House for a Family in the 21st Century

Our final project for the semester was to create a house for a family living in the 21st century. In other words, we would design a house that is characterized by modern trends in architecture. We were given a site and then we were set off. The first thing I did was observe the site and noticed a significant curve in the landscape at the front of the property. I took advantage of that and produced a curved facade that would be the front of the building. That explains how I derived the curvature of my house.

One feature I wanted was the back of the house to look like a completely different structure than from the front, and vice versa. Someone would walk to the back of the house and think to themselves, "Wait, is this the same building, or am I missing something?" The slope of the terrain also assisted in this idea because I could create two levels. I made the upper level bigger and wanted the lower level to look like it was jutting out from the upper level, hence the same curve as the upper level. I decided to make the main entrance in the back just so people would walk through the beautiful landscape around the house and get to the "hidden entrance" in the back. Of course, I made sure to put doors in the front of the house as well to accomodate the lazy not wanting to walk all the way around the house to get inside. I still arranged trees and the sidewalk to direct people towards the back instead of the front.

The interaction with nature and architecture is a growing trend which causes many glass or window-filled facades to be created in modern architecture. People can be inside the house, sheltered from the elements, and still can feel the presence of nature around them. This is why I added so many windows in the back of the house. The view of the creek behing and the trees surrounding is critical to the pleasure of living in this house. For this reason I also created porches wrapping around the house to give people even more interaction with nature.

Another feature I added to this house is the interior connection of the two floors. In the stairwell, as you can see in one of the renderings, the ceiling is gone on the lower floor. It is just a big gaping whole where those on the upper floor can look into the lower floor. This increases interaction between the two floors.

The arrangement of rooms and hallways are unique as well. Each room is different and the hallways aren't arranged in a grid-like system like many others. This gives an abnormal feeling to the layout and enhances the overall attitude of the house. The family living here will not get bored.

Structurally, I placed foundation walls under the exterior walls of the upper story for support. I then added a sheet stone facade to the exterior of that. For the rest of the exterior walls, it is just concrete with a brown plaster facade.

As for the roof, I couldn't figure out what I could do with the curve that I had created. Then I thought to myself, "Why would I create a roof, which would cover up the beautiful curves that I have created with the walls?" Because of this thought, I decided to keep the roof flat and just raise the exterior walls up 1' above the roof to give a type of ledge and to help emphasize the curve even more if looked at from above. On the roof, I added gravel to give it character instead of it just being concrete.

Overall, I think it was a success. It took much longer than I had anticipated and I almost didn't finish on time! Luckily I did and was able to get 3 good renderings of my final product. Hopefully, with time, I will take even more rendered shots and post them here. Enjoy the renderings and comment and let me know what you think or any reccomendations!
By the way, the blue blob in the back of the first rendering is a van that didn't render! That will soon be fixed!

Final Blog of the Kitchen Renovation

Finally, I am able to blog again! I have been ridiculously busy the past month and now that school is finally winding down, I am able to start back up my site! I finished off talking about the kitchen renovation that I did. I used Revit Architecture 2010 to make a computer model and posted some photo-realistic renderings. I was not quite finished when I posted them. I ended up adding a wooded ceiling and added carpet. Not much is different except for the exception of the materials I added. Here are my final renderings. To me they turned out pretty well. As I mentioned before, this was my first time using Revit Architecture. I picked up on it faster than I had expected, so I expect to learn much more and be that much better at it in the near future! I can tell the difference already with our last project that we just finished up. I will talk about it in my next post, so stay alert!

Beginning Revit Architecture

Finally, we are learning to use Revit Architecture for the first time. I had never used it before now, but had been looking forward to it for some time. Everyone is talking about how it is the software of the future and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it! My professor Mark Clayton began teaching us the simple commands of Revit. He gave us a model that he had already created and we were to redesign the kitchen/dining/living area and somehow incorporate curves into our design whether it be a wall, floor, etc.

Below is an image of the original floor plan and to the right are two 3D images of what it used to look like.

As you can see, the area is very plain. There is only one straight wall projecting into the room to separate the kitchen area from the living area. This creates a very dull living space. We were asked to redesign the room, to make it beautiful, by incorporating curves.

Above is my revised floor plan. It was a long process but it turned out pretty well. The original plan was very dull and uneventful. The only structure in the space was the wall jutting out horizontally into the space to separate the kitchen from the living area and the way the kitchen was positioned just left the living and dining area one big space. The first step I decided to do was to move the kitchen to the right side of the room to create a sort of "walk-through" space in between the living and dining area. However, once I moved the kitchen, I realized that I was cramped for space. To give me more space, I moved the laundry room to the right side of the room beside the kitchen and adjusted the dimensions of the master bedroom, bathroom and closet to be able to fit it in there. After all of my creating and deleting walls, I was able to arrange the rooms in a pattern that was suitable and still kept the same square footage, minus a couple of square feet. This left the hot water heater and coat closets protruding into my extra space that I created. To fix it, I just simply rotated them to be positioned along the wall in between the hallway and the back door. One of my complaints of the original design was its lack of space. Not literally the lack of space, but the lack of individual spaces. I wanted to create many different spaces in the one big space we were given to work with. I started this by moving the kitchen but there was more to be done. The original plan had just one floor and one ceiling. I wanted to create spaces by splitting the levels of both the floor and the ceiling. Originally, I wanted the living area level to be at ground level, the kitchen area level to be 1'-6" higher and the dining area level to be 1'-6" lower. I successfully raised the kitchen level, however I could not figure out how to create the lower dining level (though I have somewhat of an idea how now). I figured that I could also raise the dining level, but to a lower height than the kitchen level, still keeping my three-leveled floor idea. How did I create my curves? Honestly, I just played around with curves on the floor of the room until I found something that was able to flow through the room. Once I had both floors, it seemed like they were just blobs in the middle of space, that they didn't "fit" into my space. I resolved this by continuing the curve of the kitchen floor and running it along the back wall, giving 3' of walking room along the wall. This fit the kitchen space into the room which then fit the dining space into the room because the dining area curve conforms to the kitchen area curve. I wanted to put some kind of wall to separate the kitchen from the other areas. I wanted to separate the living and dining areas from the kitchen, but didn't want to isolate the kitchen from the living and dining areas. For this reason, I created a small curved wall at the corner of the kitchen and cut a rectangle out of the middle to also help those in the kitchen communicate with those in the living and dining area an visa versa. The last step of my design process was to change the doors, windows and light fixtures inside the house. I changed the back door to an all glass double door and created my own windows using the family editor. The windows were simple. The windows are from floor to ceiling, the bottom is a rectangle and the top is an arc, very common. Then, for interior lighting, I installed recessed-can lights all along the curves in the ceiling. I took many different renderings, but these three were the best, all rendered in high quality which took about 30 minutes each to fully render.

It was really awesome working with Revit Architecture and it is just amazing how powerful of a program it is! It's no wonder why so many firms are switching to Revit Architecture. Hopefully, this is just the start of my education using Revit Architecture and I am looking forward to using it even more in the future.

The Beginning of My Sketchbook

Well, I am just now getting to the point of installing my scanner drivers and scanner program onto my computer and so now I have scanned the few pages I have taken up in my sketchbook. I will try everyday to scan my pages from that day and upload them here and talk about them but I'm not going to make any promises (haha). Hopefully, this will not only help me document ideas and observations but may also provide some opportunities for others to view my pages and come up with ideas of their own!

This image is just the front and back cover of my fancy-schmancy sketchbook (haha). The paper label on the back says, "This journal cover is handcrafted by artisans in India.

The technique is to head discarded bicycle spokes and burnish lovely patterns onto handmade paper."



This is the first page. I wrote this when I attended the lecture on "Designing Your Portfolio".

Your portfolio is what people will see of your works. It is your "business card". People will see your portfolio before they will see you, for instance when applying for a position at an architecture firm. Popular programs for creating your portfolio are Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator .

THE GRID: Use it, know it. It makes things easier.
CONSISTENCY: Randomness will only hinder you. Create a graphic idea and stay with it.
WHITE SPACE: Don't be afraid of it. It is your friend. Just because it looks empty doesn't mean it has to be filled. INTERESTS: Don't put them to sleep. Open and close with well documented projects.


HINTS:
TEST PRINT: This is a necessity. The screen can be deceiving.
ORGANIZE: Gather all of your information and move it to one location.
TYPOGRAPHY: Compose something clear, clean and easy to read.
QUALITY: Photos, drawings, graphics- These should be of the highest quality.
NO PIXELATION IN YOUR PICTURES: MAKE SURE that all of your pictures are crisp images. If there is some pixelation, use Photoshop to sharpen it up.
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Here I was just drawing a curved wall to get an idea of what a curved wall is supposed to look like and to jump start me toward designing one.


While trying to design a wall, I had seen a building which had metal beams from the outside protruding through the wall on the inside. The beams were used for structural purposes, but were also used for an aesthetic purpose. I searched Google and found images of similar buildings which had the same "beam design." Here are two images that I found. The first is an example of beams protruding through the wall to the exterior and the other is an example of beams protruding into the interior of the building.
I liked the idea of seeing the structure from the inside, since most of the time the structure of a building is hidden by the walls and ceilings. I imagined having a wall which would use metal beams but one would be able to see the beams from the inside of the wall by using a type of transparent plastic to create the facade of the wall. The plastic would allow a person to see the curvature of the wall while allowing them to see through the facade and observe the structure and connections that made the wall become what it was. It would be both a visual and a learning experience for the viewer.

This is just an idea that I had for a building design that came to me before I went to bed one night. The building would be symmetrical in every direction and would consist of two stories. The curved-t shape in the top view is the second floor while the curves joining each part of the t is a roof covering for possibly a balcony of some sort. With four balconies on the second floor, one could observe everything around the building, a 360 degree view, if they walked to them all. The first story would mainly consist of 4 arcs with the darker lines being straight walls. The four arced pieces on top of the roof of the first floor would be windows extending out of the roof letting sunlight into room from the ceiling. I'm not sure what purpose this building might serve. Maybe a house? Maybe a town hall? Maybe a club?
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These are just drawings helping me figure out what our second wall design would look like or how it might be connected.

Who is Eric Opperman?

I am a sophmore architecture major at Texas A&M University. I am 19 years old and am from Nacogdoches, Texas. My family consists of my parents, Jeff and Ginger, my brother, Case, my dog, Dan, and myself. I also have a great girlfriend, Meredith, who attends Rice University in Houston.

What inspired me to be where I am now?

Ever since I can remember, I have been very artistically and technically minded. While admiring objects for their beauty, I would also figure out or imagine how they were put together. From my observations I would build things at my dad's workshop or even out of cardboard boxes and use my bedroom as my playground. When I got older I began looking at objects at a bigger scale, mostly being architecture. Realizing how my mind worked and my interests I was able to see which direction my life would be heading. When it came time for me to start looking at colleges, Texas A&M was already high on my list because my older brother was already a sophomore civil engineering major there. I liked the city and the campus so that was a step in the Texas A&M direction but with some research and conversations with older friends, I learned of the strong architecture program that was offered there. That pretty much sealed the deal and before I knew it I was driving to College Station to stay for my 5 or 6 years of college that lay ahead of me.

Where am I heading?

Currently, I am a sophomore architecture student but as is everyone else, I am trying to figure out what I see myself doing in 5 years or so after college is through and I am thrown into the work-world. Some people are set on what they want to do, but I am having trouble finding my niche because I am so interested in everything! I like straight architecture but I also like landscape architecture and construction. I plan to get a masters in architecture so I can get licensed as an architect, but if the opportunity comes I would love to study landscape architecture or construction science. Similarly, ever since a vacation to Germany in 2004 I have has somewhat of a fascination with Germany and the German language. This also presents another direction that I might want to go in. Of course, a minor in German will not provide too many opportunities here in the US but depending how I like my study abroad, I might want to find a job as an architect in Germany. I don't know how how much of a chance that might be, but it is a possibility. As for now, I'll just worry about being a sophomore architecture student.