The Best Part of the Semester

Yesterday, we went to the university theater to hear the option studio presentations. As a quick reminder, the way the graduate architecture program is set up, there is a series of core studios which are taken sequentially until you have four semesters left in the program. Then, you have three semesters of studios where you are mixed with everyone else in your year and up to three semesters ahead of you, where you vote on which studio you want to take. Since whatever studio you end up with takes 90% of your time in the semester, it's a pretty intense time. There is a stampede to find out the studios being offered when the Dean's Letter comes out the day before, there is a stampede to find out what studio you're in when they post the rankings the day after the presentations.

So, we watched the presentations. There were only eight studios this down, down from 13 last year. I guess they didn't like hearing from people who got their eighth choice from the top. Actually, its because there's a big group in BsAs and Seoul this semester.

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So I found out today what studio I'm in: I got my first pick, a shanghai studio lead by John Hoal, who has taught a very similar studio before. The studio looks at high density SE asian urbanism, with the project of a high rise on the river in Shanghai. There is a trip as part of the studio, probably run me about $1500 after airfare, lodging, and food for a week. We'll find out more tomorrow when we have our first class meeting.

Thursdays are busy days. I started with advanced building systems at 8:30AM (yes, the one in the morning). Then I realized I'd forgotten the jump drive I needed for my bookmaking class, so I had to bike back home and pick it up. Biked back to school and barely had time to print it out before biking back out the library for our class at 11:30 After bookmaking, I went back to the architecture building and hung out until I had to leave for my urban issues class at 4. I had a lot of time, so I decided to take public transportation to get to the classroom where it was held at SLU.

I looked up the directions on Google, and boarded the metro. Realized that I wasn't going to be able to disembark as the station I wanted was closed, so I rode all the way to grand central station and had to take a bus back up. Wandered around the grounds of SLU for awhile before I met up with the rest of the class in the SLU school of social work. This class I'm taking, urban issues, is not the typical seminar.

First, the class is made up of five different disciplines from two schools. Architecture, Urban planning, MBAs, Law, and Social work from Wash U and Saint Louis University. Taught by five professors representing the five fields. The object of the course is to form teams to respond to social oriented RFPs in the St.Louis community, like master planning impovershed neighborhoods, remodeling buildings into community assets, and designing prototypical housing and developing recovery plans for natural disasters. Should be an interesting class. Took the bus back home.

At 9pm, we met back at studio to pick desks. Dew and Chuck will be in my studio, which is cool since I know them really well. There's only two girls out of 11 in our studio, and apparently there's a studio with all girls and only one guy. People were joking we need to have a mixer.

I don't know why we always meet so late. Is it because some students have classes until 9? And there's no good time thursday morning where people don't have classes? I don't really get it, and I'm a freaking vice president in the freaking GAC that organizes it. I think there's a definite division within the GAC of people who deal strictly with student functions, and those who also work for the administration. I'd say we're mere puppets for other puppets but then it would suggest at the end there's someone holding the strings.

There is something surreal and unsettling about not having studio yet. We're all slightly drunk with anticipation which is half fear and half exultation. Even without studios, without professors or desks, the vast majority of students congregate, pulse through the halls of Givens, reading new architecture books in the library, flip through pendaflex folders we've already checked numerous times. We're tracing our steps, like a dancer nervously traipsing across the empty stage before the first practice of the season. It's our own seductive dream, a prelude to the organized fantasy that is architecture school. Studying architecture in school is a fantastic game, like an incredibly immersion and addictive online game combined with the joy of art, design, and creation, and its everywhere, everywhere you look is architecture, you cannot help but be surrounded by it. There's not really a comparable profession: it's like a botanical genetic engineer is set loose in a rainforest, an athlete in a perpetual Olympics, a writer in an endless library. It's all architecture, all ripe for theft, subtle variation, criticism, homage, analysis, disgust, and delight.