ST. JAMES TOWN IN THE SPIRIT OF MVRDV

ST. JAMES TOWN PROPOSAL IN THE SPIRIT OF MVRDV VIDEO

LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSy5DWi0a7A&feature=related St. James Town is located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and is a urban renewal development project gone wrong. Its an misinterpreted attempt at Corb's Towers in the Park concept. STJ was built in the 1960s and is the largest high-rise community in Canada, it is also one of Toronto's poorest communities. As a assignment in my "The Human World" class a group of students were allocated to develop a design proposal derived in the spirit of a specific firm. The firm which was selected was MVRDV. 
PROPOSAL FLY-THROUGH ANIMATION

LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcFkMrb6ce8  

STUDENTS ARE BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

Budding architects will work on Bermuda’s historic homes during summer internship
By Don Burgess

Colin Campbell is looking to the past to help preserve Bermuda’s buildings for the future. 
The regional director for design firm OBMI is launching a summer internship programme for budding architects based on a successful scheme he ran 16 years ago.
The project could see students work on historic buildings such as Tucker House, the Unfinished Church, Verdmont, ­Waterville, Tivoli, Springfield and Ships Inn.
Mr. Campbell hopes other architectural firms will unite to help the students and provide drawings that can be donated to the Bermuda National Trust.
He said: “There is a requirement to invest in the future. 
“Times and tides continue to pulse and we need, as a community, to invest in scholarship and good effort.
Ancient
“In a normal economic run, students of value present their skills sets and are absorbed by the economic community — but this isn’t a normal time.
 “In 1993, under similar economic circumstances, my partner and good friend, Maurice Terceira, and I decided something had to be done.”

ARCHITECTURAL DIGITAL TOOLS

Those days of paper and pencil are long gone, but we all knew this.  I wasn't required to pick up a pencil since my first year in Architecture school, and that was just a means of breaking us down, and filtering out the meek. Now in fourth year, we find our selves working strictly with digital tools such as; the 3D modelling prototype, and the laser cutter. With this you can see in a few years there will be no need to present projects on paper, just digital projections, or even holograms.  

The image above is a project done for one of my digital tools classes, created in AutoCad, 3DMax, and Rhino. It was then loaded into Ryerson University's new laser cutter (apart of the new digital fabrication lab) and then cut out of 3mm thick blue plexi-glass. The image is actually only a rendering of the final product. Believe me the final product did not look any different from this. The project was to create a lamp shade using only the laser cutter, and a Ikea lamp cord needed to me incorporated into the assembly.