Studio and Authentic Mexican food at the Taco Bell

The architectural studio I am in is the last of the core studios as part of the graduate track program. This is also what I call a 'confluence' studio, which is made up of entering students, such as myself, and continuing students. The continuing students have for the most part, never designed habitable structures before. These students who entered the program a year ago, came in largely as non-architecture majors, and so their first year is a hellish boot camp focused on principles of design, the iterative design process, and modular transformation. How hellish? Today is the one day of Fall break we are granted, and the students currently in that program have a pin-up review. Last week, one student thought he was having a heart attack and called EMS but it turned out to be an anxiety attack. They have to work at least twice as hard as we do. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing- I think a large part of architectural education is that crucible test- if you don't love architecture and design enough, when you're professionally, its never going to be worth it.

Anyway, I digress, but my main point is that up until this studio I'm in now, this will be the first studio where they are designing actual buildings, and thinking about how people really use space, and the leap to creating habitable forms. And it seems like a real challenge. I see a lot of really frustrated people who pin up, and it looks like they haven't done much work, but really they've been throwing a lot of effort into it. 

As for me, I feel like I'm this kind of odd space with this studio. The main goals of this studio are threefold: 

1. Bridge the gap between the entering students and the continuing students
2. Develop an understanding of how habitable spaces can be created at multiple scales- the room, the apartment, the common spaces, the public spaces created between buildings in the urban landscape.
3. Provide an introduction to the complete design process- including issues of accessibility, egress, structure, and systems. 

And I'm not sure where I'm going with this.... so.... 

ON TO PAGEDALE!!!!

One of the electives I'm taking is a seminar on the city/suburbia, not from a design standpoint, but more from a standpoint of trying to understand the factors that shape movements of people and money within metropolitan regions, especially through the lens of socioeconomic and political implications. One of the issues which is the focus of this seminar is the rising problem of inner-suburban decline, as it is a relatively new issue that we will have to deal with more and more upon entering the workforce.

The main deal with the inner-suburbs is they are losing jobs and investment to the outer suburbs or back to the cities, and they have little infrastructure or economic power to deal with falling revenues and rising social services expenditures. Pagedale is an example of one of these inner-ring suburbs, which is the object of our study. They are typical of some midwestern metropolises which have dozens of tiny municipalities. The area around Pagedale in north St.Louis county is called "the Balkans" for the several dozen tiny municipalities that exist and compete in that space. Pagedale, for example, is only a few square miles in size, with a population of around 4,000. It was started as a streetcar suburb, but transitioned to industrial suburb, and now like many places, the manufacturing plants have been closing and the neighborhood entered a period of 'decline'.

Last evening, we took a group tour to visit it. Our first stop was a visit with the Mayor of Pagedale at the small city hall. She was a wonderful, friendly, grandmotherly person, who talked about her aspirations for Pagedale, and the recent developments to the town including the recently opened grocery store. It's funny to think about a small thing like that, a local grocery store, that most of us take for granted with our cars or local grocery. Many Pagedale residents don't own cars, and before the Save A Lot opened, were reliant on bus service to get to more distant grocery stores.

Anyway, she also talked about the city's relationship with Beyond Housing, a nonprofit corporation that started in St.Louis, spread, and then consolodated in Pagedale to look at the effects of concentrated effort on improving a small city. This seems like a great outfit- they got grants and funding for senior housing, purchased  and rehabbed vacant housing, built new single family homes, and secured funding for repairs and improvements all over the city of Pagedale. They were instrumental in the construction of the grocery store, which according to the mayor, was a dream come true in a city with a serious lack of retail and services.

Anyway, afterwards we had a kind of odd driving tour of Pagedale, which didn't really give us any kind of clear indication of the city landscape as (A) It was around 8pm at night, (B) Pagedale is not particularly well lit at night, and (C) the car I was in had its windows tinted to questionable legality. Anyway, the highlight was that we went to a place where I could finally get some decent Mexican food, a taqueria in a building which used to be a Taco Bell. The irony was good, and so was the food, although the agua horchata could have used a little cinnamon. It made me feel really far from Arizona.