Show me the Moneo

Monday night, I went to the jam-packed lecture by the world renowned architect Raphael Moneo, where there were so many people crammed into the hall, they sat in the aisles and had to be cleared away from sitting in front of the doors. I was underwhelmed by the lecture at first- Moneo at his age has a weak voice and a heavy accent, not improved by our stellar sound system. It was an odd selection of works he presented, three laboratory science buildings recently completed in three Ivy League schools. I gradually got into the lecture, less taken by the architecture of the work as much as I was by the enthusiasm and passion Moneo brought to it. It was also personally interesting to me in that I'd spent two years working on a similarly programed building. Student's reactions were underwhelmed and the aisles gradually cleared before the two hour lecture ended.

Last friday, we had our first real review for studio. How does one rate critiques? Was it instructive? Perhaps. Was it fun? By absolutely no means. There are a few teachers in this school who seem to have a certain view of architecture that is so meticulous and distilled that there is no room for personal enjoyment. It is architecture of space shuttle construction, without the space shuttle. It is an understandable reaction for a compromised and weak profession which has nearly given everything away to consultants and contractors, but this more often than not comes across as bitterness which leads to the piss-on-everything attitude I find so frustrating and deadening.
For this review, I created ten scale models of various edge conditions of water meeting land in New Orleans (natural bayou, Mississippi river pier, drainage canals, underground culverts, etc) with the intent of then taking these pieces and somehow with their juxtapositions, create a new language for how water meets land. New Orleans, for those who have never considered it, is a city in a delta between a lake and a major river, and yet there is more richness in the relationship between urban context and water in downtown San Antonio, Texas. At any rate, I ended up with just the pieces and not the wider idea, so we were justifiably criticized for having a "conceptual" model that was less conceptual than our abstracted "literal" model.
I was commended for the physical models I made. The most praise I got out of that review was for the level of craft. I bought a douglass fir 4x4 post and sliced it up and sawed it up in the band saw to create the various "natural" or pervious landscape. It was then sanded to perfection. The hard, impervious parts of the sections I cast out of Rockite, which is a kind of anchoring cement, in formwork made of styrene. These bits and pieces were played with by all the reviewers during our presentation. If you want to engage the reviewers, make toylike models.

A note about casting- In my undergraduate at ASU, in our first semester of studio, we were introduced to pourstone, another brand of anchoring cement, which I practiced into a skill mostly using foamcore formwork. Creating a mold out of styrene requires lots of patience, craft with the cutting and welding of the styrene, and a ton of toxic weld-on, which chemically melts the styrene, is cancer causing, and does lots of other nasty stuff. The formwork was easier with the foamcore, but the product far inferior- if you want beautiful cast concrete architectural models, you have to go with the styrene-rockite method. I tested both for this project. The generic anchoring cement came out looking like a rusty steel plate. The rockite came out looking like polished granite. Absolutely beautiful and crisp. 


Saturday night, Chuck and I took the bus to a themed party at a friend's apartment. People in my studio have a hard time understanding why I take the bus when I have a perfectly good car and a parking permit. Anyway, the theme of the party was the twentieth century. Come as any decade, kind of thing. The vast majority of guys, myself included, went with the 30s-60's professional male. White shirt, black pants, narrow dark tie, fedora, and optional suspenders. Fun. There are still Chinese students who come up to me and tell me that they've heard I've lived in China, and I flash my rusty "I speak a little chinese" back for their amusement.

I was dismayed to learn so late that the study abroad programs here are free. There is the regular tuition, and whatever it costs to get there plus living expenses. Early my first semester, I attended a lecture by the study abroad program coordinator who never made this clear. The massive numbers thrown up on the screen for the program cost were inclusive of tuition that we were already going to have to pay. If I had known this, I would actually considered more strongly going to Helsinki. It would leave me a little bitter if there were any bitterness left.

Got a fun book in the mail today: Kitch: an Anthology of Bad Taste which happily enough is for school. My final paper for the AA class concerns populism and architecture and so it seemed an appropriate source material. Should architecture submit to the public's taste or challenge it and make taste?