Housing Studio Workshop Ends: Housing Studio Begins!

Last night, after we broke up around 5:30 from the housing workshop, everyone went to Heman park for a BBQ. We went home first, dropped our car and bicycled to the park. It was a beautiful afternoon. I don't know if you've seen photos of my neighborhood, but the trees canopies completely cover the streets, creating a canopy  that filters light down to the street level. It was a short, five minute bike ride to the BBQ site, and although it took awhile to get a grilled sausage, it was so worth it when they were ready. All the invited speakers were there, and so was the beer, so it was a really nice time to just chat, and mix and relax. It was a nice time. The park is huge and beautiful in the late afternoon sun, warm edging into coolness of evening.

(One of the surprising differences about private schools vs public is this whole alcohol thing. At ASU, my mom has to sign a paper swearing that that none of the money dispersed for college events will be used to buy or subsidize alcohol. They have booze at nearly every event here.)

Today, we went into school an hour before our scheduled meeting time of 10am. We were bicycling, and the weather was beautiful, and I thought it was the perfect time to explore Forest Park some more, so I split off from Saori who had to do some reading, and bicycled through the meandering paths, pastures, forests, hills, and pavilions that make up the park. It really is a special place, on the epic scale of the gardens of Versailles, and it was especially nice this Sunday morning. Tons of joggers and bicyclists.

Today's work session was very much about consolidating the information we gathered over the past two days and discussing the questions and issues that arose from it. Of course, the conversation of conclusions became very sidetracked and diverted as the visiting architects began to essentially have a public debate. I swear, you get a couple of accomplished architects in similar fields in the same room and they start to go boom-boom-boom, shooting ideas back and forth over the heads of students. Bill Morrish actually apologized to everyone for their "entertaining each other." The other two visiting lecturers/workshop leaders were Julie Eizenberg and Donnie Schmidt. Donnie was actually an ASU graduate and was definitely the young gun of the group. All together a great group.

We finished the workshop by taking two sites across Delmar and creating massing models for those sites, and then finally critiquing the massing models in the giant site model. It made for a really long day, and we didn't finish until about 6:30 in the evening. Saori and I went home and realized we were both too wiped out to do anything so we just cooked rice and ate some soup and called it a day.

Overall, I really liked the housing workshop. I mean, its not a pleasant experience, although there are moments of exhilaration and excitement with the intensity and exchange of ideas. It was very intense. Very intense. You come up with different solutions and work differently when you're given three hours compared to three days. Theres more risk, more adventure, more bold strokes and more interesting mistakes. We didn't really produce much in the way of viable solutions, but what it was really useful for was to understand the problems and the consequences of architectural and planning gestures. Basically, we delved a bit into planning theory, and a bit into the culture and politics of socioeconomics. If you create a building close to the street, what happens? If its far away from the street edge, what happens? How does that affect the perception of the buildings around it? or across the street? Etc ad infinitum.

We've got classes tomorrow morning at 9AM, so its good to get a good nights rest. While we still can.