Heyo

So...

I've let a week go by without posting. I'm finding it hard to chronicle my mind during the summer, because I turn it off. Maybe I need to take a walk around this great city I live in for some inspiration. That's why I love living in a design city: there is design everywhere I look. I guess I just need to clear my mind and let it all inspire me, release the chains I find myself putting on my mind, and let the thoughts flow.

Goals for the week:

Go for a walk.
Forget where I'm going and simply go there.
Bring a sketch book.
Let my mind spill onto the page.
Bring my findings back here.

That may just be what I do. I definitely need something like this. Until then.

Happy Pride!

Random Rant

Okay. So random rant.


This is the Education Sciences Building at the University of Minnesota.

This is the view from the Education Sciences Building at the University Of Minnesota.

WHY do the education students get (arguably) the best view of downtown from campus?! And why do they get one of the best reno jobs on campus for their offices?! Okay, so we get Rapson Hall, with an addition designed by Steven Holl, so I can get over the building. But the view... I simply cannot get over. This is an inspiring look at the city we live in, all the design it encompasses, and the reason we, as designers, do what we do: to make a city that can be proud of its skyline, its riverfront, its urban core. The river, inspiring so much design, flowing like a slick ribbon through the picture. Bridges span the valley, bridging the gap from here to there, bringing the skyline forth into almost touchable reach. The mills, representing the reason this city is here today, standing proudly along the river. The skyscrapers, showcasing Minneapolis's place among the great skylines of the country, rise silently behind. This picture shows every way in which design can bring a small milling town into a thriving metropolis of the 21st century.

This is why this view is so very inspiring to a design mind like mine. So why the heck do the education students get it?

(Yes, I am seeing green)

Brain Vomit

One of my favorite things about being a design student is the connection you have with other design thinkers. When I am alone or with people not versed in design thinking, thoughts race through my mind, but stay there. I know that it would be hard to have a conversation with them about the random and seemingly minute details running through my mind. But when you put two design minds together, magic happens. All these thoughts kept circling in my mind finally get a chance to be freed. It's a moment of pure brain vomit...Okay, so maybe that isn't the most pleasant metaphor, but that's truly what it is. It is an uncontrollable spewing forth of all the pieces of unchewed thoughts in my mind.

"Can you believe how square engineers are?"
"Is it SketchUp'ed or SketchedUp?"
"Good thing that's the psychology building because is designed to play tricks on your minds."

This is how archinerds communicate. This is how two architortured minds connect. And best of all, this just confirms what I already know: design is my life.

Straight Lines? There Is No Such Thing.

This isn't going to be a very long post, but I noticed something very interesting while walking to Target this evening. The city street I was walking down was a pedestrian mall, straight through downtown. So why, when I was walking down Nicollete Avenue was my path taking so many curves? Isn't the most direct path from point A (the bus stop) to point B (Target) a straight line? It makes sense from a design standpoint. However, there is one thing design cannot predict: humans.

We are the factor that can make or break a design, we cause architects to look at their completed projects with the little animated cloud of squiggly lines over their heads and mumbling bad words under their breath. People like to walk, but they also like to congregate, to move at different paces, and to create spaces of stillness in the middle of a corridor of movement. Also, we like to go off the beaten path, indulge in our sense of adventure. When you put all of these into a single downtown street, you find people standing in the middle of the sidewalk, walking opposite directions right at each other, and even those just walking in zigzags for the fun of it. This street becomes a living room, a hallway, a doorway, and more all at the same time.

Thus, my walk to Target became a constant zigzag, saying excuse me, and getting dirty looks when I didn't drop a dollar in the panhandler's cup.

God I love Minneapolis.

KC Masterpiece

Although I grew up in small town Kansas, I've always considered Kansas City to be my city. It was only an hour away and we spent countless days there for softball games, shopping trips, and the like. After all I have learned, I appreciate it even more for the hidden gem it is. 

Located smack in the middle of the country, it is easy to get to from anywhere, easy to get around once you get there, and full of interesting neighborhoods, buildings, and design. Sadly, not many people know about it, or feel it is not worth their time. They couldn't be more wrong. I want to share just a few examples that show why KC is a diamond in the rough.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

This classic beaux-art building is home to one of the best art museums in the country, according to friends who are experts on art (of which I am not). On top of this, admission is free! How many world class art museums can say that? Outside, the museum is surrounded the sprawling Kansas City Sculpture Garden, full of sculptures by artists known the world over. As if this wasn't enough, there is the stunning addition done by Steven Holl, known as the Bloch Building.

This is the real reason I visited Nelson-Atkins. My art friends would love the art, my sculptor friends would love the sculptures, even my landscape friends would love the gardens. But I, as an archinerd, love the Bloch Building. It bares a striking resemblance to Rapson Hall, the building I study in everyday, due to being designed by the same architect. This really is a case of world class architecture right in the middle of America. It sharply contrasts the classic limestone building sitting atop the hill, while still allowing it to be front and center as the museum's iconic facade. Sitting east of the main building, cascading down the hill, half underground, this addition is an experience all its own. I could try to explain it in full detail, but the only way to do it justice is to visit it. Do it. Go to KC, visit this museum. See great art and architecture all wrapped into one site.

Sporting Park

On the Kansas side of the metro sits one of the newest of Kansas City's world class sporting facilities. Home to Sporting Kansas City, KC's pro soccer team, this stadium is an experience all in it's own. Come for the game, stay for the architecture. Or come for the architecture and stay for the game. Either way you are in for a great time. Designed by world renown Populous (who has an office in KC and also designed TCF Bank Stadium on my own campus) this stadium makes soccer fans and architects alike smile. Designed to be intimate, to be fan friendly, and to promote charity, this stadium achieves all three. The bowl seats just over 18,000 (many games actually see over 19,000 fans due to standing room tickets).  All seats in the stadium are under a roof, while the field is under the wide Kansas sky. This roof not only shades the seats and keeps the dry in rain, it also keeps all noise inside the stadium and right in the ears of opponents. The stadium contains lavish club spaces, areas where fans can directly interact with players as they enter the field.

Again, this is an environment you must see to believe. Pictures don't send the chill down your spine like roar after a Sporting goal, the blue confetti flying, the cauldron going insane, all against the best backdrop in all of major league soccer.

So...what is the moral of this story? Go to Kansas City. Do it. Hop on I-70 or I-35 or, if you are adventurous, even I-29. Introduce yourself to a city much like an awkward junior high student. She has an inferiority complex, being overlooked by the popular kids, like NYC or LA. However, once you get to know her, she blossoms before your eyes. The Country Club Plaza, the Crossroads District, Union Station, the Kauffman Center for the Performing arts, and, yes, the world's best barbecue. Why else would I name this post after a bbq sauce? So stuff your mouth, as well as your eyes. You'll be in for an experience that lives up to it's sauce, a masterpiece.

An Architotured Mind?

This is quite the title, I know. But why did I choose it?

Everyone knows the horror stories of all-nighters in studio, projects that pose impossible amounts of work with scary deadlines, cutting 55 slices of cardboard only to glue them back together...

But that isn't the type of torture architecture has caused my mind. This involves how everyday spaces morph in front of me. An art museum is no longer and art museum. A shopping mall is no longer a shopping mall. Even my own college campus is no longer simply a collection of buildings and lawns. Every designed space becomes a source of inspiration, a question of design, and a space to be studied. I cannot drive through suburbia without wincing, almost feeling physical pain at the site of McMansions going up block by block in record time. Any house where the walls are dry walled before the roof is even begun gives me nightmares.

On the other side of the coin, its amazing how the canopy of a tree becomes architecture, how a single block of a busy street becomes an outdoor living room, and a shopping mall becomes a way for a growing middle class to express their new-found values.

A design mind begins to see the world differently than the average mind, asking itself so many questions.

"What did they do?"
"Why did they do this?"
"Does it work?"
"What would I have done differently?"

Then my mind delves into concepts such as: programme, aesthetics, context, form and function, the list goes on and on.

The fact that these questions race through my mind in every city I visit, every building I enter, and every space I inhabit, that is where the title for this blog comes from.

I inhabit an architortured mind.

What am I crazy?

To answer that question: yes.

That is the precise reason I decided to begin a blog. Looking back over my first two years of college, I wish I had a record of everything that has happened, of the ways I have become the archinerd I am today. Also, I figured it may be entertaining to read....maybe.

Anyway, hopefully I will keep this up, as I have never been able to keep a journal. It is my hope that if nothing else, this glimpse into the life of an architecture student will make you feel a little better about your life, a little less hectic, a little more sane, and above all else, make you feel...something.

Cheers!