Experimenting with Stop Motion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyrW5rUpL0c

I've done my share of video editing in the past, so that was another reason i was looking forward to this project - being able to use my experience.

So instead of adobe after effects for editing, I used adobe premiere pro cs5.5 which is much simpler to arrange and organise stills and music. You can still edit the video quality itself and add effects, but for more advanced video effects one would use after effects, which is what makes it temperamental to use for simple clipping and arranging.

I had already been taking photographs of my drawing, so I quickly made a stop motion film to experiment with the idea of speed drawing, as well as an actual stop motion animation towards the end, where Im looking through different possibilities of computer-related businesses.

The song is Vagabond by Wolfmother

New England House

There wasn't a lot I could find out about this house, in fact it was particularly hard to find, and only site seemed to have any information on it whatsoever. Still, it gave me some insight into the why/how of the project, where the matrix filled in the rest. Here's the article from the site http://archrecord.construction.com/projects/residential/archives/0604RHe-1.asp House in New England

New England Office dA, Inc. With the New England House, clad in black rubber and cedar, Office dA reinvents the cube By Fred Bernstein Monica Ponce de Leon & Nader Tehrani Twenty-five years have passed since the Rubik’s Cube was a marketing meteor, but as a metaphor, it still has force for Monica Ponce de Leon. Each year, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), she teaches a studio named for the maddening puzzle, which offers an important lesson: When a volume’s exterior is truly linked to its interior, getting the outside right may require tireless manipulation of the inside. Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani, her GSD colleague and partner in the Boston firm Office dA, have created a house that demonstrates that challenge. The typical American approach to home design, in which each new space adds a new volume, held no appeal for them. “This house,” says Ponce de Leon, “is the opposite of sprawl.” That, and the desire to get the two-bedroom, 2,600-square-foot interior up high enough to give the owners treetop views, resulted in a nearly cubic building. But there is nothing simple about this cube, which twists and turns in plan and section in an almost dizzying profusion of material and formal explorations. Tehrani and Ponce de Leon, who have been working together since they partnered on their GSD thesis in 1991, consider their projects built essays. In this case, the clients, a young couple, set the bar high: Collectors of contemporary art, they imagined their land as a place for site-specific artworks, of which the Office dA building, a weekend house, would be the first. On the site, extending over more than 30 acres in western New England, half a dozen old farm structures already stood around an oval “village green.” Tehrani and Ponce de Leon wanted the house to mine—as well as undermine—local building traditions. For the east elevation, which visitors see from the driveway, and the south facade, which they pass on their way to the front door, the architects chose shiplap and board-and-batten siding, materials that, Tehrani suggests, “emerge from the language of the farm.” The more private north and west facades, however, were free to speak languages of the architects’ own invention. Inside, too, Office dA avoided domestic clichés. Much of the ground floor is relegated to the garage, but the architects didn’t permit anything as simple as a door from there to, say, a mudroom. The entry is via an outdoor stairway, where the cedar south facade and rubber west one peel apart, creating a slit that suggests a journey to the center of the earth. The walls bracketing the stairs tilt in, “carving away headroom as you no longer need it,” says Ponce de Leon, explaining one of the moves that show the careful tailoring of plan and section. Making additional references to the facades, many of the interior elements (some created in collaboration with Boston designers Manuel de Santaren and Carolina Tress-Balsbaugh) seem to bring exterior components inside. A mahogany fireplace surround, for example, suggests, in its composition and overlap of vertical and horizontal patterns, a microcosm of the house’s southeast corner. Inflected by the exterior cladding, some of the windows look through horizontal wood slats, while others are pinched by bands of rubber.

Gathering Ideas

Reflecting on the idea of 'gathering,' we have to take ideas back from our previous two projects, as well as a building we are researching, and our 1:100 site model back at the start of the semester. Also have to define the building through our startup business idea and colleagues... which I think will mainly define the interior of my building.

I've started my bringing the main focus of my first two projects together - light weaving through, and freeform architecture, where my second project had no defined form, but an infinite number of potential forms. However this was applied to a temporary market stall, not sure how it would survive with heavy wind loads and permanent loads on various floors...

Startup Business

After intense brainstorming I found a new idea for a business that I'm very passionate about. I did have some subtle inspirations for this, so that I could believe that this idea would be possible and be brought to the world of architecture:

The idea arose from a business of software engineering and video game desiging: virtual reality.

In our technological age our experience of the world can be seen to rapidly accelerating to new artificial levels. The Internet has largely provided catalyst for this, in the form of avatars and online mmorpgs as well as social networking sites. But so has technology: the micro-chip and the processor is getting smaller and faster. We went from small round CRT's to Large Flat OLED's to 3DTV, the 3D still requires glasses and isn't exactly realistic but is definitely rapidly heading towards an end result that will be indisinguishable from real life.

Well what if one could, even today, immerse themselves in an artificial reality but trick the senses to feel, smell, see and believe what they're seeing is real. This is my essential idea, a business for a team that creates and operates a virtual reality 'box' that simulates an architect's design for a building and renders it in real life to a 3D simulation as well life-like sound replication (depending on materials). This is much like the virtual box seen in the film 'Sunshine' by Danny Boyle:

Except we're not yet up to the technology of advanced 3D projection, BUT, we have got to a point where we have invented glasses that 'augment reality.' Meaning the background and environment stays the same, but the glasses project an object or objects in 3D as you would see it in real life (http://www.vuzix.com/ar/products_wrap920ar.html#wrap920ar). Even the new nintendo 3DS has it. With the conjunction of these glasses and the virtual reality room with 3D sounds and touch capability, an architect can experience their unconstructed design as if it were real, and their clients can explore it and review the design before construction, avoiding added costs and changes during the construction phase of the project.