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.