crit!

Crit: short for critique in architecture, where projects are presented, discussed, and criticized.
We had our first crit of the year today. For once, I was done ahead of schedule. I finished my model saturday, finished the drawings sunday, and had all my presentation materials ready an hour before the crit at 2. And I never stayed in studio past midnight, either.
One of the things I love about studying architecture is the time right before review. It's an intense time. People are puting final touches on thier models and drawings, setting up thier presentation area, checking out each others' work. The Project is finally done, for good or ill. The end of the long and weary road has been reached, and whether it ends in failure or sucess, the end is a celebration in itself. People dress up more for critiques, they're jazzed, buzzing, and chatting. It's a bit like show-and-tell combined with art class; everyone wants to show what they've done. It's a culmination of a lot of work.

Our crit had an usual format. They crammed all 48 of us into one studio WITH our models and drawings (thereby tripling it's normal density) and the first thing we did was go around and give the basic idea of the project in one minute or less.

For an identical problem with harsh constraints, we had a dizzying array of different projects. There was a small group of maybe five projects which were very similiar, but most were completely different from each other. Out of 48 people, only a few other people had a roof that wasn't perfectly flat, and only one other person had a roof that wasn't made of horizontal planes.

I was also surprised by the high level of craft people had in thier models. There's definately an improvement since last year. I guess those with better craft got in because thier portfolios demonstrated thier commitment to quality craftsmanship. We had two outside reviewers who worked with architecture firms, but the one in my more intense crit group left right before getting to my project. The woman who critiqued my project teaches one of the other third year studios and is fanatically by the project. I overheard her say that there was supposed to be only ONE opening in the structure as only one opening was described in the program. I guess she doesn't like to think outside the box.

Anyway, she didn;t hate my project, but I got the impression that she thought I had squandered this assignment. From her perspective, this assignment was about developing real-world solutions using real world connections. My take on the assignment was that this was for material and form explorations. We're both right, in a sense; it's just the inherant problems of building without a real program or context. She, and some other students, thought my project was too sculptural and had too much going on. I can appreciate both these comments. When designing the roof, I thought more about the opportunities and challenges of working with the torqued surface rather than the space which it defines.
As to the too-much-going-on critique, I suppose I should take it as a compliement that I had a lot of really good ideas that dilute each other. For instance, an angle becomes much more pronounced when its next to a straight line or a right angle. Throw a bunch of angles togather and you lose context of what is supposed to be straight- the angles lose thier angularity.

At any rate, this was what my studio prof said last time I talked to him, although I disagreed with him at the time. I was just really excited about the torqued roof structure, and it does look really cool. All in all, it was a good crit, although I wish I had more people review it. A lot of students took pictures of it, and I took pictures of a lot of other student's models I thought were interesting. Jen and a bunch of interior girls dropped by to watch the crit in process, and even without knowing I'd designed it, they went straight to my project because everyone else had basically a box. From here, I go on to plus/delta my design and design process.

Media I'm Grokking: Chronicles of Narnia, starting with Magican's Nephew. The Gorillaz Demon Days. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00082IJ08/qid=1126580951/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2460545-4086348?v=glance&s=music&n=507846It's kind of poppy but extremely varied from electronic funk to dennis hopper reading a short story interspaced with melodic lyrical interludes. Also stuff by Cake is really cool.