Reviews

Yesterday around 4pm, I handed in my last project, and I was done with my first semester of graduate school.  Even though I was done with my reviews wednesday, it took me until friday to finish the work for my other classes.

In undergraduate school, elective courses were relatively light; in graduate school, they were much more intense than I was expecting. They're no longer cranberry sauce for the turkey- they're their own courses.

Anyway, the turkey, studio, was served up tuesday and wednesday. I went ahead and printed friday evening, which turned out to be a good move as the printing situation got to be a little crazy as pretty much everyone in the school needs to print something for this week's reviews.

The format of the review was relatively simple. We reviewed in Stienberg Hall, which is a terrible place acoustically since all the noise gets bounced around. They had partitioned it into three review alleys where students could pin up. All 72 of us reviewed over two days, with three reviews going on simultaneously. This was kind of fun, since students could hop around to see projects they were interested in, or see friends presenting.

I presented the first day. I had four 3'x6' boards, a 1/32" scale model, and one 1/16" scale model. My reviewers included Don Koster and Andrew Cruse (who were our studio instructors), Donnie Schmidt (of Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects of LA), Bruce Lindsay (the dean of the architecture school),  Gia Daskalakis (another associate professor at Wash U), and another woman visiting critic whose name currently escapes me.

My verbal presentation went pretty poorly. I was visibly nervous and uncomfortable, and I don't think I set up my project well for defense. Let me clarify: my project does not look very exciting. I would say its very well designed, but by no means is it a landmark, iconic building. The successes of the building is less grand gestural, and I didn't really put that out there as a statement. Because of this, the first round of critque was essentially getting at "this is kind of a boring building." There was talk about "competence," and they did appreciate the full realization and believability of the floor plans, but they still described the building as "tired." They said it was too rigid, that the window patterns showed potential that hadn't been fully fleshed out, and that the pool was "whimsical" in a way that I had perhaps not intended- further that they would have liked to see more of those same kind of whimsical gestures in my project. So that was not good. I argued a bit with Donnie over the necessity of an iconic gestural building (its a housing project, where people come home) which is good, but I perhaps went a bit too far with it.

On the plus side, they liked my drawings, they said my plans were extremely clear and readable, and they were entranced with the character and vitality that my photoshopped renderings conveyed. Dean Lindsay said he really liked the project and was particularly impressed (although this could have been due to his happiness at seeing the success of a student presenting high levels of clarity and readability in documents).

So that was that, and I was done. We had another day of reviews where Saori presented (and her review went fabulously well, the kind of review where she had fun and her reviewers had fun), and then at the end of the second day they served everyone egg nog spiked with various quantities of spiced rum. That was a sweet gesture. There are a few perks to going to a private school, and alcohol on campus and at school events is definitely one of them.

The next two days I worked on both documenting my work over the semester, finishing a project for my Reconsidering the Margins project, and finishing up a project for Metabolic Cities where I made a suit filled with Archigram images. The suit was kind of fun although it came out kind of muddy. I was using an acetone transfer process. This is a pretty old-school technique and it requires some practice, but it can be pretty effective. These are the steps:

1. Print out your image that you want to transfer.
2. Find the oldest, crappiest, photocopier you can, and make a mirrored photocopy. (or you can print out a mirrored copy in the first place, if your photocopier doesn't mirror).
3. Place the photocopy face down on the material you want to transfer the image to. 
4. Splash or spray acetone (nail polish remover) on the sheet to make it really wet. You'll have to work fast as acetone evaporates and dries quickly.
5. As soon as it is wet, quickly use a firm edged tool, like the side of a ruler or a hard rubber screen printing tool, and scrape the back of the paper the full length of the image. The idea is to push the image onto the material. 
6. Immediately peel the photocopy sheet off the transfer material.

Just be careful spraying that stuff. I picked up a spray bottle and was using it to get an even wetness to the sheet, but the bottle warned against inhaling the spray or mist of the acetone. The material I was transferring it to was basically tyvek, or a kind of paper coverall used by people who need to spray paint or remove asbestos. Unfortunately, the transfer process does not lend itself well to varying shades of gray. Anyway, I finished the suit and turned it in, and that was that.