My Hiatus

Sorry for that.  Things have been happening at a slower pace in the studio due to many issues regarding land; though that is just making short of a very long list of difficulties we have just recently run into with some state agencies, but that may be a rainy day post.

On a personal note, I took another trip to New Orleans this past weekend and experienced the night life of the city (read: Burbon Street or La Rue Burbon.)  I would personally rather just leave that to the tourists and travel more through the city, but in the same breath it is also something that needs to be seen to even begin to comprehend.  The air is full of a hurried excitement as throngs of people rush to lose all inhibitions and a stink that I cannot begin to detail the origins of.

Also worth mentioning, Tray, Julius, and myself will be traveling through Alabama and paying a visit to many of the projects done by Auburn University's Rural Studio on our way to Talladega Superspeedway.  And I am certain there will be at least three posts about our journey there and back.

Revisiting

It's something that I have done a lot more this semester than I have in semesters past.  Be it a place or idea, it's a practice I always saw I needed to do but for one reason or another I have not, until now.  Maybe it is the dynamics of working with a group that demand a constant observation to maintain a clear focus with original ideas intact or constant communication with others keeps the ideas coming a head. This week was another revisiting of a place though.
Last time we were there it was very impromptu, and without knowing when we went, Leah had kindly arranged for us a tour of the museum in Biloxi, MS that Frank Gehry's firm is currently working on, with the help of a local firm.  That local firm, whose name escapes me now, was kind enough to walk us through the project again, while looking at some of the points from a more technical standpoint.  I think the one thing that stood out to me was just how much control Gehry's office maintains after they "give," so to speak, the project over to the local firm.  If ANYTHING moves more than just 3 inches Gehry has to give his approval before it can continue.  Anyway, here are some more pictures, mostly from the two structures that are not going to be completed for another year or so; those being what are referred to as the "Pods" and where a Ceramics studio will be housed.

And my favorite:

Design Developments

We are working diligently the past few weeks on detail drawings for the construction set, which can cause ones soul to grow restless when staring at CAD details for hours and hours on end.  I've broken these times up by revisiting some earlier design documents and adding newer details.  We're also beginning work on our book to document the process from the early work to the built product.
We've recently run into a problem with one of the grant agencies over an address dispute which has put a halt on our moving forward with the building phase, but we're hopeful that we will have all that cleared up soon.
I hope to post more drawings from earlier as well as some of the more interesting details as we work through them.

More Information (But Not What You May Think)

As it has become evident, the water towers have caught my attention for many reasons unbeknownst to myself.  But the more I have looked at them, the more they tell me about the area under and around.  

Iconography

I wouldn't know what it was otherwise.

Infatuated

(Re)Constructing Gehry

That was what Frank Gehry's Ohr- O'Keefe Museum of Art looked like 5 years ago.  That is a casino barge that washed over top and eventually settled on the building leaving very little behind.  Today the museum is nearing it's (re)opening of three of the five buildings on the campus with the other two slated for completion sometime next year.  One of the curators of the museum, greeted us outside the main building in which the offices are located and told us kindly that the building wasn't open, but once we explained to her our story, she was more than happy to guide us around and explain all the work that has been happening post-Katrina.  It may have also helped that she once taught a little at Virginia Tech, but that's only a minute detail.

Learning by Seeing [or possibly Seeing by Learning]

It's getting to a point on our project that is kind of scary, soon it will be built.  And with that looming over us we must work through many, many details to make all parts look thought out rather than a serious of details that were overlooked and solved, unthought, on site.  With that understanding, we went to look at projects by the Gulf Coast Design Studio as I previously mentioned.  A few members of the studio were kind enough to attend our last pinup and invited to give their observe their work and how they mitigated many of the same issues we are currently addressing in our house for Ms Dang.

Some of the trouble for us has been in the fact that the house must be 18' above sea level, which at our site is about 12' above ground level. The first thing that has to be figured out is how one moves from the ground to the house and additionally, how one would do so without getting wet.  Another problem we have to address revolves around something called Smart Code, which while well intentioned, many parts do not make sense in practice here in Pass Christian.   The code calls for almost 50% screening of the underside of the house viewable from the road.  There are screens in town that are just pasted to the side of the houses, so we are trying to achieve a screen that is more thoughtful and engages the underside of the house when viewed from the road.  

For every example of a more correct way of accomplishing anything there is a wrong too, and we made sure to take note of those as well.

Lessons In Material

Today, as a studio, we traveled east to Biloxi, Ms to look at the work of the Gulf Coast Community Design Center to look at how other designers have dealt with some of the more challenging aspects of working in the region post Katrina.  While looking around we came across a recently finished project by Marlon Blackwell that was done for Architecture for Humanity.

The project is interesting because of the material usage.  The materials are all off the shelf, but used in ways that are out of the norm, something that Jim constantly talked about with us last year.

The siding on the building is that which is typically used on steel buildings everyday but with out much thought.  But my favorite detail on the whole building is on what is the back of the house.  The porch, which is an element of the region, is viewed as a key element of many of the homes here.  In this project, the porch is shaded by a screen which is hung on garage door tracks allowing them to drop down to a vertical plane and shade from the harsh western sun in the evening, but be put up on a horizontal plane to protect from the during the day when the porch is being used.