Final Project

I have used this class as a way of further exploring, analyzing, and reflecting on my architectural experiences during my undergraduate collegiate career at Ohio State.  Some of the micro projects have led me to portray a little about my time in Knowlton Hall.  These have provided me the opportunity to show some slanted views into the "studio culture" and what it is like being an architecture student.  However, these views do not really represent the core element of architectural education: studio.
Most of my time outside of class is spent at my studio desk in the wee hours of the morning working on projects.  Lots of students, like myself, spend countless hours outside of class just working on studio design projects.  I felt that it would be important to portray the process of collection/trash buildup that occurs every quarter as a studio progresses and students get more and more tired.
I wanted to try to attempt a cartoon version of drawing that I have never had the opportunity to do before.  I got the idea from my initial cartoon making exercise in the super power micro project.

These images show a cartooned version of myself at my desk, working on projects at all hours of the night.  The trash buildup is exponentially increasing in every image as I and other students get more exhausted as the quarter goes on and care less and less to pick things up.  Coffee cups are strewn about the floor in an attempt to demonstrate how tired I am.  The images on the little computer screen are actually images of projects I have worked on throughout my collegiate career.  They appear chronologically, tracing my development through school in a weird representation.  While making these images I had the opportunity to reflect on all my experiences in those wee hours of the morning as well as poke fun at myself more living in and participating in this messy, insane environment.  The situation is slightly exaggerated but I felt it necessary to demonstrate the idea I was trying to get across.
I enjoyed trying to make a cartoon out of everything that normally exists around me in studio, giving it a more lighthearted appearance than it actually appears.  The only "real" things are  the images of my projects, but again these were also fabricated so in a way they are cartoons as well.  Looking back on this now, I wish I had made one more image of myself working on this project.  Due to my final reviews for studio, I was stuck making most of this project in the late night hours when I could find the time. 

Final Project Brainstorming

In a similar vein as a lot of my other projects for this class, I want to use this final project as an opportunity to explore my undergraduate experience as an architecture student.  For my narrative, I am interested in portraying a typical cycle of studio. In this narrative, I want to portray how I (like many other students) stay up all hours of the night producing work for class, only to have an instructor bash the idea or suggest an alternate direction for a project.  I plan to show some of the projects I have completed during my 3 + years at Ohio State, which maybe will give me a chance to reflect back on those of experiences.  When working on the super power mini-project, I developed an interest in cartooning and I plan to explore that here, albeit I am interested in attempting a slightly more illustrated style.

I found this picture while scouring the internet and found it really interesting, sad, and inspirational all at the same time.

Cathedral

I enjoyed this narrative and was very interested in each little twist from the start.  I typically have problems with people who are intolerant and don't except others, so from the beginning I was at odds with the narrator.  Perhaps that made the reading more interesting for me though.  I did appreciate how the narrator slowly started to makes attempts at grasping an understanding of the blind man's world and began to become somewhat sympathetic to his situation.
This article raised a really interesting idea for me.  I have always been a visual person.  My architectural education over the last three and a half years have led me to be even further rooted in the appearance of things visually.  Often times the best student projects in our studio portray a thesis or suggestion simply through imagery.  Words tend to weaken an argument and so we strive to eliminate the need for verbal explanation in our presentations.  The story about the blind man reminded me that such a form of communication is not the only way of demonstrating an idea.  Other forms of art that introduce smells, sounds, etc. begin to explore this.  The blind man, despite being very aware of his surroundings as described by the narrator, required more detailed descriptions of the world around him or needed to feel things rather than see them with his eyes.  I think I would greatly struggle in a world where I could not see things with my eyes, but then I guess there are other ways of "seeing" the world.

Microproject 5

My friends always make fun of me for having way too many cards for various things in my wallet.  My wallet is usually pretty fat haha.  But whenever I look at them, I can justify keeping all of them.  Most of them are frequent user cards for food or grocery establishments and art supplies stores where I buy things for my architecture classes. The top image shows them all laid out.  The next image shows them all in a stack.  While I do not actually keep all of them in my wallet at once, when they are all stacked up they measure almost 1". 
That does seem to be way too much to be carrying around my back pocket.

So in order to apply my assigned actions of: to collect or to simplify, I would love to smash or squash or the cards in my wallet down.  Essentially this would simplify the process of searching through my wallet for the card I need and to collect them all into once spot.  The last image shows my idea for a card in the future that, similar to a driver's license, shows your face, but instead of showing identification info, all of my cards are displayed to define who I am.  In a way this is more descriptive of my life than listing off my height, weight, eye color, etc. like a normal license or identification card.  The last image shows the cards I probably use most often, simplifying the number of cards I have as well.

My entry for a 24 hour design competition held in Knowlton Hall

Pixelated

I could not decide on a typical superpower so I took a slightly different take on the assignment.  So much of what I do in terms of presenting my studio projects deals with broad ideas down small details or some some cases photoshop pixels.  Renderings and other imagery I have produced for in my undergraduate career have required the use of photoshop to nitpick details and pixels in order to properly convey a project thesis.  Taking this in mind, along with the fact that architecture consumes most of my life and "free time", I decided to experiment with the idea of pixelating myself into architecture.  The two images shown above are attempts at this process, one taking a inspiration from Andy Warhol and the other attempting to look like a comic book. If I had to relate this to the idea of a superpower, I guess I would say that in my world everything is pixelated and by being pixelated or dematerialized, I could use architectural buildings and monuments (such as the Bean in Chicago) to travel the world. It took me awhile to find the exact effect I was looking for but now that I have finished this one, I am interested in showing myself in other places around the world