Tag Archive for ‘Portfolio’ at ku10

Tag Archive for 'Portfolio'

Yale BP08: Common Ground Poster

Published

on July 27, 2008

. 1 Comment

A while back, the Obama campaign hired Scott Hansen AKA “ISO50” to follow up Shephard Fairey’s PROGRESS print. The result was my gateway to the rest of Scott Hansen’s work: amazingly tactile, geometric, retro work combining natural media, Swiss layout sensibilities, late 90s futurism (a la Designer’s Republic), and the pop vernacular of 60s-70s music posters.

Two weeks ago I got a chance to try my hand at totally ripping off Mr Hansen. I was asked to do a poster advertising Common Ground’s involvement with the Building Project, to be posted on our building site for the next two years. (The 2008, ‘09, and ‘10 BPs are going to be next to each other.)

Whenever I design anything my first reaction is to go for the heroic, which is why—until recently—a lot of my buildings were either very long or very tall. In addition to ISO50, I looked at Works Progress Administration and Soviet Constructivist graphic design—they all have in common lots of bold, carefully calculated geometric shapes, solidly anchored typography, dramatic angles, and strong colors.

As far as graphic design goes I’ve always considered my lack of illustration ability to be a weakness—luckily, over the years my crutches have gotten better. I modeled the raw geometry in Rhino, adjusted the virtual camera to 25mm, and exported a 2D Illustrator file, where I adjusted colors, gradients, and typography.

Next I brought my Illustrator work into Photoshop, where I started applying textures to the objects and to the foreground/background. I made a circular array of squares and applied that to the background to get some more dimension out of it.

I brought my poster to site the next day, where it was promptly rejected for being, basically, too cool, and also for its overly BP House-centric focus—turns out they wanted a more “community”-ish design, meaning less imposing and more contextual. Read the brief carefully, kids.

I went back to the drawing board with a couple of new challenges: the aforementioned context, adding a map, and—worse of all—use the Common Ground logo as the main title. (As you can see from their webpage, the Common Ground logo is fresh out of Word.)

I made this one after getting only three hours of sleep—my client, uh, conveyed the urgency of the situation—and after a while I got sort of delirious. When evaluating my own designs I always leave the final word to gut reaction, and my gut was telling me this one was very very bad. I shopped it around my friends and got a couple of responses: “fall collection,” “New Years’ bash,” “leaves?” etc. Some of them mentioned that there were serious hierarchy/perspective problems, which got my subconscious thinking while my conscious passed out.

The next morning I work up at 4 AM and couldn’t stop thinking about the damn poster. I got out of bed and hiked over to studio at 5 in the morning and started ripping out layers, gutting the crap, completely determined to save my design. I put everything on a white background and saved the basic geometry, and incinerated everything else. I added a dash of McSweeney’s and a whole lot of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (not on purpose)—thus was born the final print.

Portfolio Brief

Published

Gary

on May 10, 2008

in Declaration

. 8 Comments

An excerpt from my portfolio, together with my resume part of my primary pimping package. It’s basically the money shots from three projects.

501a Project 2: W^2 Steam Hotel

Published

Gary

on November 2, 2007

in Declaration

. 11 Comments

The second project was ostensibly a proposal for a W Hotel in New Haven. There was some [lame] controversy around this project—some people objected to the W people being involved with the project (they came and did a presentation about their marketing strategies and the problems W is facing as a brand and a suddenly upmarket mass-market boutique hotel; they also came to our final reviews), on the grounds that they feared W would poach ideas. Whatever. I think it was great that W was involved—we got the inside scoop and that’s really pretty invaluable, even if I didn’t use much of the research they gave us.

My proposal was for a two-stage cylindrical hotel, vertically arranged: a first-level “profane” stage with all the trimmings of a high-powered, hyper-connected business world, a transition level, and an introverted multi-level steam-filled chamber divorced from the outside world.

You’d enter on the first level, check in, finish whatever business you had in the lounge or meeting rooms, and the ascend up a gradual spiral stair to the transition level.

The second level is a broad chamber saturated with long flowing curtains and a cantilevered cold-water pool. Here you’d divest yourself of your worldly possessions and change into a white terry-cloth robe.

Then you’d ascend up a second staircase, this one completely enclosed—you’d feel the thickness of the slab and the heat of the central steam tap as you climbed upward, and thus a strong sense of passage into sanctuary.

The upper chamber consists of 12 levels, approximately 160 feet and 100 rooms, filled with steam geothermally tapped from the earth’s interior. It’s just you, your robe, and everyone else: without your status symbols and identifiers you’re on the same level as everyone else. Like the best Finnish and Russian saunas, here deals would be made and networks forged, lodging minimal and relaxation complete.

The review was fairly interesting, though there was a pompous rotund punk who seemed a bit, ah, quick to judge. (I was, naturally, running on about 20 minutes of sleep.)

(download .wma)

501a Project 1: smart car gallery

Published

Gary

on November 2, 2007

in Declaration

. 1 Comment

I’m finally getting my act together and upping some project images. I still need to get into the photo lab and photograph my models before they disintegrate—I mean, you guys are going to have no idea what the hell these buildings really look like until I do that. Meanwhile, what we have here is a random drawing and rendering of my first project, a gallery/showroom in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for DaimlerBenz’s doomed smart car. (Williamsburg, as y’all know, is one of the few places in ‘merica with a high concentration of people dumb enough to buy a smart car.)

Basically, the project is a gigantic beacon that aims to give a small showroom way more presence than any small showroom should have, by broadcasting the interior spaces and activities over external screens that spiral up to increasingly megalomaniac sizes. Meanwhile, the building itself is designed to give the smart car residual cool by hosting “cool hipster programs” like indie pop concerts, paint-a-smart studio space, overpriced bars, and the like.

First, below is a link to a recording of my final review, courtesy the staff of our long-suffering yearbook Retrospecta. Marvel at my dangerously sleep-deprived, caffeine-addled, overly conciliatory state of being. (For the record, this project was a few samples short of a remix, and I straight-up said it. My philosophy is that it’s best to get the reviewers past the project’s obvious weaknesses so we can talk about the good stuff.)

(download .wma)

Here’s a section drawn through the project’s long axis. You can see the workshop/garage on the first floor, the “program surface” on the second floor, complete with stage-showroom, the gallery on the third floor, the cafe on the fourth and the bar on the fifth. (Incidentally, this is the first section I’ve ever hand-drawn in architecture school.)

And here’s a way over-the-top rendering of an outdoor night concert at the gallery. This project’s all about catapulting image to insane heights, and I think the graphic reflects that nicely.

My First Project

Published

Gary

on May 13, 2007

in Declaration

. 1 Comment

The day before my last I visited the site of my first project.

The WW Gallery.

I took a generic loft unit and made a private gallery.

The main feature is a series of four-meter-wide sliding panels for his overflowing art collection, four in a 3.2-meter-tall cabinet and another four in a floor-to-ceiling partition. The panels subdivide the shoebox-shaped loft into square “stages,” with the last section serving as an office space.

I was surprised at how thick the frames had to be—the “panels” are really walls suspended along a ceiling track.

This is the first project I’ve taken from start to almost-finish, and nothing’s like seeing my delirious lines made real. It’s the kind of hard fix architects need regularly to stay [relatively] sane.

But, the project still has a ways to go.

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