My desk from the back.
My desk from the front. You’re looking at one year’s worth of models, about 80% of all the models I’ve made at YSOA so far.
Those of you who knew me in undergrad know that I got through the last three studios nearly model-free. The result: I left not knowing what made a building really work—circulation, space planning, scale, all the things that happen when drawings and models are the core of the process. Yale’s transformed me, particularly the Building Project. I’m finally learning how to architect. The people here just don’t take no shit.
Here’s the scheme that our team won with—what’s going to be built is going to be way different, due to client requests.
The 1/8″:1′ scale model Photoshopped into a photo of the site, a plot in New Haven’s Hill Neighborhood. The house has two units in one envelope: the owner and her family live on the first floor while a single tenant gets the second floor. (The owner’s a wheelchair-bound Iraq War veteran, which is why the entire family unit is on one floor.)
The backyard. The kitchen wall is fully glazed, so the garden and kitchen are visually connected. Rendering by J. Haferd.
A section through the house, describing the sectional relationship between the owner (first floor) and the tenant (second/third floors). Both spaces are partially or completely double-height, with some pretty dramatic skylights. The tenant’s “third floor” is actually a suspended sleeping loft set within the tenant’s main space. Drawing by T. Smierzchalski.
First floor/site plan. Notice the tenant’s entrance on the East (right) side. Drawing by K. Thatcher and J. Hahn.
Second floor plan. The second floor is about half the width of the house, the other half being the double-height space of the owner’s living room/kitchen. You can see the stair leading up to the bedroom loft. Drawing by K. Thatcher and J. Hahn.
The owner’s main living/kitchen space, seen from the West end of the house. There’s a thick bar of cabinets and stairs that separates the living area from the bedroom area; the tenant’s wall curves over it and up to the ceiling. Rendering by J. Haferd.
The owner’s master bedroom. Clerestory windows cut through the tenant’s space to illuminate the owner’s bedroom. Rendering by J. Haferd and myself.
The tenant’s main space, high in the house. Rendering by J. Haferd.
Last night, against six other groups, my group won the 2008 Yale Building Project. For the next few weeks our house goes through revision hell. This summer, our house goes up. This is all freakin’ awesome. [Almost] no one in our group thought we would actually win—we figured we might get, at best, 2nd or 3rd. Then we had one of the best reviews I’ve ever had, a review where the critics slowly outlined why our project made a big heap of sense. That was absolutely, super sweet.
My Building Project group set out to design a “simple” house, and we completely failed. We got the opposite. We had a helpful but somewhat disastrous mid-review, and over the last few days I’ve been thinking about why. More importantly, I’ve been thinking about what the hell it actually means for architecture to be simple.
There’s formal simplicity, where the building looks simple. This is what Minimalism is. I’d argue that it’s a more shallow form of simplicity because it’s largely aesthetic—Minimalism doesn’t necessarily have a programmatic payoff. There’s little programmatic genius in a Minimalist building: its simplicity comes from ignoring architectural variables, from ignoring certain aspects of functionality, what reduction to a building’s “necessary elements” really means. In other words, Minimalism comes from making an architectural problem easier by simplifying the problem. John Pawson’s work is a good example of this.
Then there’s architecture that comes from an efficiency of “moves”—i.e., design decisions. To me that defines a class of really great design: buildings that address multiple issues with the fewest moves possible, as opposed to a building that’s the sum of individual moves addressing individual issues. The former reveals a sort of diligent genius; the latter’s sloppy, lazy, and unnecessarily complex. David Adjaye’s work is a pretty good example of this.
I think I want the latter.
The Building Project is unbelievably, outstandingly educational in a very frustrating and almost painful, completely unpredictable sort of way. I feel like I’ve learned more about architecture in the last few weeks, working with my groupmates, trying to get together a house, then I’ve learned in the last eight studios combined. It really is the right reason to come to Yale.
I had my final review today with Jennifer’s studio, in the most sleep-deprived and completely worn out state I’ve ever been in my entire life. I had a pretty good jury (full of Young And Upcoming New York Architects of the sort that infest the YSOA) and we took about an hour talking about my project, so it’s too bad my brain checked out six hours earlier.
Looking back at a semester of projects, I think I have trouble thinking in programmatic terms. That is, I don’t really understand how programs work together to enliven a space or a building. My process is basically anecdotal—I think of a memory I like and then design a building around that—which inevitably makes my buildings sequential and oddly one-dimensional, because I’m just playing that memory back. I need to learn to design consciously rather then letting my subconscious do the work.
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