Cooper Union Hometest

This is my home-test submission to the Cooper Union Architecture. The home-test is a series of visual tasks and written prompts that are the meat of the admissions decision at Cooper Union Architecture, which does not require anything else for its application (no portfolios,  letters of recommendation, essays).

Chances are slim (900-1000 applicants for about 30 spots = 3% acceptance), but I can honestly say I enjoyed the tasks, and learned something about my creative process on the way.

I deliberately didn't over-work my responses, and some of them are definitely of a higher quality than others, but anyway, that's the nature of the beast, as it were.

Sketchbook 1: Architecture & Urban Planning

I believe in the free exchange of ideas. I also think it's healthier to bounce raw concepts and ideas around, in order to inform them and grow them, rather than keep them protected and private. I record much of my thought process visually in my sketchbooks, where I think by writing and drawing through my ideas. I'm now publishing selections of these sketchbooks under loose categorizations partly to archive, document, organize my observations and speculations, but also possibly to inspire other people to ponder, criticize, or improve upon something I have observed or proposed.

This is the first sketchbook - Sketchbook 1, which deals with Architecture and Urban Planning.
Later sketchbooks will include drawings and observations on different topics.

These documents will be updated fairly regularly with higher-quality scans, new images, and multiple installments
I will try to keep the installments relatively short, for the sake of density.
Eventually I plan to post a complete, high-quality, un-edited version of my notebooks for archival purposes.

The Office: A Monumental Architectural Concept

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This is an architectural concept that started out as an assignment in academic composition to draw my "dream room."

When I discovered the Indigo Renderer plugin for Google Sketchup a few months back, I modeled and rendered the concept in Sketchup - playing with the lighting and rendering capabilities of Indigo, which turned out to be quite powerful, if a bit clunky to use.


The idea of "The Office" is an imposing interior space, that humbles the entrant, who walks the central carpet to the desk where I would be working.

The space uses subtle tricks of perspective to fool the eye into perceiving the space as much larger than it actually is.

Descriptions

Some more views

MOONWATER

MOONWATER official advertisement

I recently created a business concept for bottled water company called MOONWATER for Economics class. MOONWATER is a Chinese-based bottling company that harvests water in the form of ice crystals on the poles of the moon, and distributes it as bottled water to consumers on Earth around the year 2050.

The project was largely an excuse to play with rendering and lighting in Google Sketchup with the Indigo Renderer plugin, but the concept is in fact, not as outlandish as it may sound. NASA recently discovered water in polar craters of the moon - enough supposedly, to support a human colony. A significant amount of "volatiles" - substances that freeze and vaporize in the high temperature differences on the moon - such as methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were also found, which could mean potential fuel sources for Moon-Earth shuttle systems.

I am hoping to eventually expand this brand to include the whole lunar water-harvesting operation.

A .pdf of the presentation I gave can be found here. (Has a few typos)


Disclaimer: The Chinese characters on the MOONWATER logo do not mean "moon" or "water." I chose them because they looked nice. 



















Some renders from the design process - more can be found here.  

The following is a letter from the CFO of the company addressed to potential and current investors in MOONWATER.


Dear Citizen of Earth and Investor in MOONWATER, 


As CFO of MOONWATER corporation, allow me to relate a short history of the rise of our new lunar phenomenon that is changing the way we see water, and challenging the perceived limitations of our world.   


In the land grab for lunar property that took place in the 2030’s, MOONWATER Corporation was among the first investors to see the potential of polar properties, which had hitherto been under the control of a joint coalition of the Chinese, Russian, and African Governments. These governments sought to fund their lunar colonization efforts with the aid of private investors, and so made opportunities for large-scale investment. With full property rights guaranteed under these governments, MOONWATER invested in over 2,500,000 acres of land at both the south and north poles of the moon. Buying these properties at an exceptionally low price, and having bought highly efficient water harvesting technology patents from privately funded research companies seeking to privatize NASA research technologies, MOONWATER was positioned to become the first major water harvesting company to have a functioning water mining operation on the moon. 


        Initially developing water harvesting techniques to provide water for hydrogen fuel cells and oxygen for Chinese polar colonies, MOONWATER soon began to see economic opportunities elsewhere. As the persistent toxification of water resources all over planet Earth became more and more ubiquitous, and more potent, it became more and more expensive to purify water, and ensure that dangerous chemicals, heavy metals, and other pollutants did not enter the general drinking supply. Nearly all of the Earth’s major ice flows were now in the form of sea water, and therefore expensive to gather, due to the energy-costly process of desalination. As many terran water utilities and bottling companies were bought by energy companies in vertical mergers in part of their restructuring to match the demand for hydrogen fuel cells, simple, clean, trustworthy drinking water was increasingly demanded. 


       In 2037, MOONWATER Corporation began operations in commercial water bottling. Targeting financially well-off ecologically conscious individuals and organizations, MOONWATER set off to establish a new name in bottled water, and be among the first to establish a functioning lunar-terran economic model. MOONWATER has continued to lead the industry in developing more efficient, safe, and cost-effective means of harvesting, processing, and transporting water from the moon's polar craters to the water-conscious of earth. 


      Drinking MOONWATER, you are not taking water from the poor and disadvantaged of Earth. Drinking MOONWATER, you have no ecological impact on our already ravaged planet. Drinking MOONWATER, you are tapping into molecules that have witnessed the rise of life on earth, the evolution of humanity, and the totality of human experience on our planet. 


      We hope that you will join us on our journey through the cosmos, and become of a part of the group that dares to go further than any other in the quest for new and ancient worlds – all in the name of clean, fair, and safe drinking water. 

Sincerely,

-Song Mei Jingxi, CFO, MOONWATER Corporation

MOONWATER HQ, < 14.55 N ; 74.12 > Sea of Tranquility

My Portfolio - DOWNLOAD HERE

I'm posting a .pdf version of my portfolio, showing samples of my work in drawing, painting, sculpture, graphic design, and architecture. It includes 25 works, and it is approximately 12 MB in size. Feel free to download --> here <-- 

Ink

Here's an ink drawing I recently did of the view from my school's second floor.
Looks a bit old fashioned...

Summer 2010 Paintings

Here is a selection of paintings done this past summer, in Maine.
I wish I had more time to paint!

Under the pier at Aspasia Marina. 

At the beach in South Portland

A finger in the morning at Aspasia Marina 

Seguin Island in evening

Portland skyline in evening 

Morning fog at Aspasia Marina

Academic Drawing 2009-2010

Here is some of my work in my academic drawing class done in the past year.
(Sorry for the bad quality photoscans. I'll be taking shots in better lighting conditions later and replacing these.)

Socrates

Antony?

The Eye of David

Brutus

Anthology Book Project

I recently completed a massive project - the design and layout of my school's student writing anthology, a 90-page collection of the best student writing of the year and some graphical artwork.I started working on this project in the late fall, trying to discover a stylistic vocabulary for the visual appearance of the book. In the final design of the book, I diverged from my original ideas, especially those on the cover, going for a more inky, messy feel. The book is included here as a .pdf for your viewing.
Some of my own writing is included in the book.

(Please note all content of this book is legal property of its writers, editors, and designer[me] )

The cover.

A chapter spread: Poetry:

A sample content page from the poetry section.

The Nonfiction chapter spread.

Here's how it looks printed.

(We got nice glossy paper.)

The inside leaf.

Yearbook Class Page Design

Here is a design I did for our class page in our school's yearbook.
It is inspired by the Apple Nano-chromatic ad.
Each member of the class is represented in an iPod nano of a certain color, with album art depicting them.

My version.

The original ad.

The album art.

Here it is in print.

Painting in Vilnius

I have been doing some more painting - now in Vilnius. 

A sort of warm-up sketch of a portrait of some British military man 

-- or Lenin, depending on which you prefer (w/o reference)

A painting by the Vilnele river with two of my friends posing. 

Painting by the Neris river looking over Vilnius, near the 

bridge over the junction between the Vilnele and the Neris.

The Vilnele again, from the other side, and in a different part of the park. 

A path in the woods near Antakalnis

Oil Painting in Crete

I recently returned from an absolutely incredible trip to Crete with a group of art students from my school.
These are some oil paintings done around the area of Myrtos, a small village on the southern side of the island.

Painted in the afternoon/evening between the rocks of the coastline near Myrtos:

Painted in the afternoon/evening looking down from atop the hills above the town of Myrtos:

Painted at 7:45 - 9:00 AM from the rooftop of the town school in Myrtos, looking at the sunrise to the East:

Aurimo Sketchbook 8 Italy 4

   These are some pages from my Italy sketchbook - they explore fluid dynamics, passive solar heating and cooling, alternative methods of energy capture and storage, and other functional aspects of building design.

These are observations of turbulence in the river at the Ponte San Trinita, Florence.

Some ideas on alternative energy:

This is my way of understanding problems - drawing through them. I understand then the different ways they have been solved, and can better approach finding my own solution.



These are the beginnings of some of my ideas on passive solar heating/cooling. I am trying to develop simple systems using water, gravity, convection, conduction, radiation, cohesion/adhesion, evaporation to solve complex problems of thermoregulation in spaces.

OpenSim Architecture - The Temple Monument

There's a neat little opensource version of SecondLife called OpenSim. I use it to to experiment with architectural ideas. Here is one structure I put up to try out an idea I had drawn out on paper, when given the assignment in Architectural Composition. The assignment was to create a temple, a nonsectarian place of worship or meditation. This building was my response to the assignment.

I hope eventually to do some higher-quality, more realistic renderings in Rhino or some other software.
As you may notice, the "shininess" quality I applied to the surfaces of the building are a generalized blur of a gradient representing the environment.