Review

Today is Tuesday, May 17. By the time you read this, I will already be dead. Seven days ago, we had our final review for studio. Architecture studio review is the classic tradition stretching back at least half a century (but where did it start?) whereby at the end of the term, students present their work in a representational manner with models, animations, drawings, renderings, in addition to an oral presentation to a jury, typically made up of architectural professionals.


Hours of sleep friday: 6
Hours of sleep saturday: 4
Hours of sleep sunday: 0
Hours of sleep monday: 4

Size of my final boards: 11'4" x 7'
Cost of printing: $200
Cost of prints that printed wrong that I couldn't get a refund for: $60.

Critics on my review: 6



I guess I've never really thought about why we do it this way. In the "real world" professionals present their work to people who are not architects, and at any rate, the intent is to "sell" the product of architecture, so the review isn't that. The alternative, that the review is about the critique of the students technique and theory, strikes closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really make sense when you consider that the review is the last thing you do for studio. There might be a good exchange of ideas in a presentation, directions the student might take the project, aspects unconsidered, tweaks and variations to explore.... but that time is not built-in. It's not part of the architecture school culture.


One of the critics for our studio was a landscape architect who early on in the day started talking about her "fantasy two weeks," amending it to professional fantasy two weeks after a humorously awkward pause. She was talking about a two week period after a review where a student might actually keep working on the project based on the feedback. What struck me was, why don't we do it? Do we need the time to develop the project up to the final review? Was there once an underlying idea that students would actually go back and revise their work? As a student, I can safely say that the vast majority of architecture students mentally checked out the moment they sat back down in their chairs, and that what was actually discussed in the review gets dissolved in a hazy mist of exhaustion mingled with two week fantasies of drinking, relaxing, and sleep. Which is why I have people take notes for me when I get critiqued.


It gets tricky though- suppose your entire project is suspect, or the underlying assumptions you have built the architecture on are invalid. One of our classmates was told that his project would kill many people as well as cause the destruction of the the greater part of New Orleans. I think this might have been stretching it, but suppose it were true. What is he going to do for those two weeks? There's also the issue of fallibility. Who's to say the critics are right? So much of what we do is subjective and dependent on unspoken convention and theory.


I guess review is about clarifying your own thinking- it pushes you to confront, understand, simplify, and synthesize your own thoughts about design and architecture, which is really the point of studio. Any studio. The projects don't really mean anything. Peter Cook said it best- words like Urbanism are just words to get the ideas behind them to move.


It's always interesting to hear the way students describe their reviews, especially given the ambiguity about their purpose. What exactly is makes a "good" review then? Or a "bad" one? In the context I just described, a bad review would be one where the critics do nothing but rave about how good the project is, and a good review would be one where the project is ripped apart to its most basic level and all its ideas exposed and challenged.


As a student, it gets emotional. The relationship between your project and you is tense- at the end of the semester, you hate your own project. Its an idiot thing, terrible, ugly, stupid, boring, and trite. Why did you even think it would work? You must be a terrible designer. But its too late to start over and there's too little time to tweak it into something good or interesting. You work on it numbly, filled with a mute loathing and dream of just finishing so you can sleep. But its also your baby. It's your work, your blood on the model, and its your tired eyes staring back at you from the beautiful six hour rendering. So you hate it, but its your work and emotional and drained and exhausted, it is too easy to conflate your project with yourself and get defensive about it in a review. Every time, I have to remind myself that its not about getting the reviewers to like me or my project. I have to tell myself this all the time.