Valentines Voyages

The night before Valentine's day, Saori and I made Udon noodle soup at her place for our valentines day dinner. I've been learning a lot about Japanese soups, and especially about the many uses of miso. We had to have our valentines day dinner then, because the next day Saori went to San Diego with her studio on a field trip, and I had my first day of work back at DWL.

Saori's studio focuses on the redevelopment of Papago Park, and each person is part of a team covering a certain facet of the park. For design inspriation and a case study, they left for San Diego look at the giant park there. It sounds like a really fun road trip that they're driving there. The school is also paying for their trip, although technically, its just their money coming back to them. They'll be gone until late Saturday, so it was kind of sad spending valentines day alone.

Anyway, valentines day, I woke up at 5:20 AM to get ready for work. I've not been getting much sleep anyway, so I'm starting the day off wiped. I left my apartment at 6 AM, and caught a bus to central Phoenix. Took about fifteen minutes of waiting for the bus, and about forty minutes ride time. I arrived early, so I wandered over to the nearby Circle-K and got a donut and some coffee and watched the sun rise.

It staggers me when I think about the density of Buenos Aires compared to Phoenix. How much wasted space there is in parking lots, little ten foot swaths of lawn or dirt between the sidewalk and property walls, all the low buildings, and massive streets. Downtown central Phoenix has a density which would only be found on the farthest suburbs of Buenos Aires.

Anyway, work was good, people remembered me even though its been eight months since I worked there last. I was set to work on some graphics of a library layout, very similar to the work I did in one of my studios a few semesters ago when I had to design a library.

I left the office around noon, but caught the wrong bus home. It was still RED LINE, but it was the other one that I needed. This red line took me way south on central, all the way to Broadway. I was re-reading Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas, so I didn't realize where I was until we'd passed through downtown already. I hopped out on Broadway and Central, convienantly enough at a transit center ( look, here again the old adage holds true- when you are irrevocably commited to a situation, the world moves to help you) so the woman working there told me what busses to take to get back to ASU.

I ended up taking two more busses to get back to my apartment and from there I biked back to studio, ending up in class just shy of an hour late. This wasn't too bad, considering the laid back nature of the studio and the fact we always seem to start group meetings about half and hour after class begins anyway. So I was in studio until 5:00 PM, and right after that we had a guest lecture we all were supposed to attend which lasted for an hour. I was passing out during the lecture, trying to stay awake.

An interesting side note, I was staggered to find out that ASU's college of design pays guest lecturers $5,000 to speak, not including airfare. And most of these are people I've never even heard of, although they are relatively high in their fields. For designers I have heard of more frequently, $10,000. For the top architects in the world, ASU paid Shigeru-ban and Glenn Murcutt $50,000 each. I missed the Shigeru-ban lecture but the Glenn Murcutt lecture was probably worth it. That guy lectured for close to three hours and he was great.

After the lecture, I went up to the second floor of the bridge gallery where its dark and there are couches, and I passed out for an hour. Then I went back to my drawing class and we spent about an hour doing portrait sketches before calling an early end to the class. I went home, made some casadillas and went to bed.

Photo Above: View under Priest Drive crossing the Salt River