First Year Spring Portfolio

William Zillich ARCH 133 Final Portfolio March, 28 - June, 10 S p r i n g Q u a r t e r, 2 0 11 Profesor JoAnn Moore California State University San Luis Obispo, CA

Born in Durango, Colorado, Will Zillich grew up immersed in the rural, small town atmosphere where he was constantly connected with nature. Being in southwest Colorado, He was exposed to many different cultures and learned about the importance of sustainability and conservation.

Always wanting to travel to new places and explore the world, Will has been fascinated with learning about exotic environments and foreign cultures. Even from early childhood he had always loved to build and create.

With interests in art, engineering, sustainability, space and architecture he enjoyed learning. He attended Durango High School where he took many classes that focused on design, engineering, science and art. During his entire high school career he was involved with the Durango Aerospace Design Team. This competitive team worked together to fully design a large orbiting space settlement. Being exceptional semi-finalists in the International Space Settlement Design Competition the team was invited by NASA to compete at the world finals each year, where they were grouped with teams throughout the world including ones from India, Australia, Uruguay, Japan, England and the UK. Will’s team was able to collaborate on an international level with their designs and won the world competition 3 out of 4 years.

Will knew that his ideal career would involve some form of design and construction and, with his interest in sustainable buildings, he felt that Architecture would allow him to have a profession that he loved. He is currently pursuing a Masters in Architecture and hopes to receive minors in Sustainability and Landscape Architecture. Looking for a career that involves interdisciplinary collaboration he hopes to work at a firm that appreciates his creativity and team working skills.

He looks forward to someday when he will be able to do work that influences people to lead better lives.

During this quarter I did not draw as often as I would have liked to but the few times that I did draw I was impressed with the outcome. The single drawing workshop of the quarter was great fun and I learned a lot about freehand perspective techniques.

DESIGN VILLAGE social parametrics _ spring 2011

The design village project was a great application of all the design tools that we learned and allowed us to experiment with building a larger scale structure that would need to shelter and support five people. My team was able to create one of the cheapest and strongest designs, and we were able to set up our entire project in less than an hour compared to teams that were still building into the night.

The entire design village competition was a great experience because it taught me about the hardships related with having incompetent lazy team members and arrogant overbearing team members. Other than the team dynamics the entire project was incredible with everyone living up in Poly canyon and partying throughout the night.

Our design had to address the variable slope of the site and needed to be adjustable. The best way we found to address these issues was to align each bed side-by-side and offset them to create terraces down the hill. Drilling multiple holes in the vertical support posts allowed one side of each bed to be raised or lowered depending on the slope of the specific site

During the design and construction process we set up our project and tested many prototypes to make sure that the design would work. By the time we actually carried our entire project up to the canyon we had plenty of practice setting it up and taking it down. The trip up the canyon was pretty interesting because we compressed our entire project into one package which we thought would be easy to carry up on our backs. The first half of the trip was easy enough and we felt excited to be one of the first ones up in the canyon. The last half of the walk up the dirt road started getting more difficult and by the time we got on to the side of the hill we were one of the last groups to chose a site. It only took us half an hour to completely setup and finish our project so we had the entire afternoon to walk around and look at the other projects many of which were very interesting.

William Zillich , May 8 , ARCH133 Spring 2011 , Cal Poly , San Luis Obispo

The second project of the quarter involved the research and recreation of a house from an influential architect. The house that I chose was the Wolfe House by Rudolph Michael Schindler. I chose this house because it was one of the more visually interesting ones that I saw while glancing through the list of available houses. Through my research I found it was built on Catalina Island in the town of Avalon, a place where I have been many times during my adventures at sea camp. Through the recreation of the entire Wolfe House in the 3D modeling program, Bonzai, I was able to visually represent the underlying design program that the architect built from. Despite the constant hours spent working on the computer and the plethora of problems that Bonzai had, this project was a very valuable experience.

Not only did it teach us about certain architects and how to use computer modeling programs, it also taught us about the importance of saving your work every 5 minutes and having multiple backup copies for when programs decide to crash and corrupt files. Through the use of visual renderings and animations we were able to show different aspects of the house and how the architect had imagined it.

Analysis of R.M. Schindler’s Wolfe House

DESIGN CAL POLY

The final project of the year was full of many different small projects that all related to a site on or around Dexter lawn. The site that my class was assigned was a small garden area on the end of the architecture building near a main walkway through campus. This site has many interesting elements and through the many analyses we were able to describe nearly every aspect of the garden. The first part of the project was the rapid design of three vending machines which were meant to deliver things that every architect needs at 4am.

These vending machines then required the design of a place to put them and the design of a pathway and threshold to get to them. The project merged into the redesign of the site with the addition of a pathway that included stairs and two platforms. I decided to utilize the roof of the architecture building and continue Dexter lawn up on to the roof, creating a new spot that people could go to relax and socialize. My project drew elements from the concrete posts that were already present at the site.

DESIGNING CAL POLY WILL ZILLICH

Design Models

This project included the making of many models that explored the site, its basic elements and the relation between our project and the surounding buildings. The models we made were at diferent scales to detail diferent relationships and elements of our designs.

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The Adventures of Spring Quarter

This quarter was the most intense one this year because all the projects required so much work and demanded so much time. Even though we only did three projects each one was very involved and detailed. Each of the projects was very different and was good in their own way. Though my favorite was the design village project because it was so constructive and hands on, I enjoyed the others. They each taught me different skills that will be useful later in my schooling and hopefully applicable to my career. even though I did not enjoy the endless time spent on the second project, every time I see a simple animation it is impossible not to think how I could do that in form Z. that project changed the way I see all computer renderings and animations and I find it both interesting and annoying that I can’t get Bonzai out of my head. The third project was also very enjoyable because I learned a lot about the different ways that I could enhance renderings to make them look more realistic and artistic. The introduction of a digital and hand drawn display board was a new concept and I was very impressed with how mine turned out.

I am glad that my other classes this quarter were not as demanding as previous quarters because the architecture work load expanded to fill every spare minute and I imagine that if I was not working on my projects for that time they would not have turned out as well as they did. It was interesting seeing the difference between first quarter and now because when I look back at all the things that I was doing I can see a very significant improvement in my skill at drawing and my designs have started showing more compositional strength.

Overall this last quarter has really allowed what I have learned to come forward. The amount of creative freedom in the first and last projects resulted in a broad range of designs. The final show of the first year architecture studio class had many impressive projects and showed the many skills that some of the students had mastered. Through the combination of all the tools that we learned this year we were able to combine the advantages of each and generate very imaginative designs.

This year in architecture William Zillich “Architecture tends to consume everything else, it has become one’s entire life.”-Arne Jacobsen

This year for me has been one of the most enlightening, academic, fun, stressful, and creative years ever. I knew that it would be a challenge to be in the Cal Poly architecture program but what I have gone through and accomplished this last year has gone way beyond my expectations. When I applied to the architecture program I was not really sure what I wanted to do for a career but after the first quarter I was pretty sure I had made the right choice. The projects that we were able to do were some of the most creative and educational ones that I could imagine doing in the first year of college. All of the projects had very steep learning curves and forced us to go beyond our comfort zones while designing and building many of our projects. The projects that involved the shop were some of the more enjoyable ones for me because I have always liked using power tools and building large scale things.

One of the biggest aspects of architecture that surprised me was the studio culture and social life that emerged during the constant work for both the individual projects and the team assignments.

The friends and colleagues that I made in studio first quarter have continued to be good friend and we bounce our ideas off each other and critique each other’s designs. Many other crazy things happened in studio this year that have made my college experience very enjoyable. Along with all the long nights spent working on projects there were times when projects were not due and my friend and I still spent time in studio.

Being in San Luis Obispo has also been very fun. Even though I have not been able to enjoy the outdoors or go to the beach as much as I would have liked the beautiful weather and calm rains made the trips between studio and the dorms worth walking the 2 miles a day. Coming from beautiful Durango Colorado to San Luis Obispo has been like going from one paradise to another. In my future years here I hope that I will have enough time to explore some of the trails around here and learn to surf or just have more time to relax at the beach.

Some of the off campus events were highly inspirational and made me glad that I could be involved in such a creative field. The velum competition seemed like a very appropriate way to practice design and manufacture on a small scale. It also let the students showcase some of their work and display the types of projects they could come up with. It seemed like it provided just the right amount of competition. I hope to work on a project over the summer and with luck enter it into the velum competition next year. This year has been such a great learning experience and I have been amazed by what I could do given a little creative freedom and the competitive yet collaborative nature of studio.

Final Portfolio

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ARCH-0133 Beginning Design Lab Spring 2011 Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo Morning Studio 205 Professor JoAnn Moore Coordinating Professors: Michael Lucas,Keith Wiley, Brian Ridley, Brent Freeby

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