In for the long haul - beginning Summer 2009

After 6 years doing IT work with a Business/Management of Information Systems degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, I realized that I didn't want to always wonder if architecture was really for me. After a year and a half of architecture classes at Cuesta College I have finally begun the 3 year master of architecture program at the University of Oregon.The extremely rigorous 8 week summer program is just wrapping up, so I thought I'd post samples of my work in the program.

This summer's studio course was a residential project on Eugene, Oregon's Mt. Baldy for fictitious Donald and Linn, with their twin 14 year old daughters and dog . The program called for 3 phases: guest house, tower element, and main house.

We started the process by hiking up the mountain and marking off the site. Here is an image I put together showing the selected site.


The site model was the homework for our first weekend as we dove into the design of the guest house for week 2. Without knowing the specific variables for the rest of the site's program, I came up with the following design, shown in the model that was due following the second weekend.


Week 3 gave us the opportunity to try to figure out where our tower (between 43 and 55 feet tall) were to fit on our site, what the uses of the tower would be, and what views a person would gain by having such an element on the site. We had a fun time figuring out how to fit our stairs inside the ten foot by ten foot shell getting up to Linn's space at the top. This phase required an axonometric drawing of both the stairs in the tower and the site as a whole, even though we only knew the general volumetric requirements of the main house. Here are my results after the 4th week.


Around this time we took an overnight field-trip up North. We hit a number of sites, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Gordon House, Alvar Aalto's Mount Angel Library, the Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood *(where the outside shots of the film "The Shining" was filmed), the Columbia Gorge Interpretive Center, and John Yeon's "the Shire" landscape installation. Here are some of my sketches from the trip.


After our hiatus field trip, we hopped into the design of the main house on the site and the practice of perspective drawings.


Ok, fast forward to week 7, preparing for the Monday morning final crit the beginning of week 8. I finally allowed myself to hop back onto the computer for designing the layout, after forcing myself to design, draft, and render everything by hand all summer. Here is an image of my 5' x 3.5' presentation board and some images of my final model.


I hope you enjoyed this brief excursion through my summer beginning the Master of Architecture program at University of Oregon. I will try to force myself to post more often as I continue the program, so you can see some of what I am learning and/or producing in my 60-80 hours per week in studio.

blessings,
-Corey