The Studio Effect & Revit

Last weekend, Saori and I went to St. Louis to visit the architecture school's open house. With a week of reflection, its occurred to me that this was actually a pretty slick piece of marketing on the school's part. Any architecture student can tell you that they learned the most from their classmates- more than the professors whom they see perhaps for a few hours a few times a week, and more than from the lectures and other classwork. As a student, your primary source of inspiration, debate, new skills, and new ideas comes from the people with whom you spend 80% of your waking hours, the other students.

WashU encouraged all admitted students to attend the open house. This included many people who are also looking at other top schools in the country. One open house brings together some of the best and brightest students in the pool. The school provides ample opportunities for socialization, including encouraging a bar group the first night, all meals together, a happy hour with free beer, wine with a lavish dinner of small tables, and an open bar at a local club/bar. Hell, even I made friends and talked with a bunch of different people. You start to think, hey I could get along with these people.

It's illusory and a little misleading as not all of them will end up attending. However, it was very effective with me, and I do hope that most of them do attend, as I would like to get to know all of them better, and what they can bring to the collective table.

One other thing I thought was interesting was the software encouraged by the school. It sounds like most of the students are working in SketchUp, AutoCAD and Rhino, Rhino being the 3d modeling software (replacing the useless and painful FormZ of my graduating class). I'd really like to continue using Revit, as I'm really fast at it now and it can do so much so quickly. Build one model and boom boom boom, plan, sections, elevations, renderings, flythroughs, etc. We'll see. I almost want to get a new minitower to run revit exclusively- dell outlet sells some 3.0+ Ghz processors for less than a grand, but I'm debating how much more performance I'd get out of it compared to my souped up laptop I bought over a year ago. I'm sure I'll figure it all out.