design, build, learn. repeat.

A Tale of Two Houses

Here’s a look at my two active house projects, one under construction and the other in the early design phase. The first, Carmen’s house, has finally been started by a wonderful volunteer group called Christian Aid Ministries. Their construction team has made quick progress; since the piles were driven about two weeks ago, they have already framed the floor, walls, and most of the roof. Carmen and her husband are thrilled to see their house going up after many months of delays.

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Structures for Inclusion 9

SFI 9: GENERATE.ACTIVATE.MAINTAIN March 20-22, 2009 | Dallas, TX Announcing the 9th annual Structures for Inclusion (SFI) conference, presented by DESIGN CORPS, the buildingcommunity WORKSHOP and Texas Schools of Architecture. Entitled “GENERATE.ACTIVATE.MAINTAIN”, SFI 9 explores the process of community-based practice and, ultimately, how you insert yourself into the cycle of thought and action. Saturday’s panels explore the breadth of issues which community-based projects begin to address, the means through which to expand our knowledge and skills, and the environments within which we might continue to expand those skills. In addition to small-scale discussions following each of the panels, the conference …

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Spring in Biloxi

This weekend was sunny and beautiful. Spring in Biloxi is a long, warm, tranquil season that gradually melts into summer. This Friday, Alan and I biked around Ocean Springs; later on, a group of friends and I went to a Seawolves game, stopped in at the Pub, then watched a bad movie, Witch’s Sabbath, back at our house. On Saturday, Ocean Springs held its Mardi Gras parade (the first of the season; different cities and groups stagger their parades between now and Mardi Gras, which is the 24th). Alan, Molly, Brooke, and I met up to watch the parade go …

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Seminar #4: Design, ethics, and the naturalistic fallacy

Read more posts about architecture in Archispeak. [See the archive]. A wonderful thing about the Spring studio we have here is a weekly seminar in which the students (a mixed group from MSU, UT, and BAC) and many of the GCCDS staff talk about architecture. This year, we’re also carrying into the seminar some ideas from our conversations about values. The discussion is built around readings from this book: Thomas Fisher is dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, and in this book, he asks us to imagine a future in which the assumptions that our …

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Sketchbook: 500 SF Houses

This week, I decided to try something fun as a way to practice my sketching and rendering. I decided to make some tiny, unusual houses that might be found tucked away in some corner of the world. These are my first three sketches, done in pencil, watercolor pencil, and pen: Light House: Hillside House: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was …

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Official

All right! The paperwork is finally done and I have an official job with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio starting February 16th.

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MLK Day 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is always a big celebration in Biloxi, and this year’s festivities were endowed with extra significance, the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. See some of my photos from the parade on Flickr.

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Apologies

My writing productivity has been slow lately, and for that I apologize. I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about this blog and how to make it better, and that has paradoxically made me worse at posting because my attention has been elsewhere. In the meantime, you may want to take a look at Flickr, where I’ve been uploading lots of photos. And expect some news and changes over the next few weeks as I figure out where I want to take this blog. As for real life, I’m back in Mississippi after a great holiday in Virginia. After …

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Sketchbook: Hagia Sophia

Interior of the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey. From a photograph in Spiro Kostof’s A History of Architecture, 2nd Edition.

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Dec. 2-6 Building at The Trace

Edit [12/26/08]: See these photos and more at my Flickr page. The main (only?) advantage of unemployment being the ability to do whatever you like, I spent last week building at The Trace. I worked on a 3-bedroom house called the Cypress. Thanks to the leadership of construction supervisors Bryce and Austin, an enthusiastic college group from Ohio, and a mix of other volunteers, we started from a slab and raised the walls, built the porch, and set about half of the roof trusses within the week. Here’s the Ohio group: The project is moving quickly. In the past 4-6 …

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