Here’s a chronological list of my architectural influences and interests:
Summer 2006 – I took an architectural sketching course through the MIT ESP program (part of the HSSP 5-10 week high school enrichment program). My instructor, a student in the SMArchS History, Theory + Criticism of Architecture and Art program, recommended I get in contact with Robert Cowherd since I was considering Wentworth for undergraduate studies.
Fall 2007 – I sat in on one of professor Cowherd’s courses on informal settlements. Most of my notes are about Medallin and Caracas. In one of the required texts, Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, details the growing informal settlements worldwide and their symbiotic relationship with the formal, more traditional idea of a city with established infrastructure, land ownership, etc. He argues that, in the case of Caracas and Medallin, economic policy pressed by both Ronald Reagan and Magarett Thatcher played a large role in the (forced) migration of many families from agricultural communities into the cities to find work and sustain themselves and their families. In addition, Davis brings attention to often overlooked health, justice, and social issues.
Since that class I have maintained an interest in the relationship between formal and informal cities on a global scale. The Designing for Life: Medellin | Caracas events that took place on campus in fall of ’08 particularly interested me because of the case of Medellin. In its case, the city funded architectural interventions that helped to improve the quality of life for its residents. Sergio Fajardo Valderrama, then major of the city, led a team which identified the poorest areas of the city with the worst crime and placed their interventions there.
Junior year I took an Urban Planning elective with Muhammad Abdusabbur. Among the topics discussed (aside from the assumed literature on Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch) was new urbanism and transit oriented design, the latter a focus of my term paper, which investigated the possibility of re-connecting the sprawling suburban areas between major cities through transit oriented design. Besides learning about TOD, the most enriching information was a diagram from a Columbia University study which investigated the relationship between growth in an area and the addition or subtraction of a rail station stop.
Currently, my interests lie within a desire to quantify sustainability. It’s a very vague term loosely used in our culture as a feel good word. I am concerned with determining the amount of embodied energy required through the harvest, transportation, manufacture, transportation, installation, and operations and maintenance of a building. I would like to take that amount of energy and equate it to dollars so most have a tangible understanding of the impact different construction methods. I plan on doing further reading into cap and trade and carbon tax systems.
Another interest deals with the lifestyle of excess Americans enjoy.