Following our foam core exercise on Monday, we continued to explore the art of modelmaking in a new material: chipboard. Chipboard is a much denser board than cardboard, harder to cut through but more rigid for architectural models. Many students had struggled with the “fluffiness” of foam core, so the chipboard was a nice departure. The goal, like on Monday, was to construct a 4″ cube, but instead of mitred corners, we chose to use “knee braces” with the chipboard, which are essentially 45-45-90-degree triangles

In celebration of 10/10/10, we spent the first part of our class today watching the iconic film Powers of Ten by prolific design duo Ray and Charles Eames. The film was made in 1968 and explores the idea of scale beautifully. By starting with the image of a man and woman on a picnic blanket on Chicago’s lakefront, the field of view zooms out, by a factor of 10 every 10 seconds, zooming beyond Chicago, beyond the United States, into the atmosphere, into the solar

As a brief project leading into the chicken coop design (which may very well become something different in response to the recent floods), we spent three days doing architectural precedent studies, which are an integral research phase to any design project. Below is a description of the precedent study’s importance, taken from the handout we gave to our students for the project: As designers it is critical that we thoroughly understand what has come before us so that we may better build upon the mistakes

Today we welcomed our first official “guest lecturer/speaker” to Studio H: Ben Nicholson, a high school friend and overall scientific genius. His accolades include degrees from Cornell and MIT, experience working in municipal wastewater management, chemical engineering, biodiesel and alternative fuel sources, and involvement in 4H and the California Avian Bowl in his younger days. Ben is now in Business School at the University of California Davis and is visiting for the week from the San Francisco Bay Area. Ben gave us two fascinating presentations: