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Week 7

In Greg Lynn’s “Animate Form”, he talks about motion and animation and how the concept can be applied to architecture. I connected this to my studio class as we worked on designing our models. The reading explains how architects incorporate motion and movement to inanimate objects like buildings and sculptures. As technology advances and computer-generated drafting has been simplified, the ability to model buildings and be able to examine how the space aesthetically simultaneously has almost become seamless. In class, as we work on our models, we are supposed to incorporate this “flow” throughout our project. A building that gives the illusion of motion and flow attracts people to it to explore ad see the rest of the building. Respectively, the drawings of buildings are supposed to illustrate said flow of the building. The reading also shows how simple representation of the flow of architectural forms can create art, like the example of Duchamp “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2”. The flow of these paintings and buildings is what gives us the sense of their “living” aspect and it is was intrigues us to experience them.

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Week 6

As a class, we visited the Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles this week. It was my first time going to this museum, and I was thoroughly impressed. Obviously, I first noticed the eye-catching façade of the museum; the honeycomb shape and grand size of the panels not only compliment the building itself but the surrounding buildings as well. Walking into the museum, the first floor is a total opposite experience than the outer face of the building. The floor is one large circular room with the walls having a smooth look to them and these “tendons” supporting the ceiling. As we moved into the top floor, the walls have the honeycomb shape again from the exterior of the building but not much else architecturally. Some of the artwork contained in the gallery space is interesting but some of it seemed pointless and out of place. My favorite part of the museum was on our way out when we get the view of the vault where the rest of the huge art collection is stored, the amount of art and the size of the vault was very striking. Overall, the trip to the museum was educational and I will be revisiting to experience the other exhibitions that were unfortunately closed when we visited.

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Week 5

This week we talked about Foucault and his discussion of heterotopology. We talked about how different eras and movements in time shape how buildings and structures look and are built. For example, in downtown LA, there used to be many Victorian buildings built many years ago but were torn down and replaced by the second largest concentration of government buildings, behind Washington D.C. Also, how the space or building is occupied forces us to experience the space a certain way, broadening the sense of architecture to just building buildings. As architects, we try to portray how someone in the space should feel and experience it, although extremely difficult since everyone will not have the same emotions towards the structure. However, those emotions can change with what or who is occupying the space. For example, the empty space that the Broad museum had when it was first built emits different emotions and experiences than it does now that it contains a wide range of artwork on display. Or in a larger scale, a full and lively city with people would be eerie and lonely if it were vacant. Architects try to balance the intentional use of a space and their design to create a space that is both aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time.

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Week 4

As human beings, our memories are what help shape us and our personalities. Our most memorable experiences are the ones that have affected us in one way or another. As architects, we create spaces that people visit and experience, in which we attempt to produce positive memories. We input our own emotions into our design and try to have people mimic those emotions when they experience the space. In the “Thinking Architecture” article by Peter Zumthor, he talks about how images from his life are connected to his training and work as an architect. These images come anywhere from his professional life in architecture gathered over the years to his childhood in his aunt’s kitchen. I believe that this applies to anyone designing, not only to architects. We use our past experiences and what we have seen and not necessarily copy the same ideas, but incorporate what we liked from the experiences and modify it to make it our own. And once built, our designs will affect people differently and create different images and experiences within them, and they could possibly design for themselves their own take of your work, creating a ripple effect of many different designs from the same inspiration.

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5 cites for SFMOMA Expansion

Gardiner, Ginger. “SFMOMA Facade.” CompositesWorld, CompositesWorld, 1 June 2015, www.compositesworld.com/articles/sfmoma-faade-advancing-the-art-of-high-rise-frp.

Kreysler, William, et al. “Qualifying FRP Composites For High-Rise Building.” Fabricate 2017, UCL Press, London, 2017, pp. 130–137. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n7qkg7.21.

"SFMOMA Expansion / Snøhetta" 04 May 2016. ArchDaily. Accessed 12 Oct 2017. http://www.archdaily.com/786762/sfmoma-expansion-snohetta/

"Snøhetta: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Expansion, San Francisco, California, U.S.A., Design 2011- , Construciton -2016." GA Document, no. 138, Aug. 2016, pp. 78-95. EBSCOhost, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bvh&AN=758562&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Volner, Ian, and Matthew Millman. “A Look Inside the New SFMOMA Wing by Snøhetta.”Architectural Digest, 29 Apr. 2016, www.architecturaldigest.com/story/san-francisco-museum-of-modern-art-snohetta.

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Week 3

Technology has played a huge role in the advancement of architecture and how we can create and design. As an architect, it is important to be up to date and even futuristic to be able to come up with the new and improved ideas before others do. For the longest time, architects had to draw their blueprints and 3D drawing by hand and only using basic shapes, which were basically constrained to circles, rectangles, and straight lines, to create more complex and irregular shapes. With the help of computer generated drawings, not only have we been able to speed up the process but also expand the scope of work that architects are able to do. With the new software, we can create and modify drawings and some would consider them art by adding color and perspective to them. But others would visualize and interpret the drawing as a totally different concept. That’s what I think allows architecture to expand its horizon and scope of work to places further than just buildings. I have come across a quick documentary about an architect becoming the lead designer for some of Nike’s biggest shoe styles. Other architects create huge abstract sculptures and pieces of art with concrete concepts and ideas.

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Week 2

LA is not a typical city with typical urban ways of city making. Reyener Banham describes Los Angeles in four ecologies; surftopia, autopia, foothills, and the plains of id. Each of the ecologies have different characteristics and environments and should not be functioning together but they somehow do in LA. Surftopia are the beaches that are known worldwide and have a really relaxing and care free vibe. Autopia is unlike the beaches, driving in LA is a very fast paced and chaotic but somehow still organized. The foothills are where the rich live now for the privacy and seclusion but before the time of the automobile, the poor had to live in the hills due to the constraints of traveling up the hills And the plains of Id are the flat lands where most of the population lives. I believe it is the diverse cultured population within LA that plays a big role in making LA the city it is. With the amount of people in the city, the cultures are forced to coexist and function together in order to keep the city running and able to adapt like no other city in the world.