A Long Day At School

Today was a tumultuous day of ups and downs. Even the weather, which began cool, turned brilliantly sunny, and then to a heavy snowfall in the evening.

My day started at 9AM, with my class which covers the AA in London. This class covers the pedagogy of the AA, its notable faculty, and notable students, and investigates how theory and practice and student work contributed to the production of some of the biggest architectural names of the 1990s and beyond. (Hopefully the answer isn't: "they had a trendy pub").

That class was short in deference to me and a classmate who had a conflicting class at 10:30 in the form of that HAL class I was mentioning earlier. This I suffered through, all the while thinking "no way, no way, no way." After that class let out at noon, I checked the balance of my student card, bought a cup of chili for lunch, and was pleasantly surprised to find ASU had emailed me the syllabus I needed. I quickly printed it out, photocopied my transcript (which I had on me on the chance I could waive out) and dashed to the madam professor's office. She looked it over, almost cursorily, and allowed me to waive.

It felt like a prison reprieve. I tried not to dance out of her office on my way to a celebratory coffee drink. It was a good drink to have, because at 1:30, we entered the great lecture hall for the studio presentations. This three-hour affair sees all the professors of each of the 12 option studios present the work their studio will be undertaking. (After taking two fundamental studios, grad students of any year get to pick and choose the studio they want to take each semester, hence the term option studio.)

I'd pretty much made up my mind of the top six choices. Really there was one and two, which looked really really cool, and everything else, which looked ok to not so interesting. My first choice was an adaptive reuse studio which would take an industrial site in St.Louis, an old brewery, and turn it into a data center and digital arts museum. Just because this studio was not cool enough, there was also a week long field trip to the netherlands to work at the Delft, which is some institute that I've never heard of but has a cool name. Of course I didn't get in to this one.

My second choice studio was a project in central Florence involving the creation of a monestary and a contemporary art museum, considering the religious texts for traditional monestaries, contemporary arts museums, vertical typologies, and contextual issues in dense, ancient cities. And a week in Florence, as well. By now you may have guessed I didn't get into this one either.

I got my third choice (half-full, some people got their seventh choice out of 12) which seems like it deals with designing stuff for post-Katrina New Orleans. I did put it third, but honestly, in the field of architecture, the post-Katrina New Orleans project is almost mandatory. It's almost as bad as shipping container architecture. The spin on this one is that it seems to involve political boundaries and infrastructural systems like water drainage networks. Downside- we're basically picking up where the first two studios to take this course, and another university left off. Upside- I get a trip to New Orleans out of it, and to be honest Ive been wanting to reconnect with my birthplace a bit more.

At the very least, I can have benets and chicory coffee at cafe du monde, and really, what more can you ask from a studio?

Anyway, that was fun times from about 1:30 until 4:30, and so I wandered around, checked emails, and did some stuff online until my 6:30 class, structures II. This class made me nervous since I'd waived out of structures I, since I took it over 4 years ago at ASU, and I hadn't taken any structures classes in over 4 years. The professor of this class is really fun. The licence plate of his convertible actually spells out "structures" and he explained things a very clear way that made me confident that I could figure this stuff out. But it was a long class, that goes until 9pm.

By then, there was an inch of white stuff on the ground, with much more white stuff coming out of the sky, so it was "alec learns to drive...On Ice!" all the way home. I did ok. Some swerving coming around corners, but I took it reall slow, and I took the less hilly way home, and instead of attempting to slide down the ramp to my garage, I parked it on the street. I'll shovel, sweep, and salt tomorrow morning I think (since I dont have to go to the HAL class workshop tomorrow!!!).

Also waiting for us when we got home (besides a hungry and irritable cat) was a hot crock pot full of oxtail stew I'd been cooking for over 24 hours. Good stuff. Extremely filling. Nice dish for a cold winter's night.