A friend of mine emailed me some articles about the firm he is currently working at. This firm is RoTo. Reading those articles revealed some of their build-build qualities in their designs. Firstly, their office is a converted brewery. That made me think of their knowledge and beliefs in relating and manipulating things. This project I posted is from Dwell couple of years ago. It is a house built in a Montana Ranch like 5 or 6 years ago. The form is very modern but the materials used is very natural and rural. The details and constuction methods is not modern but very handcrafty. That element alone creates a great dialog among the designers, builders, occupants, materials, and site to form a cohesive architecture. I think this project speaks of some great and intuitive ideas we are trying to pursue in this site.

About damn time.

I am very glad that you post your first entry, opening up some discussion, and frigging disagree with some of my ideas. This is a place to exchange and share ideas to one another so new ideas can be made and develope here inside these dotted lines.

To respond and react to me saying architecture should be hand drawn and hand build. I think it it taken from my idea of SHOP DRAWINGS. I feel that there are 2 types of architectural designers. The first one is a designer and don't know how to build shit. The second on are builders that knows how to make but doesn't make them elegantly. Me and you...we are the raw 3rd kind. We are the ones that design in our building mode. We don't do crazy abstract drawings. We do informative, logical, amazingly cool shop drawings even when we are not building it. I just think my ideas of architecture being hand drawn and hand built are not trying to revert back to the old ways and not progressing architecture. I think if you want to build something new and advance, please do couple of shop drawings to express that idea. I think it would help you think a little bit to a lot in doing that.

I completely agree with you and the WAAC idea about building. I am sure that we can't hire 40 architects to build a house. A lot of times, those abstract and dry drawings cannot tell the contractor how to build a building the way the architect intended it to. I would think shop drawings would make building and making the architecture more expressive and more intentional.

I hope you respond and react to my respond. This is fun and provoking.

Oh Shit! I finally made it to the finish line, or is it the starting line. Mike I apologize for my complete and total absence from this so far. I have been a bit apprehensive about hurling my words out into the dark abyss that is the blog world. But first off, I feel that there is something that should be explained. Build Build was a group founded in the Washington Alexandria Architectural Center in 2004 by a group of students that were sick of simply designing things on paper. There was a collective need to get physically make something. To stop simply designing things but actually put things together. There were too many projects that had been designed but never brought to any sense of completion. They had to get out of the books, off of the paper and away from the fucking computer. Thus the bastard child of the Design Build idea was born and given the purposefully undesigned moniker Build Build.

With that out of the way- Mike I am simply treating this blog as a discussion. So, I can not agree with you that completely hand drawn, hand built architecture is the "way architecture should be" there is no "way" that architecture should ever be. Saying that seems to say that architecture can not progress, that it has a specific set of ideas or concepts or practices that it must adhere to. The greatest thing about design and architecture is that there is never a way that it should be. It is and never will be a defined by a single process that arrives at a specific goal which it "should be". I will admit that I personally enjoy much of the same architecture and type of design that you do, however I am not willing to completely write off other ideas that differ from mine.

Seeing as this Blog is named Build Build I will be treating this as a place to display and receive your feedback on things that have actually been done. Whatever the are. as long as an idea has been followed through with it deserves to be up here. Now that we are out of school too many people simple talk about how much they want to do something, or make or design something, but never actualy do. Is this caused by their lack of a teacher/supervisor who is telling them to be creative and make shit? I dont know. Mike you are one of the only other people I know that actually gets off his ass and does shit, builds things, and follows through with it.(at least most of it). This acts as a motivator and an inspiration and a place to receive constructive criticism on the things we actually do, not just talk about.

So. That all being the case:

Hommie I like the chair, keep putting up more stuff, I will too once I get a new camera( I know I know like 4 months and counting) . and I swear I will post more regularly from now on.

Go.Do.See.Make.Build.

This post might be a reaction to my thesis I posted a week ago. I was causually checking out my internet feeds and one of my favorite page have a link to a newly developed website network that's called Open Architecture Network. The name and the idea of this website is very similar to my thesis I did two years ago. I am not trying to say they copy my idea because they didn't. My idea is more genuinely related to the making of architecture. Their idea is more like a setup of a architecture studio online. I already emailed them and the replied. They want me to post the project up and have people comment and give me suggestions. If you have time, just click on that link and check it out. You might find my thesis project in there if I feel like posting one up there for them too look at.

I haven't post anything recently but I had a great conversation with a friend of mine who recently got a PDF copy of my thesis book. He then commented on it and I told him my thesis led me to believe in what I am trying to express in this blog. I thinking posting excepts would have a great run in this blog:

/.open.source.architecture

/.With the advancement of technology, a line of code or a pixel are being taken for granted. The honesty and charm of an 8-bit computer graphic is replaced with detailed 3-D rendering. The idea of abstract represenation is replaced with actual representaion. Digitality is replacing physicality.

/.Today, I see people relying on computers to perform physical tasks more than ever before. Drafting tables, pencils, and triangles are being replaced by AutoCAD. Digital models replace physical models. As a tool, I think computers are wonderful, but they lack that physical honesty a hand drafted drawing or a physical model can offer. There is no directionality in a line that is drawn on a screen. Process is absent in the digital world.

/.The evident of our existence is through artifacts which are the things we create. A building is an artifact, but so are the drawings and the design sketches. How much of what we create do we want to be digitalized in to zeros and ones store on a rigid rotating planar magnetic surface [aka hard drive]? Is that the artifact that we want to leave behind?

/.This thesis is an exploration in the process of making. It is a discovery of the self through self expression. In a world of mass-production, people rarely "make" to express the self. Art is becoming a commodity. In this thesis, I want to take a step back in order to understand the essence of making. I want people to be aware of the importance in expressing the self. It is not a rejection of technology but as a way to combine technology and self expression in creating.

This is the first of a series of chair I designed that I will post. However, I designed this chair almost a year ago but I did built it because I have access to a workshop. The next chair I will post next time also would be designed and built by me. Try to enjoy until I start to crank out some digitally made chair.