Where did you go over break?

By Audrey Treece




Welcome back everyone! I hope everyone had a stress free break and is ready to get back to school mode.

I have always enjoyed the breaks throughout the academic school year. It is guaranteed time that you have where you can plan trips, explore new things and take care of unfinished business. I truly do not know what I am going to do when I have to enter the “real world” and work forty hours a week All. Year. Long.

That being said, one trip that I took over break was to Key West, Florida. It is one of those places that I would have never purposely visited without the influence of my father. I can say that it was nowhere near my preconceived expectations, but I can also say that it did not let me down.

I will be an advocate of Key West and say that it is one place that I think every person should visit at least once in their lifetime. The island is only a few miles big but has a lot to offer. You can see the southernmost point in the United States, the home of Ernest Hemingway or you can browse up and down Duval Street to check out new restaurants, bars and hidden shopping centers. On the other hand, there is a working port and marina which is a new experience in itself. If you are looking for a beach, however, you are headed to the wrong place. There are only two beaches on the island that are MAYBE the size of one of the architecture studios.

If nothing that I listed sounds of interest to you, I highly suggest visiting just to see their architecture and the way the spaces work. It is filled with indoor and outdoor spaces that are truly unique to their location which you will never find here in the Midwest. Although many of the spaces are truly open air “shacks” there is a valuable lesson to learn on how the space is utilized. Buildings that we would find unacceptable here in Southern Illinois flourish in Key West.

Key West is incredibly hard to describe. It is one of those places you truly have to visit. If I was forced to describe it…the best I can come up with is a mixture of Bourbon Street, Las Vegas and the Lake of the Ozarks in a tropical setting.
Just take my word for it and visit! If you want to check out live footage on Duval Street: www.liveduvalstreet.com/.



Photo credit:
Visualphotos.com
visit-florida-keys.com
traveladvice.hotels.com

Thesis research - Possible References

By Molly Moran

Hawken, Paul. (1993). The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. New York. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

The book begins with a powerful statement about business and the world, “Businesspeople must either dedicate themselves to transforming commerce to a restorative undertaking or much society to the undertaker” (Hawken. 1993. Pg.2). It is a do or die statement that sets a serious and ‘real’ mood for the rest of the book. By listing the problems or issues that equate to, “waste equals food, nature runs off of current solar income, and nature depends on diversity” (Hawkins. 1993. Pg. 12).Explaining the consumption and reuse system that the world runs on. That we as consumers do not consumer as much as we put out. A product produced may takes more material to make then is actually in the product and that the waste of some products are reduced to a harmful form instead of something that can breakdown back into nature. Even products that can be broken down back into nature may be over produced to such a concentration that it can’t be absorbed back to nature. Business handles these environmental issues with, “the concept of ‘environmentally sound’ landfills and toxic waste incineration is attractive to industry because it requires the least amount of change and preserves the status quo with respect to industries’ goal and ambitions, while boosting the waste disposal industry. By focusing on the immediate problems involving the disposal of waste, industry is able to say that it is responsive to rising public concern. What it is actually doing is avoiding the fundamental issue, which is the creation of waste” (Hawkins. 1993. Pg.45).

Paul Hawken gives several cons and statics on waste incinerator plants, the initial concept for my thesis, that I feel is best left the contexts he provides in his book:
"What about waste incineration, the method of choice for dealing with most other forms of waste? First, keep in mind that the incinerator industry rose from the 'ashes' of the nuclear industry. As costs and safety concerns began to erode nuclear power's allure, the companies that had most benefited from building the plants-Bechtel, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, and Babcock & Wilcox- got into the 'resource recovery' business, also known as 'trash to cash'. But the energy resource recovered through burning trash to run steam turbines is a minute fraction of the total energy required to make the trash in the first place.

Incineration does not eliminate garbage or waste, it merely changes its form. Emissions are spread across town and country, which is why they have tall smokestacks. (New Jersey example of average yearly emissions) For every 100 tons of trash, incinerators produce 30 tons of fly ash, a granular substance that contains most of the toxins from paint and plastic, as well as mercury, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals. The fly ash is then trucked to a landfill where it has to be enclosed in a plastic liners for many thousands of years."(Hawken. 1993. Pg. 46-47).

Moving on from the negatives of business and industry on the environment Hawken begins to explain what efforts it will take for business to turn around it distcrutive ways and provide a healthy environment for the future. "Restoration is not a business term. But then, neither is degradation." (Hawken. 1993. Pg.58). This quote infers that business must act and conduct itself in a way that not only reduces its impact on the environment, but enriches the future environment and society.

The book then goes on exploring ways and examples of corporations and industry actively reducing and reusing waste and the pros and cons of those examples. Such as, Kalundborg, Denmark where thanks to geographical proximity a wide verity of major industry reused nearly all of each other's waste without prompting from the government. It accrued thanks to business cooperating and ultimately saving a buck. Then again, many other examples and suggestions urge government to give a more persuasive push toward sustainable business by making more economical to reduce and reuse material and waste.

Back to work!

By Matthew Owens

Winter break is over and it is time to get back to school, kind of a bummer right. I hope everyone took advantage of this month long break since it will most likely be the last. After this summer we will graduate and for most of us I am sure we will be heading to work in an office somewhere. That means no more month long winter break, spring break, fall break, or summer break, unless of course you enter education as a professions. It is most likely we may never again have one month off work until we retire, if we retire. I know while I was working in an office the most time I ever took off was a week and a half, which was a long time and it only happened once, because of a surgery. Other than that I would usually take off a week for a vacation, and the odd day here or there for whatever reason. So this is it, what will be the last winter break for most of us.

So good bye to long breaks, they do not exist outside of education. Although it’s not to say that we didn’t have anything to do at all over break and we just relaxed the entire month. No I am sure some of us took advantage of not having class and got a jump start on this semester by continuing thesis work. Of course getting anything done is difficult with the holidays and spending time with family, and we all deserved some time off after last semester. Anyway I hope some of us grad were able to get some work done, I know I didn’t get as much accomplished as I would have liked, but it was break. I ended up doing some unexpected traveling which was excellent!

So back to school, back to the books, back to the crazy hours of an architecture grad student. I must say it is hard to get started after such a long break. We get out of the routine, we get out of sync, and we form new habits and patterns over such a long break. Even when I was working and coming back from a week long break it was slightly difficult. Having to get up to the sound of the alarm, getting back to the grind, and getting back to work. The one thing that I can say is different about time off in school to work is that once a semester is over it is over, but at work the projects keep moving forward even if you aren’t there. So at least we will not have to come back to an inbox full of emails or catch ourselves up to what we had missed during any vacation time. So maybe going back to school after a long break isn’t as difficult, but none the less it will be somewhat of a challenge to get going again.

Hope everyone had a good break. Now let’s get back to it.

We Are Generation Flux…

By Jason Skidmore

In the latest issue of the magazine Fast Company the main article was entitled, “This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business.” It is a great article highlighting modern business and how professionals are succeed in the modern economy. Rather than summarize the entire article, which would be a crime to the article itself, I will quote the entire article for your reading pleasure. My interjection is that the world of doing business has changed and is changing. As professionals we have to make ourselves marketable in anyway necessary. The following is an excerpt of the article out of the magazine Fast Company, written by Rober Safian.

Be Not Afraid

“What's "a bitch" for companies can be terror for individuals. The idea of taking risks, of branching out into this ambiguous future, is scary at a moment when the economy is in no hurry to emerge from the doldrums and when unemployment is a national crisis. The security of the 40-year career of the man in the gray-flannel suit may have been overstated, but at least he had a path, a ladder. The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see “The Four-Year Career"), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you'll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating. "Fear holds a lot of people back," says Raina Kumra, 34. "I'm skill hoarding. Every time I update my resume, I see the path that I didn't know would be. You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you'll have everything in your tool kit."

Kumra is sitting in a Dublin hotel, where earlier she spoke on a panel about the future of mobile before a group of top chief information officers. She is not technically in the mobile business; nor is she a software engineer or an academic. She actually works for a federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as codirector of innovation for the group that oversees Voice of America and other government-run international media. How she got there is a classic journey of flux.
Kumra started out in film school. She made two documentaries, including one in South America and India, and then took a job as a video editor for Scientific American Frontiers. "After each trip to shoot footage," she says, "I'd come back and find that the editing tools had all changed." So she decided to learn computer programming. "I figured I had to get my tech on," says Kumra, who signed up for New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She then moved into the ad world, doing digital campaigns at BBH, R/GA, and Wieden+Kennedy before launching her own agency. Along the way she picked up a degree from Harvard's design school, taught at the University of Amsterdam, and started a not-for-profit called Light Up Malawi.

"So many people tell me, 'I don't know what you do,'" Kumra says. It's an admission echoed by many in Generation Flux, but it doesn't bother her at all. "I'm a collection of many things. I'm not one thing."

The point here is not that Kumra's tool kit of skills allows her to cut through the ambiguity of this era. Rather, it is that the variety of her experiences--and her passion for new ones--leaves her well prepared for whatever the future brings. "I had to try something entrepreneurial. I had to try social enterprise. I needed to understand government," she says of her various career moves. "I just needed to know all this."

You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded. GE's Comstock doesn't have as eclectic a career path as Kumra--she has spent two decades within GE's various divisions. But just because she can dress and act the part of a loyal corporate soldier doesn't mean Comstock is not a GenFluxer. She's got a sweet spot for creative types, especially those whose fresh thinking can spur the buttoned-up GE culture forward. She's brought in folks like Benjamin Palmer, the groovy CEO of edgy ad firm Barbarian Group, to help inject new ideas and processes into GE's marketing apparatus. "We're creating digital challenge teams," she explains. "We're doing a lot more work with entrepreneurs. It's part of our internal growth strategy. It creates tension. It makes people's jobs frustrating. But it's also energizing." Comstock, once president of digital media at NBC, is now one of CEO Jeff Immelt's key confidants. "I've always gravitated to the new," Comstock says, in trying to explain her comfort with change. "Part of it is who you are. I grew up in media, in news, and developed almost an addiction to go from deadline to deadline. It's intoxicating." And profitable. Comstock is the architect of Ecomagination and Healthymagination, GE initiatives that have helped reconfigure the company during this financial crisis. While it's too early to tell what Healthymagination could produce, the Ecomagination group has to date accounted for $85 billion in revenue.”

If you would like to read the rest of the article you can visit: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/162/generation-flux-future-of-business.

Palestinian Museum in Birzeit

by Joel Wallace




Below is an excerpt from the World Architecture News and is presenting a large scale museum project in Palestine. With crunch for thesis development already here, this project could set as a nice example of masterplanning, design, and cultural significance that most of our topics may require attention to. Designing to respect the past, present, and future are what drives our biggest challenges and projects like this are a good reference for how this may begin to be accomplished.

Through an extensive selection process The Welfare Association is intending to appoint architects to masterplan and design the Palestinian Museum which will be located in Birzeit in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The selected architects will be responsible for masterplanning a phased development of the Palestinian Museum on a very important site within the overall campus of Birzeit University, near to Ramallah.

The Palestinian Museum will be a unique cultural project and is being developed to become the primary and authoritative source of knowledge and new thinking about Palestinian history, culture and contemporary life. Such a space does not currently exist. The Museum is conceived as a thematic rather than simply a narrative museum, in which many different aspects of Palestinian history and culture will be explored in innovative and revealing ways, creating debate and discussion about both past and contemporary themes.

The Palestinian Museum project has been in gestation for over a decade and has gone through a number of different stages of debate, thinking and rethinking. After a great deal of internal discussion and external consultation, the Welfare Association is now totally confident that the overall strategy and concept direction allow for the Palestinian Museum to be built.

Because of the nature of the Palestinian reality, where a majority of Palestinians are today living outside historic Palestine (i.e. Israel and the Occupied Territories); and because of the barriers and checkpoints erected by Israel which prevent the freedom of movement of Palestinians living under occupation (and prevent most Palestinians in the Diaspora from even entering any part of their country), the Museum is conceived as a hub which, in addition to catering to the population in the West Bank, will also serve a network of branches and associated centres, sharing with them information, research, web-based material and touring exhibitions, as well as human resources and expertise.www.worldarchitecturenews.com

Data Centers

By Jason Skidmore

One of the most interesting projects I feel that architects get to be involved in at this time in history is the creation of data centers. This type of architecture in many ways is cutting edge and relatively new to the profession. It seems as if the requirements are easy enough to understand. It most be in an area that's mostly cold year round and has easy access to water. It makes plenty of sense, because if you have ever used a computer of any kind you know how much heat they can put off. There is one Norwegian data center that is in a cave and kept cool by water which is accessible because of a nearby fjord. If you would like to read more about the data center please visit the Gizmodo post at http://gizmodo.com/5870367/this-norwegian-data-center-is-built-in-a-cave-and-cooled-by-fjords. It is a rather interesting read. I hope that in the development of these data centers, that not only is the security, efficiency, and utilization optimized, but also that they are aesthetically pleasing to look at. It would be a shame for such a mark of our time in the grand scheme of humans not be interesting to look at.

Happy Holidays!

by Audrey Treece

Happy Holidays!

I was having a hard time trying to figure out what to write for this blog entry. I think you all can agree when I say that as of 4:00PM on Friday, December 17, 2011, my brain went on strike. It told me that I was not allowed to think or work on anything until I got sleep and my body readjusted back to a normal schedule and/or routine.
I began by using my best friend, Google. I started typing in different words for architecture to see if anything struck my interest. After several attempts, I ended with “Christmas Architecture.”
Here are some humorous things I found:
Twelve Days of Architecture
On the first day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
A study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Second day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Third day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Fourth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Fifth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Fiiiiiive Computer screeeeens,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Sixth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Six clients not paying,
Fiiiiiiiiive Draaaama Queeeens,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Seventh day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Seven cups of coffee,
Six clients not paying,
Fiiiiive Rennnnderiiings,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Eighth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Eight concept sketches,
Seven cups of coffee,
Six clients not paying,
Five more rendered sceeenes,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Ninth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Nine interns drafting,
Eight concept sketches,
Seven cups of coffee,
Six clients who are still not paying me,
Five Perforaaaaaated screeeeeeens,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Tenth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Ten roofs a leaking,
Nine interns drafting,
Eight concept sketches,
Seven cups of coffee,
Six clients still not paying, and I’m sending the invoice again, I don’t care if it is Christmas…..start paaaaaaying me!
Five R.S. Means,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Eleventh day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Eleven-hour work days,
Ten roofs a leaking,
Nine interns drafting,
Eight concept sketches,
Seven cups of coffee,
Jesus, these stupid six clients will never pay me,
Five more minutes to refresh this screeeeeeeeen,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
On the Twelfth day of Christmas,
my Architect gave to me
Twelve interstitial spaces,
Eleven-hour work days,
Ten roofs a leaking,
Nine interns drafting,
Eight concept sketches,
Seven cups of coffee,
Six clients didn’t pay me,
Fiiiiiiiive Gold—-en Meeeeeeeeeans,
a four-sided building,
Three French Curves,
Two turtlenecks,
And, a study guide for the A.R.E.
.
Merry Christmas,
pay me
www. archdaily.com/193884/twelve-days-of-architecture/
and this:

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/read.php?CATEGORY_PK=&TOPIC_PK=1844

I hope you all have a nice holiday season and most importantly a healthy and restful break.

See you next year!