Reflections, Part IX

Now, finally, to reflect on this past and final year at Iowa State University. It’s been a long road leading up, alot of great memories.

Int he fifth year of our studies, we have one comprehensive studio followed by our choice of option studio. I couldn’t have had more of a contrast between classes and professors between the two semesters, and to be fair, I had asked for both. For the comprehensive portion, I had requested Tom Leslie, who had a reputation among us for running the toughest studio. I figured that if I was going to test my grit, I had better go full throttle. So I requested him. Following that, I requested the fabled Toy Studio, run by the even more infamous Mitchell Squire. Now I had already had Mitchell’s Craft and Crafty Action lecture and had planned to take his Goodness and Beauty class as well. But Toys…well…I don’t want to say it’s sinister, but I can’t think of a better term right now.

The comprehensive studio was our Boston project; a contemporary music hall. The project was complex to say the least. Program, structure, acoustics, ventilation, site treatment, this project had it all. There was also the diagram. Early in the project we were to develop a simple diagram that would act as the foundation for everything. It’s a handy skill, but Tom required nothing short of a perfect fit in order to move forward towards the rest of the project. There was a reason he had the reputation for being the toughest. Of course, I couldn’t have just left it at that. While I pursued a programming concept based off of the idea of a promenade, my partner, Dan Siroky, started introducing me to Grasshopper. We both became heavily invested in the promise of the program. Grasshopper is a parametric modeling program, which essentially means it is data driven and the aspects of the model are quantified and then can be built into a visually generative program. The programs that we were able to create not only ended up generating our form, but we found that by inputting the limitations of our space and the programmatic needs of our theater, we could allow the program to begin generating our seat layout so that it follow code guidelines for means of egress, standard sizing, and then check line-of-sight. We also began to find that the program could interact with other programs out there, and allow for some interesting results. By hooking Revit and Ecotect into the Rhino model through Grasshopper, we were able to set up a process by which, in theory, we could allow the program to check and modify the acoustics of the model. Unfortunately, even with his Macbook Pro and my ROG Asus, we didn’t have anywhere near the computational capacity to run these programs to their full extent, and we had to make adjustments the old fashioned way. In the end, instead of simplifying our model down to the point where the numbers came out right, we believed we were actually getting real feedback from our model, and in the end, Ecotect was showing that our acoustics were along the same lines as the current Boston Symphony, the third best acoustical space in the country.

There was a major problem though. For as much as we an allow a program to do the number crunching work for us, it is our hands that, in the end, must make the project, and we came short on that. Given more time, more computer power, we would have been able to make our U-turn completely and come full circle with the design, but life doesn’t always work that way. We didn’t have the big model. If there’s one thing that still haunts me from that semester, it’s that big 1/4″ scale model I attempted and ultimately failed at. The methods of digital to physical fabrication are still a point I want to explore. We had a good project, I can feel that in my bones, but we didn’t understand at the time how to push it into reality. But I can’t blame a program for that. It’s supposed to be my job, as an architect. I take the things that I think up on paper or screen, and I turn it into real objects. I’ll figure it out. All I need is the chance to continue the work, and just you wait, myself and others pursuing this, we’re gonna blow your mind.

But the train had one more stop for me at Squire Station. Now I had taken a lecture class with him before, Craft and Crafty action, and was taking the follow up course at the same time a the Toys studio, Goodness and Beauty. Both of these classes had a great effect on my design perspective and opened me up to more of the theory side of architecture and aesthetics. This will probably come up more in later posts. They also held many surprises for me, though I might delve into more of those at a later date.

For my last semester, I had originally wanted to take an independent studio focusing on my ideas about theater, but due to constraints, I was unable to pursue it. Instead, I turned to Mitchell and his Toy Studio to round out the rest of my education. Now, I could have taken many other studios. There were plenty of others exploring real building typologies or environmental design that would have surely been an interesting add to my portfolio. But I had gotten through Tom’s studio, and I was looking for a change of pace. Indeed I got it. Where Tom can be clear and concise, Mitchell is enigmatic. Where I got answers to my questions in previous semesters, I found more questions than I knew what to do with in Toys. But that isn’t to say that Toys wasn’t a blast. I got to make a set of parts toy that could build tent structures of different sorts. We made a twister mat out of bubble wrap that covered the entire atrium. I got to also make a larger than life Rock’em Sock’em Robot. It was actually really intense at times. Just deciding on a course of action was difficult, as our limitations in the studio were given only to what we decided on. The really great thing about this studio was that it allowed me to start making again. There was no way to work through the problems without building and testing them, watching them fail, and then fixing and rebuilding. It was a great end to my time at Iowa State, and gave me a lot of ideas to chew on.