Boxes Boxes Boxes

Architects like boxes. You might think that with the cutting edge technology and nurb curve modeling capabilities that we've gone beyond the rectangular building footprint, but that is not usually the case. It's just that there is more hype and publicity for the crazy curvy stuff.

I've been at my firm for about a month now, and it's been a lesson in boxes. Boxes come in very different scales and types. There are cool boxes, and there are downright boring ones. Here is my tale.

My first week, we started off on an apartment master plan project in China. It consists of arranging buildings, landscape, and circulation on a large tract of land by the ocean front. This is essentially an exercise in moving boxes, which sounds boring perhaps, but it's actually not. You move a box, and it's a 15 story tower, a mid-rise apartment, rowhouse or snazzy villa. You have to think about the spaces between these boxes: are they creating view corridors to the ocean? Is there enough privacy or too much in their backyards? Now those are some cool boxes.

The next week, two of the people I worked with got pulled into a college campus design project in Asia. They were given a list of program (activities) that the building complex needed to address as well as square footages. To begin "sketching" their building, they created concept models by making the program into boxes with the correct square footage. They color coded these little boxes according to program and began to arrange them two dimensionally, but also to stack them to see it in 3 dimensions. You have to consider things like, how do people move through spaces? How can you foster interaction and creativity in a university with how they use spaces? These boxes aren't whole buildings, but those are some pretty cool boxes too.

This entire week, I worked on a hospital project. The basic floorplan layout is set with wall thicknesses and all that, but not quite to the phase with enough detail to build. They were deciding what type of flooring to use and what color. They had decided on some synthetic rubber plank material, and they needed to color code different areas of the space as way-finding. So I arranged tile in the hallways, changed their color, and made 3 different schemes all week ... If you haven't figured it out by now, these do NOT qualify as cool boxes ... in fact, they're incredibly boring boxes.

I consider it a right of passage for the intern. We've all got our stories of the boring, necessary tasks that need to get done in a firm. Some people at the firm drew toilets. Those may qualify as worse ... hahaha. I hope I get to work on some more fun boxes soon.