Bored At Work (RARE)

So long time no update! How's everyone doing, thought I'd post something... kinda random but still an update regardless. So I haven't really doing much so far into my Summer break except work and enjoy my free time. And for those of you who don't know I work in the pharmacy of a CVS. Well tonight I got bored! And that usually in most cases, never happens! So I've done this once before but I did it once again, I took the vials that we dispense medications in and started making people/creatures out of them. So enjoy them! 

Break Time!

So I've been done with school now for a little more than a week and let's just say I'm trying to enjoy this free time by being productive but also relaxing because that's something I haven't got to do in a LONG time. But I just wanted to let you people know that I tend to update my blog frequently this Summer starting with today by re-doing some things on the blog. 

This right here is an image taken at Monticello during our trip and it's probably one of my fonder memories leaving my first year in the IARc program. I just wanted to say thanks to everyone there that let me get to know them and for them taking the chance to get to know me if they did. Being around people 25 hours a day, you really get a chance to learn about the people you work around and it's a great bond I formed with many people. I got closer to people in this first year here then I did my entire four years in high school. I've met some awesome people and I plan to keep in touch with them. But to my friends, enjoy your break and enjoy whatever comes to you. See you guys later! 

Presenting... The Bend!

So for those of you that actually follow my blog or even check it out I'd like to send you a million thanks! Because it really means a lot to me for people to see just some of the stuff I create and design because I feel like it should be shown and this is a great place for a beginner to display their work. If you are one of these people, hopefully you've seen my little secretive project I've been working on labeled as the Autonomous Project... well I'm here to tell you that Monday night was a late night at studio for me and I finally finished on what I was creating. Tuesday we had our final sort of critique which really wasn't much a critique at all, it was more of an exhibit for people to watch around throughout our studio and basically see what we had to show off. And this whole project we were supposed to work on throughout the entire semester and it was entirely about our design process and what we thought that was itself. And so we were not required to create a final piece but me I feel like that just might be part of my process, I like to experiment and figure things out and start building and solving problems. So now I will show you the result of what started out as 80 pieces of 36x48" of corrugated cardboard sheets...

what you are looking at is 320 pieces of cardboard hand cut, hand measured by myself in a very short amount of time. Five days of hard work and it paid off because this is what I created and in the end I was extremely proud of it, out of the 80 sheets I could get 4 panels out of each sheet. The pieces I cut from the 36x48" sheet were 18x20", I tried to use a standard size for depth and height of a chair/bench. I knew when Stoel assigned us this project way early in the semester I wanted to make a piece of furniture, it's something I've been longing to do for quite a long time. So cardboard was a material I felt like I knew slightly better than wood and I wanted to see if I could take something so flat and neutral and create something beautiful in form and also create something along the lines of "modern." So these were some of my initial sketches proposing some of my first ideas, and I had three ideas that I kinda worked around, which I'll show you in the form of Sketchup. 

So that's sort of the evolution of my bench, it started off very standard looking and boxy. Then I took Frank Gehry's Wiggle Chair and derived a continued form from that. Then in my final idea which I ended up making incorporated a bit from both ideas. So in the end I will honestly still say I don't know my process at all, but I know it works for me and I'll continue to do just that. Things are always changing and I'm constantly learning things and doing things differently based upon past experiences. So I'll leave you with some more images of the overall design process! 

I'M HERE! 

Final Presentation Reflection

Presentations have always been a difficult thing for me, I’m slowly getting better mostly because this major practically forces you to take your nerves and overcome them. I’ve never been a fan of public speaking, the only time I really seem to feel good about it is it’s something I’m truly interested in. Or if I'm pretty knowledgeable about the subject I’m presenting on. Luckily with this final studio project I was speaking on a space I was designing for architect Santiago Calatrava, and he is one of favorite designers and I like to think I know quite a bit about him. And the space I ended up creating I knew a lot about as well because I designed and planned out the majority of the space except for the exterior walls which were already in place there. 

But when the day came for me to finally stand in front of all my fellow classmates and teacher and TA’s my nerves were doing pretty well truthfully. I had rehearsed what I said the night before on the drive to school so I did have some practice but I didn’t want to put any notes on cards or anything. I felt like with notecards I would rely to heavily on them and tend to look at them for guidance. So it was all in my head and I managed to talk about everything I had planned except a few points. But overall the points I missed were nothing that took away from speech, they were just kind of extra snippets of information. And I also started my presentation by providing a brief background about Calatrava and the way he designed because it was a way for me to weave my way into my design and relate these two together so you had a sense of where I was coming from and why I did things just the way I did. Presenting is really only half of it though, there is always afterwards when you have to take questions and you never know what you could be asked. But I felt like all the questions I was asked I answered in a good and polite way and was able to defend most aspects of my design because I tried to consider things such as code, or a bathroom size or the way my designer works or it relates; things like that. 

Going on the first day, when I read that last Sunday I was petrified because I never really want to go on the first day but in the end I was definitely glad I did because the other two days of critiques I just got to watch and take it all in. Watching like forty some critiques you see how people design differently and how they think something works within a space or doesn’t. I could tell people that really cared about what they were talking about because they seemed to have knowledge about what they were talking about and they considered things as well. I enjoyed all the presentations that had time invested in them considerably, if your board looked good and clean and your model and if your presentation was good and crisp... I enjoyed it. A lot of people seemed to sort of do the model as a sort of after thought, and it was noticeable. Or some people would get up to present and just explain where there perspectives were drawn from and which one was there so called “money shot” and I got tired of that and just didn’t like it. So I liked things that were different and I liked the people who really tried to put forth a significant effort. 

I thought I'd show you this to, even though our final project is over we have an autonomous project we've been working on and it's due Tuesday but you won't find out exactly what it is until then!