Phones, Boots, and Housing

I bought a new cell phone yesterday. My old Sony-Ericsson slider was a fantastic phone. Really had a nice physical motion of sliding the phone open with a clean gesture to answer it, and a smart click to hang up. However, the phone started to randomly turn itself off without warning after about two years and when mom let me know I was up for a new phone I went down and picked up a a new phone.

Unfortunately, the physical attributes and mechanical gestures of the phones have suffered an apparently huge drop in popularity, development, and availability. Two years ago, it was all about sliders. Now, its all about the smart phones. I don't want a smart phone. I'm already too dependent on the internet as it is. Additionally, I don't want to pay the cell phone companies any more money a month, especially for crappy data streams at outrageous prices. So no to smart phones. However, I did buy a phone that looks like a smart phone, but is really a dumb phone. It's a Pantech Link, manufactured by a Korean company I've never heard of, and its essentially like someone took a stick phone and flattened it and added a small keyboard. Its a phone designed for texting which it does really well. It's really thin, and pretty easy to use, so I'm happy with it so far. Cheap too, ten bucks after rebate.

I also picked up a pair of boots for bad weather. Given that St.Louis is a cold, wet place for a lot of the year, and given that my shoes are best suited for a desert environment, I took a trip down to the Red Wing Shoe store and tried on some of their boot before finally picking up a pair of 6" work boots that are waterproof and insulated. Going to start breaking them in today.

Intensive, surprise workshops seem to be the M.O. of the architecture school at Wash. U. We were given a brief verbal warning that we would be having a weekend workshop in two weeks when studio started, but then about three days before with no other information distributed, we were given a schedule for friday, saturday, and sunday that pretty much takes up the entire day.

While I'm very happy that we're having this workshop, and I appreciate the intensity, it would be nice to have a little more warning. I know I came here to study and to struggle, but it still feels like they're yanking the carpeting out from my feet when they spring this stuff on us. Maybe its the deep set type A personality. On the flip side of that, I've never had more dedicated staff. Instructors come in for desk crits and for discussion saturday mornings, sunday afternoons, 9pm at night, sacrificing their own personal time to work with us in studio. None of this 9 am - 5 am m-f schedule.

Anyway, our workshop is on housing, specifically public housing, which is the focus of the semester. We began the day with two long lectures by visiting architects and academia, then broke into a 3 hour charette to design massing models for a high density project on Delmar road. The school provided us with a massive 1/32" scale street model with existing buildings, and we plugged all of our sketch models into it. Then we discussed how each model project was affected by its neighbor, and how two projects could start to make the same gesture with similar forms and spaces, or splits that could be continued. It was kind of a fun exercise actually.

Today we're going to meet at the site itself for photos and to better understand what we're dealing with.