Photo Documentation

Today we have our "midreview" for the semester.  I'm not particularly concerned about it aside from the fact that I'm guessing that the feedback I will receive will essentially be "good, keep going, think about where the program will fit into the building" which will not really be helpful.  It will, however, help push me to being a full blown architect soon, I suppose.  With my models and drawings where I feel they need to be, I decided to take some pictures this morning of the knitting projects I have been working on and the models I built at home the last couple nights.  Here come pictures!

This is the knitting project I was working on at the end of winter break - it's a fun wavy scarf!

This is a close up shot of the cowl I finished right before our trip to the northern part of Finland.

It's supposed to be able to be worn as a hood, but I think either mine is too short or my head is too long.  I struggle greatly to not have my hair poof up when I try to wear it this way.

These are the wristers I just finished.  I bought Icelandic wool at the largest knitting shop in Helsinki based on a Norwegian pattern I found on ravelry.  The mixture of having 3/5 nordic countries involved made me happy.  This is before I felted the wristers.

Here they are quite a bit smaller - post felting.  Typically I do this in the washing machine but because I am not certain how well the washing machines would work here, I felted them by hand.  Thankfully, Sally was very encouraging because it was a surprisingly extensive process.

This is the first model that Pentti (one of my studio professors) seemed to think have promise.  I am developing an America Center for Helsinki.  In thinking about American culture I decided to start the design with  an outdoor "theater" for picnics, lounging, occasional performances, and film screenings. 

In architecture school, reviewers always ask us to "turn the building on it's side.  Mine surprisingly looks akin to the Leiviska church we saw a couple weekends ago.  The fact that it's more engaging this way probably means something, but I'm not quite sure what that is yet.

After working on the previous model in plan and section drawings for about a day I built this next iteration where the library and gallery spaces are underground with a light well around the perimeter.

It looks like a building which is both quite exciting to me and seems a little early in the process for me to be there.  The real challenge is trying to work sectionally and this iteration is still very plan oriented, in my opinion.

This was my preliminary diagram working through the variety of programs in our design project, their size and public vs. privateness of the space.

These are my diagrammatic plans and a section of the model above.

In order to get away from my propensity to be completely orthogonal I played around with making a stick model.  It didn't help with the sectional quality yet, sadly, but has more unique volumes and either will be a good different starting point or got it out of my system!

Midreview in 4 hours and then I have visitors in Helsinki and spring break starts!!!

I've Been Negligent...Trying to Catch Up on the Blogging

This week I have not been very interested in blogging for some unknown reason so I have quite a lot to catch up on, probably in almost bulletpoint format.  Monday we had studio which meant I started thinking about our project that morning (after working a little bit on my foam chair).  We are to design an "America Center" for Helsinki.  The project is much more complex and I kept zooming in and out of different scales. I did some basic diagramming of the various necessary spaces and then found myself detailing plans for the library....I think my professor (Penti) thought I was a little insane, but he didn't seem to necessarily think that was a bad thing.

I think this was the day that the dining halls were both so busy that we tried the X-Burger stand near the strip mall designed by Aalto for the first time.  It was surprisingly rather good (or I was starving).  It was not cheap, but reasonable by Helsinki standards.

Tuesday was a very busy day of accomplishing nothing.  I woke and did some more sketching for studio.  at 12:30pm we all assembled at the American Embassy.  My main sense after meeting with the ambassador was that security took far too long and a lack of being impressed.  It was a really great opportunity and he seemed very nice and very intelligent.  It simply seemed like he would have been much more comfortable hanging out with us instead of meeting formally around a table.  With his earring and broad sholders, the ambassador did an excellent job of playing devils advocate with us on questions that he posed about the current crisis in Japan, our role as designers, and environmental issues.  I was disappointed that I left the meeting not knowing his opinion on anything we discussed and not knowing if he really heard anything we said.  This is probably less a reflection on him and more on my lack of interaction with politicians.  Next we had history class and then Peter MacKeith (who flew into town for a few days after leaving a group of 21 students in Copenhagen) wanted to meet us all for a drink.  We did not have time for dinner beforehand, so after 2 hours most of us excused ourselves in search of food.  Sally, Matt, Todd, and I went to an Indian restaurant which was quite tasty!

Wednesday morning I glued and sanded my foam chair and came up with a few more thought for studio.  Everyone assembled at 13:30 where Peter affirmed (changed by our perspective) some of the foundations of our assignment.  It's very good that he was in town to clarify this early in the process or some of us would've been derailed further into our designs.  He then went around and looked at our Finnish and American images and cubes.  After Penti talked to everyone, I set to work on the one to one scale model of my chair for review on Friday.  I was starving around 7:00pm so headed home.  After eating dinner, Sally and I finished our assignment for building systems (we'd spent quite a while developing it on Monday evening).

Thursday was more chair in the morning, building systems from noon to 3pm, and then frantic chair building.  We had an office visit at 6pm which was a surprisingly good time.  The representative for ALA architects was very kind, very interesting, and impressively generous with his time.  I liked a lot of their work and what wasn't my taste I at least respected and enjoyed hearing how their firm developed.  The name apparently means something like "plan" in Finnish and the 3 guys that formed the firm chose it because they wanted a three letter word that started with A (top of the yellow pages) that had meaning.  The concert hall/opera house they are finishing in Norway (which was the competition that got their firm started) is beautiful, in my opinion.  That night a bunch of kids went out for St. Patty's, but I came home and made food in the wok for dinner and started building a model for studio.

Friday was mid review for our chair design.  I really enjoyed the professor of our teacher who was a guest reviewer.  He clearly had a lot of experience and was very kind.  I was disappointed that the class I was most looking forward to this semester is still a trial and error experience with the most common answer to any question being "I don't know....look at lots of chairs".  It was fun to see everyones work, though, and enjoyable to get covered in chunks of foam together.

Kenny in his library chair discussing intense physics, stack-ability, and strength

My family of chair models - the large seat is very poorly done because foamcore does not want to hold a curvilinear shape and we are not friends.  Julie (our teacher) thinks my metal proportions are off although I based them on an existing chair.  My next step will be finding chairs with wood runners and metal runners and drawing my chair to see which size of material is the look I like.  

Sally is working on a rocking chair so there was a huge trust element to actually sitting in the seat.

Todd titled his chair the "leap of faith" because its both a little high and an little deep for him

Saori tried to explain her vision for her chair as everyone else kept getting excited about their own ideas for the design.

Matt's chair was clearly the most sanded and probably the most comfortable.

This is easily the happiest I've seen Michael.  He loves his chair because he is designing it to fit him perfectly (even if it doesn't work well for others) and challenges them to say it isn't comfortable.

Nothing particularly monumental happened over the weekend.  I battled with the laundry machine Friday afternoon because the power was switched off but I could easily fix that and started my clothes.  After two hours the machine stopped running, but my clothes were not wet.  No water had entered the machine so they had just been spinning dry.  I figured out how to switch the water on and tried again with my fingers crossed that there wasn't a good reason for the shut down.  Thankfully, things went well, but I missed dinner with the trio (apparently they had Cajun food in Kallio with Mo-town music!).  I met up with them at a local bar there were there were some interesting and some very intoxicated Finns.  Sally kept kneeing Matt and Todd because she felt trapped next to the smelly Finnish man who kept asking her out.  He sang a couple blues song to us in Finnish and used a very insulting pick up line towards Sally so we finally left.  Everyone was keen on dancing, but then we ran into other international students of architecture from Aalto University so decided to tag along with them and make some friends. They were really nice, but the only name I remember is Maria from Bacelona because the names from Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway were far less familiar.

Saturday was girl's shopping day.  Sally and I went to a pastry shop and got coffee a few blocks from our apartment and then took at least an hour or two to get into the middle of town.  We went in many a cute little store and found many design items that we would like if they were only a fifth of the price.  Then we tried on some clothes at a store called Mango in Kampii before progressing to Forum (where things are a little more reasonable and sales were happening).  Sally bought two pairs of inexpensive earrings and I got a couple shirts (one is a bring pink color which is a wonderful change from my very black-centered wardrobe here).  Next we went to Stockmann and then we started to get hungry (around 3pm).  We went to Cafe Esplanade to get salmon soup but the salad looked really good, but kind of expensive.  Sally knew of a better option - we went to Cafe Ursula on the 5th floor of a department store and had the best salad I think I've ever eaten (and/or I was starving).  Next, we found our way back to the apartment, happy but exhausted.  Sally had oatmeal for dinner and then I made myself spaghetti and garlic bread before heading into Kampii to meet up with Todd and then Saori and Matt for a little bit.

Sunday has been very enjoyable and quite low key.  We got ready and then picked up a pastry (don't worry, I will be just having normal cereal tomorrow) and walked to the train station.  The Eilel cafe there had reasonably priced coffee (hot chocolate for me) and was a nice place to sit and eat.  Then we found a bus to our next building for building systems and took a ton of pictures.  It is a funerary chapel so was closed/locked.  Hopefully we will find a contact person to be able to get inside sometime in the next couple weeks.

                                     

I made a poor shoe choice in the snowy conditions, so when we got back to the train station I booked it back to our apartment for dry warm socks and sweatpants.  Then I ate some lunch and watched the last two sermons from my church in St. Louis (last weekend I did not 'go to church' on our excursion).  The current series is really interesting both in the sermons and the recommended books that I am working through along with the study.  I then got to talk to DW for awhile, knit, read, video chat, watch Bones, make plans for spring break, book dinner reservations, and eat dinner.  A lovely, lazy, yet plenty productive end to the weekend.

Tomorrow Peter will be in studio to give us feedback along with Matti and Penti on our current designs. In between activities this weekend I have made 4 models so am well set for that.  I do not love any of them yet, but think I have made quite a bit of progress and nearly have a complete idea for the next iteration.  The truly interesting thing will be to see what he has to say about our chairs on Tuesday.  The big push for the week is our midreview on Friday afternoon, but as the requirement is 3 models at the same scale as my current models...it's perfectly acceptable that I knit a lot today and am getting uncharacteristically distracted by spring break.

Finland East - Sunday

Sunday was the longest day of the Finland East excursion - primarily because we spent sooooo much time in the bus.  We all pretty much slept all day, just waking for an hour or so at each building, but still felt completely exhausted because sleep on a bus doesn't provide much rest.  I got back to Helsinki with an awful headache thanks to having my neck be so crooked - leaning against the window to sleep backfired.  However, it was still a day of some neat sights and fun pictures!  Our first stop was a Medieval castle.

I first took a picture of this huge door and then asked Sally to stand in it so the scale wasn't lost - it was "so big"

Fi-rar the cannons!

Sirkkaliisa told us that this was the oldest, most northern courtyard in the world.

Our next stop was a museum dedicated to the use of wood.  The impact of the environment on a design and the fact that a few pictures do not tell the whole story was emphasized to me through this experience.  Moments were beautiful in this building, but it was not as well designed as I had hoped.  Prior to this weekend I had looked at a few images and couldn't wait to see the building in person.  The outside is far less idyllic in the winter than in the summer.  My main issue with the architecture, though, is the spatial organization.  I felt lost a lot of the time I was in the space.  It wasn't clear how to exit, but there also was not a specified direction to the museum.  It took asking my classmates for me to know the theme of the multitude of displays because I first saw some angels, then a room with a squishy floor and a nature movie, and then some hats...quite an interesting combination.

These wood slats around the gift store, however, are lovely.

This is the "room of silence".  It apparently was part of a world's fair before coming to this museum.  The images is projected and mostly stagnant, but every so often a bird or butterfly would move on the screen.  There are "nature noises" and the floor material impressively feels like walking on muddy grass.

The hat display was probably my (and I think almost everyones) favorite part of the museum.  These hats were historically designed for people working in the forests - this one is my favorite!

After this museum, I decided that there must be a requirement that all Finnish museums have an Aalto chair (I hope that's not true, but it seems that way).

This was actually a very neat, while simple, display.  Each piece of wood is on a hinge and it was interesting to touch the different types, read about their strength, and actually feel the different weights of each example.

I walked into this room and heard the characters of Fern Gully (a movie) crying out as the machines came in to cut down their homes.  This exhibit pointed out the poor planning of the flow of the building to me because I had to walk through a hallway to get here and there was not a different path back to the primarily showroom.

The itinerary planned on us eating lunch at the museum, but their cafeteria was closed, so we went to the nearest restaurant - an assisted living facility about 10 minutes away.  Lunch was a lot like school lunch (slightly better, but clearly the same catering service) and then we hopped back in the van b/c we needed to drive 1.5 hours and get to the Aalto church before 3pm.  Our ride, however, had another plan in mind.  We stopped at least 4 times because the vehicle was malfunctioning.  I believe the driver said a belt had broken....he fixed it was a hair pin, but then that broke and he had to work with it again.  The first time we had to pull over, Sirkkaliisa commented that "at least we are near a bus stop", which was quite humorous (and poignantly true).  Due to the many delays we made it to the Aalto church around 4pm.  Everyone tried to hide their disappointment that we weren't going to be able to enter the church.  Thankfully, as we all circled the structure snapping photos, our teacher went knocking on the doors of the church offices and parish and found a care taker who was willing to unlock the front door for us!

Classic Aalto door handle (seen in far too many buildings in Finland, in my opinion).

My favorite part of the building was the use of "lamination" (even though that word was way over used my first semester of grad school so I wish there were a more accurate term).  Aalto had two layers of windows which were at different angles.  This both gave the light a more playful quality and served the practical purpose of providing storage space for the partitions.  This church's sanctuary can be divided into three separate sections.  Sirkkaliisa explained this was popular at the time because churches were starting to be used for other functions, so having multiple rooms was good...plus so few people regularly attend services, it's good to be able to have a more intimate space.

Our final stop was a seafarer's museum.  Sadly, it was closed by the time we arrived, but the 

 was very intriguing.  I think it was the first time I had seen the exterior of a building with such vibrant colors. Interestingly, on the Thursday after this we visited ALA architects and saw their submission to the competition for this project.

We had what should've been an hour to an hour and a half drive from here back to Helsinki.  I am very glad Todd had found a movie on the bus, so we watched a Bruce Willis film in which he was a bank robber all the way back to the city.  The soundtrack was a very entertaining set of 80s music.  We arrived back at the main train station around 8:30pm (a lot of cars were passing us on the way beck....we think the driver was trying to be cautious with his less than perfect mechanical work under the hood) and we were all thrilled to vacate our seats.  It was quite a whirlwind weekend.  Sally and I went to McDonald's for dinner (I've had more McDonald's this semester than I did the last two...but it's sooo good and one of the few places open on a Sunday night) and headed home.