Anyway,
Studio- this semester, I'm taking a more "urban" studio, which is to say its taught by the chair of the urban program, a South African. He's really big on Asian cities, which is the focus of the semester. The site is a large area of the riverfront in Shanghai, on the same side as the Bund across from Pudong. We're trying to get a trip over there organized, although people in the studio keep flaking out. It's expensive (we have to pay for the trip ourselves) and we're planning on going for a week, which is a LONG TIME in graduate school. I really really really want to go. Actually, I'm debating going anyway regardless and try to find someone that someone knows shanghai really well to show me around once I get there. We started the studio quite intimately. We recorded in minute detail two days of our lives. What we were doing, how we felt, where we were, phenomenological aspects, scalar aspects, social aspects, etc. etc, and from there, analysis, an attempt to establish what it is that organizes our lives, and digging into the qualitative aspects of what makes us enjoy the things we really enjoy. Then making what I'd call a phenomenological model of our "life space" and finally aggregating it 500 times to create a city of me. So its been a bit of a challenge, but what else is new?
Advanced Building Systems- this course attempts to tie together structural and building systems, looking at the architectural potential of how the systems can interrelate. I'm in a group of five, and our group basically takes an existing building and tears it apart to understand the systems and to evaluate how well it works. Our buildings: two SOM skyscrapers; the Burj Khalifa and some new tower in Shenzhen, with integrated wind turbines which supposedly make it "net zero". At any rate, I've always wanted to know how the Burj works so that's been kind of fun.
Urban Books- softie course. Combined with the art school here, we learn the basics of making books, the content of which is supposed to be reflective of our understanding of St.Louis. Kind of urban design 101 combined with bookmaking. Kind of fun, useful for later when I'll have to make a book for Design Thinking (precurser to the degree project), and I like crafting stuff anyway.
Urban Issues- (are you seeing a pattern here?) This one is also kind of a strange class- this is a combined class of Architecture, Urban planning, Law, Business, and Social work students from St.Louis University and Wash U. We make teams and work for a local community group.
Anyway, it seems like its going to be a relatively light semester, although studio is getting interesting and quickly very complicated and intense. Urban issues could also be heavy, depending on how things go. Not too worried about the other classes.
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