proto|mondo » schooling

The Kids are Alright

Rusty Smith — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:23:43 +0000

For the last several weeks the Foundation Unit students have been working away on making “forgeries” of the machines of sculptor Arthur Ganson. These machines, similar in many ways to the work of Jean Tinguely and the Eames’ “do Nothing Machines” do just that: nothing. Except that they also do everything simultaneously. Ganson’s machines are magical; they are designed and constructed to produce a visceral, emotional response from the viewer. Ganson has described himself best by saying that “I put my ideas and passions into objects and am always learning how to speak with my hands.” The Foundation students have been doggedly faithful to this ethic, and seem to have really turned a corner this past couple of weeks. While their current machines are admittedly in a herky-jerky state of being (most of them have simply thrashed themselves to death in the course of their design and manufacture) the learning in the class is palpable. Today we discussed how to shove the project forward, and the students put forward many, many fantastic observations concerning the next step toward the end of the semester. So even though the machines are not (yet) in a perfectly working state, here is a non-comprehensive short list of the themes they have decided to carry forward:

Work as a investment
Who you can count on, and for what
Adaptability and Agility
A “yes, and” approach to collaborative work versus a “yes, but” approach
A broad yet efficient use of resources, whether physical or otherwise
Planning the plan
working alone while simultaneously working together
disengage in order to reengage
Attention to detail
Time management
The success of failing (“Failing forward”)
Rolling with the punches, or rather, “what to do when Risk Management pays a visit”
Plug and chug: iterative work
Multiple streams of exploration
The art of the Tinker
Material creativity
Anticipation as a motivator
Testing beyond imagination
Documentation: write everything down
Delegation and dependence.

Now that is a pretty good day in studio.

Oh, and if you click on the thumbnail above you will open a gallery of images of the students process and prototype work over the past two weeks. Hopefully soon we will a little more “formal” documentation of the working machines, but I gotta go to France first.

by Rusty Smith

Second-to-last pour

Rusty Smith — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:52:37 +0000

For the past year and a half, three Rural Studio thesis students have been constructing a hybrid soccer/football field, new parking and a skatepark organized around a common public space better know as the Great Lawn. The community’s desire for a skatepark led to the application and reception of a $25,000 grant from the Tony Hawk Foundation. To stretch these generous resourses to their maximum, and integrate these typically urban elements into the rural landscape, the students proposed using landforms to soften the park and reduce construction cost. The driving concept behind the skatepark design has been to use concrete as a thin shell…doing so enables the slab to be manipulated by the land beneath it….aesthetically this has allowed them to play with the typical perception of concrete as a mass while also providing different riding experiences for the skaters. From a pragmatic standpoint, much less concrete has been used than in a typical skatepark, but a significantly larger and more complex series of runs have been developed. Recognizing that typical skatepark elements are clones of an urban landscape, the design attempts to push the banal rail and ledge condition into something more sculptural; doing so allows the space to be seen not only as a skatepark but simultaneously as a sculptural piece of the rural environment.

This week the team is finishing up laying sod, welding up the rails, and making the second-to-last concrete pour. Opening day for the park is just a couple of weeks away on Saturday April 10th – come out if you can!

by Rusty Smith

20k House

Rusty Smith — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:03:33 +0000

Since 2005, in addition to the traditional charity homes and community projects that the Rural Studio has designed and built, we have been ardently working to bridge the barriers between the income-earning poor and their accessibility to existing affordable federal housing programs. The goal of the $20k House project is relatively straightforward, yet has profound implications: provide a replicable housing model that is creative, affordable, durable, energy efficient, diverse in housing type, and that can be purchased by a prospective rural homeowner for $20,000, including all costs for materials, labor and contractor’s profit. Today I was in Birmingham where the current Outreach Team made one amazing presentation about the current state of the 20k House project to Regions Bank, one of Rural Studio’s major donors. All I can say is that led by instructor Danny Wicke, this year’s team (Clem Blakemore, Penny Hagbert and Will Holmanand) have significantly raised the bar on this important project.

The $20K House Project involves Rural Studio students in the development of a range of home plans and prototypes that can be built by local contractors under the USDA’s Rural Housing Service Section 502 Guaranteed Rural Housing Loan Program for construction and homeowner financing. This program serves rural residents who have a steady (albeit low) income, yet are still unable to obtain adequate housing through conventional financing. The Rural Studio $20K house project gets its name from the lowest realistic mortgage a person on social security and/or disability income could maintain. The $20k house is also clearly intended to offer up new job opportunities for emerging entrepreneurs in the local building industry while simultaneously stimulating the local economy. To date eight $20K homes have been built and occupied by clients. The current team has engaged a contractor to build the most recent prototype under real conditions, and are working with that same contractor to revise the prototype into a final model that is well-tested and proven suitable for public consumption. In today’s presentation, they presented their development of a wider array of prototypes that meet a broader variety of client, site, and contextual conditions.

Make sure to keep up with the 20k blog – this is one project well worth watching.

by Rusty Smith

Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas

Rusty Smith — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:28:27 +0000

Architecture is not merely “problem solving,” rather, it serves purposes; it has specific goals and agendas and is always on target. Architecture stands in opposition to….

In their most recent assignment, the students are asked to pair up into teams of two and construct a span between two of the blocks in the Dudley Hall Courtyard. The span bridges approximately 4 feet. Using only drinking straws and straight sewing pins, the span is to be beautiful and successfully hold up the weight of a single clay brick. In the freezing cold, we were able to evaluate about two-thirds of the proposals. Due to a little whininess, we did not get to all of them – I guess we will have to wait for spring for that. At any rate, our criteria for the evaluation of the span is very straight forward: Each team receives 1/3rd of their overall score for successfully spanning the site, 1/3rd or their points are assigned for the support of the single red clay brick, and 1/3rd of their points are assigned for a solution that is beautiful. As you can see, most of the students are so far batting a solid 66 2/3 percent.

But we have to be really close – at some moment – any day now in fact – the kids are going to bridge the gap and figure out that they are not simply learning “this thing” just so they are then able to do “that next thing.” Right now however as a class they seem to think they only have to learn how to (pardon the popular expression) “connect the dots.” At some point they have to figure out that we are actually simply trying to get them to recognize a dot when it hits them over the head. Learning how to learn. All over again. But for now the cohort seems like they are still trying to learn the same old way.

On the bright side though, there is always this summer!

by Rusty Smith

Pattern Emergent

Rusty Smith — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:48:31 +0000

Pattern is all around us. Whether embedded within every speck of the cosmos, or simply a derivative of our subconscious desire to understand the chaos of experience, suffice it to say that a system of order(s) binds all things together. From the immediate relationships of locality emerges the tapestry of a tightly coupled existence…. To begin the current project the students were all given a standard “pattern map” that consisted of a square inscribed with a complex system of orthogonal lines, angles and radial arcs derived from the natural internal geometries of the square. Using black and white paint, they were then asked to derive a series of three tiles from the described geometries using the various devices of axial symmetry, radial symmetry, and asymmetry. Using these initial tiles as a point of departure, they were then asked to develop and refine the tiles so that they may be assembled into three different “tapestries” each mindful of one of the following constraints:

The first tapestry is to have a clear organizational strategy and utilize a regular repeat that is infinite.
The second tapestry is to have a clear organizational strategy that can be utilized infinitely but have no repeat.
The third tapestry is to have a clear organizational strategy but be hermetic within its own boundaries.

Each of the tapestries is to be constructed using xerographic technology Each tile was to be exactly 8” square. The overall composition of each tapestry is 80” tall by 48” wide with no border. In addition to each tapestry the students also included one original hand painted representative tile on a 20” x 30” piece of illustration board. From beginning to end the students had a total of about two and-a-half weeks from the time we gave the initial pattern map. This was about four days longer than we expected, but with only a couple of days to go in the original schedule, we found that many of the explorations could use one more pass, and felt that the final assembly of the tapestries was going to take a much more significant length of time than the students were scheduling. From the looks of the final results, I think both assumptions were proven true. A double handful of the tapestries seem well developed and assembled.

Beyond the continued development of patience, persistence, and work-done-daily, the larger architectural goals of this assignment are pretty straight forward. As we continue to methodically explore systems of structure and enclosure, it is important for the students to first begin to develop strategies for component modularization, modification, and variation. By exploring these ideas graphically in two dimensions, we hope that at least a few of the students will be able to successfully extrapolate these same notions into three dimensions. I suppose we will see soon enough. Layering in the complexities of structural systems that we first investigated last semester will only add to the challenge as we continue.

It was her stern necessity: all things
Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower,
Deceive us, seeming to be many things,
And are but one. Beheld far off, they differ
As God and devil; bring them to the mind,
They dull its edge with their monotony.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Xenophanes
All life is pattern… but we cannot always see the pattern when we are a part of it.
Belva Plain, Crescent City

by Rusty Smith

Creating tiles in Photoshop

Rusty Smith — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:59:43 +0000

Ana and I met today to talk about the next part of the assignment for the students. We want to continue the tile project, but move briefly into the digital realm and use some of their mad Photoshop skills we have been hearing so much about. Photoshop has several tools that make creating tiling patterns easy – the one we are going to use is the “Offset” Filter. This technique is really handy for making textures for backgrounds, or for 3-D models and the like. In a nutshell, the Offset Filter cuts your image that you want to tile into 4 pieces (equal quarters or otherwise) and slides each piece sideways so that the edge of each of piece that was in the middle is now on the outside edge of the overall tile. This makes the edges tile smoothly, but does leave the middle rough. This is easy enough to fix using a variety of other Photoshop tools. Sound confusing? It really isn’t, once you see it in action:

To start out, open an image in Photoshop. I am going to start with a picture of some nice tree bark from photoready.co.uk:

After I open up this image to work on, I like to open another copy of the image before I do anything else. This will come in handy in a minute. Also, don’t forget to save an original copy of the image before you do anything – just in case you mess something up – Photoshop rule number one – you never want to work on original images!

Next, open the Offset Filter. Go to Filters > Other > Offset…

Our original image is 341 pixels wide by 477 pixels high. In the Offset Filter dialog box, I will enter 170 x 235, this will roughly quarter the original image. As this filter begins to make more sense to you, you can play with these settings to get the image quartered just the way you like it.

The image will now look like this:

As you might guess, the image will tile ok, but will still look kinda funky in the center where the tile edges don’t line up (you can check it out here). To fix the tile up, basically all you have to do is cover up those seems in the offset version, and you are done.This is where your mad Photoshop skills come into play.

Go back to your original image and using the lasso tool, copy and paste portions of that image back into the offset version. When I cut and paste a piece out of the original, I usually will usually feather the selection by 2~4 pixels to get it to blend well with the background. Here is an image in progress – you can see where I have lifted the knot from the original and placed it in the new version:

Continue to copy and paste portions from the original to cover up each of the seams in the new tile. Once you have it pretty well coverd up you can begin to use the rubber stamp tool to blend in the remaining visible seams. The only thing you have to really be careful of is to not change the outer edges of the new version – if you do, those edges will not line up cleanly when it is tiled. This is what my final tile looks like:

So, that is it – if you want to see what the final version looks like all tiled together – check it out here.

by Rusty Smith

Holiday

Rusty Smith — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:32:42 +0000

Today is the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Holiday. There are tons of blog posts out there talking about the significance of the day, but I thought it might be enough to simply point out that we have 3 Rural Studio students working diligently on significant renovation to the Greensboro Safe House Black History Museum. The museum occupies a house used often by Dr. King during his organization of peaceful resistance protests of segregation in Alabama during the 1960s, including his hiding from the KKK only days before his assassination in April 1968. The museum was founded in 2002 by Theresa Burroughs, a civil rights foot soldier who worked with King. The Safe House Museum is located at Davis Street and Martin Luther King Drive, Greensboro, Ala. 36744. You can check out our students ongoing work at www.cadc.auburn.edu/soa/rural-studio/2009Blogs/SafeHouse/

by Rusty Smith

How to Kill an Idea

Rusty Smith — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:46:29 +0000

Yesterday I went out to the Rural Studio to meet with Andrew Freear to talk about all kinds of beginning semester stuff. In amongst the wide-ranging conversation we started to talk about where ideas come from, and how the Rural Studio manages to get work done. For me the thing that I am always taken with in the process of design deals with the “art of the possible,” or rather focusing our energies on what we can do, instead of what we can’t. I think on campus we often get caught doing the latter – somehow confusing our pithy and salient observations concerning all the difficulties of the problem at hand with actually doing work. Ultimately it is a dodge – not because we are lazy, but rather because we think too often that design is simply a “convergent activity.” In other words, we tend to want to quickly isolate the issues of a problem and converge on a solution. At the Rural Studio, design is more often treated as a divergent activity: one in which you first must ask what is desirable, and only then ask what is possible. Thinking about what is possible versus what is impossible may sound like only a subtle distinction, but in my experience it is the difference between a successful brainstorming session and an unsuccessful one. My good friend Adam Kallish calls this the difference between “problem seeking” and “problem solving.” I like to think of it simply as developing goals versus implementing solutions. All this reminded me of a series of fantastic original illustrations produced by Scott Campbell for Showoff Films.

Eight Ways to Kill an Idea

By: Scott Campbell

by Rusty Smith

wikifish.org

Rusty Smith — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:49:18 +0000

As of Wednesday, studio is officially underway – the kids have cleaned up and reorganized the classroom, they are well underway with organizing all of the left over materials from the BEST project for delivery to the Rural Studio, they have their next project and they have their next reading. As if all that is not enough, we are going to try to get wikifish.org back up and running again, so that we can revisit the issues of studio culture and students rights. Right now the site is pretty rudimentary, but hopefully over time it will become as robust and useful as the original wiki proved to be.

by Rusty Smith

Field Studies: Quito

Rusty Smith — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:07:44 +0000

Because of our curriculum transition the Program of Architecture currently has a double handful of students participating in a wide variety of our off-campus “field Studies” programs. We have 15 students at the Urban Studio in Birmingham, 25 students out at the Rural Studio in West Alabama, 17 students in Rome, 15 students in Istanbul, and 16 students in Florence. Later this semester we will have another contingent of 18 more students depart for Rome, and later still 8 or 10 students make an extended two week visit with Professor Sheri Schumacher to Quito, Ecuador. Today I had the opportunity to meet Professor Helena Garino, who is visiting from Quito. Professor Garino is the coordinator of the Interior Design Program at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She is here this week working with our students and getting them up to speed on the project, site and context in which they will be working this semester. Back in Quito, she has 15 students who are also working on the same project, and later our students will join hers there to work collaboratively on their joint proposals. The project at first seems fairly straightforward from a purely architectural point of view; it involves the renovation of a 16th century jail into a sort of mixed-use building. Where the project gets really interesting is in the fact that the site sits at the foot of a small volcanic mountain (relative to those that surround Quito, anyway) known as El Panecillo, or “small piece of bread.” It is at this point in the urban fabric where the 16th century grid of the Spanish city first collides with the rugged mountains that ring the city, disrupting the orthogonal order of the the vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Roads become sidewalks, and sidewalks become stairs all within a half city block. Historically and culturally significant, it is also where the pre-modern city rubs up against the contemporary expansion. From Professor Garino’s initial presentation to the class it also seems that this joint in the city fabric is a place that marks a boundary between communities: those that are old and historically established, and that of the more recent immigrant making do as they can. It will be with a great deal of interest that I follow the students along as they grapple with the complexities of such a rich site: history, topography, and culture collisions -my initial sense of Quito is that it is a city of edges both figuratively and architectonically.

What more could an Architecture Program ask for in an advanced architectural problem? The hopeful part in all of our field studies programs is that by having students spend real, directed time in a culturally and architecturally robust place (if only for a few weeks as in the case of Quito), is that they may develop some sort of awareness that they have a significant role to play as designers in the larger world, even if the problems that they encounter are well beyond the power of bricks and mortar to solve. To rub up against the boundaries and edges of the discipline – or any other aspect of life that otherwise defines oneself, and still be able to contribute in some other way – that perhaps is the most important lesson of all.

by Rusty Smith