Probably my favorite work by Heneghan, the Museum Tonofenfabrik in Lahr, Germany was an old clay factory that has been redesigned into a museum about the city of Lahr (Heneghan Peng architects). What I love so much about this building is the juxtaposition to all of the buildings around it. Especially since it is still connected to part of the clay factory, I feel that walking through the museum would lend itself to the feeling of walking back in time and then returning back to your current era. I am a sucker for minimalistic buildings with clean lines and sleek figures and this building does it perfectly. It is a relatively common shape, lending itself to looking like a parking garage or staircase, but it is done so elegantly that it becomes its own creature. A seemingly otherworldly figure surrounded by its ancestors from an earlier time.

heneghan peng architects. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/stadtmuseum-lahr-germany

In stark contrast to the natural and warm aesthetic in the Airbnb EMEA office that Heneghan designed, Quellos Fitout, an asset management firm, is very minimalistic and rigid with simple color schemes. (Heneghan Peng architects). The lack of door handles and wall decor really allows the viewers eyes to wander throughout the entire space rather than focus on a specific object. The simple white and silver color scheme is very clean and professional. Instead of making work more like home, this building allows for a stark contrast between home life and work life.

heneghan peng architects. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/office-fitout

Created in one of the few remaining classic Dublin dockands styled buildings, the Airbnb EMEA office designed by Heneghan is three floors and holds 400 people (Commercial). As you can see from the pictures, it utilized a lot of the styles we talked about in regards to high efficiency buildings. It uses a staircase as the focal point from a viewer but also as a centerpiece for the residents. It has large windows allowing tons of natural light to flow into the building during peak work hours. Furthermore, the open floor plan allows for easy collaboration as well as lets natural light travel further into the crevices and recesses of the building.

Commercial. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.hparc.com/work/category/commercial

Announced in 1992 and expected to be finished at the end of this year, the Grand Egyptian museum, complete with sculpture gardens and an entrance marked with a huge statue of Ramses II, is going to be the largest archeological museum in the world (Sattin 2020). It is expected to attract over 7 million visitors a year. It makes use of a 162-foot elevation change between the Nile valley and the Giza plateau and is built on a slope. It is triangular in shape and grows as the visitors get closer to the pyraminds. The building is divided into four galleries and ends with large windows that look over the pyramids. There was an architecture competition to decide the design of the building and Heneghan won the competition. The main material used for the building is alabaster with supports of metal.

Sattin, A. (2020, January 16). Everything We Know About Cairo’s New Grand Egyptian Museum. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.cntraveler.com/story/grand-egyptian-museum-cairo-everything-we-know

Mitchell Stroud

Blog 4

For my final personal blog, I chose the Ten Eyck boathouse on Lake Onondaga in Syracuse, New York. For me, this symbolized the culmination of 6 years of hard work. I started rowing in 7^th grade for fun and to lose weight but I never expected it to lead to rowing for the 10^th ranked university in the US for rowing or rowing in college in general. The lessons that I learned in just one year rival the 6 years of lessons I learned while rowing in middle and high school. I was given a rare opportunity by being recruited here. I was not nearly as fast as the rest of the freshmen that were recruited with me, but I was eager to prove myself and gain fitness. I would like to say that I gave it everything I had, but rowing taught me to never make excuses and that just feels like an excuse to me. Most of the year I was nursing an injured back and I made the decision that the benefit of rowing for 3 more years did not outweigh the cost of permanent back problems. I could write for days about how hard that decision was to make and how it made me feel, but I’ll summarize it to this: I gained a second family up there that year, and being stripped away from that and the sport I dedicated my teenage years to is very painful.

But enough of the sob story, let’s talk about how cool the boathouse is. You would think that coming from the Chesapeake boathouse here in OKC to this more traditional, no frills boathouse, that I wouldn’t like it. This could not be further from the truth. Walking into the boathouse, you are immediately hit with a wave of history and nostalgia. From old oars hanging on the wall, to the trophy case in the corner, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of hard work and dedication that this building was essential to. The boathouse has an actual house attached to it, and the head coach lives in there to keep an eye on everything. They would always string up Christmas lights upon the pillars and the balcony that overlook the inlet where we would launch the boats. It was always beautiful to see the lights from the water as we would end a tough practice and carry the boats back into their bay.

Mitchell Stroud

Blog 3

The building I picked for this blog is my high school, Harding Charter Preparatory High School (HCP). I have a whirlwind of emotions about this building. Unfortunately, HCP was forced to relocate under the “pathway to greatness” project. It might have been built in 1925 and still had asbestos in it (we were assured it was properly quarantined), but it was rich with history and character.

I did not start to truly understand how much this school meant to me until I graduated. Freshman year was a huge transition. The first two and a half years there I absolutely despised it. I complained that there was so much homework and I never had any free time. I did not see where all of the work was leading to until the last year and a half. My junior year I started to realize how all of the work that I had done over the past 3 years fell into place. I was taking college level classes that made it so much easier now that I am in college. I started to look at other schools’ high school curriculum and realized how much more that HCP taught me. This made the transition into college much easier. I already knew good study skills and how to write cohesive thoughts. These things that thought were common among college freshmen actually allowed me to stand out and excel in classes that my peers were struggling with. Finally, it gave me the academic resume to pursue college athletics at Syracuse University. Although I got injured my freshman year there, I would not have been able to get there without the work that I put in during high school.

Overall, apart from the visual appeal to this building, it became a symbol of the community and comradery that I formed with my peers while also gaining a top notch education.

Mitchell Stroud

ARCH 3013

Blog assignment 2

For my first blog assignment I talked about my home. This blog is about a building I spent more time in than my own home during high school, The Chesapeake boathouse in the boathouse district. Unlike my actual home that was filled with only good memories, the boathouse was quite different.

I absolutely adored the boathouse district the moment I set foot there in 7^th grade. However, rowing for the next 5 years, I would come to learn the true, gilded nature of the district. I loved the large bay doors and oddly industrial but sleek design of the buildings. They were beautiful and purpose-built. The large, open bays held millions of dollars of rowing equipment and looked good while doing it, in theory.

The sad reality of the district is poor management and upkeep. As you mentioned in class, the facilities are world class and the USRowing High Performance team does train here out of the Devon boathouse. The rapids are great for international kayaking competitions, but made them too difficult for the average consumer, on the off chance that they had the rapids running. Furthermore, the single stall of the men’s bathroom in the Chesapeake boathouse was broken for an entire year and a half before it was replaced.

All of this is to say that I made my second family with the other rowers that rowed here, and we saw the potential that these facilities had. But we also saw these facilities be beaten down and fall into disorder. I have too many demotivating stories to share all in this blog, but I am glad for what the district fostered. As much as I disagree with its management and their sketchy legality, they did bring provide the necessary tools for us to grow as a rowing program and we got some impressive results from that. However, if we had the ability to row for another team, the majority would have.

Mitchell Stroud

ARCH 3013

Blog Assignment 1

My Parent’s House

I thought I would start these blogs off pretty easy by starting with my parent’s house. They have had the house over 25 years, and they bought it as a fixer upper. The two things I always hear them say about the house when talking with friends or new people are that the house was one of the first California contemporary homes in Oklahoma and how there was purple shag carpet in the bathroom.

Of course, there is the obvious meaning of this house being my childhood home, but beyond that it functions as a mental time capsule so to speak. Now that all three of their kids have moved out of the house, whenever we all visit it takes me back to when I was a little pest and my older brothers would pick on me. Whenever I go home, I feel like I can completely be myself. I do not have to maintain a façade of having my life together or act neighborly. I see my parent’s house as a sort of vacation. Although when I am there it is usually breaks from school and some weekends, but I feel like I can fade away from the real world and float in a suspended state of relaxation and good times. Unlike many aspects of my life, my parent’s house is the only place where I only think of happy memories. The good memories always shine through when I’m thinking about their house, whereas other parts of my life I have to remind myself to see the positive instead of dwell on the negative.

Overall, from the purple shag carpets my parents removed while renovating it, to the loving memories that its wall elicit, my parent’s house functions as so much more than the wood, glass, sheetrock, and concrete that it is made of.