E.D. Post
Born and Raised in Grand Rapids, MI.
Graduated from Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning at the University of Michigan in April 2018 with a B.S. in Architecture and a Minor in Writing.
My time at Michigan (and my mom and dad) has fostered in me a strong sense of social responsibility. Design has an obvious and direct impact in the public sphere, so I want my career to be based in active communication with the communities I am privileged to work/live in.
In addition to issues surrounding homelessness, I am engaged in activism for worker and animal rights.
What's your perspective?
Theory I Like
“Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian. These words are
rarely used to praise architecture, but in fact they
represent the interests of a growing number of
architects looking to escape the ever-quickening
cycles of consumption and fashion that often reduce
architecture to a stylish fad. Architecture of
the Everyday is a plea for building that is emphatically
unmonumental and antiheroic, an architecture
rooted in the common-place and the routies
of daily life.”
This book helps inform my journey of figuring
out how to find and represent the daily life of
people moving on a street.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE EVERYDAY
Steven Harris and Deborah Berke
Princeton Architectural Press
Yale Publications on Architecture
1997
UGLY AND ORDINARY: THE REPRESENTATION
OF THE EVERYDAY
Deborah Fausch
This essay looks at Learning From Las Vegas by
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a seminal
text in architectural study, as well as other works
by the couple. Fausch also analyzes the work of
Alison and Peter Smithson. Within both of these
strong architectural contexts, she compares and
contrasts successes and failures of representing
everyday life.
Through this, I found several more helpful sources
in the Smithsons, as well as a solid theoretical
base on which to develop my rationale for why
I’m choosing what in representation.
THE PUBLIC FACE OF ARCHITECTURE
Civic Culture and Public Spaces
Nathan Glazer and Mark Lilla
The Free Press
A Division of Macmillan, Inc.
New York
Collier Macmillan Publishers
London
1987
“Architecture, by its very nature, is a public matter.”
The first sentence of the book does well to
summarize the types of essays it contains. There
are five categories into which the essays are sorted,
each type being an active aspect of public
space and architecture.
THE USES OF SIDEWALKS: CONTACT
Jane Jacobs
1961
Jane Jacobs’s essay is under the first category,
“Principles of Public Space.” She describes sidewalks
as a habitat for communication and interaction.
This essay helped me to narrow the definition
of my intervention site, and to find theoretical
ground to stand my thesis on.
ORDINARINESS AND LIGHT
Alison and Peter Smithson
Urban theories 1952-60, and their
application in a building project
1963-70
The M.I.T. Press
Cambridge, MA
1970
Alison and Peter Smithson are architects and urban
planners from England in the later mid-century.
One of their biggest contributions to these
fields was their assertion that space should be
defined by its actual bodily uses, as opposed to
pre-conscripted programming. This is very significant
in architectural explorations of “the everyday.”
If that is our goal, then how do we begin
to achieve that?
THE GOLDEN LANE PROJECT
The Smithsons arrived at the same conclusions
as Jane Jacobs in her essay. Through design, they
took it further. How can a building hallway take
on the role of the sidewalk and the city street?
Their exploration via their own architectural
project deeply informed my extrapolation of this
question.
INSIDEOUTSIDEBETWEENBEYOND
Bureau Spectcular
Jimenez Lai
This drawing flattens what would otherwise be a
three-dimensional space so as to blur visual and
physical relationships we typically might take for
granted (see its title).
I was interested in the technique, as well as the
general exploration of what flattening can do for
a drawing. In a similar fashion, it makes me wonder
what giving dimension to something previously
flat can do for space.
Matisse Drawings
Curated by Ellsworth Kelly
From The Pierre and Tana Matisse
Foundation
Organized by the American Federation
of Arts and Mount Holyoke
College of Art Museum
UMMA
It was really helpful for me to look at the Matisse
drawings to get a sense of methods for documenting
movement. It seemed like he was preoccupied
with capturing the change that occurs
when a figure is in motion. The repetition of that
form to document, as opposed to other more notational
methods like “swish” lines might be something
I imitate as I begin to create visualizations
(or drawings) for my project.
EVERY BUILDING ON THE SUNSET STRIP
Ed Ruscha
By separating the sides of the street from
one another, and again, flattening it, Ruscha
is making the familiar strange so as to analyze
it from a different perspective.
He doing a facade study of what the strip
would look like from the POV of a car (or a
person riding in a car). This provides a very
flat and distanced perspective that would
dimensionalize and become more personal if
the person had closer contact.
I took a similar approach with my initial drawings,
but made them vertical instead so as to not
prioritize one side of the street.