Second crunch

One step at a time. This has been a busy week. We have a review this Friday for which we are on charette. After a crappy desk review last friday, we had a relatively good one monday, which gave us some direction to what to have for friday. The answer is: a lot of work. Monday night, I made a run to Lowes and bought cement, a 12' long cedar 4x4, which is actually a beautiful piece of wood, some lexan which we wasted $22 on because it cant be laser cut, buckets, mixers, etc for making concrete, and drove it all back to campus.

Good lecture by architect Rick Joy, which is ironic because I've been to his studio twice in Tucson, studied architecture in Arizona for damn near 7 years, and I've never seen him or heard him speak. We're actually quite lucky- this is the only lecture he's doing this year. He put some nice work up on the wall, and reiterated that architecture is hard work, and really the only way to distinguish yourself is to work harder and smarter than all the other architects.

Anyway, today our mid-century modern class went on a field trip, you can see the photos I took here. Really an amazing building. Actually, its the most beautiful building I've seen in St.Louis so far. Really quite sublime.

After the fun field trip, it was back to studio work, where I sliced up some of that cedar post, ran it through our band saw, and sanded it down. Its a nice piece of wood. The grain and color remind me a bit of of salmon sashimi. It's quite nice, especially the crisp corners.

Then I went back to studio and made a test wall of concrete. In my undergraduate, I used anchoring cement to and foamcore molds. I got pretty good at it, but styrene molds really is a huge improvement. Holds is shape a lot better, gets a crisper, smoother, surface, but its harder to fabricate and harder to take the mold off. On the other side, its not such an imperative to take the mold off so quick like it was with the foamcore. The test came out nice, a little rough where there was an unclean edge of the styrene.

Anyway. It's 9pm, and I've got a damned long day at school tomorrow and much to get done before then.

On Architecture Schools

Today was an interesting day of firsts.

I used the laser cutter for the first time. Ever. When I was at ASU, which had one laser cutter, it was a pretty big deal to use it and pretty much only upperclassmen were allowed access to it and they really only used it for final models. I was never interested in it because it was such a machined product, it sucked the life out of a handmade model, it made our architecture look like something mass-produced in China. I was also biased against it in that kind of luddite-pride-conflated-with-technological-ignorance. I just never learned to use it as a tool.

Three years down the road, at Wash U, with three laser cutters, people use the laser cutters even for desk critiques, which is pretty much every week. Almost everything at this school is laser cut, and the smell of burning plastic and wood is prevalent. I still don't like it- it is useful for cutting contour topographies, but I would never want to use it for buildings.

There is a kind of material palate native to each architecture school- the laser cutter is obviously one of them. Back at ASU, there were the usual basswood, chipboard, and cardboard models. But there was also use of concrete and plaster, which I have not seen here. Wash U is a lot more toxic- the heavier use of laser cutting opens up a wide range of plastics to form, burn, (and inhale). HDPE, acrylic, plexiglass. Styrene is in huge use here. It's kind of a neat material to make models from- one ends up with a smooth white object, but the glue is a toxic nightmare with the consistency of water that chemically melts the styrene to bond it. Students apply it with metal syringes and they call it "poison". The MSDSs for it are terrifying.

Actually, I had to make a run to Walgreens to pick up some syringes, as I was in fact, cutting styrene and needing to use poison to put it together. Walgreen's sells a variety of medical grade syringes, and pretty cheaply too, actually. I'm not sure how I came across when I asked "do you sell syringes? I need a syringe with a large resivoir." but oh well. At least they are pretty cheap, although the long sharp needle is a constant safety concern for me. I move very carefully and slowly with the syringe. The only thing I would imagine worse than ingesting this poison is accidently injecting it.

I'm taking a history of the Architectural Association class which has an incredible amount of reading as homework. However, the readings are absolutely astounding and astonishing, texts that have shaped architecture and proposed ideas that strike me as incredibly radical compared to those of which I have been exposed as a student. Bourdieu's Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which is an extremely intense look at why we judge taste the way we do. The AA, Peter Cook, and Alvin Boyarsky who set themselves up at heretics- there's a reason why we don't read them in school:

Peter Cook- "You have to be some kind of nut to create good architecture."
Alvin Boyarsky- "I think students working together in large studios is one of the most stultifying things that you can imagine- that's why so much architectural education is so poor. It's trade union stuff. You know you go into a studio and students are all working on the same project. They more or less decide how many sheets of paper they're going to hand in and how its going to be drawn. They watch each other every day of the week, every hour of the day to see what's new, so that there are never any novel moves possible and the teachers can walk around the studio in each other's shoes, saying approximately the same things."

Boyarsky gets better: "I would never use professional standards as a measure for education. I mean, if you think of what all those whores out there are doing....professionalism is a curious thing. You get some crummy office that's been doing the same thing for ten years- figuring how to get through the codes or whatever, and just because they're doing it, that doesn't make them professionals."

Boyarsky, by the way, was the director of the AA, who really lead the school out of its worst state imaginable in the mid 1970s to the institution it is today.

Friday Night Life

Friday night in the big city- and another studio session ends so frustratingly I have to leave the building for awhile. Happy hour with the graduate architecture council is a welcome relief with the $1 beers. The weather is not as warm as it was yesterday, but it is still a welcome change from the icy misery of January. Home and a hot smoked sausage sandwich with an episode of BBC's Life. Life, which was from the same producers as Earth, follows roughly the same format, but is less sublimely edited, and spends less time on its subjects- with a bit less of the distance Earth kept. Another episode, served with a gin and tonic. Here, where the Earth cameras panned away, the Life cameras keep the stock rolling to watch a chinstrap penguin get flayed in slow motion by a leopard seal, or the carnage of a dozen Komodo dragons tearing into a dead water buffalo. It's incredible, compelling footage, all of it, and one can understand the value of spending several months to capture ten minutes.

Haircut day

Last week, temperatures dropped as low as 9 degrees in St.Louis. Today's high was in the 70s. After this miserably long winter, these warm breezes strike me as odd- I no longer trust the weather. It's sad that this spike of spring is tainted by my memory of an inch of solid ice covering every surface. But I'll get what I can take with this crappy climate. I wore a coat today by force of habit, although it was merely cool when I headed home from studio. The windows in our apartment are open tonight, to circulate the air. I hope the days of high gas bills are over.

Today, being Thursday, I have no classes, so it was a working day of trying to get stuff done. Not so much studio stuff got done, but I fared better on my personal list. My hair was getting a little long, and finding an hour can be such a challenge later in the semester, so I went out and got a haircut. A classmate had recommneded this place called Cutters&Co., so I decided to give it a shot. At fifteen bucks, its really not much more than a CostCutters or a SuperCuts haircut. I made an appointment an hour or so before I drove down. The shop is a bit hard to find- its in the basement of a very nice hotel- the Park Plaza hotel, a few miles east of school on the edge of the Central West End. They validate your parking, and for $15 (student rate) you get a coke or a beer, scalp massage, hot facial towel, shampoo and cut. A pretty sweet deal, even factoring in a tip. Apparently they get a lot of students from the universities as their clientelle is pretty much by word of mouth only.

Afterwards, I stopped by Straubs, a gourmet grocery store, and picked up some chocolate and a few boxes of tea before heading back to studio with the windows down.

Beer Wednesdays

I had a really irritating professor in high school who would refer to Wednesdays as "hump day", as in it is the day, once you are on the far side of it, there is a clear view to the weekend. It sounded so damn lazy to mentally frame your entire week in relation to how far away you were from the weekend. Sure, maybe he hated his job as a teacher, and maybe he had a really fulfilling weekend life, but it seems to me that if you spend five days out seven thinking about two days, that's a lot of lifetime.

Anyway, for me, Wednesdays really are "hump days" in that if you look at my weekly planner, there are large chunks in the middle of the day every week except for Wednesday, which is a solid bar of green from 9am until 9pm. It's an ordeal, and not just from the length of the day.

This morning I got up at 8, got ready for school, and was out the door at 8:30. Driving. Wednesday's and Fridays I usually treat myself to driving to school instead of walking to the bus or bicycling. Today was special because there was a group of undergraduates who were selling "pancake breakfasts" to fund-raise for their upcoming service spring break to New Orleans. They're going to build a urban farm hut, whatever that is, as a compliment to the chicken coop a previous group of students had constructed. Whatever the cause, I was sold at "pancake breakfast." 

I was actually the first customer of the day and they were still working out the kinks in the pancake-production process. Astoundingly, it seemed like one of the two students staffing the electric griddles they had set up on folding tables had never made pancakes before. Actually, he admitted it, and I wasn't impressed with the pancake making skills of his associate either. The surge protector blowing and the griddle turning off in the middle of cooking my pancakes probably didn't help either. 

This is kind of turning into a "so there I was, eating pancakes" story, so I'll skip a bit. The pancakes were good and they gave me some coffee. I think they might have actually made some money, too.

First class of the day, at the crack-o-dawn hour of 9am, was my Architectural Association class, where we talk about various articles, papers, and books associated with the AA. This is a tough class, and there are some really smart people in it. The readings are devilishly hard, lengthy, and complex. An decent understanding of modern and postmodern theory as well as critical theory is pretty much prerequisite in order to have any idea of what the authors are going on about. It's a good glass, and when I struggle through the readings and catch a glimpse of what the author is trying to show, I'm always staggered with the power of the ideas and why these readings have never come in front of us before. 

So there's three hours of that, which is pretty brutal, and then I have a break for an hour before my next block of time, which is four to five interrupted hours of studio. Really its closer to six, as I'm usually scrambling straight out of the AA class to jump into whatever I'm supposed to have done for studio. And studio is usually a mix of struggling to understand what I'm supposed to be doing followed by a struggle to understand how I'm supposed to do it, followed by a struggle to understand why we should be doing it in the first place. And then I brew a fresh cup of tea. 

Immediately after studio, we file downstairs en masse to structures II, which is actually a wonderful chance to attempt to learn something with a definite answer. It's almost kind of like sudoku, you don't have to think, you just follow a process to arrive at an answer. I'm usually pretty beat by this time, and so by the time 9pm rolls around after three hours of structures, I'm so happy to have my car there to drive me home, I could dance. Or weep. And Suki is always so happy to have me come home two hours later than usual to feed her. 

B(l)anking out

Today was finally nice enough to bicycle, so I layered on my hoodie, scarf, and windbreaker and threw on my 20 pound backpack stuffed with my laptop, peripherals, and binders. First stop was the bank to make a deposit, which entailed biking up and down two hills. By the time I got to the bank, which is about a mile away, I was out of breath and drenched with sweat and most disconcerting, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I was also boiling inside of all my layers. I had to sit down outside on the sidewalk for about five minutes in front of my bike to catch my breath, and then I couldn't remember my own address. (but I could still recall my social). Had to sit down in the waiting room for about ten minutes while I drank the bottle of water the bank gave me. Biked very carefully to school, which was a long gradual downhill run.

Biked home very cautiously tonight, no problems. I think I'm just really out of shape, especially for strenuous activity. I thought my walking every day was good, but its clearly not keeping me ready to bike. So I'm going to keep biking (albeit with a much lighter load, avoid the hills, and watch what I'm wearing!).

The Hater

Some of my more astute readers have probably noticed this more than myself, but I've realized that I am really having a hard time giving this city a chance for me to like it. Do I want to like St.Louis? This question is giving me pause, which is odd since I'd think any idiot would want to like the city he's in, regardless. I wish I liked St.Louis as much as I liked New Orleans, so I guess the answer to the previous question is a qualified "yes."

Additionally, when I moved out here, I was bitter about attending a school that in my mind, was towards the bottom of the list of the schools to which I applied. Since, I've realized that I'm at a fantastic school and have come to appreciate the quality of the courses, faculty, and most of all, the students. But that initial bitterness became associated with the city itself.

It's also hard for me to look at the city and appreciate it on its own terms. Coming from Phoenix, Arizona, I can't help but note the spectacular lack of ethnic diversity (and the food culture which it brings), as well as the bitterly miserable winters. Phoenix is a boomtown, still on ascension. St.Louis has fallen a long way and is still struggling to cope with that trauma. I'm having a harder time finding what makes this city a great place to be.

In theory, I should like it a lot more- there's a lot of craft breweries, the meat and cheeses are great, and there's a lot of great old architecture with lots of potential. The people here are generally friendly, and there's some supposedly great local cultural ammenties. Movie theaters with bars and old leather couches for seats. The city museum. The bar and club scene. Downtown revitalization. A day-by-day struggle and attempt by the city to redefine itself which is really a fascinating and fantastic thing to be a part of.

And I've felt really disengaged from all of that. There's a Tado Ando designed museum here where he brought in Japanese concrete workers. There aren't that many US works by Ando. I havn't been there. Ditto for the contemporary art museums. Ditto for the downtown citygarden, hailed locally as a fantastic urban public intervention. Mom had to drag me up to the top of the arch.

I don't even really hate this city- it not like Tulsa or Memphis where my initial reaction was to get through it as quickly as possible with as little contact with the city as possible. It's just kind of there, like a dog you always pass in the street without bending down to pet it. I've never lived someplace where I've been so ambivalent.

Part of it may be that I don't want to get attached to it, as stupid as that sounds. I don't really know what I want to do architecturally anymore, so I can't really say with any reason that I don't want to work in St.Louis, but for me it feels like "if I'm working in St.Louis, I might as well be working in Phoenix."

And I'm sure that if I was born and raised in St.Louis and moved to Phoenix for school, my reaction would be completely the same, chastising Phoenix for its St.Louis deficiencies. It's also hard to find love for a city that I never see. My world revolves around studio and so my interactions with it are the spaces between. Walking through the St.Louis weather in mid-January. Trying to find a decent place to get some food after studio. Waiting for the bus. Pizza runs to Papa Johns. Grocery shopping and personal property taxes. The urban form out here in U city is pretty bland. This is my interface with the city, and with that in mind, it makes it an uphill battle as far as city appreciation is concerned.

Also mixed into this is my general moodiness and the lack of vitamin-D producing sunshine. I hate feeling so miserable and apathetic- nobody wants to hang around someone like that, least of all me, especially since I subscribe to the belief that people who are unhappy choose to be that way, and I don't want to think that I'm the type of person who chooses to be unhappy.

So I guess that really I can't wait for St.Louis to grow on me- too late for that. I have to make more of a concerted effort to appreciate things that are uniquely St.Louis, perhaps starting with the list of the five things that make me happy:

1. Family and close friends
2. Travel
3. Good food
4. Music
5. Making other people or creatures happy - (I guess this is where design comes in)

Hey, look at that, design and architecture didn't even directly make the list. There's a kind of satisfaction, a purposeful groove I get into when I'm designing, but its too complicated, too frustrating to call it happiness. 

And lets just leave it at that. I've been accused several times this semester of overthinking. And perhaps over-blogging falls into that category as well.

Dinner at Arnaud's

Yesterday was our last day in New Orleans, so a small group of us decided to find someplace nicer to eat. Not Commander's Palace kind of nice (not that we could get into CP friday night anyhow), but still a nice dinner. To make a long story short, our studio instructor wanted to meet and chat with a few students over cocktails and he recommended the bar in Arnaud's. Nice place, very old school, with white mosaic tile floors, and the waiters all wear white ties and tuxes. Cigars on display in old cabinets, cocktails with ingredients you've never heard of, and the service is exemplary. Anyway, we grabbed a a few sofas in the corner and ordered a round of sazeracs. 

A sazerac, for those who don't know, is a locally famous drink, of which New Orleans seems to have a limitless number. There's the hurricane, the hand grenade (an ever popular concoction seen all over Bourbon street in a grenade shaped container), but the sazerac seems to be an altogether more elegant drink, not typically served in a plastic cup for street consumption. It is a cocktail of rye whiskey, sugar, and bitters. It's not a big drink- it took up less than an inch of the very cold highball glass it was served in, with a razor-thin sliver of an orange.

I'm not a big whiskey drinker, but I figured "when in New Orleans", and its not like I was chugging this thing. Sazeracs are very strong drinks, and we pretty much sipped those suckers for about an hour. And by the time we were done, we were really feeling it. So we decided to transfer over to the zagat-rated restaurant. The waiters found a table for us in the jazz room, so the seven of us grabbed a long table towards the back of the room. Another round of drinks was called for - Tanqueray and tonic, an old favorite, for me. 

The jazz was great- they were far enough away that we could converse normally, but still contributed to the overall feel of the place. I ordered the crabmeat Karen, which is crab and mushrooms stuffed into puff pastry which is crab-shaped. It was quite good. What stole the evening was the bananas foster, which they prepared tableside. I was dying as I watched our waiter fry up the bananas in the brown sugar and rum in the butter, and then the whole thing flambe'd and served over vanilla ice cream. It was unbelievable. I can't make up my mind if it was better than the ethereal, sublime cafe du monde beignets. 

All in all, it was a great culinary capstone for the trip. 

NOLA

It's wednesday night in NOLA (New Orleans LA), and I'm sipping a hurricane from a plastic cup. New Orleans is one of the places in the country where you can walk around with booze as long as its not in a glass container, and bars stay open pretty much as long as they want to. This particular hurricane came from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, one of the oldest buildings in the French Quarter, although I have difficulty believing that the bar was founded by the pirate Jean Lafitte. However, I have come to appreciate the role myth plays in architecture. After all, it is entirely possible that he did found it. Anyway, at this bar, we got into a discussion with two gentlemen who told us that this was in fact the case, and furthermore, that this was the best place to get a Hurricane in the Vieux Carre, and specifically, that one should always drink it through the straw with the least mixing possible. Of course, one of them was a tour guide, and the other was a horse and buggy driver. 

The vieux carre is terrible driving. Every other street is one way, and often streets are blocked off. Which is why, one night coming back from a day of touring, I found myself going the wrong way down a narrow one way street. And of course, with our professor's warning about getting arrested in New Orleans (not advised. They put everyone they arrest in one large room together) we of course are doing this creative driving right in front of a cop. Amazingly, he doesn't follow us or pull us over. We probably just looked like the stupid lost tourists we were. 

The night we got into town, we walked to Cafe duMonde a few blocks away. We split a bunch of beignies and just about died. To call them doughnuts would be profane. Sweet, chewy, flakey, fluffy, warm, and coated with powered sugar, so we all end up with these crazy white powder grins like we're coke fiends. 

We wandered around cemetery one, just north of the vieux carre, and all the elevated mausoleums. What does the XXX signify on the walls of the voodoo priestesses? 

Monday night red beans and rice for dinner one night, take out from the counter at the back of a vieux carre 24 hour corner convenience store. Cheapest meal I've had here, including breakfasts.

Jumbalaya Supreme at Coops, including crawfish, smoked ham, shimp, and sausage. Served with a cold local beer. Wow. Spicy. Delicious. 

We did do one night on Bourbon street. Fascinating street, I don't need to do it again anytime soon. A bit of Vegas on a small scale. I was reminded of the hedonistic town for the boys in the Disney movie Pinnochio. We went to a bar called "The Beach" where there was a rodeo whale ride behind the stage, a fat, annoying dude with a mic wandering around trying to boost booze sales, and $5 bottles of bud light. Bit of dancing. Didn't stay too long.

The hotel is cute, two floors, two courtyards. There's four of us to a room, sharing two queen sized canopy beds. Hotel Provincial. Great location, valet parking, a few blocks from Jackson square. 

Tonight I walked to canal street in the rain, and kept walking looking for a bus shelter from which I could catch the St.Charles st streetcar line. Until I realized that they were marked by small narrow signs on a few poles. The street cars are great. Old clanking bits of metal and wood. Reminds me of the street cars of Lapa in Rio. Wood seats, light bulbs. But so slow. I could probably walk faster than these cars. Oh well, just part of the way of life of the big easy. A massive woman in silver paint, a professional human statue, advised me where to get off to meet Ayumi and Tim, Saori's sister and brother-in-law, for dinner. They took me to eat some good Lebanese food, and then were kind enough to drive me back to my hotel. 

First day, we stopped by a po'boy restaurant. Good stuff. Expensive. Tell me, why does a Poor Boy cost $9? Is it because that's what you are after you buy them. The fried shrimp were dancing out of that po'boy though.

Lectures and discussions by a parade of notable luminaries where the fields of architecture, urbanism, politics, sociology, economics, geological/hydrological history, landscape, and drainage intersect. Where it is crucial to distinguish the difference between hydrology and hydrography. More than a few have offered to buy our acrylic model of the topography of the city of New Orleans. We'd be idiots to sell it.

Pumps. Lots of pumps. Tours of the pumps that keep the city of New Orleans from drowning in rainwater, groundwater, and storm surges. Pumps that are mysterious and silent, pumps that can cripple the city if they fail. 

At New Orleans University, we were threatened with arrest if we didn't climb down from the floodwall by the old lighthouse.  

St.Louis is Standing By

Yesterday, Washington University took the unprecedented step of closing the school due to inclement weather. This is something that hasn't happened in 15 years, so this is a fairly significant indication of what the school is expecting. They closed the campus at 3pm yesterday to allow us to get home and avoid rush hour (it was also beginning to have freezing rain), board up the windows, stockpile bread, whatever. The weather media was also blowing this way big, using words like "disaster," "historic," "cataclysmic," and so on. So far what has materialized is about a quarter inch of ice on everything and a few inches of snow. That's it. I came in to school today to get some work done and I took the city buses, which are running with few exceptions. This morning the winter storm warning was cancelled and replace with a blizzard warning. It is getting colder, but not break-out-the-old-brandy-we're-going-to-die kind of cold.

Of course, the gods of irony are going to make sure now that my frozen corpse is discovered like that of the poor squirrel, frozen solid, leaning into the wind with its paws covering its face.

On a lighter note, I'm going to New Orleans sunday. I'm still a little concerned about the road conditions getting out of town, and I'm hoping that the major interstates will be clear by the time we leave sunday morning. It's going to be an epic trip. We've got two cars (one of them is mine) and 7 drivers/passengers between us. It's about an 11 hour drive down, so we'll definitely be sharing driving responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the trip, actually. Down south, following the course of the Mississippi river to its delta, traveling through some of the poorest areas of the United States.