Review

Today is Tuesday, May 17. By the time you read this, I will already be dead. Seven days ago, we had our final review for studio. Architecture studio review is the classic tradition stretching back at least half a century (but where did it start?) whereby at the end of the term, students present their work in a representational manner with models, animations, drawings, renderings, in addition to an oral presentation to a jury, typically made up of architectural professionals.


Hours of sleep friday: 6
Hours of sleep saturday: 4
Hours of sleep sunday: 0
Hours of sleep monday: 4

Size of my final boards: 11'4" x 7'
Cost of printing: $200
Cost of prints that printed wrong that I couldn't get a refund for: $60.

Critics on my review: 6



I guess I've never really thought about why we do it this way. In the "real world" professionals present their work to people who are not architects, and at any rate, the intent is to "sell" the product of architecture, so the review isn't that. The alternative, that the review is about the critique of the students technique and theory, strikes closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really make sense when you consider that the review is the last thing you do for studio. There might be a good exchange of ideas in a presentation, directions the student might take the project, aspects unconsidered, tweaks and variations to explore.... but that time is not built-in. It's not part of the architecture school culture.


One of the critics for our studio was a landscape architect who early on in the day started talking about her "fantasy two weeks," amending it to professional fantasy two weeks after a humorously awkward pause. She was talking about a two week period after a review where a student might actually keep working on the project based on the feedback. What struck me was, why don't we do it? Do we need the time to develop the project up to the final review? Was there once an underlying idea that students would actually go back and revise their work? As a student, I can safely say that the vast majority of architecture students mentally checked out the moment they sat back down in their chairs, and that what was actually discussed in the review gets dissolved in a hazy mist of exhaustion mingled with two week fantasies of drinking, relaxing, and sleep. Which is why I have people take notes for me when I get critiqued.


It gets tricky though- suppose your entire project is suspect, or the underlying assumptions you have built the architecture on are invalid. One of our classmates was told that his project would kill many people as well as cause the destruction of the the greater part of New Orleans. I think this might have been stretching it, but suppose it were true. What is he going to do for those two weeks? There's also the issue of fallibility. Who's to say the critics are right? So much of what we do is subjective and dependent on unspoken convention and theory.


I guess review is about clarifying your own thinking- it pushes you to confront, understand, simplify, and synthesize your own thoughts about design and architecture, which is really the point of studio. Any studio. The projects don't really mean anything. Peter Cook said it best- words like Urbanism are just words to get the ideas behind them to move.


It's always interesting to hear the way students describe their reviews, especially given the ambiguity about their purpose. What exactly is makes a "good" review then? Or a "bad" one? In the context I just described, a bad review would be one where the critics do nothing but rave about how good the project is, and a good review would be one where the project is ripped apart to its most basic level and all its ideas exposed and challenged.


As a student, it gets emotional. The relationship between your project and you is tense- at the end of the semester, you hate your own project. Its an idiot thing, terrible, ugly, stupid, boring, and trite. Why did you even think it would work? You must be a terrible designer. But its too late to start over and there's too little time to tweak it into something good or interesting. You work on it numbly, filled with a mute loathing and dream of just finishing so you can sleep. But its also your baby. It's your work, your blood on the model, and its your tired eyes staring back at you from the beautiful six hour rendering. So you hate it, but its your work and emotional and drained and exhausted, it is too easy to conflate your project with yourself and get defensive about it in a review. Every time, I have to remind myself that its not about getting the reviewers to like me or my project. I have to tell myself this all the time. 

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.

Welcome to Spring Break

I think I've found a good solution to how to get to work. I'm going to buy a car.

But in the meantime. I've discovered a great alternative. ASU president Michael Crow drives me downtown.

The way this works is that Crow saw through the establishment of a downtown campus for ASU. This campus has classes used by regular students at the Tempe campus, who really did not want to A) Fight traffic, or B) Pay for downtown parking. So part of the deal is a free shuttle bus which runs from ASU's tempe campus straight to downtown.

Friday morning, I biked to the shuttle stop on ASU in less than ten minutes. The shuttle bus left at 6:30 AM. I was the only one on it, which feels a little strange, but ok. The bus dropped me at Polk and First st, which was another ten minute bike ride to work. So I got my workplace at 7:05. I had time to bike around the neighborhood, and pop into a Jack in the Box for breakfast.
Next time, I'll take the 7 AM shuttle and get another half an hour of sleep in the morning.

Work was good, simple tasks to do, so I filled in the rest of the time really getting everything right in the programs, and doing some areal photography work over the site. I rode home with a bunch of chittering, giggling, Devil's Advocates, the peppy student guides and salespeople who give tours of ASU to graduating kids with thier parents. It's hard to believe there was so much enthusiasm for ASU. They were like evangleist youth groups spreading the Good Word, so pure was thier faith in ASU.

I got my two other books in the mail. One was Images of the City by Lynch, and the other was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I love Vonnegut. His books are like tinted glasses to look at your world. Some books are good at drawing you in and making you forget the world around you. Others are good for making you look at the world around you. I like the book so far, Cat's Cradle was better, Vonnegut seems more resigned and embittered by the world around him in this one. Image of the City was recommended to me by my old history of architecture professor and friend Dr. Morton, while he was reviewing my project.

Listen: Friday was also my mid-semester review. Five of us pinned up in the hall outside our classroom at a time. One person got the board, and the other four shared two huge movable whiteboards which we pinned up on both sides. We completely took over the corridor and clogged it up. Our reviewers in the early part were actually two thirds of the Argentine faculty. Milagros, a faculty from southern Argentina, and Professor Claudio Vekstein, whom we all know from our many adventures south of the equator.

I went late in the day, but the reviewers really liked my work. The idea of putting up a facade of another building on the old mill was a really controvercial decision which made my studio teacher (art and theory background) nearly come to blows with Milagos (brutalist modernism background). It's fun when reviewers fight. Especially since they'll typically give you ammunition for later development. Everybody loved the patio on top of the grainery. That shot with the silhouette and the sunset nailed it. That was the money shot, even if it was completely fabricated. It's the idea of what they could see rather than the precise angle or height (I shot the sunset from on top of A mountain, a good several hundred feet above where the top of the grainery is).

Saori's studio was not so fortunate. Her studio all looked really unhappy leaving friday. Seems like Professor Spellman wasn't too happy with the state of things, or the amount of work. So there's lots of work for them over spring break. Our studio teacher told us that she didn't want us to worry about working over spring break.

After studio, Saori and I and Jamie (old roomate) met up with a bunch of grad student girls from our Buenos Aires trip, and we sat ate mexican food and drank margaritas and talked for about two hours. One of them summed up the problem with all our of studios/thesises. "We're halfway through the semester, but we're not halfway done yet."

So that was friday. Today I picked up Sally and Jonathan's van at thier apartment and took it in for an oil change which was part of the deal that I made with them to borrow it over spring break. Better, really since Sally left me money for it too. Anyway, after the oil change, I watched a movie, relaxed, read about half of Breakfast of Champions and then worked on my sketchbook.

My sketchbook, incidently, has about 320 more pages that I have to fill with drawings and sketches. This sketchbook when I turn it in will consititute most of my grade for my sketching class. So there is some serious work to do, especially considering that I have five weeks.

Five weeks. I have five weeks of school before graduation. I need to get on the ball with figuring out all the finalities and nicieties of the graduation ceremony and protocalls. And I need to figure out a place to live too, as the lease here is up in mid may.