Category Archives: Year 1

This is the parent category of all courses taken in year 1.

Process of kombucha and mycelium

In sustainable systems I learned to produce biomaterials such as kombucha leather and a hard material out wood-eating mycelium.

here’s the process:

I wanted to make sandals for my final project. in the beginning the soles were going to be made out of the mycelium material and the straps out of kombucha leather.

this are process pictures of the mycelium.

 

 

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I made the sole molds by vacuum forming an already existing shoe then put the materials inside.

the mycelium started growing slowly and I decided to feed them flour and the white matter started to increase and took over the wood shavings.

a week after my molds started

growing different kinds of mold so I decided to make the soles out of a repurposed piece of wood.

the process of the kombucha leather went more smoothly and I managed grow 4 pieces of different thickness and the variation between brown and white sugar. my first piece grew a tiny piece of mold and got rid of it by adding more vinegar to the recipe. I ended up dyeing the material with beets.

process pictures of the kombucha leather.

 

final product

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designing for non-humans

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Birds in Washington Square park  face a big number of challenges and sometimes get hurt, so my proposal is to have a bird hospital addition to the already existing field house. the addition will include hospital facilities and shelter for the different birds

wire basket: mini projects Making Meaningful Things

basket made from annealed wire, embroidery thread and jute string.

PROJECT 4: Arch-I-texts

ARCHITECTURE/FIELD TRIPS

For this project I decided to visit the Guggenheim Museum and the How Should We Live exhibition at the MOMA. the Guggenheim is my direct connection with architecture, a building that  I have always liked and admired; organic architecture and how the form supports the function was my research question.

the  How Should We Live exhibition is linked to my interest in product design, the exhibition included lesser known examples of mid century design, it recreated displays and living spaces of the pioneers of modernist design it also included work by female designers.

 

museum1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MEMORY

Both of my inspirations are from the early to half of the 20th century and remind me of why I became interested in design. I remember going to my grandparents house when I was around 12 and realized what an anomaly it is. located downtown in my hometown Saltillo Mexico, it stands out from the victorian and turn of the century mansions, the flat ceilings, rectangular terraces and floor to ceiling windows. it was built in the 40’s and the first modernist residential building in Saltillo. I always loved how simple and functional everything was and the fact that it was and old house but seemed more modern than other contemporary houses. the quality of being timeless is one of the reasons I feel attracted to mid-century design.

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TEXT

I decided to not include text my final product but I created two posters with text. one of them is an advertisement for my chair and the second one is a quote from The Fountainhead a book where the main character is based on Frank Lloyd Wright the architect of the guggenheim, that book affected how I think about design and architecture.

 

Utopian-Dystopian Place Project

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for me the concepts of  Utopia and Dystopia are similar whats is utopia for some might be dystopia for others and vice versa . Utopia itself suggests uniformity in various ways and that reminds me of dystopia. a perfect world is not a size fits all. I decide to only use primary colors to reflect this, but at the same time there is white, black and different shades of this representing the marginal layers in society. the colors are contained by angular shapes that look futuristic and neat but when you look closer they structures and stairwells don’t make sense; this supports my idea of utopia and dystopia being the same at the end because they are so extreme.

My visual inspiration came from Multidisciplinary Bauhaus artist-designer Herbert Bayer, his architectural renderings of minimalistic and geometric buildings and brutalist architecture, which has some utopia gone wrong ideas behind; most of those buildings are now updated and ugly some are ruins.

In my pieces one is a cityscape, at the begging I wanted to be more objective and for my piece to look like a real city, but at the end I decided to play more with color and transparency to emphasize the perspective drawing. my second piece is an interior view of one of the buildings, the top residence of the skyscraper, it looks more like a floor plan there is no furniture inside and some walls are transparent but the intricate floor plan makes it seem claustrophobic. a palace in the sky that its also a prison. this piece made me me think of socialism which seems like a failed utopia for me, it is good it theory but it ended up failing in some countries because of power abuse and the fact that people like to compete.

 

PROJECT 3: Collaborative Dream Videos: Remembering our Animal Natures

rabbit-00_03_09_16-still003 In this project we had to explore time based media the our obejctive was to connect with our animal nature as representation of our social styles.

 

 

rabbit-00_02_55_12-still002Hummingbird

 

Rabbit

 

Cheetah

 

rabbit-00_02_54_08-still001

the main point of this project was to learn how to collaborate by analyzing our social styles; when we got the results of the quiz we realized that i’m a driver/expressive, both Kexing and Kristin are amicable which did not sounded  like the best scenario also considering that we have such different aesthetics and cultural backgrounds, the most unexpected thing about our unusual pairing is that it worked.

the hardest part was coming up with a concept but we discovered that we had similar dream experiences and decided to go from that.

 

once we started filming and had some film theory also with a little inspiration from Un Chien Adalou things seemed seemed more clear.having music also helped it gives rhythm and guides the editing process.

utopia and dystopia

both books Brave New World and 1984 deal with the theme of dystopia, but the characters don’t realize at the beginning or they think they live in a perfect world (utopia) this concept suggest uniformity that is also related to dystopia. a perfect world is not a size fits all.

my visual inspiration came from Multidisciplinary Bauhaus artist-designer Herbert Bayer, his architectural renderings of minimalistic and geometric buildings which also include mixed media elements like newspaper cut outs.

this juxtaposition of different media represents to me a media dominated society and the simplicity of the building reminds me of utopia so does brutalist architecture specially housing projects.

there is something authoritarian about this style but it is also supposed to make people’s lives easier.

I want to create a bristol board triptych with 3 scenes from future utopian/dystopian society where the buildings seem normal but as you look closer you realize that there is something wrong and the buildings an city planning does not make sense. I will draw by hand the city in perspective, then i will use color treatments endplay with opacity in photoshop and illustrator.