Brian Hampel5th year architecture

@ K-State

Portfolio

Brian Hampel

Education

Kansas State University2009-present

Currently pursuing an M.A. in Architecture with a minor in music

Kansas City Design CenterJanuary-May 2014

A semi-professional adjunct to K-State and KU, involving both academic design projects and real-world urban issues within Kansas City.

Skills

SoftwarePhotoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Corel Painter

Rhino, AutoCAD, Revit, 3DS Max, Sketchup

My computer skills are strong. Studio mates consider me the first line of tech support.

FabricationLaser cutters, intermediate woodworking, proficient model building, clay and foam sculpting

ArtisticIn order of proficiency: Graphite and charcoal drawing, dip/fountain pens, digital painting, acrylic and oil paints, pastel, crayon, chalk

Accomplishments

Became a favorite student of Prof. Mick Charney

Named “Opinion Writer of the Year” by the K-State Collegian in 2012

Learned to contact juggle

Convinced Prof. David Sachs to cameo in my first filmmaking project

Composed and recorded an Irish-style duet for piano and electric guitar

Broke a tie in a quiz bowl match by answering a question about I. M. Pei.

Work

Bushton ManufacturingSummer 2014

Designed advertisements and technical drawings for woodworking equipment, and generally gave aesthetic advice to an engineer

K-State Collegian2010-present

Staff writer, generally tasked with opinion columns and coverage pieces

There’s no better way to develop your writing skills than to write a lot. I have a way with words that most architects don’t.

City of TribuneSummer 2009

Grunt work, including work with concrete pouring, city sewers, and heavy machinery

Farmway Co-op & United Plains AgEvery June since 2006

Scale operator during wheat harvest, meaning 100-hour work weeks and lots of stressed-out clientele

620-927-0177brianjhampel@gmail.com

1810 Hunting AveApt 4

Manhattan, KS 66502

Writing skills

Breaking Up the Monopoly

There are better games out there

Monopoly is far and away the best-selling board game of all time, but it’s not a very well-designed game. It’s not terrible, but it was designed in the ’30s and it shows its age. Monopoly was cutting edge during the Great Depression, but game design has come a long way since then. Imagine watching the “Lord of the Rings” movies while everyone else is still marveling at Charlie Chaplin movies, blissfully unaware that there are movies with color and sound. Here are some common criticisms of Monopoly and some modern games that improve on its problems.

The Auction

Fun fact. The rules of Monopoly actually specify that when a player lands on a property and doesn’t buy it, that property is auctioned off to the highest bidder. Somehow, that rule got ignored in the last 70 years. Playing this way can actually shorten the game down to an hour, but Monopoly’s auction system still isn’t anything special.

For a much better auction game, check out Power Grid. In Power Grid, every turn starts off with a bidding war over new power plants the players need to power their ever growing web of cities. The brilliant thing about Power Grid’s bidding system is how each power plant fits into its supply-and-demand economy.

There may be a cheap, efficient uranium-based power plant up for grabs, but I have to look at the uranium market before I consider bidding on it. If another player is already tapping the uranium supply pretty steadily, uranium will become a bit more expensive when I start buying it, too. Maybe it’s smarter to bid on a lesser power plant that runs on something more plentiful like coal or garbage so I don’t accidentally shoot myself in the foot by creating a pricing bubble.

Dice of Fate

The way most people play, there isn’t much strategy or skill in Monopoly. It’s not as bad as Chutes and Ladders or Candyland, of course, but a lot of your success in Monopoly depends on good dice rolls. If you’ve been rolling poorly, there’s nothing you can do about

From the K-State CollegianNov 6, 2013

it. Still worse, once the dice are cast, the player doesn’t have any choices to make except “to buy or not to buy?” A lot of modern games have figured out how to use dice rolls without putting the players at the mercy of probability.

Formula D is a racing game that uses a roll and move mechanic like Monopoly, but it gives players many options as to how to move and navigate the track. You can shift into higher gears and get dice with higher numbers. There are penalties if you overshoot and bump into another car or approach a turn too fast and run into the wall. Formula D takes a bit of luck to win, but also planning ahead.

Last Night on Earth, a rare zombie themed game that is actually well-designed, uses the roll and move concept to move your characters around the map. Dice rolls determine who wins in a fight between human and zombie, but there are other things on top of the dice rolls to make the game interesting and challenging. If a human character gets a crummy die roll and can’t move as far as he would like, he can choose to stay put and draw a card instead. If he gets a crummy die roll when fighting a zombie, that card might let him re-roll the die or add one to his roll. It adds the extra layer of, “Do I play this card now or should I take the hit and save it for a rainier day?” Humans beware, though, because the zombie player can also play cards of his own like “This could be our last night on earth,” which causes male and female characters in the same space to “lose their turn.”

Player Elimination

In the rare game of Monopoly that actually lasts long enough for people to start trading properties and amassing fortunes, people will eventually go bankrupt and get eliminat-ed from the game. At that point, there is nothing to do but wait for everyone else to finish up. Most modern games don’t eliminate players since game designers realized that it’s no fun for the eliminated parties, but some games have found creative ways to do it well.

Betrayal at House on the Hill is a horror themed cooperative game for the first half, then a randomly selected player is revealed to have retroactively been a traitor all along. He starts killing off other players with his own collection of weapons and possibly an army of demons to command or something else as morbid. In addition to the clever twist of not eliminating anyone for the first half of the game, the second half is a gut-wrenching team effort that will leave you emotionally invested enough to care about what happens to the team after you die.

Writing skills

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Differences

The major difference between their approaches to naturalistic architecture is that Wright imitates the organism while Yeang imitates the ecosystem. When looking at nature for inspiration, Wright and Yeang view nature at different scales, with Wright zooming in on individuals within nature while Yeang (who has a background in ecology) looks at the interactions of systems within nature.

Wright imitates formal ideas from the scale of individual organisms and aims for designs that appear to have grown naturally out of the landscape like organisms. Yeang aims for designs that have a place in the metaphorical food chains of their surroundings, and particularly in skyscrapers, he aims to create self-contained, smaller scale ecosystems that contain a variety of functions and experiences, mimicking the biodiversity of an ecosystem.

At Price, Wright deliberately eschewed the typical modernist steel frame in favor of a structural core-and-branches approach reminiscent of a tree, seeing it as an organic way to approach the skyscraper.1 The tower of Johnson Wax has a similar approach, and he employed highly distinctive columns reminiscent of lily pads throughout the rest of the facility. In both cases, Wright took a formal idea from nature and applied an abstracted version to the structural system of his building. His formal ideas also extended to his use of symmetry. The larger plans of Johnson Wax and Price Tower are overall asymmetrical, but at a smaller scale, the windows, lamps, and furniture are all symmetrical. The natural analogy might be that while a tree is asymmetrical, the smaller organisms that inhabit the tree are symmetrical.

Yeang, on the other hand, doesn’t make any claim to imitating nature in such a formal way, and his buildings show no hint of a biomimetic structural system. At Solaris and Menara Mesiniaga, he embraces the steel frame in a very Corbusien fashion. The upper levels of Mesiniaga have exposed trusses and other devices to make the structural frame clear, and Solaris's floor plan resembles the column grid and curvilinear enclosure of the Villa Savoye's ground floor, rather unlike anything Wright would borrow from nature.Also in the vein of formal ideas, Wright and Yeang also see different potentials for lighting. At Johnson Wax, the light that reaches the main workspace peers through the spaces between the lily pad columns in a way that resembles light peering through the canopy of the forest. The characteristically Wright windows of the Price Tower have a similar effect, creating small parallelograms of varying colors that imitate forest lighting. Yeang, on the other hand, looks to light in a more utilitarian way to optimize his buildings’ heat and environmental performance. Solaris's enormous light shaft and atrium exist to let light through the building, but don't make any significant artistic gestures the way Wright does.

On the note of environmental performance, Yeang sees it as a guiding factor in design much more so than Wright. In Designing with Nature, Yeang writes that a “premise that is crucial to ecological design is that there are finite limitations to human use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources.” He goes on to advocate sustainability on the grounds that the earth is a “closed materials system” with a limit to the amount of resources that we can consume, saying it would be wise for us to conserve said resources since “all design inevitably takes place within their confines.”2 One of the reasons Yeang prefers steel frames is

An excerpt from my paper “Architecture from Nature:A comparison of the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ken Yeang”

that steel is a recyclable material that can outlive the building and be reused, analogous to the way that ecosystems pass matter from one organism to the next and never waste anything.

Wright may have been ahead of his time for climatic design in modern American architecture, but modern tenets of sustainability aren’t fully represented in his architecture. For all the ideas he borrowed from nature, it doesn’t seem that he ever mimicked the ability of a resource to be recycled.

Another idea borrowed from the natural ecosystem, Yeang goes to great lengths to design tall buildings with a variety of spaces, experiences and functions, and he criticizes a major trend in tall buildings, that “[m]ost skyscrapers today are nothing more than a series of stacked plates one on top of the other.”1

Yeang devotes a full chapter of Reinventing the Skyscraper to his analogy of the ideal skyscraper as a manmade urban ecosystem. Among other points, he posits that such a manmade ecosystem would mimic a natural one in “balance of producers, manufacturers, and services” analogous to the producers and consumers of natural food chain, “high functional diversity” analogous to the numerous highly specialized species in an ecosystem, and “high community diversity” analogous to the sheer diversity of species in an ecosystem.2

In the Menara Mesiniaga, Yeang designed a variety of gardens, outdoor rooms, pools, and public plazas dispersed throughout the vertical form in a variety of different kinds of floors, but it is a headquarters for IBM with much less diversity of function and services than Yeang’s ideal urban ecosystem. Solaris, however, is a quintessential example of his mixed-use, self-contained urban ecosystem that weaves ideas of urban design into the vertical fabric of the building, providing diversity for all its inhabitants.

By contrast, both the Price Tower and Johnson Wax’s research tower are perfect examples of the repeated floor plate design that Yeang is reacting against. Price and Johnson Wax each use a single, prototypical floor plan that is essentially repeated upward. It is an efficient way of approaching the tall building, to be sure, but it doesn’t lend itself at all to the kind of ecological diversity that Yeang draws from his studies of nature.

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At Price Tower, Wright emulates a tree. At Solaris, Yeang emulates a forest.