Departure Lounge

Departure Lounge is the 2007 National Architecture Conference in Melbourne, Australia. There are two streams of sessions at this year’s conference, which include the Lounge stream and the Integrated Practice stream running April 19-22. The Lounge stream focuses on individual architects on certain topics and The Integrated Practice stream will focus on BIM (the use of Building Information Modeling. The conference will consist of speaker presentations, tours that look at commercial and residential buildings, Supa Tutes and Pecha Kucha Night.

Grad School

Although this is my first year in college, it is never too early to start thinking about grad school. Grad school is really important to me. Since I was young, I knew that I was going to finish school with the highest degree possible. It’s a very serious decision and so far I’m thinking about going to The University of Texas. There are a lot of things to consider when picking what school to attend. I want to go to Texas because their architecture is also really good. They have an architectural interior design program that I would love to go into. I know that Texas is A&M’s biggest rival, but when everything is set and done, I am just looking for what’s best for me. Doing grad school is the best idea because there are more job offers and now a days everyone goes through it. I am pretty sure that I wouldn't be happy with myself if I didn't go through with it. Texas is not a sure thing, but it's definitely in my mind. For more information on The University of Texas Grad School, click here.

CARPOOL

I have been doing some research throughout the semester and I think I want to join CARPOOL. CARPOOL, which stands for Caring Aggies R Protecting Over Our Lives, is a designated driver club. It is safe and reliable for all students in the Bryan/ College Station area. The rides are free and non-judgmental, all you have to do is call the number 693-9905 found in the back of your student ID. The reputation of CARPOOL is very high. I have a lot of friends that call CARPOOL because it’s very convenient and safe. Students at A&M trust and love CARPOOL. I think CARPOOL is the smartest idea the school can have. The program runs during the weekend. The program is really cool and I know that I will be working for a good cause. I love helping people and what better way to do it than CARPOOL! For more information on CARPOOL, click here.

Artfest

I have decided to enter two of my works into the Artfest. The first one is a picture that I took of my brother during Christmas break when we were visiting the family in Mexico. The family gets together every year and plays a game of "the veterans vs. young boys" baseball. My brother was just hanging out and I really liked the way he was posing so I took the picture without him even knowing. I really like the way that it looks in black and white. The second one is an 11x14 poster board "LOVE" drawing that I colored with pastels. I made it last semester to show contrast in colors and I like the way that it turned out. The word love is "hand spelled".. haha. No but it really was my hand!

College Schedule

This is the new schedule that I created for the Architecture courses that I have taken and will be taking at Texas A&M for the previous, current and following years. Microsoft ExCel is a good program that I use to organize my things. It's very easy and efficient. Though I have made my schedule, I am pretty sure things are going to move around and change. Although it is not final, I hope to follow it as close as possible!

Building

For this assignment, I was to create a structure using Autocad Viz 2007. I wanted to design a building that was interesting and different. I used the box and cylinder to put together the structure of the building, then I used the convertible mesh to select the polygons in the cylinder and deleted half of them to make the final design. I also used the modifier called lattice for the window mullions. To render it, I used ambient occlusion.

Next, I added color to represent the materials of the building. I changed the ambient, specular level, glossiness, reflection, and self illumination to represent the glass, show transparency, and the illumination of the building. I put both images of the building into Photoshop. I used a blending tool multiply, which blended them together.

Finally, I changed the hue of the building four different times to show the variety of color choices the building can have. To show scale, I added two people.
















This has been by far my favorite assignment. I really liked the way that the process evolved and the end result of my design. I learned a lot more about Autodesk Viz and I find it more efficient to use. My design was based on a building that I would like to see in the city. The glass is a wall that surrounds the actual concrete building and I think it gives a good architecture look to it. I'm proud :)

Skyline

For this weekend’s assignment, I was to design something in TopMod that would later become a paper model. I decided to make a skyline. I saved it as an obj file and opened it in Pepakura. Pepakura is a program that allows you to make a paper model from a 3d data, like the skyline I made in TopMod. Pepakura is really easy to use. It unfolds your 3d model so you know exactly where to bend, cut and attach it together. I even went to the point of adding the numbers so it would let me know exactly where to match things up with. After Pepakura, I saved the new document and opened it in Photoshop so I could color it. I went with different shades of blue and added white spots to create the design of office windows. I printed this out and made my cool skyline!