Solar Decathalon 2002: Trojan Goat

Trojan Goat - by Pakesh Patel

From 2000 to 2002, architecture and engineering students at the University of Virgina worked on the first Solar Decathlon held on the National Mall in Washington D.C. sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Fourteen team designed and built homes powered entirely by the sun. The house won 1st place for architecture (by judges that included Glenn Murcutt) and 2nd place overall. The team also tied for 1st Place in the Energy Balance category, and received several other awards.

BIQ House

BIQ House Rendering - src

Hamburg, Germany - The 15 unit Bio intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House, part of the 2013 International Building Exhibition, was built to test the world's first "bio-adaptive" facade, which uses micro-algae to shade the building as well as generate energy, designed by Arup, SSC Strategic Science Consultants and Splitterwerk Architects. As the world's first building powered by algae, the facade's bioreactors use photosynthesis to grow the algae, which is then harvested and converted to biomass for energy generation. This process for generating sustainable, renewable energy creates a shimmering, dynamic green facade for the building. The micro-algae, about the size of bacteria, are generated in reactor panels that are supplied with nutrients and carbon dioxide in order to grow. These panels are the secondary skin of the building envelope covering 2,150 square feet of the southeast and southwest facades.

P.F.1 (Public Farm 1) by WORK Architecture Company

Designers: Amale Andraos, Dan Wood

P.F.1 - © Elizabeth Felicella

Public Farm One, by WORK Architecture Company, was the winner of the Young Architects Program, run by the New York Museum of Modern Art and the PS1 Contempoary Art Center, to design a temporary installation in the courtyards of PS1 in Queens, NY in 2008. This temporary installation was a shift from the previous 40 years concept of the Urban Beach into a new leisure revolution, one that created a new symbol of liberation, knowledge, power and fun for the city. The Urban Farm became the symbol for their "generations' preoccupations and hopes for a better and different future." Since cities have become accepted as having superior benefits to the suburbs, including quality of life and environmental impacts, they now have become the place of experimentation. Public Farm 1 (P.F.1) "is an architectural and urban manifesto to engage play and reinvent our cities, and our world, once again." 

Design Help: Kitchen Cabinet Dimensions

Kitchen with Standard Cabinets - Source

Kitchen cabinet sizes are largely standardized. Unless you are dealing with custom kitchen cabinetry, which can build cabinets with any dimensions, you will find lower prices and predictable sizing in stock or semi-custom kitchen cabinets. Because kitchen cabinets come in hundreds of sizes, below is a guide to a few of the more common kitchen cabinet sizes.

Film: My Architect

My Architect: A Son's Journey is a documentary film by Nathaniel Kahn on his father, Louis Kahn (1901-1974), detailing the architect's extraordinary career and his family legacy after his death.

Architectural Sketching: Streetscape

Streetscape by Jigsketch

Architectural sketches come in many types though the street can be considered a very important aspect of any built environment. The threshold between a building and the street has always been an important aspect to any design which is why architects have been concerned with facades for centuries.

Tutorial: Pencils and Leads

Pencil Grading Chart

Pencil cores are generally made of graphite mixed with a clay binder which creates easily erased grey or black marks. Graphite pencils are used for both writing and drawing which provides a durable mark, resistant to moisture, ultraviolet radiation, and aging.

Pencils come with either numbers or letters on them. From the image right, we can see that the letter B signifies the blackness of the pencil, the letter H signifies the hardness, and the letter F stands for 'fine.' In the United States, we use a different system using numbers to identify pencil hardness, ranging from #1 to #4. A #2 pencil, all to familiar to those that grew up in the US is the equivalent to the European HB.

Living Machines: SFPUB Waste Water Treatment

System Diagram src

Tutorial: Setting up AutoCAD Lineweights

Lineweights in CAD can be a bit difficult until you learn the tricks. At my school they taught us that you can set up lineweights in two ways; by layer and by color. You can also use both to setup lineweights, though sometimes they can cause issues when printing. This tutorial goes through the basics of setting up your lineweights in AutoCAD using these two methods.

Tutorial: Hand Rendering Elevations

Hand Rendered Elevation

Elevations are an important part of architectural design. There are many ways to create elevations. You can use Sketchup, AutoCAD, Revit or one of the many other rendering programs out there. Creating a three dimensional model for elevations is very time consuming and creating a two dimensional elevations in AutoCAD also requires a lot of time and effort to get the right textures and line weights, much less taking the time to render them in Photoshop. Thus, the quickest way to create an elevation is to complete them by hand. This way you can also choose the detail of the rendering depending on the amount of time you have as well as work through elevation iterations to define your ideas without the hassle of computer rendering.

Jane Jacobs: The Life and Death of Great American Cities

5th Avenue New York City

In Jane Jacobs’ book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she discusses the particular nature of cities. The introduction focuses on how City Beautiful and the Radiant City differs from how cities truly work and how cities have suffered as a result of these ideals.

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Marilyn Moedinger Lecture: Adventures in the Vernacular

Marylin's SOM Fellowship Travels - source

Design Help: Closet Dimensions

Woman's Reach-in Closet - Source

Standard Depth Measurements

For reach-in closets, the standard depth is 24 inches and is used for suits, shirts, dresses, and pants. The 2 foot depth is required to handle your hanger. For coats and jackets, use a depth of 28 inches.

• Minimum depth 24 inches 
• Use a depth of 28 inches for coats 

Photoshop: Transform a Picture into an Architectural Blueprint

Creating a blueprint in Photoshop is fairly easy and straight forward. The following video by Blue Lightning TV outlines all the steps and techniques in order to transform a picture into an architectural blueprint. There are also many interesting tips and trick in this video with layering, brushes and masking tips.

Humor: By Architects for Architects

Check out this funny video from BXL Design Architects in Australia.

Architectural Rendering: Using Scale People

When adding people to an architectural render it is important to keep them in scale so everything about the render looks correct. So how do I keep them in scale and where do I find people to add?

In AutoCAD

The first way is to add people into your AutoCAD drawing before you import them into Photoshop. This is the simplest way to keep people to scale. There are free CAD blocks online with people that you can add to your building drawings. The blocks are generally not too well defined and you can't manipulate the people too much in Photoshop once imported along with your building drawing. If you are doing quick renderings, keeping people in your imported drawing would help you save a bit of time.

AutoCAD: Menubar

Even after they created the ribbon in AutoCAD, sometimes the best way to work with CAD is to use the menubar. To show or hide the menubar is quite simple. Type in the command MENUBAR and hit enter or the spacebar. Then it will prompt you to enter a new value for the MENUBAR. Entering 0 will hide the menubar and 1 will show the menubar.

Command: MENUBAR  hit enter or spacebar

Option 0 : will hide the menubar

Option 1: will show the menubar

More AutoCAD Tips and Hints from the Architecture Student Blog

Design Help: Dimensions and Colors

I found these links while doing research for studio and I thought they were worth sharing. The following links outline standard closet dimensions, general home and office dimensions like chair and railing heights as well as RGB color codes while working in Photoshop or Indesign.

Closet Dimensions
Standard Dimensions - This link is broken, hopefully only due to website maintenance
RGB Color Codes

AutoCAD: Getting the Tabs on the bottom back