And a good story for us! 
Thank you! 
Great telling! I really enjoyed myself! 
And I also did get your troubles with it, at least I think so. 
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I was thinking of ridiculous shapes like this guy
It was dumb. It be honest I don’t even remember other people’s projects.
We don’t actually submit anything in architecture. We just get a final grade at the end of the semester on what we’ve done overall.
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Isn’t a corner only 90 degrees though? If you’ve got more than 3 planes intersecting, not all of them would be 90 apart. Or have I got my definition wrong?
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I didn’t think they had to be 90 degrees apart. I was under the impression that 2 planes meet at an edge and 3 or more planes meet at a corner.
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Oui, the 90deg thing is just practicality in building
The fish is correct…angle don’t matter so long as it’s 3+ planes…
Don’t you call the 90s a square corner or something along those lines?
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At least you’re being stimulated to be creative, which is a method that’s severely lacking in our education programs in my opinion.
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Spatial Narrative Project
First Year
Gang gang, lets keep this ball rolling. In stark contrast to the previous project, this was actually my favorite from my first year. It is quite abstract so I’ll do my best to describe my whole thought process to the best of my ability.
We teamed up with an adjacent studio for this project, so there were like 40 of us (~20 per studio). All 40 of us were given a random “role” out of a hat (literally); like carpenter, soldier, miner, father, consumer, scientist, etc. I was given the role of the writer. Then we were given a grid with the same amount of boxes as there were roles and we had to organize our roles on the grid so that similar roles were adjacent to one another; like father close to mother and child, consumer close to producer, carpenter close to potter, etc. As the writer I was placed on the outside edge, so one of my sides was open to the outside. My other three sides were bordered by the (movie) director, the bookbinder, and the ranger.
Now that we had our roles and neighbors, we had to design and create something that represented our role as well as interacted with our neighbors that could fit into our box on the grid (6 in. x 6 in.). My biggest fascination with writers is their ability to create entirely new universes, with their own unique histories, cultures, lands, cities, people, etc., (this mostly applies to fantasy writers) so my initial ideas all revolved around this concept. Early in the project I drew up ideas of a landscape radiating out from some central piece representing the writer, like a chair or typewriter. However, I realized that this was painfully too representative and needed to be much more abstract.
I liked the idea of the ‘universe’ radiating out from a central object representing the writer. Eventually the ‘writer’ became a sphere while the landscape radiating outward became cubic (like Minecraft) to represent the contrast between real and imaginary. Looking back at my old sketchbook from first year, some of my ideas were incredibly ambitious. For a while I was stuck on the idea that the sphere would be in the center and the cubic landscape would radiate outward but not touch the ground, similar to the rings of a planet, and the whole thing would just balance on the central sphere. However, I think I always knew in the back of my mind that I would not be able to achieve that . Instead I ended up designing a stand to carry the whole thing. This also allowed me to pull the landscape away from the sphere so that they did not actually touch which I liked.
The next part was determining how each side of the landscape would interact with its respective neighbor. I thought my solutions were clever, but not many people understood my thought process so bear with me. The bookbinder was relatively simple. I shaped the cubic landscape to represent the basic construction of a book, two covers sandwiching the pages together with a spine binding it all together. For the director I incorporated diagonal lines in contrast to the orthogonal cubes to represent a directors interpretation of the writer’s story. I was pretty proud of that one; I thought it was pretty dern clever. The ranger one was a little difficult. I ended up building it up like an outcrop (like the ranger looking out over everything). The side facing the outside of the grid I opened up, representing the writer being open to outside influences and inspiration.
Now I had to build the thing. I ended up deciding that the cube would be wooden and shaped on the lathe. The landscape would be built up in layers of laser-cut chipboard (similar to something 3D printed). Carving the sphere was relatively simple; its not perfect, but its good enough to clearly contrast with the cubes. The landscape was quite intricate though. I drew out each layer individually on Rhino to be laser-cut. I realize not that there are probably 1000 easier ways to do that but this was my first time experimenting with this kind of model. I ended up using 2 full sheets of chipboard to cut everything out (one for the top and one for the bottom, they were mirror images of each other).
The next step was gluing each layer together in the correct order, which was quite a slow and infuriating process. Luckily I only lost one tiny piece throughout the whole process of putting it together.
I ended up being pretty happy with the final product. It actually has some pretty nice weight when you hold it in your hand which is pretty satisfying. In addition to the model we also needed a drawing for accompany it. My professor had wanted an axonometric drawing, but after trying for a few hours I realized that, with all the little cubic corners on mine, that was near impossible for me. I ended up doing something much simpler (mostly because it was around 10pm at this time and it was due 8am the next morning) and focused on all the layers of the model. I made it really sketchy which I ended up liking.
The overall ‘neghborhood’ was not that attractive and did not quite achieve the intended aesthetic we were hoping for. Not many people collaborated with their neighbors, so it was a mess and the whole grid layout became irrelevant. Oh well, big oof. I was happy with how my guy turned out so that’s all that matters to me.
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You should have just 3D printed lol, it would have taken a significant amount of filament depending on your settings, but it also would have taken over 24h to print. All you would have had to do was CAD it, slice it and then just set it to print. For the drawing you could have just exported a DXF of the faces or posted a printscreen of the file.
EDIT:
Who was the person that just stuck a bunch of acrylic rods in a plank of wood?
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I’ve never been a fan of 3D printing models. I prefer the look and feel of wood and chipboard much more than the layered plastic. Not to mention it’s also much cheaper than buying all that filament.
Lmao, no idea Hopefully it was someone from the other studio. I don’t remember who though.
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Hey,
Thanks for the tag, had real fun reading again.
Donno why, but your thing remembers me of something out of star wars.
I can’t totally get the context to architecture of this assignment, looks more like art school.
Little curious what the professor said to your building?
And also to the whole end result. Did he criticises, that the single objects do so badly fit to each other?
Again the whole table could be a map of a star wars town. 
Thanks for sharing
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First year is foundation. Industrial design, interior design, landscape architecture, and architecture all study together. It isn’t until second year that we are separated into our individual majors. Foundation is mostly intended to stimulate our thought-processes and creativity.
If you’re referring to my initial design, he basically said what I wrote: “it’s way too representative.” I was regurgitating the prompt back out rather than reimagining it and putting my own spin on it.
He had actually criticized it before the final pinup. He had seen that there wasn’t much collaboration between the students, so that idea was scrapped. Instead he incorporated a rule where the projects increased in height towards the center to give it some semblance of cohesion. Didn’t really work well in my opinion though 
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That’s a nice way yo going into this!
That, I don’t really get.
Wasn’t the whole object your idea?
Btw why are you up at this hour? 
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It was too obvious and representational. It needed to be more abstract and representative. Think of it like a book or a movie; rather than blatantly saying “something bad will occur soon” (which is what I initially did), it’s better to represent the idea with a storm, crow, etc. (which my final idea achieved much better).
Can’t sleep right now.
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*Reminds
Looks a bit like a separatist battle station to me.
*Did he criticise the objects not fitting with each other?
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The design with the ball in the middle looks Star Warzy to me
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That grid system seems very cool to me…
Writing down close which are connected to each others…
It’s kind of cardboard?
And i want to know how you made wood sphere
The project overall came out really nice to me. It’s creative and i loved the idea of writer being as a centre 
great work again!! 
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It’s a computer program for design.
I carved it on a lathe.
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First Year Competition
First Year
O O F. I guess I should use our extended Spring Break to add to this guy.
Annually, each year of students is given a competition by the faculty. All the students of that year are given the same prompt and given a week to respond to it. After the week is up a selected panel of judges will pick the finalist and then announce the winner(s). The first year competition is usually something abstract but the one for second and third years is usually more architectural. Fourth and fifth year don’t have competitions because half of the fourth years are always gone on travel and fifth years are doing thesis work.
This was the first year competition. We were given a metal rod (I think it was about 4-5 feet in length) and told to use it to answer the prompt: “how to begin and end a line.” I had no idea what that meant and ended up looking way too into it. I soon realized that competitions were not my strong suit. This theme has resurfaced each year.
Most people just ignored the prompt in their projects, but I mistakenly took it way too literally and came up with a terrible design. It was basically a concrete base with a lot of slots for wood pieces to sit in that would hold up the rod. It was very dumb though and would have looked terrible if it ever came into existence. I remember spending most of the week designing it and having to go absolutely ham in the wood shop on Friday to get everything cut before the shop closed for the weekend (the competition was due on Monday). After that, all I had left to do on the weekend was make the concrete mold, pour, let it cure, and then assemble it all.
I ended up spending all of Saturday in studio finishing the mold (legit like 16 hours straight), which at the time I thought had turned out alright. Of course I was a first year who had never casted anything so I had nothing to base it on, but I digress.
A buddy helped me pour it Sunday morning and my plan was to open it up that night and assemble it. Everything went cleanly until I finally went to open it up at like midnight that night. The outside parts came off nicely, but the wood pieces intended to leave the slots were stuck in the concrete. Looking back at it, it should have been obvious that it would not work but I was a young and dumb freshman. I ended up staying all night trying various methods to get them out, like burning and drilling them out, but nothing worked. Big oof. I had nothing for the competition.
My professor was cool about it and helped me out afterward to try and get them out. He let me borrow some chisels from his house and I tried those but just ended up cracking the entire thing into pieces. I had taken a little piece from it as a souvenir to remember it by, but I think I threw it away a bit ago. Oh well. Looks like I didn’t even care enough to take any photos of the concrete piece either.
The winners of the competition were all pretty nice. They all had fairly simple designs that they were able to execute cleanly. I am not sure how most of them responded to the prompt, but I don’t think the judges really cared. At the end of the day though, I did learn a lot, both about how to work for a competition and how to pour concrete. My pours today are much better than back then. 
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I wish we had competitons like that. The closest thing I remember was our multidisciplinary project at the end of term 1, year 1. It was to build either a walker, writer or stacker robot (depending on what you were told) out of Lego Mindstorms. My group was typically shite and I did all the work with not many components. The only good thing about it was that our walker set the speed record for our year LOL, although they didn’t give us anything.
The mechanical students have some kind of competiton going on right now where they have to build a line launcher which has a range of 4.5m (it’s supposed to launch a squash ball with some string attached to it). From what I’ve seen, most people don’t know what they’re doing and I’ve seen some pretty tragic designs. Except for a friend (who’s on our society committee with me) who knows exactly what he’s doing.
He welded together an actual gas canon, apparently during testing, they fired the ball and tried to catch it with a bucket and ended up punching a hole in the base of the bucket from some distance away . Then, from what I was told, during their first demo, they fired and the ball bounced into a TV, but didn’t smash it because they weren’t running at full pressure.
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Now I get why you needed the calming music. 
Thanks for sharing, enjoyed reading it. 
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Love this thread!
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