Graduate School

I visited Rice University during the summer of my Junior year on a school trip, the Science Academy of South Texas a magnet school specializing in engineering, math, and science. I visited for a session of 2 weeks where we visited the university, attended classes, stayed in a hotel since we couldn't in the doors, and visited many of the important attractions that Houston had to offer including a private tour of NASA, Shell, MD Anderson and even got to go to the amusement park. I learned more in that summer about myself in that short amount of time than I could fathom. I learned about college life, independence since I had never been gone from home for longer than a few days, connecting to people, life and death from the hospital, but more importantly, I learned about myself. I learned that I had to speak up for myself, sell myself without being fake, be comfortable with being my own person, and I learned that the best friend you could ever have is the one that stares back at you every morning. THe one that knows you best and can guide you with your passions to learn and live is yourself. I fell in love with Rice university and wanted and still want to go to school there. It's a gorgeous campus that has so much to offer including one of the most prestigious colleges in Texas and the US.
Currently I am attending college at College Station at Texas A and M doing my undergrad degree in the School of Architecture which is also very prestigious and ranked in the top ten in the nation, tieing with Yale University. I am excelling in my studies and am enjoying my classes learning a lot from them, having plenty of laughs, sunsets and sunrises in one day working in studio, but I'm learning and living and following my passion. For the time being my place is here in College Station, but in the future I would like to pursue graduate school at Rice. I want to go to a different university to not settle and conform to one point of view offered here at A and M but rather get other perspectives those of which are offered in the big city of Houston. Maybe my passion will push elsewhere but for now I hope to go to Rice. The experience had there was a unique one and one I will never forget. The campus is inviting and the people are friendly. I know my education and time spent here at A and M is well worth it and a stepping stone to get to graduate school and it will take hard work, but it's something I'm willing to work for.

Why Rice you ask? According to Rodolfo Machado of Machado-Silvetti Associates in Cambridge writes: "We have had similar experiences with a few other schools across the country, and Rice is the only one where we find students to be intellectually developed and professionally useful, which is unfortunately a rare condition these days. " That's saying something. Rice accepts only 200 students each semester divided between graduate and undergraduate to the program. It is needless to say very difficult to get into. It offers an accredited Architecture degree for 5 years and offers a lot of study abroad programs to help create well rounded students. Links are shown at the bottom in regards to more about the university, but I will say that while Rice is a dream of mine, I have to leave things to God and his will and follow my passion of learning and architecture to find out where it will lead me. I ended up here at Texas and M and thank God I did. It's a great program where the professors are superb and challange the student and I'm glad I came here. The classes are amazing and something to look forward to and will prepare me for that next step in life, grad school. Best of luck to you on your journey.

Rice University School of Architecture :http://arch.rice.edu/modules/indexwin.php

Aggie Habitat for Humanity

Aggie Habitat for Humanity is a club I've been wanting to join lately as I volunteered last semester with St. Mary's Catholic Church to help paint a house for community service. It was a great experience and I have volunteered with the less fortunant before at my local chuch, St. Jude's Catholic Church, back in my home town over breaks. This is a great club to consider joining because not only does it help out the community, but in the process you learn about construction methods which are always a plus for an aspiring architecture student, but also life lessons and relationships you learn along the way. It's not just about building a house as I came to learn, it's so much more than that. You help create a home for family that wants to better themselves and essentially shelter the future, their children and builders of tommorrow's society. At the same time you're making friends and helping build apart of your own society.
The goals the club promotes is to create low cost homes where since labor is on volunteer basis so it's essentially free for the owner, but all the owner has to pay for is the materials over the course of 30 years with no interest. It is an attainable goal for them and it helps give them back a little part of their dignity back. The organization is founded by a Christian group, but is open to all volunteers regardless of faith or culture. There is expectations to meet in regards to the club in that if you say you'll join and volunteer you have to show up, there is no room for wishy-washy flip flopper behavior as each house takes at least 500 hours to make given that all the volunteers are present. On the contrary, it is very easy to sign up for by simply entering your email and the club is very structural with officers and activities planned out. The way I see it as with most passions is if you love what you're doing and you're helping others then you'll want to show up to lend a helping hand and those expectations will be met and if need be you'll be accomidated by your situation and talking to offers. The main idea is get involved and see how you can make a difference, every little helps, so that being said, I think I just convinced myself to join the local Aggie chapter, you should to.

Here is the link to the Aggie Habitat for Humanity official website main page where you can sign up for the following semester and learn more about what the club has to offer:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/

Mission Statement:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/about/mission.asp

How to become a member:
http://habitat.tamu.edu/members/member.asp

iNTA Conference

Upon furthering my research I decided to search Google.com to find a conference that highlighted the aspects of culture and Architecture. Considering my interests in design, sustainable architecture, and green architecture it came to great surprise that that I stumbled upon a site highlighting a conference held in Indonesia. The conference's main goals were to combine the culture, natural environment of the tropical rainforest and urban society to maintain and further all three of these key aspects. The conference was held in Jogjakarta hosted by Duta Wacana Christian University April 3-5 of this past year, 2006.

According to the site conference, the goals of the conference were as follows:
1. Traditions, Vernacular Architecture and Urban Forms
2. Tropical buildings construction using local materials
3. Comfort and Quality of Tropical Urban Spaces
4. Design Paradigms and Strategies, Complex Decision Making Processes
5. Parametric Comp Tools for Analysis, CAAD Design & Knowledge Systems
6. Planning and Building Regulations, Criteria for Sustainable Design Standards
7. Planning and design for disaster response and reconstruction

The overall theme was "Tropical Architecture: Harmony in Culture and Nature". The place the conference was held, in Jogjakarta is a center occupied by roughly half a population of college students and is one of the leading places in Indonesia having the highest rate of education. The reason I decided to further pursue the study of this conference and why it peaked my interest was because it prompted me to learn about another culture a little further through getting a taste through what I've read about the city and to see how other's plan to teach other's about the environment around them to preserve it but adapt it to their growing needs of urbanism.
To learn more about the city and the conference click on the links below:

Main Website
http://www.inta2006.org/client/programs/front/index.php

About the Sponsors
http://www.inta2006.org/client/programs/?menu=organization&submenu=about_dwcu

About the City
http://www.inta2006.org/client/programs/?menu=general_info&submenu=about_jogja

Art Contest

Original Picture


Design Poster



I've decided to enter the 2007 Art Contest being held on Campus for TAMU students. I will be submitting one of my works of a photograph I took at St. Mary's Catholic Church that I altered to change the contrast and colors to show the beauty of the light and shadows throughout the picture. The original picture is the first one and the second picture is a picture of the design poster I made of the church and image altered.

This is an important piece to me because it's religious so right away I have a strong connection to it but the way the light falls on the Virgin is very delicate but beautiful. It highlights her and creates a serene feeling that I tried to capture using a camera. The way the light streams in through the window makes a very calming soothing spiritual feeling. I then transfered this into several smaller frames of the same picture to create a design poster. This poster was used previously for submittal for my design foundations class taught by Professor and Artist Dick Davidson who gave me a respectful grade. It's not so much the grade that matters but the fact that it's a religious piece without necessarily saying so and is moving from my perspective is what matters most to me.


Art contest entry form

Contact Information ( some excluded on the internet to protect my identity)

Name Erica Salinas

Local Address excluded

City ST ZIP Code excluded

Permanent Address excluded

City ST ZIP Code excluded

Local Phone excluded

Cell Phone excluded

E-Mail Address excluded

Alternate E-Mail Address excluded

Hometown College Station

Major Environmental Design

Classification U2

Title of Work Blue Virgin

Medium Photography


Category
Select one of the following:
Photography

Physical Description
Compsition and collage of Photographs

Artist’s Statement
See blog above

See things is a different light.

ENDS Degree Plan for Texas A and M University

The above spread sheet was created using Microsoft Excel for the purpose of planning out my degree plan based off the previous courses taken and those anticipated to take during the summer at my local community college. Column dimensions were changed, text bolded and centered, and colors were added for further clarity. I need a total of 136 hours to graduate.

Please note when you click on the picture you will be seeing a very poor quality screen shot of 70% magnification if you click on the picture once an icon of a + with a magnifier will appear. If you click on it, it will appear in normal readable text.

The degree plan was taken from the TAMU website online catalog at:
http://www.tamu.edu/admissions/catalogs/06-07_UG_Catalog/architecture/environmental_design/arch_studies_opt.htm


Here is the link for the online google group published online:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?id=o15853536362093656857.2303814232487031428.00803465909050869604.3698548381248590497

Visual Mind

Above is a picture of a photo merged image of a screen shot taken from Visual Mind

The map is a things to do map that has the listing of my different professors and the assignments that are pending within this week.

Visual Mind is a program designed to help express the mind thought process both personal and for buisness gains. It is a tool that works similar to a bubble spider web but is designed to help the user sort out their thoughts by categorizing and differentiating between tasks through use of colors, text boxes, and notes. This becomes very helpful in the case where templates are predesigned with the user in mind to have them be pre fabricated to be able to express the thought process to others. For example, there is a template for buisness in which a buisness man using this program could write the program using a premade template to show the project ideas and pitch it to a client. The user can have the bubble text boxes collapse to show the main idea but when you look at the bottom of the screen the notes are clearly visible. They boxes extent to show the children categories as well and those also can collapse and expand. The program can be uploaded to the web for others to view and expand the different categories. Unfortunantly, at Texas A and M the internet for personal computers via wireless internet and dorm USB connection have been down and the Computing Center does not allow downloading or uploading of programs. Two screen shots were taken of the program and photomerged in Photoshop. Some of the resolution was lost unfortunantly and in the program I assure you it looks much more clearer. Personally, I would most likely not use this program again because unless it's used for buisness or projects for others to understand for personal use it's a bit tedious to write a program in what can be done in a minute to write a to-do list by hand. That's my personal opinion but it does have a nice professional look to it. If you're skilled enough at it and get quick enough at it then otherwise perhaps I could be proven wrong. For now though unless it's school related or buisness related, I'll stick to paper and pen.

Here is the link from the site directly for a 30 day trial version. Try it out for yourself and prove me wrong. As far as tutorials go there are tips of the day upon opening the program and the program is very basic and user friendly with helpful icons and menus that are clear to understand.

http://www.visual-mind.com/download.html

Up Side Down House

http://www.lostparks.com/bandwiththeft13k.jpg

Caligari TrueSpace 6.6

Note: The above pictures are screenshots of the workspace of the studies.

The program selected to learn about was Caligari TrueSpace 6.6. It is a unique program that combines 3-D modeling and rendering. I downloaded the trial version and shown in the links listed below and used the help of tutorials and experimentation to navigate throughout the program. Once you learn the basic principles the program is relatively easy to use on the surface but can become very complicated when camera angles and animation and layers are added. Unfortunantly, be forewarned that with the trial version you cannot save and are limited to certain tools as well as the file is not completely supported so not all the links are found in the program which causes it to crash and without save you have to start over each time. I learned in using the program there are pre-fabricated objects and scenes that could be manipulated to show different times and lightings of day. Grids could be used to manipulate the objects and replicate them. The human forms could be changed to adapt to the features of a person and mimic human expression such as if the icon happy was clicked the face object would grin. The human object could also mimic the features of a person in a photograph but could also be distorted horribly to the point that they are unrecognizable. This was the case in the scene where the figure looks alien like but the original is to the left of it. The spheres could be manipulated to have different textures and optical illusions. Paths could be added to make the objects move and collide into each other. All these components work together to create 3-D animation and essentially make up a fantasy world that mimics reality but where constraints and how you program it govern it rather than everyday life and physics.

Links:
http://www.render-lab.com/Getting_around_1.htm#1.%20Help%20is%20available!
Tutorial on how to use the basic functions and is very helpful.

http://www.spacekdet.com/tutorials/
Collection of many tutorials including video and step by step guides on how to create renderings and 3-D scenes.

http://www.caligari.com/download/trials.asp?Cate=DTrials
Download the trial version. This requires anywhere from half an hour to an hour to download.
Must include email address as they send you the code to enter to allow you to begin downloading.

http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS7/brochure/intro.asp?Cate=BIntro
Caligari website

Viz--The Thousand Hour Long Project that is actually rewarding in an odd sort of way...

My first approach as I'm not particularly skilled with Photoshop or Autodesk Viz was to watch the tutorials and try and import a file from Top Mod, a program I am familiar with to a point. This was a failed attempt and instead I started from a single cube in Autodesk Viz. I then began following the tutorial as listed in the links below and developing it to my own and personalizing it. I then added different tools and layers including: twist, taper, bend, wave, bend, face extrude, squeeze, edit mesh, and a combination of manipulating all these tools as well as the axix heights. The image was then rendered with ambient occlusion and a camera was added. The image was then transfered to Photoshop where it was further rendered using a layering of the images attained in the previous renderings from Autodesk Viz. Layers were added to give the effect of reflection and glass and a sailboat with three people were added to show scale. Above is the finished product. Believe me it takes a lot of time and it sounds a lot easier than it actually is, but it's really cool and interesting when it's finished.

Total: Start 3:30pm end 11:07pm I'm amazed. It takes a while but you don't feel it after a while. It is challenging though.

Link to the tutorial for Autodesk Viz and Photoshop:

http://www.ends170.com/tutorials/viz1

An Elephant Named Rickkkiiiiia

The baby elephant was created through us of several programs. The first being Top Mod in which the structure was designed around the to be elephant and then was built off the structure. This was mainly to develop the skills and if you really wanted to make it, it could be considered a circus tent. The elephant file saved as an .obj was transfered to Pepakura, an Asian orgami like program that unfolds the parts. The file was saved as a printed PDF and transfered to Photoshop were colors were added. The file was printed in color and then cut up and taped together to get the elephant as so. The steps are shown in the above photos.

In addition if you would like to try Pepkura for yourself the link is as follows:

http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/download/viewer.html

Video Tutorial:

http://www.ends170.com/tutorials/pepakura1