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Mar 20thSectional Perspective of Project “The Curious Case of the Hidden Niche”
Once again, you can see by my lack of posts, I’m having trouble managing this particular blog. This semester in general was extremely stressful oddly because of the other classes instead of studio. I realized it would be useful to have descriptions of courses that are required of the ENDS program and what it entails. So here it goes!
Semester 2:
ARCH 404 : Architectural History 1A with Sherry McKay
The course description is pretty ambiguous but it’s a very traditional art/architectural history course. It navigates throughout history by studying particular themes in architecture and how the styles and organization of the spaces align with the themes. We’re currently studying a mixture of art, architecture and orthogonal drawings. There’s a short paper and a longer paper along with a midterm and final.Personally, I’m adoring this course because it’s such a nice relaxing distraction from the psychotic nature of studio. I do know that other classmates find this course dull because it’s heavily correlated with history and no design involved at all. The professor is also very knowledgeable and easy to understand and the coursework itself isn’t very difficult but when it coincides with other courses, it can be crazy.
ENDS 404 : Environmental Design History with Susan Herrington
A historical study of certain themes related to the Environmental Design. This is strangely different from the architectural history course as it relates to landscape architecture and urban design as well. It’s helpful because sometimes you hear people throw around the terms “Modernism”, “Eclecticism”, “Typology” and honestly, I had NO idea what anybody was actually talking about. This course studies a certain theme every week with a lecture, a one-page paper/response and a student presentation. So these themes REALLY get ingrained in your mind and it’s nice to understand what people are talking about when they use these words.In terms of coursework, this is fairly light as well but the one-page response can get annoying fast but at the same time, you’re able to develop your writing skills very quickly.
LARC 440 : Site Analysis and Planning II with Will Marsh
Exactly as it sounds, the class is mainly based on studying the natural infrastructure (learn to love the hydrological cycle) and learning how to best integrate your design or land-use planning to the site landscape. You learn how to interpret the terrain from maps and local land forms, understand the dynamic nature of the landscape systems and creating site-responsive designs. The lectures are super entertaining but the class itself can be exhausting.
For coursework, this course combined probably takes up more time than studio itself. There are six mapping assignments for this course and for the first two assignments, collectively took at least 24 hours to complete. There’s also a notetaking journal requirement and a book review. Managing the workload for this course is literally a gongshow.
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Studio courses deserve a blogpost all to themselves but if you’re interested in the work that we do, check out the tag #ends302 or ends302.tumblr.com. We have to complete a tumblr for studio so it’s a pretty good collection of what we come up with.
Cheers!
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artificialelegance asked: Hey! I saw that you took the Intro to Arch course at Columbia last summer. I just applied for this summer and just wanted to ask how your experience was. I'm not an arch undergrad student, but have taken some fine arts/furniture design courses. I'd appreciate any comments or thoughts you have! Thanks!! I hope your studies are going well ;)
Oh hello! Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I did take the course at Columbia and the one they did very well when I took it is that they segregated the experienced students from the non-experienced ones. So basically every studio (class) is composed of around 12 people with a TA and a professor. I’ve never taken visual art courses before and I had experience with a few intro architecture courses. But I felt that the difficulty level was appropriate for me in my studio.
I had a great fun during my summer course and it honestly was a huge crash course into design. I would recommend you to do it because in addition to the studio, they have workshops and office tours which were also quite enlightening. But if I were to have a choice, I would take it after I had a year or two in arch undergrad first because I think you would get more out of it.
Anyways, hope that helps!
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on the intro workshop
Seriously sorry for the lack of posts to all the few people that are reading this. I dove in headfirst into the ENDS program and I haven’t had a chance to get myself together. After a whole semester, I have to say I’m enjoying it very much. It’s such a breath of fresh air from the past two years where it was really starting to feel like you’re drudging through all these random courses and getting nowhere. After talking to many of my colleagues, it doesn’t even feel like school anymore. It’s also very motivating to be in a group of hardworking and like-minded people. When you see your studiomate furiously sketching, you feel like you should do it too. All in all, it all really started with the Intro Workshop.
Intro Workshop
Before the fall semester starts, all incoming ENDS, MARCH and LARCH students give up the last rays of sun to do a two-week workshop that gives you a nice introduction to the program. It’s an additional $500 dollars and mandatory. It’s really the only time the ENDS students ever get to interact with M’ARCH students so it’s really interesting to see how graduate students work and how undergraduate students work. We get tours to places around Vancouver and some lectures and thankfully, some free food! For our workshop, the theme was resources and that was the idea we were suppose to think about throughout the two weeks.In our first week, we visited different locations all around Vancouver and we’re suppose to learn how to draw and think in different scales ranging from 1:1 - 1: 10000. We visited Wreck Beach, Richmond, EPCO Steel Plant, Seymour Watershed, Strathcona Neighbourhood and the Delta Landfill. As you can tell, most of the locations were supposedly “resources”. It was really interesting to see some of these places that usually, you would never be able to see, especially the steel plant. We had to finish a series of drawings from each location and lets just say that was quite a challenge for undergrads.
In the second week, we got into separate groups to come up with design installations for different areas of a SALA Intro-Workshop party which was fun. In our group, we got to figure out the designs for the seating lounge. It was like a crash course on how to figure out designs and learning to SIMPLIFY. I felt like it really us a good idea of working with people that you’re going to spend two years with and figuring out how to design in a big group which definitely WASN’T easy. I feel as if I could kill the people that I’ve only met for a week but at the very end, the party made the whole experience worth it.
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Overall, my first semester was extremely stressful. It took a long time to adjust to the intense schedule that the program expects from you. Most of time, I’m really either in class or in the studio from 9:30am until 9pm and everything takes double or triple time I expected it to take. But if I think if you’re really enjoy doing it, it’s not that bad at all. Time pasts by so quickly and I think the people that you’re with really makes the program what it is.
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on GSAPP Intro to Arch. and New York
Here is an ugly picture of a cool sculpture I made in the course.
Sorry for the sporadic posting but I’m in New York right now at Columbia University, taking an Intro to Architecture course. I will continue updating about ENDS as much as I can and I will also be evaluating this summer intensive.
This is also my first time in studio and in the Big Apple so I’m trying my best to find time to blog. It’s been a week in the course and I’ve already been in studio from 9am - 3am for past two days. Keep in mind this is INTRODUCTION to architecture so I’m expecting crazier things to come in the ENDS program. -
cloversmith asked: Hi! I am interested in the ENDS program but still have reservations about it. Do you mind if I ask you questions from time to time? Such as: are there any co-op options for the ENDS program? Or rather, have you heard how easy/hard is it to find a job after completing the program? etc. etc. Thank you!
Hello! Yes, I will answer questions to the best of my ability. I also know a few other older ENDS students from my workplace and I will probe their heads for answers.
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I know a lot of people are going to ask about my portfolio pieces to see how they can construct their portfolios accordingly. Here’s a small sample of what I had in mine. In all honesty, I wasn’t very proud of my portfolio and I really beat myself up after I submitted it because I procrastinated so much to the point at where many of my installation pieces were unfinished. I guess it’s a lesson learned and really you should spend a lot of time on it.
On the question of themes, I decided to write something up about the concepts I found consistent throughout my work.My first piece is chicken bone/thread construction of an insect creature. This is actually my favourite piece out of everything I did because I put a lot of work into it and it came out as I sort of expected.
The second piece is sort of this experimental piece where I reversed the roles of paper and ink and had a paper construction on an ink canvas. And lastly, it’s a drawing of fish and pagodas because I like fish and pagodas.
I talked about my theme as focused around ephemeral and temporal products. Things that will expire or grow into something new or in transition. The insect showed the metamorphosis from insect to winged creature. The reaction between the ink/paper sculpture turned into a gradient over time so I took photos of its change and illustrated it in my portfolio.
Sometimes these piece feel like they’re so out of reality but I’ve recently realized how abstract and conceptual the profession is. You really have to throw your mind out of the window and stop thinking pragmatically. I’m usually a pretty realistic and cynical person so sometimes when I’m writing stuff like that, I feel like I’m bs-ing the whole thing. But hey, it’s academia for ya! I also have to argue from another standpoint that it’s through these abstractions that you study where you can find form and ideas for your projects.
For some blasted reason, I made it and the best advice I can give all you budding architectural students is don’t try to mimic other people’s pieces or design a lot of architectural things. What they really want to see is a portfolio illustrating what your skills are about composition, line, colour, drawing etc and a portfolio that portrays WHO YOU ARE and how YOU CAN BRING A NEW PERSPECTIVE to your ENDS class.
Good Luck!
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UMM.. WHERE IS THE BATTLESTAR GALACTICA?
APPROPRIATE. FOR. THIS. BLOG.
Great collection of iconic vehicles from Sci-Fi by Josh Ln including the DeLorean from Back to the Future, The Millenium Falcon from Star Wars, The Ghostbusters’ Station Wagon, The Enterprise and The Tardis from Doctor Who.
(via ryanpanos)
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on being super busy and lists
I barely have four posts and I’m already neglecting this! Sorry to the two people reading this blog. I have 3 or 4 blogposts lined up in my head to write about but I haven’t gotten a chance to settle down and write because I’m doing the following things :
- working for Elementslab! A research lab at UBC SALA that manages an urban design reference called elementsdb. It is SUPER COOL as in Simcity for the real world.
- preparing for a summer intensive architecture course in New York! I’m trying to organize everything as I trapeze to study for a month at GSAPP.
- trying to pass my driving exam so I can get a license. Ironically, I’ve really bad spatial reasoning and I’m trying to be an architect.
- having my birthday! I’m turning 20 in 3 days and I’m trying not to have an existential crisis about my life and how old I am.
I’ve been meaning to talk about the following things.
- portfolio pieces! Yay! Everybody wants to see how they can get into ENDS!
- reconciling my love for all things scifi and architecture through ray bradbury
- updates from New York about my course there!
- ENDS schedule and what it all means
Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon! -
Jun 6thIs 3D Printing Taking the Artistry out of Architecture?
One technological element that is truly hitting its stride in the architecture sector is that of 3D printing. While CAD and BIM allow architects and designers to draw and create using a computer, 3D printing takes these exact, computer-developed plans and prints them as is.
The absolute exactness of this architectural development medium means speed and precision are high on the list of positive elements associated with 3D printing. There is no level of human error involved and exact specifications can be tested in miniature form.
It is this lack of the human element, however, that provokes the question: could 3D printing take the artistry out of architecture design?
According to Yale School of Architecture dean Rober A. M. Stern, the personal, tactile nature of design development is paramount in his works.
“I personally still make little drawings and I like to use sculptors modeling clay, which I was introduced to by Louis Kahn who used it,” says Stern. “But it goes back in the architectural terms tradition in art terms in general to the tradition of sculpture. And I like to shape things, and mush them around, and play with shapes.”
When I was taking classes at Emily Carr, my professor made us work with our hands.I find that by feeling the materials or noticing a beautiful shape in the scraps adds so much to your design process. For one of my projects, I ended up flipping my model upside down and ended up with a better result. The designs are meant to be experienced by people and I’m afraid the rise of 3D printing might take away from experiencing our products as we create them.
(via archistudent)
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Anonymous asked: did your portfolio revolve around a certain theme or was it a collection of your best works? :)
Hello Anon!
I have no idea how you manage to find my blog a day after I created it but at least I have one reader!
To answer your question, I had a collection of my “best” works and it also revolved around a theme. Naturally when I was creating the pieces for my portfolio, my interests and inspiration pushed my work around a very broad theme. It certainly wasn’t intentional but when I saw the trend emerge I decided to write a little bit about it in my portfolio.
If you’re worried about whether to center your own portfolio around a theme, I’d say do what you feel best represents your experience and your background. Your portfolio needs to show your physical skills (drawing, sculpting etc) and your understanding of visual aesthetics. I know people with portfolios without a theme who were accepted into ENDS so I don’t think it’s a big deal.
^ I want to be an architect who likes to steal cats.
< a blog about my adventures in the Environmental Design program at UBC.
