I finished my first week of work!
I showed up monday, bright and early to start on time and got an older computer across from a young woman from southern China, Xiao Wei, who speaks german fairly fluently for having lived here for five years, but is also studying part time as a student.
Leo, my direct boss, the argentine, sat down with me early monday and laid out the tasks at hand. They were just starting a competition and puting me and him on it full time.
The competition was for a new House of Music in Innsbruck, Austria, slated to replace a really awful 1950s era city hall in the middle of one of the best cultural centers of the city, just outside of one of the main portals to the Old City, and directly facing the imperial palace. So the location is incredible. The city looks adorable, actually, and its in a narrow mountain valley so you look up and see snow-capped peaks around you like a Sound of Music production set in Salt Lake City.
The problem is that the brief and all the supporting materials are in German. So it's kind of a stumble out of the gates since I have to Google Translate everything about the program, the intentions, the client, etc. So far this week, I spend most of the time getting to terms with the site- the relation to the city, to the mass transit system, the site history, pedestrian paths, what's around it, the style of the facades around it, those kind of things.
Friday, there was an all-staff meeting, and I got to see everyone at the office around one not so big table. There's only about a dozen of us, with J at the head of the table. He spoke on an off for about two hours, the meeting was entirely in German, and I struggled to keep my eyes from glazing over, to try to alertly pick out words from what he was talking about.
At one point, he said "Wasser dunkel braun" and I thought "OH! He said dark brown water!" and I felt really pleased with myself. It turned out he was giving a long lecture about how the office needs to work harder, the coffee from the machine sucks (dark brown water), and that if we win some competitions, he'll buy a better coffee machine.
Actually, he said that so many architects seem disillusioned, but that you need to "burn" for architecture, and that when he drives around at night, over to Behnisch architecture for example, the lights are still on and people are still working late into the night. He complained that the lack of dedication here meant that everyone was abandoning ship at six.
Aannnnnd I asked for next friday off.
I showed up monday, bright and early to start on time and got an older computer across from a young woman from southern China, Xiao Wei, who speaks german fairly fluently for having lived here for five years, but is also studying part time as a student.
Leo, my direct boss, the argentine, sat down with me early monday and laid out the tasks at hand. They were just starting a competition and puting me and him on it full time.
The competition was for a new House of Music in Innsbruck, Austria, slated to replace a really awful 1950s era city hall in the middle of one of the best cultural centers of the city, just outside of one of the main portals to the Old City, and directly facing the imperial palace. So the location is incredible. The city looks adorable, actually, and its in a narrow mountain valley so you look up and see snow-capped peaks around you like a Sound of Music production set in Salt Lake City.
The problem is that the brief and all the supporting materials are in German. So it's kind of a stumble out of the gates since I have to Google Translate everything about the program, the intentions, the client, etc. So far this week, I spend most of the time getting to terms with the site- the relation to the city, to the mass transit system, the site history, pedestrian paths, what's around it, the style of the facades around it, those kind of things.
Friday, there was an all-staff meeting, and I got to see everyone at the office around one not so big table. There's only about a dozen of us, with J at the head of the table. He spoke on an off for about two hours, the meeting was entirely in German, and I struggled to keep my eyes from glazing over, to try to alertly pick out words from what he was talking about.
At one point, he said "Wasser dunkel braun" and I thought "OH! He said dark brown water!" and I felt really pleased with myself. It turned out he was giving a long lecture about how the office needs to work harder, the coffee from the machine sucks (dark brown water), and that if we win some competitions, he'll buy a better coffee machine.
Actually, he said that so many architects seem disillusioned, but that you need to "burn" for architecture, and that when he drives around at night, over to Behnisch architecture for example, the lights are still on and people are still working late into the night. He complained that the lack of dedication here meant that everyone was abandoning ship at six.
Aannnnnd I asked for next friday off.
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