa blades, from sketch models to watercolors to drawings and plans. I was fully immersed in architecture without really knowing where I was. My mother very astutely compared it to learning a foreign language. It was as if I was thrown into the country where I knew nothing and asked to communicate. So I definitely struggled. I was thrown into the conceptual framework without having an idea of the final destination.

During my final critique I was praised for being able to inhabit the conceptual part of the project, finding a language of circles inside parentheses as a way of communicating intimacy. Where I failed, and I quite agree was in translating those sketches into architectural spaces. I did manage to create one space of intimacy in my final model -- that moment at the end of the long suspended hallway that looks into the longer gallery. The critics thought it had really succeeded because it was only at that moment that I had a specific purpose (or program) for that space.

An idea that kept coming up was the idea of architecture as a 'language'. This idea, inspired by Sartre and his contemporaries, expresses that architecture or math or someone's individual behaviour all represent languages. We are in essence trying to find our own language, finding the coherent system of elements that will make up our vocabulary and fill our imagined projects.

My task now is to more quickly get to the architectural moment and really work them out, figure them out, figure out how to shape spaces starting from an initial and seemingly disconnected idea. In the next project I will make that leap from Concept to Form/Architectural Space while more closely holding on to the Program for whatever it may be. Onwards we go, hopefully shedding the 17-hour days. The discover goes on...

Back to Boston: Comforts and Discomforts

Returning to Cambridge made me both excited and nervous. In a way, it felt like a home-coming, the places familiar, my new home a cooperative house literally one block over from my apartment of two summers ago. My first night saw the death of my cellphone charger (panic! my line of communication!) and the mass making of chili in the coop kitchen (hoorah for sharing and communal living), thus full excitement.

Tomorrow begins the adventure of Career Discovery at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I've heard excellent things and I've heard scary things. The Architecture program is supposed to be top notch and intense. It is also supposed to consume your life. For 6 weeks? I'm all in.

I'll hopefully be blogging more about the trials and tribulations of the program and provide a window into my developing design process.

Stay tuned.

Blue + Yellow = Eco-Green!

A fashion and photographic (fash-ographic? phot-ashion?) chromatic experiment...

In The Details...

I like wearing funky socks or wild Italian underwear. Only the observant (or lucky) few will notice my subtle love for colour.

Enjoy two colourful details, through sock shots. Orange in San Francisco. Purple in Montreal.

An overflowing and enthralling excerpt of Rawi Hage

There is something enthralling about Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game. He has such a descriptive, blunt and raw style. Sentences bubble over. Below, two sentences.

I lay on the bed and tried to sleep through the sound of the omnipresent engine, a sound that was loud but muffled like underwater signals from a clanking factory buried under seven layers of seas. I imagined a factory with armies of slave monkeys packing tuna in metal cans, and sticking on labels with esoteric languages, and arranging the cans in waterproof musical boxes screeching diabolic symphonies, and shipping them on the backs of seahorses to underwater villages filled with drowned soldiers, kidnapped maids, invading barbarians, treasure hunters and a princess who had been enslaved in a sealed bottle by a jinn with a single earring, and who was now waiting for a fisher to solve the riddle and take her back to her lost palace, where she would rejoin the caliphate in a garden of jasmine and amber, and stroll through the arches of Baghdad before the invading armies burned her favourite books and destroyed thousands of tales.

How Blue Are My Pants?

My Vacation From The Internet

Some spilled thoughts after my vacation from the Internet.

Early Thursday morning, I left for Vancouver/Whistler for a short family vacation. Along with leaving Montreal, I also decided that I would relinquish the Internet while I was out West. No gmail, no facebook, no googlereader, no nothing.

Over the course of my Internet-free 6 days, I sometimes felt an urge to check my email but I refrained. I felt relaxed, connecting with friends, old and new, and chilling out with my family. It felt good to be Internet-free.

Upon my return, I had 71 messages in my inbox (mostly crap) and over 1000 stories in my GoogleReader inbox (most of which I deleted). There was a need to catch up, but there was also a desire to hold on to that freedom I had found. What was I really connected to?

Often, I feel like being too connected to the Internet, feeling as if there is something to check at every second -- whether someone's facebook status or a breaking newsstory or gossip hot off the press -- breeds an artificial sense of connectedness and completely false insecurities. There needs to be a middle ground.

The moral of the story? Moderation is key. Spend less time in front of the screen. Check your email twice a day, not twice a minute. And instead of connecting across the net, actually connect with those around you, in the wide wonderful world.

For Walter

Today my family and I are at Whistler for the dedication of the Cheakamus River Bridge to my late grandfather, Walter Zebrowski. Here is the unabridged text to my speech.

Soon after my grandfather died, I changed my name. Before his death in 1996, I had been Stefan Rubin (although legally I had always been Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin). With his passing, I felt it was time to finally take my full legal name and honour my heritage, even if it meant plummeting to the end of the alphabet.

When I think of my grandfather, I remember all the words others have used to describe him: a Polish man of humble roots, a valiant WWII soldier, a Canadian immigrant, an egg farmer in British Columbia. And while he never lost his thick Polish accent, these things are not at the core of my personal memories of Walter. When I think of my grandfather, Whistler is inextricably linked with his memory.

Every year, we would come to Whistler, ski and visit Walter at his cabin on Cavendish Way. I remember a slightly imposing figure but a gentle soul. And a stubborn man, a true Polish trait that continues to run in the family. But above all he was a man who loved Whistler, his second home.

In our basement hang two frames. One, from 1975, written in elegant script recounts the dedication of a lake, Lake Eva, in honour of Walter’s daughter, my mother. The other, a black and white photograph, shows a man standing on top of a mountain, proudly posed with one arm on top of a fridge. In delicate handwriting, Walter has written: 1970 little Sproatt mountain, elevation 6650 feet, TV Rebroadcasting Station. Here he has captured his accomplishment - in a very modest way - adding little to the name of a sizeable peak and housing his TV rebroadcasting station in a refrigerator.

Regardless, you can see his pride. And I have always associated my grandfather with this proud accomplished outdoorsman and pioneering entrepreneur. Whistler was Walter’s home, he was excited to be a part of shaping the community and found his way of making meaningful contributions. While we in the family know a part of Walter will always be here, since his ashes are spread atop Sproatt mountain; today, we make a meaningful public dedication in his memory, so that a part of him will always be remembered at Whistler, his beloved home.

Made of This

Today ended a three-part series done by Nick Coleman, former Arts Editor for the UK newspaper, The Independent, written for The Economist's blog, More Intelligent Life (Read Part I, Part II, and Part III.) Our earliest memory shapes who we are today was basically the premise of the interviews.

So I reflected a bit on my own earliest memories and came up with a few...

My first dream was static. It was a closeup of a ladybug. While I don't remember how many dots it had, I remember its large size and unmoving nature. I was immersed in observation.

I remember this candy store on St. Laurent called LUX. You entered through a revolving door. It was an upscale and classy treat.

As a kid me, my brother and the two neighbours next door would set up a lemonade stand on the weekends when it was hot. One rainy day, for some reason, I was committed to selling lemonade. And I set up the stand and everything. Of course, there was no business for the committed child under the umbrella.

One afternoon, I was over at the neighbour's house in their backyard. I don't know why but I decided to eat grass. My mother scolded me severely (I must have had grass stains on my pants). I made up some excuse but, really, I was pretending to be a cow.

Arrived on Nantucket, all four of us in the family got in a car and drove to find our house for our vacation. I remember getting lost - as per usual - when we drove to our new home. It was a trademark of our vacations, getting lost on the first day.

As a child I read a lot and read lots of books about the Titanic and the Holocaust. I remember cherishing an old copy of Walter Lord's A Night to Remember.

In kindergarten, at one lunchtime, I threw out my sandwich because I was done. Somehow I was discovered and told not to be wasteful and finish my sandwich.

I remember watching Peter Pan but eating dinner simultaneously. It was a treat to eat in the TV room - since we were always forbidden to eat upstairs.

In what must have been grade 2, I was chosen as a child gifted in math and spent time playing fun logic games in this strange attic-like room located up a flight of stairs.


I'm not really sure which of these memories is the earliest, but they are all moments that, if I think just for a bit, float up to the surface.

Anne Michaels (cont'd)

Anne Michaels continues to write echoes of my life.
Below I've created poetic quotation cutout of her poem Sublimation.

"Your actions have taught me what it is to love -
that it's holding back, as well as holding.

[...]

It [was] ... you
who convinced me
that nothing can be unravelled to its core,
that truth is a field, a cage, a cloud of sound.

[...]

How else to reconcile you
with my family;
our knowledge of each other
an invisible hypotenuse"

SpringBurst

The trees have burst chartreuse and spring has finally come to Montreal. Thought I would share a few looks I came across in a Holt's Spring catalogue. I can't afford anything, but they're good for reference and inspiration [click images for larger version].

Shed those winter layers!

The place we fall to alone

I can barely read more than two poems. There is too much
to process. Worlds of ideas in created unspoken spaces.
I cannot linger long enough, knowing
I could breathe in beauty, truth, the question
and have breath enough.


*Inspired by the experience of reading Anne Michael's poem "Rain Makes Its Own Night" three times on the 535, headed to work, and not being able to read anything else for the rest of the ride. And here it is:

Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.
Lean beach grass sticks to the floor near your shoes,
last summer's pollen rises from damp metal screens.

This is order, this clutter that fills clearings between us,
clothes clinging to chairs, your shoes in a muddy grip.

The hard rain smells like it comes from the earth.
The human light in our windows, the orange stillness
of rooms seen from outside. The place we fall to alone,
falling to sleep. Surrounded by a forest's green assurance,
the iron gauze of sky and sea,
while night, the rain, pulls itself down through the trees.

How we love

There is mystery in how we love,
but not in why.
Like forgiveness, love is practical.

-Anne Michaels, "Pushed into the Dark"

The Importance of Ritual.

Namaste starts my every morning. It doesn't come quite at the beginning, but somewhere near the start, after many conscious deep breaths and some yoga. Having this ritual keeps me grounded, solid, strong.

The beginning does, after all, set the rest of the day into motion. Even if you get up on the wrong side of the bed, perhaps a ritual could correct the course.

I like to write emails to dear ones in the morning when my mind is fresh and the cogs begin to whir happily at the thought of a friend.

I often eat the same thing every morning, some cereal and a piece of fruit and perhaps a glass of water.

I'm also a morning shower person.

Generally I am a morning person. Even on weekends I get up around 7 or 8.

In falling into a routine, you can worry about other things, instead of trying to start that proverbial motor of the mind, revving the motor to start.

I am not the first to discover the morning routine, Daily Routines showcases the routines of many writers, artists and other interesting people do in getting their craft started.

Today, I was particularly energized by my routine. And Namaste stuck with me. In Sanskrit, this salutation means 'the divine in me recognizes the divine in you'. For some reason this phrase has a wondrous beauty to me, leveling judgment and seeing that in everybody that ties us all together. A simple acknowledgment of the marvel which is the human being. So today, on the bus, I tried to connect with others, not outwardly, but by quieting the monologue of judgment and thought and changing the course of how I personally related to others. And I smiled a little more.

How happy I am that after a little time, I've come to realize the weight and profundity of that strange little word that punctuates my every morning.