Authors

These are the two authors who have inspired me the most throughout my literary wanderings:

EDITS: Okay, Kerouac still looks pretty awful, and Joyce looks like he walked out of a Simpsons episode, but I updated Kerouac a little bit, and added the real pictures next to them.

update

Wow it has been a long time since I have posted in here!  I have been very busy finishing up my applications and getting involved in all the holiday rumbles.  But everything seems to be almost done, and now is just the part to relax before looking everything over and deciding it's ready to go.

For my portfolio, I ended up printing it at Fedex, which turned out pretty nicely!  I only printed one as a test run, then altered a few of the mistakes I found (moving text down so the binding doesn't cut through it, etc.), and am now waiting for a review before I print them all out.

In the meantime, I've been trying to research what kind of architecture I ultimately want to do.  I do like the idea of commercial, and the way the challenge changes from building to building, but at the same time I love the residential aspect of architecture too.  Fortunately, the decision is a long way off, and I will have more exposure to both regions.

I have been trying to sketch lately, but after stressing out about my portfolio for so long, it's nice to take a couple week's break.  I'm sure I'll be back at it soon.

Coming soon:  The Globe Theater...MODERNIZED

Friday Night

I've been trying to write my personal statement, and I have ended up with a giant mess.  Too many ideas that went in different directions, an unclear "thesis", and about ten paragraphs that don't connect to each other at all.

So to sort out this mess, I am taking a break, then perhaps starting from scratch.  Of course, the material I've written will come in handy.  Anyways, I decided to show you some things I've been doing at work.

We started a BEQ project with over 500 units.  The kitchenette in these units are small.  Like 18" deep by 18" wide.  Next to the kitchenette is a micro-fridge, which comes higher up than the kitchenette.  Now, what is supposed to happen, is that a shelf is right above the micro-fridge.  However, it just doesn't work.  At least not yet.

In this picture, you can see the shelf has no support on the left side, and it's just sticking out into space.  We could just finish the edge so it's smooth and uniform, but there is still a problem:  the microwave that goes on top.  Yes, it is a shelf for a microwave, which will collapse the shelf without a support.

I submitted an RFI for the issue, and hopefully the architect will get back to me soon.

I do like the design however.  I think the full-height backsplashes and cladding on the wall looks really good, and shelves will look good once the issue gets figured out too.  For clarity sake: the company I work for is only doing the solid surface.  The sink, cabinet, fridge and plywood is all provided by others.

 

I have enjoyed working on the submittal for this project, and will be excited to get these into production.  The job doesn't start for a few more months at the earliest, so there is still a lot of work to be done on the design, and collaboration with the cabinet subcontractor and the plumbing subcontractor.

Pages One and Two

The Plan Rack.

Our office had plans.  A lot of plans.

So I designed a rack to store them in.  I first created an extremely rough sketch which I didn't even bother to keep or take a picture of.  Then I did a CAD drawing:




I put the .dxf file on a DVD-RW, gave it to Oscar downstairs to run through the CAD machine, then voila:

The Cedar House finally.

So this weekend, I spent most of my time working on a portfolio to put together for applications.  I finished the entire Cedar House, and have posted some of the slides from the portfolio collection.  These are in no way final, and I am probably going to change the design around a few times before I actually decide on what to get printed.  Ugh.  Stressful.  I am excited to just get it over with.

oops

Yikes.  It's been way too long since I posted on this blog.  I have been busy though, I haven't been slacking off...too much anyways.

This weekend I got a chance to sketch some awful pictures, but I also managed to get a section detail completed.  Awesome.  So here:

Section 

So after I completed this scaled drawing, which I didn't bother putting dimensions on for aesthetic reasons, I had to make the section in sketchup, which actually took longer, and a lot more clicks of the "hide" button then I would have liked.  But what can you do?  It didn't take too long, and I managed to get a pretty good shot.  Granted, I can't take it in 2D, so the 3D aspect is still there, but you'll get the idea.

So, yes.  I removed the tree and replaced it with an oversized fountain.  Modern, and the trickle would be kind of soothing, wouldn't it.


On a somewhat unrelated note, I have two important staples on my desk:  An Einstein action figure and a miniature camel (made of camel hide, not a real camel) from Morocco, whose name is appropriately Paulo.  Whenever I am stuck designing, creating, writing, or finding something to do, I inevitably wind up staring at them until an idea pops into my head.  This time, Einstein gave me the idea for the square fountain.  So if you don't like it...blame Einstein.   

Happy October

Physics Park Updates

Q Cafe Update

XYZ slide...per special request!  (I am also putting this on grass...sandbox experiment failed RE: Next Picture)

Comprehensive view

Page for Portfolio

Sketch for Wind-Up Bird Chronicles

Good Grief

Last night I was pretty excited to post some pictures up on here...until I accidently clicked the "don't save" button instead of the "save" button.  The utter frustration caused me to step away from the computer immediately, and try to calm down.  So I played Uncharted on PS3.  Upon which I started dying, increasing frustration.  So I finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.  Not a bright warm fuzzy feeling book, but an amazing and incredibly well written.  The imagery the author uses is amazing and inspired a sketch which I have not yet finished, and thus not yet posted.

Now that I have had a good 18 hours after my clumsy, data-erasing, life-wasting mistake, I can post pictures up.

The Cedar House

 Yes, the tree is finally inside the house.  And as basic as it is, it serves it's purpose.  Clean air for everyone that is rich and wants to feel environmentally better about themselves.

The walkway is a whole separate issue, and I need a landscaper to add flowers/gardens/etc.

 To give you an idea of how the tree gets light, and how the house saves energy, I put a hole on the roof.  Well, it's not a hole, it is a glass/plastic substitute.  Just like Cowboy Stadium, God can look down and watch his favorite football...err family.




Now for my favorite wasted effort:

The Kitchen/Pantry

This kitchen took me awhile to figure out.  I even made that oven, and the pantry in the back, the countertops...sigh.  I think I'll be able to do those pretty quickly though.  Plus, I still haven't decided on a color scheme for any of the furniture/paint/everything, as you can see by the stairs and rest of the inside of the first level of the house.

Tonight I will try to replace all these elements and more, and thanks to God, the NFL lockout ended, and the Cowboys are on Monday Night Football, so I can sketchup and watch football simultaneously.  Hopefully I'll be able to post the replacement pictures up tonight, but we'll see how far I manage to get.

Until next time,

Robert

Too much Tim Burton

Pictures!

Physics Park

Out of the blue today I got an urge to create a physics museum.  So I did.

The Cafe

Eye View

Pythagorean Wall

Entrance

Paradise Found

Cedar House Rules

A good weekend along with a mild cold (and procrastination) have preoccupied me over the past couple of days, but despite these distractions I have still managed to get some work done.  Especially on the Cedar House (as it is called for now). It is a bit modern, and too environmentally considerate for my taste.

Red Cedar



Front Door (at my height)

Most of the exterior work is done. I only need to add a back door on the second floor and maybe a couple more windows, but for now I'm starting to focus on the interior, or as I like to call it: a giant mess.  The roof is still something of a mystery requiring trial and error considering I have to figure out a way to let a tree grow inside of the house...

Power Outage

Bamboo Sketch

Candlelight Sketch

Laborless Weekend

This weekend, I had a few minutes to put some more stuff together on the Globe.  Although, I did spend most of the three day weekend watching reruns of Parks and Rec and mlb.tv while eating an assortment of good foods.  From what I did manage to get done: the second floor, aside from the paneling has been essentially completed.  Well, the structure itself is almost completed, because the third floor is almost a replica of the second floor.  But the massive amount of information that is now stored in this model has slowed my computer down when I try to work on it.  This also implies that all the big stuff is done, and so tedious details is probably the best description for most of what is left to be done.



In an effort to procrastinate these little complex details, I have started yet another project.  This time, it's a simple house.  Kind of...I wasn't going to put pictures up, but words are starting to fail me now :

The plan for this house was to have a Red Cedar exterior, and that still may or may not happen. The big thing that is unique here is that there is a tree/forest patch in the middle of the house.  Like an enclosed piece of land.  There is not going to be foundation in the square and will instead go straight through into the soil.  This may will cause chaos in the construction phase of a house, but that is not my problem at the moment.  The stairs will run adjacent to this indoor courtyard, and go up to the second floor, allowing the tree to get up to about 20' high.

Since it is hard for me to explain with words right now:

  The tree/forest patch will be in the middle of the house, and the height goes through the second floor.  The roof of this house will be interesting, and I have about 4 ideas running through my head on how to go about it.  But that is for a different day.  This project is an exercise  to flex my 'creativity', something that I really need to demonstrate in my portfolio.  My technical skills are good, but my artistic abilities need some tuning.  So in an effort to be more artistic, I have made two purchases:

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

Bamboo Pad

From personal experience, I can assure myself that this will be extremely frustrating.  These bamboo pads have always both fascinated me, and made me want to throw things for not being able to use it well.  They both shipped out today from Amazon, and they will probably both be here next week sometime.  So I have time to finish the Globe and the house by the time these come.  At least, that's the goal.  Eye on the prize....right?

Thank God for Linear Arrays

Who knows how many more hours would have been wasted without them.

Three totally unrelated things

While waiting in my car today, I was searching through the android market, hoping I would finally find an app that I would use more than twice.  It turns out, I finally did find one.  If you have an iphone or android, I highly recommend this app called "Buildings".  It not only has thousands of buildings, but it has directions to them, and finds the history of a building near you.  It is really fun to browse, and I can finally spend (or waste if you prefer) my time doing something interesting while avoiding other people.  No more staring and flipping through my app screen to avoid social interactions at receptions and parties.  I will never look like a loser loner to the general public again!

Perhaps that is a nice venture into my next topic, which is only an update on the globe.  The Tudor-esque style on the outside of the globe has been completed....on most of the first floor.  I know the stair columns have to be completed, but I plan on doing that last, once everything is done.

The coloring process has indeed begun, but the only thing that is set in stone so far are the both the column color and the cow hair plaster on the outside of the building (yes...they used cow hair of all things).  The columns are all just one component that is copied and pasted over and over again.  So while creating the first one took awhile to figure out, the rest was just a tedious five minutes of copy, paste, move, rotate.  Repeat.

The second floor construction has begun and all the benches are in, but a lot more work needs to be done, and it will probably take more time than the first floor did.  For starters, I haven't decided how I want to do that railing yet, and creating the "special rooms" for the royals is a whole different post.

Today I went out and bought a pencil sharpener, pencils, a hi-polymer eraser, and sharpie pens to use on my sketchbook.  Hopefully I will have some sketches soon to post up.

Until tomorrow,

Fun With Templates

Stone Brewery

Today, I met up with an old friend and we went to Stone Brewery in Escondido.  It was an amazing building, and had tons of interesting and unique materials that I couldn't help but stare at through most of our conversations.  A lot of the building was actually made of...you guessed it, stone.  But the way the color scheme and material choices in the room were able to compliment it was really beautiful.  If you are remotely interested in beer, I would highly recommend you check this place out.

  

Fun with 2x4 and 4x4s!

After a couple hours, a Sketchup crash and a few cups of decaf, the first floor of the Globe is finally complete...at least, the major construction.  There are tons of details I will go back and do later, but right now, the shapes are all in place.

2x4s and 4x4s played a big part today.  making the supports for the second floor, the fence, and the Tudor style all needed one (or both) of the standard sizes, and it worked out well.  

On behalf of the Sketchup Exporter, sorry for the smudged lines

As you can see, I used a lot of offsets to create the benches.  Each bench is 1', and the space between the benches is 2'.  At this point, the model was ready to be extruded!

Here are a couple comparisons between the First Globe, and the Second One.

Globe One

Globe Two

Besides the stage, the second model is much cleaner and simple than the first (the missing half of the stairs on the first doesn't help its cause much either).  It is also more accurate!  The benches in the first model had backs on them, which was quite a luxury I decided to include in the budget.  However, that luxury got axed in the second model, but in the original, I highly doubt the First Floor Gallery had benches with backs.  

The next step will be to finish up the Tudor detailing on the first floor, and start the second floor.

In other news, I am starting to plan sketches around different paintings.  One of my favorite paintings is by Van Gogh, called "The Yellow House".  I think it would be interesting to try to sketch a building that has the same kind of movement and style as the picture.  

The Yellow House

Until tomorrow,

Robert.

Project: The Globe Theater

When I studied abroad in London, I had the fortune of going to the Globe Theater three times.  Twice to see a play (The Comedy of Errors and Antony and Cleopatra), and once to have a behind the scenes look at the theater.  Although the behind the scenes tour was amazing to see, it also killed the sense of magic the Globe Theater has on its own.  While they told us a lot about how they mimicked the construction of the first Globe, they also showed us the high tech features built in and around the theater, which deprives the structure of its identity:  A building that defies time, as ageless as the stories that are told inside of it.

A Midsummer's Night Dream in 1599

For my project, I looked at tons of pictures of the new Globe Theater, the Old Globe Theater (in San Diego), and sketches and ideas of what the first Globe Theater may have looked like.  There is very little evidence or reports of the theater's specifications, so fortunately, a lot of elements were able to be smudged, such as the number of exits, or the height of the stage.

I started a basic globe theater a couple of months ago, but it is very sloppy, and I am restarting it from the ground up, knowing much more about BIM drawing than I did at the outset.  This is what I have for my first Globe:

My original Globe Theater (First Floor Only)

However, I think it is time for a restart, to create a more unified and cleaner Globe, and give it the dues it deserves in a BIM model.  It will also allow me to provide a step by step process on how I came about designing the structure.  

The first thing I did was make a blueprint similar to an A-sheet.  This picture isn't rotated to the traditional x-y axis, but it symmetric nonetheless.  The diameter of this theater is 100', and the stage is 40' x 20'.  I took the following steps to make this layout:

• The outside walls are 1' thick
• The distance from the back of the outside wall to the interior is 15'4".
• The fence of the first floor compartments is 4" thick.
• The exits are in the form of a pentagon, and measure 6' wide, with the remainder of the section used as stairs.
• The center of the circle is the front and middle of the stage.

First Floor Plan (rotated)

Tomorrow I will add the benches to the layout, and add some more details to the floor plan.  Even though it's tempting to drag the whole floor plan up to make it 3D, it is really important NOT TO DO IT.  It will make things MUCH more complicated than they need to be.  Until tomorrow,

Robert.