[Music] Archi Hacks - Life Hacks for Students and Architects
Hey welcome back to another portfolio review! Today we have a very special portfolio - this
portfolio is a student that is currently at Harvard GSD so this is a portfolio with
compilation of six projects done before and after his graduate study, so some of them are from his
undergrad study at UC Berkeley and the rest are done as a part of his curriculum at GSD. And as
you can see, he has pretty unique drawings and everything is pretty well laid out, consistent,
nothing too special in terms of layout, but his drawings, they always have something special
about them that makes them stand out. And you see this is the kind of control and creativity
one needs to have in order to make it to these top universities. So let's take a closer look at it.
So I think one of the recurring patterns about excellent portfolio is that their covers are
extremely minimal and again in the table of contents, only the essential information are shown
and nothing additional, and we dive right into his first project.
So this full bleed rendering just puts you right into the scene, clear indication that you're entering a new project.
And this layout is extremely consistent, he starts from outside in, from the overall context into the
project and his methodologies about how he came up with the design, and some physical
models, physical experiments, I think it's important that one mixes up both digital and physical
studies that adds real texture and flavor to your design and these explain concepts,
and yeah, overall the drawings are excellent, even though I feel like the texture could have
gone a little bit better with the drawing, or even just a single color could have worked better
in this situation I think. Yeah, aside from that, I think the drawings are rather conventional, at
this level, and you see towards the next projects, you will see how he improves. But yeah you can
see there's something about it, this is one of his first projects at Harvard, and as you can see
he's adding a lot of interesting twists to it, for example this is not just an aerial view,
but this is from someone's window, and not only that, there are all these papers that
are flying around, and these papers actually have some sort of relationship to the actual
proposal. I think these were excellent touches, I don't think I've seen that anywhere else before.
And good old style, these are drawings from classical architects.
And I think there are some of the things that you can learn from these guys is that certain drawings that are passed down to
this generation have a sense of power to them, and by being able to leverage that kind of iconography,
you are able to harness that level of reverence to your own drawing, and that is almost exactly what he does in this drawing.
Usage of bold colors and geometric shapes,
something that has been more prevalent during the times of the modernist masters, I think that might have helped.
I feel like I can totally imagine seeing these photos from like
some books from the archive, but apparently these are actually a part of his design proposal so...
Something very classical about the design and the representation totally goes hand-in-hand,
and here he's utilizing oblique perspective and this unnatural appearance actually used to be
very popular before computerization of 3d model, we've actually created a plugin that allows you to
create this kind of appearance so be sure to check that out, I'll link it to the top right corner!
Diving into the next project, another full-bleed page, which is totally different from explanatory pages.
And again you can see that he's utilizing oblique perspective and something
about them gives a sense of absoluteness to your drawings, so I highly recommend trying
those kind of representations out. This can give the audience a sense of interest,
and make your drawings look a bit more powerful.
Yeah I think the line weights
are not coming out as he intended, but I'm sure these are flawless drawings.
This drawing could have just been on its own but he added a little hand and the
brush painting the windows and obviously the windows are a big part of this proposal so he's
really highlighting that and I think this is an excellent touch.
And for this project there's a
sense of color scheme going through, most of the drawings and models are black and white
but on the parts that he wants to highlight are in this consistent golden yellow color.
There we go, in this project he's fusing this mallet to architecture so that's kind
of interesting, you all done explaining the concept through not only diagrams but also
plans and elevation. I think this image used to be on the cover of the Harvard website or
something like that, but I think this is a good demonstration of how he's unafraid of
turning the whole convention upside down because he literally just put the rendering upside down
and shows that the reflection so that the reflection looks right-side up so I think
that's pretty interesting. Another project that seems almost extremely classical, these
figure-ground studies look extremely interesting. It's axonometric, they're just purely eye candies.
And otherwise some very conventional layouts and rendering collage studies.
And another more experimental design and representation of techniques.
Yeah I think there are some recurring patterns in this portfolio by this point you might have noticed
that he sets up this kind of establishing view, and then goes on to explain his projects using
other conceptual drawings such as figure-ground or diagrams and then I think every project
has at least one or more experimental representation techniques. Very nice.
And then his personal work consists of photography, and you can see that he has,
he knows how to compose his photographs.
Yeah they're extremely minimally laid out, only includes essential information, kind of builds
character. And going through this portfolio you can almost get a sense of what kind of person
he is, even though that might be misleading I think this portfolio is successful in establishing
his character and delivering that to the audience, showing that he is well versed in his art.
Kudos to him, and great work, and let me know if you guys enjoyed this video, and please let me know
if you would like me to review some of your portfolio. And until next time, take care, bye!