Studio at the Crossroads

Saori and I watched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly over a period of about a week where we could find the time to sit down. I was surprised by how much I liked it. The hokey spaghetti western-ness of it belied its surprisingly rich story and complex themes and characters. And the flashy style and music was a lot of fun too. Great opening titles.

In studio, our group is at a bit of a crossroads. We have only two deliverables- a 3D digital model of the site with relatively accurate buildings, and a physical model with simplified buildings. The models must show topography, streets, and buildings. Since we already have the plans via GIS data, its actually a relatively simple matter of dividing up the map and extruding buildings. The base (topography) is going to be several layers of MDF that we're actually going to mill down in a CNC machine. This means that we're going to feed a computer file of topography to a 3D routing machine that will carve the site. Saves us a lot of work. (In theory at any rate, although new technologies/techniques always have an additional learning curve before they become more efficient than the older way).

The issue is these site buildings, a collection of about a hundred small residences, businesses, and community buildings that inhabit the squared half mile of the site. We are currently divided on the appropriate direction of how to represent them. We can use a laser cutting machine to score and cut tiny houses out of chipboard and simply fold them into little boxes, or we can trim down boards and chop them up and sand them to approximate the shapes. Either way, it says there's going be a lot of work for wednesday, when this is all due.

Also due for studio, parallel to all of this, is a project of research and housing. We are asked to pick three categories of housing (or really, aspects that interest us) and find examples of each for an analysis and reduction of the formal gesture to a parti sketch. I've been mining ArchDaily a lot for examples, although I've been told I should really look to more historical precedent in that book I picked up from Amazon. Anyway, there's more analysis of space and of scale thats also due Friday, but in general, it feels like a light studio week.

Today, Saori's mom came to school and went to classes. Not with us, she took the light rail down and went into a class discussing classical Japanese texts. Then she went to another class the professor of the first one recommended and after that, she walked through the art museum on campus before returning back to the apartment. The last two nights, she's made us delicious Japanese dinners.

But before we could have dinner, we went to the monday night lecture series. Tonights lecture was rather underwhelming. Perhaps it was the disadvantage of following such a charismatic and dynamic previous lecturer, but his work was just kind of uninspiring. Although there were some interesting moments, for the most part his work seemed to be merely the development of conservative projects one might do at a level of architecture school. There appeared to me to be a lack of theoretical cohesion, an over-reliance on "tips and tricks", a hesitancy of either making a bold statement or wanting too do too much with other spaces.

To his credit, he gets his work built (a marked achievement), and it doesn't look like typical buildings (another marked achievement). By putting work out there that challenges the public conception of what is architecture, he is, at the very least, elevating the cause and role of architecture in people's lives. However, I sense that he falls into the belief, common to certain Modernists, that the role of the architect is to convince the public that a certain 'style' is beautiful.

And perhaps I'm projecting here too, to a certain extent- possibly my own latent fears of merely being a competent architect, but never really making that great leap in the field in the way that some architects seem to be able to do. Either way, its good to be self-critical- I recently realized that I'm making huge assumptions about housing that reveal clear stances on the way people ought to be living, without ever really examining those theories and the values behind them.

Architecture is an inherently political act, but it is also an expression of values. Values underpin theory, which directs all design, whether or not the acting theory is acknowledged.