Marker Project Winners

Hi All,

I'd like to congratulate the winners of the ARCH1101 marker project Competition ... 

In no particular order:

Jessica Wong

http://jesarchitecture.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/perspectives.html     

William Manyard

http://arch1101maynard.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/week-3-final-images-video-xx.html

             

Mathew Burnett

http://matthew-burnett.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/experiment-2-final-submission.html

              

Narissa Bungbrakearti

http://nbungbrakearti.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/final-5-images_9.html

   

Jenny Lin

http://jennykelin.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/exp-2-final-submission.html         

It was a really tough year, the overall standard this year is the best I've seen it in the 8 years I've been running the course.

There were over 20 project shortlisted (again pointing to the depth of design work in the year) with the winners chosen by Blacktown city Architect, Larry Adams, and the Blacktown city executive team.

Larry has expressed his sincere appreciation for all of your work, and is keen to progress one of the projects further.

I'd also like to thank all the tutors for their fantastic performance throughout the semester. As always, its a team effort ... 

This is a great way to finish it off!

Kind regards

Russell 

ARCH1101 lecture test live!

Hi All,

After a bit of a false start (thanks Moodle) the test is now live on Moodle and working properly.

Here is a direct link: http://moodle.telt.unsw.edu.au/mod/quiz/view.php?id=634939

Good luck!

Russell

Special Guest Lecture Today!

Hi All,

As mentioned in last weeks lecture, this week Professor Richard Goodwin with be describing his theory of Porosity.

As Professor Goodwin's theory is critical to your understanding of EXP3, your attendance will be recorded (and will contribute to your participation grade).

Regards, look forward to seeing you all there.

Russell

EXPERIMENT 2 EXTENSION!

Hi All,

Your student reps brought up the issue with workload at today's meeting. We resolved it as best we could by negotiating an extension for EXP2 to Sunday May 10th by 11:59pm.

The extension comes with one condition though; to get this extension you need to sign up to the eLearning repository located here ... http://situationalelearning.com/selar/  

This is the website I demonstrated in the lecture, it is free to sign up and contains loads of useful information regarding the construction of buildings that has been collated from 4 different Australian universities; you would do yourself a great favor by taking a look around (great prep for your construction courses!). It's funded by the Australian Office of Learning and Teaching, so it's free to download whatever you like.

Regards, and go hard!  

LUMION download

Hi All,

Good news!

Thanks to the Built Environment Computing Unit and people at Lumion we have a solution for you:

You can download the educational version (which lets you save your work and reload it later) of Lumion form the faculty server. There are two ways to do that ... visit the faculty labs in person and download it onto a hard drive from the S drive (from a folder called "studentsoftware") ... or, use a VPN to connect to our network from home.

To connect to the UNSW network via VPN go to http://vpn.unsw.edu.au and follow the setup. If you have trouble try another browser. Then copy and paste this file path  \\download.fbe.unsw.edu.au\fbe\studentsoftware\Lumion 4.5.1 into windows explorer.

IMPORTANT!!!!! when you run the educational version it connects to the Lumion servers and gets a temporary licence. When you close Lumion you need to be online so your machine can give the license back ... failing to do this will make that license unusable, and as we only have enough for the people in the class someone (possibly you!) will miss out if the licenses get used up. If the license is returned properly they can be reused over and over.

Regards

Russell

BUILDING SITE MODELS IN GROUPS

Hi All,

Some of you have been right in thinking that building a site model to situate your Marker would be useful, if not critical.

As the general site will be the same for most of you it would be worthwhile to get together and divide up the work; one student models an over bridge, another models the site contours, etc etc.

Keep in mind that each of you will have a different way that your Marker engages with the landscape surrounding it so the local surrounds will be unique.

Regards

Russell  

Blacktown International Sports Park Marker Project Files

Hi All,

The files supplied by Blacktown Architect Larry Adams are linked from the EXP2 brief page ... but you'll find them below also:

http://russelllowe.com/arch1101_2015/experiment2/reference/M7_Marker_LarryAdams.pdf

and

http://russelllowe.com/arch1101_2015/experiment2/reference/BlackTown_CAD_Drawing.zip

Regards

Attendence will be recorded at Thursdays lecture

Hi All,

As the title says, your attendance will be recorded at Thursdays lecture.

In addition to the lecture, Jeremy Harkins, Director at INENI realtime, will be giving a demo of his best tips and tricks for using SketchUp. Jeremy is an expert in SkethUp so this will be a valuable opportunity to learn from the best.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

Regards

Russell

Grasshopper Tutorials for CoDe students

Hi All,

The Code students in the studio might find these tutorials on learning Grasshopper useful; I did.

http://elsewarecollective.com/AIR/Tutorial%20Videos/AIR_TutorialVideoList.pdf 

The creators of the tutorials explain their approach as follows:

"The video tutorials that we have put together are intended to demonstrate the use of particular Grasshopper components or geometry and programming concepts in the most interesting and architecturally relevant ways as we can manage. In some cases this is done within larger definitions (that are not explained) or using more sophisticated data structuring (again, that is ignored in the demonstration). This is intentional and we hope, not too frustrating. At these points in the videos later tutorials are sometimes mentioned (for you to skip too if the frustration gets too much) or simply the technical topics which will shed more light on the subject.

Our experiences with developing content and delivering it a workshop or studio environment have taught us that without some of this compromise, initial exercises can be incredibly uninspiring and unexciting. To inject this inspiration into the introduction of the design environment we have taken some of the most inspiring and exciting design projects of late and ‘reverse-engineered’ them (although they are not perfect imitations)."

I think its a very sensible approach as it gets you creating interesting and useful things straight away.

If you haven't already found this page, it's also very useful (especially because it broadens the application to Jewelry, Furniture and Industrial Design):

http://www.rhino3d.com/tutorials#grasshopper

And finally, from Andrew Wallace's presentation last Thursday:

http://a-shape.com/ you'll find his top 10 tips by following the link on learning.

Regards

Tutorial lists

Hi All,

When you signed up for the course you would have put yourself down for a particular tutorial/studio group. This is just a procedural thing that the university wide enrollment system demands ... we reorder these groups to get the right mix of students (by program enrollment) in each studio.

You'll find your new group allocation here:  http://www.russelllowe.com/arch1101_2015/course_info/tutorial_groups.htm 

(hint: use ctrl+f if you are on a PC to search for your name).

I'm looking forward to seeing you all at the first lecture which starts at 12 today; it's at map reference G19 here and on the left in the photo below; you'll see it as you look up the main walkway.

Regards

Advice on laptops

Hi All,

I mentioned this website at the orientation week introduction:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Computer-Games-on-Laptop-Graphic-Cards.13849.0.html

It compares one of the most important parts of your laptop .. the graphics card.

The goal would be to get a graphics card as high up this list as possible. By studying the list you'll see that Nvidia GTX cards are faster than their GT cards; good to know when you are trying to compare laptops from different suppliers.

The Mac vs PC argument has lost a lot of energy in recent years; this is because they both now use the same hardware under the skin. So now it's only the operating system that is different. But because they use the same hardware it means you can now run Windows on your Mac ... which will allow you to run the software we use at the faculty (some critical pieces only run on Windows). Keep in mind you should run it through the Mac's "Bootcamp" facility and will need to buy a copy of Windows to run. Some students have used software like "Parallels" to run Windows ... but that is like going swimming with one arm; possible, but very slow. Finally, The vast majority of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry also use Windows (which is why we use it).

While I have an iPad, iPod and iPhone at home I use a PC for work. So that's what I would recommend.

Regards

Before the First Class

Step 1: create a blog at http://www.blogger.com/

note: use your own name to name your blog, use “awesome inc.” as a default template…

Step 2: post three images ...

a: your best piece of creative work before coming to this course, think laterally if you have not done "conventional" art or design work

b: an image of a great piece of architecture

c: an original photograph of something beautiful

Step 3: write a paragraph under each of the images that tells us something interesting about them.

Step 4: find an image showing a creative work from each of the companies below (they will be your clients in experiment 1) and describe it using a noun, verb and adjective; see below for examples.

Hazan Motorworks: Noun, Verb, Adjective

Rolex: Noun, Verb, Adjective

Christian Benner Custom: Noun, Verb, Adjective

Step 5: purchase an artline 0.5mm black pen, and a squared cahier pocket moleskin notebook (you can get these from the unsw bookshop).

Step 6: if you would like to get ahead, download and install the latest version of the modelling software "sketchup" on your laptop.

Welcome!

Hello All ARCH1101 Students,

This is the course blog for ARCH1101 in 2015, please check back frequently for updates and info regarding the course.

Regards,

Russell Lowe