Oscars Montreal adventure

Oscar Bush 2nd Weekly Reflection 5/22/22 Having just wrapped up week two of senior project, I feel proud of my progression as a designer and my abilty to stay on track with the goals we set for ourselves. This week we have focuses mainly on sketching and I am seeing the progress in both Elijah and my work. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, we ended up taking field trips. I am starting to notice that all of our visits started with sketching out the property soon after we entered. It is clear that the ability to transer the main features of your surrounding quickly onto paper is important in design, and especially design observation. Our visit to McGill University was truly a unique experience where we were able to spend time with a renowned astro physicist and she genuinely was interested in our opinions regarding design. We walked the premises of her building, and one of the architect she hired, pointing out design features that David told us to look for. I was pleasantly surprised by ...

  Blog #12 Oscar Bush, May 24th Seemingly out of nowhere, we have arrived at the last day of Senior Project! Elijah and I woke up at 8:00 am ready to grind out the final details of Senior Project. We would have to leave at 3:30 pm for Proctor so we decided to get right to work. At 9:00 we spent an hour doing our last warm up sketch session and reflecting over last night’s film with David. Beginning to stress about Express Fest, Elijah and I took the rest of the day to make a posterboard and plan what our table would look. For hours we reflected over our work and what we had learned. I thought this to be the perfect way to spend our final hours, really capping off our experience. At 3:00 pm we frantically cleaned up the house wanting to leave it cleaner than we left it, and were out the door by 3:30pm. Four hours later we were pulling ion to proctor saying high to the fellas thus ending my Senior Project Experience. 6 hours counting the 5 hours of express fest stuff

  Blog #11 Oscar Bush, May 23 We started this Monday off at with a huge pancake and omelette breakfast curtasy of Elijah’s mom. Because the 23rd is Victoria Day, (a Candian holiday) we would be working from home. At 11:00 am we started with our typical warmup sketches, focusing on negative space today sketching the emtpty space surrounding an object. We then took two hours from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm to go grab some lunch at A&W and to pick up some poster board for our Express Fest presentation. At 3:00pm we returned to the house and accepted the challenge of sketching two very artistic lighting fixtures hanging from the kitchen and front hall. It took us about two hours to reach a final product. We finished our 11th day off with a viewing of Dark City directed by Alex Proyas a t around 6:30 pm. We made sure to take notes during the film for our discussion with David the next day. 6 hours

  Blog #8 Oscar Bush, May 18th Wednesday was our biggest sketching day yet. We started with a whopping 2.5 hours of sketching warmup. We switched it up a little today by putting parchment paper over schematics of the mall, traced it, and practiced making changes. We essentially spent all day drawing until from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm we ate sushi at a nearby restaurant. From 2:00 to 5:00 we did 3-D plexiglass drawings and watched another episode of Abstract the art of design. We packed up our things at the end of the work day and hopped on the bus home, finishing up another good day at the office. 5 hour 30 minutes

  Blog 10 Oscar Bush, May 20th This Friday began with sending off Elijah to his Macabia, Team Canada basketball practice in Toronto. I would be working from Elijah’s house today while David was away in Cleveland, dealing with a family health problem. I started my sketching at 11:30 am and continued on until 1:00 pm. I worked on contour drawings, and gestures drawings this morning. After a 30 minutes lunch break I resumed my work day watching a Frank Ghery Masterclass and keeping active notes. My main take away from the episodes assigned to me was that when you choose to pursue the arts you are stating that your lens on the world is valuable. You must believe that to your core despite negative feedback if you should ever succeed. Learn from feedback but take into account every aspect of it, like who is telling you that? Are they who you want to become? I then cracked out two episodes of Abstract the Art of Design, ending around 5 O’clock. I gave myself an hour off to work out before...

  Blog #9 Oscar Bush, May 19th On Thursday morning we woke up at the Sochacjevski country house. We made the roughly 1-hour 30-minute drive up there the night before so that Elijah could get some basketball work in before he left for Toronto. Although we would not be going to the office that day David had not let us off the hook. He assigned us the task of cutting the entire (probably 10 bedroom) house in half lengthwise and sketching it. We started with our usual sketching exercises which were fun as ever, then spent the next hours walking the house trying to wrap our heads around how to put every doorway, wall, and window onto our sketchpads. By the time 3:30 snuck around we packed our things and made the trip back to Montreal. When we returned Elijah and I whipped up some dinner, dressed up, and headed to his little sister’s Glee show. The show was surprisingly really good and Elijah and I made sure to loudly voice our support. 6 hours 30 minutes

Blog #7 Oscar Bush, May 18th This Tuesday we got started at 8:30 am and got right to work on our sketching warm ups. We started with a couple contour drawings but moved up to gesture drawings and David gave us another lesson on how we could improve. I probably cranked out 15-20 gesture drawing until 11:30 am when we switched over to designing our bridge and the adjacent walla design. We made some progress and elijah designed a really cool wooden light fixture. By 1:45 pm David surprised us with another field trip. His friend, Victoria Kaspi, an award winning canadian astrophysicist, and professor at McGill College and was overseeing a huge renovation on her builing. Not knowing the first thing about how to talk to the architects or what she even wanted in the building she called David and the architecture boys for help. We arrived at the McGill an hour and a half early so that we would have more time to sketch the beautiful campus. I layed out the theatre department, Sketched a sculptu...

  Blog #6 Oscar, May 16th Today we were up and at em at 7:00 am for another enormous breakfast. I found that David had made a change of plans and we would be spending most of the day visiting job sites. Excited for a change of scenery, we hit the road at 8:00 am. The drive was full of David pointing out certain examples of architecture that we passed, keeping the classroom rolling on the road. We then went to walk the property of a farm run by Davids's cousin and discussed how important and intentional the layout is. My favorite visit was when we entered a real job site and David walked us through the full schematics of an enormous condo and apartment complex. After a very long day of field trips we returned to the house exhausted. From 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm we decompressed by cranking out some contour sketches in the garden. Even though we had reached our time goa,l we asked David for one of the movies he wanted us to watch and discuss through an architectural lens. He challenged us ...

  Blog #5  Oscar Bush, May 13th David allowed us to roll in late today at 10:30 am this Friday. We got right to work and continued our practice with sketching 3-D images of our hands through plexi glass. For some reason today I just couldn’t get my fingers to look human so we moved on to contour drawing a plant. The goal of this was not to even make our sketch look like a plant, but it was to focus only on a specific part of the plant and move your pencil along the page as your eyes move across the plant. The hardest part was to stay disciplined and keep from peaking at the page. At 12:30 pm we had some sushi with Elijah’s brother John and even during that time David had us sketch out the schematics of a Japanese style dinner table. Once we had finished our sketches we went right out the door to check out the “Mary Queen of the World Cathedral”, and the Sunlife building and park down the block. On our walk David gave us a lesson on columns and how to differentiate them, the Su...

  Oscar Bush 1st Weekly Reflection 5/15/22 The first seven days of Senior Project have flown by and I feel confident that we are on track to fulfill our preset goals and all other senior project requirements. My first mention should be that the Sochaczevski family have been excellent hosts for this project, accepting me into their household with open arms. David Sochaczevski has really leaned into his role as mentor and has been prepared to set us to work every day for our required hours. David told us at the start that we would be diving heavily into the design side of architecture during this course, and have spent this first week growing a basic understanding of design concepts and refining our sketching skills. We spend a minimum of three hours a day sketching, doing very specific exercises to enhance our ability in sketching architecturally. The numerous exercises we practice are mentioned and explained in my blogs, my favorite one being “drawing with the right side of your br...

  Blog #4 Oscar Bush, May 12th We woke up bright and early at 7:00 am to an enormous Sochaczevski breakfast this Wednesday morning. We hitched a ride with David to work and started at the office at 8:00 am. From 8:00 am to 12:30 pm we sketched and sketched and sketched. We started with our normal “Draw on the right side of the brain” practice. Then we moved on to a new concept of drawing the negative space in and around an object and letting the object appear. To work on laying out spaces we then sketched the four story Soltron Atrium and Davids office if sliced in half. We then headed to the Montreal Airport to pickup Elijah’s brother Noah’s Girlfriend who was coming to visit. David decided to take us an hour before she arrived because the airport was full of lessons in architecture and things to sketch. We started with the overhang that people wait under or cabs. What about it creates the space? How does it hold up? Questions we would find the answers to by sketching it in detail...

 Day #3 Senior Project blog Blog #3 Oscar Bush, May 11th This w\Wednesday we arrived to the office at 9:00 am and David had our sketching exercises waiting for us. While he had a meeting Elijah and I practiced mirroring Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso upsidedown! This is a popular design sketching exercise because it forces you to focus on the shapes rather than what part of the man you are specifically sketching. Once we finished, Elijah and I were eager to get get some bridge designing in so we discussed some possible alterations to out schematics before David returned at 11:00 am. David surprised us with the news that we would be headed to the montreal architecture museum a few blocks down. Elijah and I boogied over there and spent a long while discussing the things that David told us to keep in mind. What creates the space in the garden?  What shape is mirrored from the building to the monuments across the street? What makes the atrium one of the most beautiful rooms in Montr...

  Oscar Bush May 10th On day two we arrived at the office at 9:30 am and started work at 10:00 am. This day started with refining our sketching skills with countless exercises that David provided. We continued our work with idea sketching and introduced “sketching with the right side of the brain.” The practice of separating the functions of our right and left sedes of the brain, and focusing on the right side of your brains recognition of shapes. David then entrusted us with some fieldwork, sending us to measure a site hallway so he would know how much siding to order. When he later joined us we found out that our measurements were far off. We walked the site and discussed our mistakes, as well as other site management details until 1:30 when we took a 20-minute break to return to the office. From 1:50-3:00, we watched and discussed a video and our personal favorite pieces of architecture. This took us to our favorite part of the day. With all that we had learned so far regarding ...

Oscar Bush, May 9th      We arrived in Montreal late Saturday night and were warmly welcomed by the Sochaczevski family. We were able to sleep in Sunday and gather our bearings before our first day at the office on Monday. We had a late start Monday arriving to the office around 10:00 am and getting rolling around 10:30 am. David started us off with a well-put-together presentation on Design and the basics we would need to consider while trying to create a space. We put that to work as he took us around the mall (the office is in a mall) and we worked on sketching our perception of spaces. At 2:00 pm Elijah realized that he had to head to his driver's lesson, so we took a two hour break and I took the metro back to the house. Sketching the schematics of the train and station under David’s instruction. After a quick workout, I met Elijah back at the office, walking in proudly after using the Montreal public transportation system alone for the first time. Starting at 4:30 p...