Show me Juhani

Hmmm it's been one of those frenetic times that completely overwhelms, especially as I have been adamant about getting a minimum of four hours of sleep at night, eating, bathing, and other extravagant luxuries. What have I been up to?

Frost Warning
Last night, the temp dropped down to the low 30s and we turned on the heater for the first time in awhile. This morning, there was frost on the ground, the skies were clear and cold, and it felt like fall was preparing for its last dance while that cold bitch winter waits in the wings. It was nice to wear my black coat again.

Sound of Space/Spaces of Sound
This was a workshop I went to last saturday with Finnish Architect Juhani Pallasmaa and composer Kalevi Aho. It was basically a two hour lecture by Aho, who played samples of music he created for particular venues including the side of a mountain, along with a discussion of the spaces and the creative design process he followed. We then broke into teams for two hours with a loosely define task of mapping and composing the sonic landscape of the architecture school campus. This was a lot of fun. We grabbed a camera and headed out to document unusual and characteristic sounds (squeaky taps, sounds of feet running down stairs, thrums of air conditioners, buzz saws of the workshop, fallen leaves, wind, etc.) and then we all made interpretive sketches attempting to document the character of the sounds. At the end of two hours, we all went around and presented our findings and documentation to Pallasmaa and Aho who criticized and commented on our work and process. It was a fun and interesting break from the studio work I probably should have been doing, and at any rate, it highlighted an oft-neglected part of architecture school by focusing on the phenomenology of sound of spaces. I'm really enjoying the 'workshops' model of architecture school (as long as they're not mandatory!).

Long Week (and still in it)
Undergraduate school was all about studio, and the other classes were interesting side dishes. In graduate school, the other classes become their own dinner courses and you're being served them all at once. Monday, even before I knew I wasn't going to pin-up, I gave a 20 minute presentation with my partner for our Metabolic city class. The topic we are developing is looking at the British group Archigram as primarily interpreting biology instead of technology in their development of cities of the future. This was actually kind of fun, as Archigram is a really fun group to study, and I have a great partner who, even if we have different ideas, really want to push those ideas and argue about them. It's kind of nice to pass each other in the hall and have a five minute discussion of whether or not the internet more closely resembles a biological model or a technological model. Tuesday was mostly spent reading and preparing for Thursday's deadlines, Wednesday I presented, and thursday was taken up in the morning of presenting our site grading project and afternoon was taken up with the presentation of ideas of radical alternative architectural practice. It's been a long week.

Two worst things to hear in a review
In my opinion, my review basically told me nothing new, which is the worst thing to hear in a review, as well as the second worst thing, I was told I had a boring project. (Which I also knew). It's very frustrating. I'm a very systematic designer and professional work made me realize that one of my really strong suits is spatial optimization. But architecture is not an optimization problem. This was the lesson of the Modernist's failure. Le Corbusier once said that the problems people face would be resolved if their homes and families were as efficiently designed and organized as their workplaces. "The house is a machine for living in." But it is actually so much more.
I have a strong rationalist tendency that tends towards that direction. I get sucked into finding elegant solutions to mechanical or programmatic constraints. Essentially, it is an hard mindset for soft problems. Maddeningly, everything I see, read, and experience tells me how vital it is to embrace the soft problems- phenomenology, text, context, etc., and I came into this studio aware of my own tendencies to ignore the other issues in favor of clean rationalism. I am convinced that the value of architectural studio lies in experimentation, but at the end of the day, despite all that, I ended up with a hyper-rationalist project. Symmetrical, every apartment with 3 sides exposed to the outside for maximum daylight and ventilation, with only 5 repeated unit types. Cleanly diagrammable, clear circulation, and self-suggestive of how it could be structurally supportive.
And its boring. Its so boring. There is a subtle interplay of openings and variation of the surface, but ultimately the project is an eroded cube. There are some spaces like a series of 10' wide bridges 36' off the ground, but I cannot explain what they might be used for other what the community decides.
I hate how it looks boring, I hate how the reviewers called it boring, and I especially hate my own view of it as boring because I'm defaulting to formal interpretations of architecture as opposed to the all the other aspects. Partially its because studio is restricted to the primacy of form, partially because of my own mistrust of formal interest for its own sake. (Why make it look like a ball of crumbled paper vs a pile of penne vs a stack of paper cups, where is the critical difference or thought behind them?)
In short, I'm like Marvin the robot sans one leg, making furious circles in the mud. I want to engage in praxis, put theory into practice, but I feel a little like this studio is not looking wide enough at the project and context to be effective. But something tells me this is less the case of studio putting constraints on what we can do rather than my own unwillingness to look outside of the studio environment. Perhaps its a bit of stubborn arrogance; look at me, I can design this perfect thing. By creating this project that has pushed the boundary of optimization, I've painted myself into a perfect corner. Hence, the reviewers telling me to "break it down" and to "mix it up."
Perhaps by eschewing formal irrationality, I've been missing opportunities to exercise creativity within the confines of the formal studio. Why not excrete some wacky shape, and then try to rationalize it into a building? That is one way I could work in this framework. We shall see.