Balloons

Soo -- rolling right back into the design lifestyle. Notice im posting this at 12:30am, fun times.

Our current studio is, unfortunately, another arts building.  My fourth one in my college career if i can count correctly? Maybe 5th ---Anyways, I'm making the most of it, and will surely whomp it up

The building will be called the Downtown Center for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and so for our first assignment we are diving into Jazz music? Oh well, i don't make the rules. We were told to pick a piece of jazz music and then design an object that can move to it, and perform this music with our movable object for our final presentation i think next week.

Anyways, my piece of music I chose is Sing Sing Sing, by my favorite Jazz musician Benny Goodman -- that guy rocks, and so does the song. Great rhythmic drum patterns, lots of ups and downs, bright colors in the horn section and a devilishly good bass line, whew wonderful!

Now -- to my object -- because I thought this song was really direct, powerful, and explosive -- i elected to go with a collage of balloons. Odd choice, I know, but hear me out. I'm hoping to make this collage of balloons hang in some way, then play it kind of like a drum along to the music, the balloons will move and make different sounds and different textures. And then i will systematically pop them at certain points in the song. Each balloon might be filled with something too, like confetti, foam, water, dust etc to create different colors and sounds and patterns with the object, and will hopefully leave something to be desired (maybe diagrammatically) below it on the ground when the performance is over. We'll just see how this goes...

Progress so far...

Back at it

Well, for my frequent viewers -- I am glad to announce my return!

My summer was wonderful, if you were wondering? Got back from the most amazing 4 months of my life in Italy and then was able to travel to Colorado to see my sissy, then over to California to hang out with my cousins and see my Uncle John get married. Great times!

I interned and Hubbell Construction Services over the summer, what a great experience. My first job site was the old Sealy Mattress factory in downtown Des Moines, which is being renovated into affordable housing loft units -- I helped by doing a whole lot of sweeping, demolition when they needed my newly molded pythons, and little odd jobs here and there. Working under Cody and Mr. Jim Woods (Woody) was great and I am looking forward to seeing that project get finished! Might be putting in some more hours there on the weekends of my X-mas break when they are (hopefully) near completion.

From there I went and worked at Plumwood Terrace, which is a condo re-build project -- the building burned to the ground a year ago and all of those homeowners are all now getting to move back into their places! There I did punch-list items which included a lot of handy-man work and less on the sweeping end. Learning little odd jobs like that was great and having Ray and Jason supervising and constantly teaching me new things was great. Thanks to all of the Hubbell family for having me back for the summer, my time spent there was, again, wonderful.

I'm now back up at ISU trying to finish off my last year of college! Adding an Entrepreneurial Studies minor to my Architecture degree this year, so im taking many boring, but informative, business classes -- so those are interesting, but i do thank my lucky stars everyday i didn't choose to have my major in that college, goodness, architecture rocks.