Architecture schools have long struggled with what is mightier: the pen(cil) or the mouse. Columbia University GSAPP (Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) was one of the earliest converts to computer-based modeling and design. But this is all deep theoretical stuff. Now, its students have taken to social media to show that it’s not all so serious.
1. GSAPPCAM: A 24/7 video camera intended to assist an architecture student’s self-imposed/socially-constructed guilt when not pulling all-nighters in studio. The hope is that if you can see what’s happening when you aren’t there, you can divest yourself of worry. Dan Taeyoung Lee, the first year MArch student who installed this, took it to another conceptual level by mapping “the difference in movement between the last two captures, mapping movement to white, and stillness to black. An inactive studio is visualized as an entirely black screen, and an active studio as a panoply of intersecting, overlapping traces.” Basically, the more white lines, the busier the activity and placing your mouse over the image reveals the original image. Fellow first year student Aldo Cherdabayev shared these photographs with Untapped, which range from hilarious to just plain interesting.
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2. GSAPP = sleep: It’s well known that architect students don’t sleep. The GSAPP=sleep blog captures this for public view.
3. GSAPP Girl charts the lives of the so-called “architectural elite” mostly with mobile snapshots of famous architects–Bernard Tschumi, Hernan Diaz Alonzo, Steven Holl…Updates have been curiously absent recently. @Gsappgirl, keep it up!
4. For some reason, all computers at the architecture school (at least in the urban planning studios) are defaulted to the printer on the 5th floor. Countless dissertations, term papers and designs have been accidentally printed there. What’s with the unsustainability Columbia? Well, Depths of Avery records the output of the printer on the 5th floor with snarky commentary.
Bottom line: Who says that architects don’t have a sense of humor?
Get in touch with the author @untappedmich.
