During my third year at Northwestern, I decided to do something a bit different. Emboldened by having crawled through the twenty pages of Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking", I enrolled in our civil engineering department's architecture studio course. I had a casual interest in architecture in that I enjoyed Chicago's skyscrapers; I had toured Oak Park, the part of Chicago where Frank Lloyd Wright had lived, worked and built; I had been to see Fallingwater and to Wright's Pope-Leighey House near where I live. However, I had no experience of the practicalities of designing a building. I went from my opened mind to a completed project over the course of the term. On the way, I learned and taught myself a lot.

The instructors for the 15-person studio class were Larry Booth and Scott Cyphers of Booth Hansen and Mark Sexton of Krueck + Sexton, who took us through a trial-by-fire of architectural theory and practice. There were tours, there were lectures by David Van Zanten and Margaret McCurry among others, we learned to sketch, we learned building information modeling. All the while, we developed and refined our concepts for a house on a site opposite Northwestern's Technological Institute.

Sketching and scale modeling were invaluable. Sketching let me quickly and fluently iterate concepts and designs, both for myself and to explain my thoughts to an audience or advisor. On the other hand, scale models take longer but they give a sense of physicality to an otherwise abstract thought. Model-building is a skill I largely taught myself, by attempting to answer questions such as: How can I model very small windows? How can I convey the transparent and opaque parts of curtain walls? How can I build the model in a way that reflects the engineering and construction of the "actual" house? Compared to my attempt at the Watergate complex in 2006, my models this time were much more refined.

The challenge I set myself in the autumn of 2014 was one of design and communication. To succeed, I learned building information modeling, sketching, and scale modeling: three forms of communication in varied media that work on different time scales. I synthesized these with my design concept to do something I had never attempted before. It was amazing.

See the slideshow from my pitch here.