Suddenly, Fall.

All of a sudden, it's fall here.

Saori really missed her mom yesterday, as we dropped Yoshiko-san off at the airport pretty early in the morning. She's flying on to visit her other daughter in New Orleans.

Sunday was cold and rainy, and we wore our Peruvian bufandas to school. Picked up some rasberry and lemon and ginger scones at Winslow's Home on the way to school, and they were really, really expensive. But also incredibly delicious. The day flew by mostly due to the ambigously gray skies, but also because we were working on the site model, milling and gluing and cutting MDF to make 1/32" scale buildings.

At 1/32", 1 inch is equal to 32 feet. A matchbox would be about the size of a one-story commercial building.

I've really gotten to enjoy using the wood shop. There's something really fun and involved about using tools to shape wood. The whole thing about "making" and the feedback loop. We needed a partial cylinder for a building, and we didn't have a compass, but I was able to mark points to approximate the curve, used the band saw to rough out the curves, and belt sand the whole thing down to the curve I drew. I was pretty proud of that.

Today was clear and cool and sunny, and I biked down to the project site I'm studying. This is located in northern central west end, a little less than a 30 minute bike ride down Delmar from where I live. I biked down and hung around the site for about two hours, making observations, taking photos, and listening in on conversations. Here's the site- on the corner of Delmar and Euclid:

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The site is really the most busy out of all of the sites our studio is considering. As Delmar divides our area of study like a broad river, the site really belongs to the neighborhood to the north rather than to the south, which is the gateway to more upscale and revitalized and commercial central west end. To the east of the site is a large ugly Missouri career center. To the southwest and northwest, two massive brick buildings, one residential, one commercial, both over 6 stories high and really creating a gateway on either side of Delmar.

There were two guys at the bus stop across the street from my site. One was an elderly pensioner who came out to watch the birds and get some sunshine, the other not as old, but graying. The conversation ranged in areas I didn't expect- at one moment they were discussing $5000 water-cooled gaming computers. Also of interest was their commentary on this Friday's dispersement of welfare checks- apparently the area goes crazy, with people buying up cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, and how 'five days later' those people are broke again and asking for money. Apparently, in light of the economic depression, area pawn shops are booming and a new one opened up near my site. Something that also caught my ear was that many landlords won't rent to people with drug convictions. I don't blame them, but it makes me wonder where those people go- if it actually drives them to worse conditions and deeper into drug culture and poverty. It suggests to me that extremely strong drug laws would then actually exacerbate the societal problems that come with with drug abuse.

At any rate, I wonder if this kind of information should come into my considerations for architecture at all- after all, people are people, and I've always believed strongly that architecture should be egalitarian, regardless of income level. I was going to say "lifestyle" but housing is so intimately tied to lifestyle, is should in some way acknowledge people's lifesyles (either indirectly, but creating spaces that allow the user to configure and use as they like or deliberate and specifically designing places for activities). But as architecture is inherently ideological, I'm not going to deliberately design the ideal drug warren. Or maybe I should, and do it so deliberately as to expose it architecturally in order to spark conflict. Modernists might take the former approach, or even take it beyond, claiming architectural determinism of space would discourage drug use. Postmodernists would take the latter approach.

I'm not trying to associate poverty and drug use here; I'm just saying these are two conditions which exist which I may need to address in this project. In either case, security and the perception of defensible space is a much more relevant design principle. (By defensible space and security, I mean to say, do the people who live there feel secure?)

Anyway, some other questions the site brings up- how will the building relate to the neighborhood to the north, which is primarily single family row housing? How will it relate to the 8 story residential tower block to the immediate west? Will the building belong to the high speed of Delmar or the slow speed of Euclid? Where do you build if you're surrounded by streets and parking lots?