IWR-24

 INTERMODAL

Intermodal is a proposal for a modular school made from canvas and timber framing that can be assembled in situ and "flat-packed" in a typical international cargo shipping container. Its modularity and simplicity of materials makes it adaptable enough to be programmed beyond the functions of a school, also serving as temporary shelter, emergency aid station, or other community functions.

 THISMIA AMERICANA

The Thismia americana was a rare species of flower discovered in 1912 that once grew around Lake Calument in Chicago - an isolated population that survived in North America whereas the rest of the Thismia species are believed to have grown only in the Southern Hemisphere. Its last sighting was in 1916 before the area gave way to industrial development. There are preserved specimens but there have since been no wild sightings, and is presumed to be extinct.

 BURIED ALIVE

Buried Alive is an exploration in extreme claustrophobic moments through spatial enclosure or "open" confinement/isolation. Here, claustrophobia is largely a side effect of realizing that a simple but impenetrable medium (transparent or opaque) stands between confinement and freedom resulting in a loop of anxiety and panic. The proximity to freedom is constrained in a manner that is equally psychological and spatial. There's an intense, pressure-inducing or nerve-wracking irony and power in how a simple medium, whether it's the ground, the wall, or a pane of glass, can force two adjacent spaces, interior and exterior, to be so close yet so far away.

 INVICTVS

 / o \

 ( O )

 A WAY OF DOING BECOMES A WAY OF BEING

Whatever a man does in reality he himself becomes - he crafts and curates his reality. When you practice an art, something that should point to a particular value or set of values, you manifest that value symbolically through artistic expression - whether a painting, sculpture, or musical composition. The art by its very nature is in some respect a reflection of life, an outcome of a creative, productive effort, and meanwhile the artist becomes his art or, when dedicated, is consumed by his art. This conscious doing, or doing with persistent attention to detail, develops certain traits or characteristics in the artist; e.g. aesthetic appreciation, technical proficiency, commitment, efficiency. One thus becomes what one does - aware, discerning, grateful, faster, better.

What happens to the man who doesn't do what he allegedly values, or worse yet, does not genuinely know what he values, and therefore has values not worth doing? What happens to the man who adopts someone else's values as if they were his own, instead of crafting his own? He operates with a facade of values, values not truly his own though he may think otherwise. Instead of deriving his values from experience, from people and their ideas, he instead just takes them without further scrutiny. Whoever has learned to do what amounts to nothing, to do what one does not truly or actually value, will have everything done for him. He does not make himself, but others make him, or he is consumed by others. He becomes a reflection, not of himself, but of the values of others. He becomes, not necessarily a copycat, but a wayward impersonation of who he gleans his values from.

The task of being is most fulfilling and complete when one's ways of doing are fully aligned; i.e. doing according to genuinely crafted values, results in being according to those values. In my opinion, when achievement is the inevitable outcome of the alignment of actions with their values, this is the path of genuine, lasting happiness. I could probably write at length about what constitutes values that contribute to happiness, but to keep it short here, I think values that are most life-affirming, not nihilistic or simply hedonistic, impulsive, spontaneous, or some combination thereof, are the long-term values worth upholding, acting on or pursuing. Those are the values that reap the most reward even though they may not be the most immediate in outcome, and may not necessarily be easy to maintain or pursue.

 2019.0510 / SCENES FROM THE SKETCHBOOK

I've often entertained visions of anomalous and enigmatic structures of unknown origin and function, maybe stemming from an interest in ancient monuments, antiquity, or fictional lands or because Space Odyssey is one of my all time favorite films. I've been keeping a small "sketchbook" in Rhino of monumental and enigmatic architecture, primarily as practice for modeling in Grasshopper, but also as a kind of liminal type of video game level for exploration in Enscape. I imagined giant shallow seas one foot deep on a massive platform in the sky held up by a metal tube, a supermassive pyramid hundreds of times larger in volume than the largest pyramids on Earth, a twisted glass and steel obelisk in an empty grass field, mysterious pyramids in the middle of an ocean as a portal to hidden tunnels beneath the water, among other structures mostly possible in the digital domain. The rules of physics need not apply in the sketchbook, and in a world where architecture is no longer subject to gravity, architecture naturally tends to the otherworldly.

 2019.0327

 AVOID

I decided to keep myself busy with an Archoutloud competition this summer, Nuclear. Think I pretty much bombed this one... Certainly one to AVOID.

 POST UP!

Post Up! was an internal poster design competition open to students at the UIC School of Architecture in November 2016. The aim was to propose a projective lineup for the 2026 Lecture Series hosted by the school. The design should express a pedagogical trajectory and/or hypothetical cultural attitude in relation to architecture. This poster won Third Prize.

The cast of speakers generally reflects the sentiment of increasingly exaggerated and stylistic polemics that abandon the rampant asceticism of the prior two decades.

Frank Gehry: Nearing 100, the old guard Deconstructivist offers reflections and a retrospective on another decade of shit architecture.

Peter Marino: Invited because of his ties to the world of fashion, a world that reinvents itself constantly, and because of his acute awareness of what is and can be "in" and "cool".

Odile Decq: Offers insight on the worldwide success of the Confluence Institute for Innovation and creative strategies in architecture, and what that success means for the future of architectural education.

Leonard Koren: Serves as an enduring figure of the wabi-sabi aesthetic of impermanence, a counterpoint to the resurgent hysteria surrounding ornament and ostentation.

Ricky Jay: A magician near the end of his career offers insights on the world of image, illusion, fantasy, and authenticity - important links bridging magic and architecture. He is the first in a long-term plan for a lineup of non-architects.

 MAYANS

These are a few studies in deviant, glitchy, peculiar, simulated physics, tacky materialities, and strange characters that were produced in Maya as part of a seminar at the UIC School of Architecture in 2017. The aim was to extract a certain quirkyness inherent to the modeling software's most basic rendering capability. Some, despite being hard edged could be perceived as plush, squishy or toy-like, while others take on an almost retro character. As a popular platform for architectural rendering, such qualities might inform the perceptual impact on an architectural work in an alternative, non-realist manner. The present widely-held standard for rendering is to maximize realism for obviously good reasons. It could be worth thinking, however, about how a more playful perception of an architectural work could inform architecture in ways that temper a bit of that realist seriousness, not for its own sake, but rather to suggest another way to expand the reportoire of architectural and material qualities - if not in real life, then at least in their paper perception.

 PAVILIONS

These pavilions, in collaboration with three studio colleagues, emerged out of case studies for an architectural technology seminar in my first year of the UIC graduate architecture program. Each pavilion is a study in itself of modular characteristics derived from each case study.