First day of studio

We went in to school early this morning to talk with a professor about a class we were scheduled to take. Afterwards, we wandered up to studio when it was about lunchtime, and caught a friend of ours we had drinks with the other night, Zhuli, and we invited him out to lunch. Since we moved to STL we've been looking for Pho. It's cheap, relatively healthy, and fills you up pretty well, so we tried out a spot out on Olive. The service was terrible, the longest wait for Pho I've ever had. The Pho was also about $7 a bowl, which is a little spendy as far as my Pho experience goes. However, the portions were very generous and the broth and noodles were great, so it got pretty high marks in my book.

Over lunch, we talked about architecture schools. Zhuli characterized most of the Chinese schools as very practical and industry directed- the intent and focus is to produce architects who can oftentimes play the role of engineer as well as architect, rather than on the design process. Is it buildable? Does it make sense? These appear to the be the questions of concern. The Chinese process also seems to take longer, which makes sense if you're also preparing architects to take on the roles given to the other engineering professions in the united states; five years of undergraduate followed by three years of graduate work. Since Chinese schools dont get out until July, and Zhuli is fresh from college on the mainland, he's effectively jumping straight into grad school from college with about a month to change continents.

I think theres a bit of circular poetry to all of this as well- my good friend Chase had his first day of teaching Chinese to first graders in Shanghai today. I don't know how it went, but I can't wait to find out.

Since there are so many students in the studio, the hall is broken into differnet sections, each handled by a different instructor. We got a quick outline of the studio, some points to consider, and a deliberately brief discussion of the first project- a week long project to produce a habitable, hollowed out block 12'x24'x36'. No programmatic parameters so its pretty open ended. Our instructor came around to meet with us individually and looked at our portfolios and asked us about what kind of software we knew.

At this point, I've worked with AutoCAD, Revit, Form-Z, AGI32, Rhinoceros, Sketchup, and I'm sure others that escape me. These programs tend to fall into two categories- user-friendly and useless, and mind-bogglingly complicated and extremely powerful.

Anyway, we needed foamcore, the selected material for the project, and so we set out on a hot tip from Dew that $1 sheets of foamcore could be had at Hobby Lobby. That sat fine with me, as I wanted to pick up some sewing pins as experience has shown them to be fantastically useful for holding foamcore while the glue dries. And I may just skip the glue and stick with the pins. Anyway, it was a bit of a drive out there but once we were done we were also periously close to Duncan Donuts, so we picked up a half dozen. Four for us, and two for the informant, Dew. Coming back to studio with a box of Duncan Donuts we were stopped not less than three times by people wanting know where donuts could be had.

After an evening of frustrations trying to locate and print a PDF for the studio, I finally was met with success and called it an evening. Saori and I retreated back to our home on Tulane ave, cooked dinner, did laundry, and watched part of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Pretty fun stuff so far.