I took a bit of time off around Christmas and the New Years. The office did the annual trek to Stuttgart to visit with the other offices and see what everyone was working on. Afterwards I took a couple weeks to collect myself and enjoy a bit of downtime.
I took the opportunity to pull material together for NH AIA's competition and enter a board. My submission can be found below and the winning entry's here. While disappointed that I was not selected I was proud that I was able to get my thoughts and material together. Working on CA for UB for the past two years hasn't given the design side of my brain much activity so it was nice to think about architecture in this light.
Looking at the other entry's (or the winners) I can see that certainly much more time was spent on visualizations. This is something that I also considered. I only threw one weekend's worth of effort at the problem (and perhaps the winners did as well) but I lack the ability to create such quick visualizations that I would be satisfied with. Its something that I need to work on, finding the satisfaction that something can be "done" without being at the absolute level of refinement. Though looking at my board after a few weeks I can see that I didn't clearly define my solution to the problem through the few plans or sections on the board. While clear in my head it wasn't communicated clearly.
This of course is the goal of this (and other competitions) is to begin to develop my ability to create new material (visualizations, plans etc etc) but also to refine the way I think and describe my own architectural interests and solutions to problems.
Other than NH's competition I've been steadily working on the chair. Eli Cleveland came through and delivered an amazing prototype of the stool which I'm thrilled with. I've included a few shots of the prototype here.
And a big thank you to Ashlee @ AMI for an awesome job on printing the board on such short notice, it came out amazing!!
