Week in Review

It's been a busy week. Work in studio progresses- yesterday, I was commended for my good work ethic in producing stuff (although I'm not sold on how well I'm designing or looking at the site context on many different layers). A large part of that is the tools I've learned over my four years of college plus the three years of working.  It lets me get a lot of stuff done in a very short amount of time- or rather, it lets me test concepts and prototype very quickly.

This week we're talking about issues of race in the urban context- I'm doing a lot of readings on the historical, cultural, and political backgrounds, especially on the phenomenon of persistent poverty in inner-city black neighborhoods. Lots of theories out there- racial segregation causes a concentration of low incomes in small area, the loss of community leaders and role models as the working middle class black population moved to better neighborhoods or suburbia, most interesting is the idea that civil rights activism gave the black communities civic representation, which shifted the issues surrounding poverty over to bureaucratized government agencies which view problems in isolation instead of community organizations which view issues more holistically. It's interesting readings.

I'm working with another guy on a research paper on biological models as inspiration for the Japanese metabolists, Constant, and Archigram, and the research material is looking very thin right now, definitely need to dig a little deeper into the struggle to actually find reference materials.

And then there's environmental systems, which feels like its taking up way too much of my time for a pretty simple, technical course in site planning and climate.