projects

What a long last couple of days! I got about six hour of sleep between two days. Yesterday, I worked from 8am to 6am, came home, slept for two and a half hours, showered, and came back to school. I actually went the entire day without eating. 

We had our first review of three for the semester- this one about the urban gestures of the project in the context of programming and site. For the ton of work I put in, I didn't get much to put on my boards. My printing costs were probably under $40, which was a steal for a pin-up review. I also had a huge site model at 1:1000 scale. 

We're working in the metric scale, which is surprisingly/unsurprisingly easy to use. I was always kind of worried about working overseas because pretty much the US is the only country that still uses feet and inches. It made a lot of sense back in the days when you didn't have anything to measure anything with, and you're building barns with your bare hands. (a foot divides cleanly in half to 6" which divides in half to 3," an inch divides in half to a 1/2, then a 1/4, then 1/8, ad nauseum). There's a certain kind of clean logic about the halving of things, but I think I like metric better. At any rate, you can intuitively grasp relationships of scale a lot more easily since the basic unit the same. For example, when you're trying to relate to the area of a square mile, its tough, because its some very large odd number and nobody thinks in terms of square yards. Acres are the closest approximation, with one square mile equal to 640 acres. 640? Really? With metric, someone says a square kilometer, and you think, ah, that's 100 hectares, or the area of a square with a 1000 meter sides. 

It's also kind of fun because it makes you defamiliarize yourself with personal standards of measurement- for example, architects who look at drawings understand the scale intuitively because we know how big a standard door is (typically 3' wide, 7' tall). Now, I have to go back and associate the scale of the door with the measurement of 2 meters tall, for example, and to try to conceive of spaces in terms of their metric sizes.

Let's face it, it's not riveting stuff (I'm getting bored writing about it!) so I can see why it was a tough sell to get Americans excited around metric in the 70s and 80s. 

Anyway, we had our review today.

Low key affair,  Johnathan S (who was a graduate student less than 8 weeks ago) and Pablo were on our review in the first half, then I got Derek H and Seng, a new faculty member who is teaching a course about Japanese modern architecture. Got good comments from both of them.

My project this semester is on a huge area of prime real estate in the north Bund in Shanghai. Over 6 hectares (which is .06 square kilometers, 600,000 square meters. etc. etc.) It sits on the Wuzhou creek, and borders everything from traditional low lilong housing, midrise colonial, and high rise contemporary buildings. My project is mostly housing, with a mix of offices, retail, and dining.  After reading about a massive overcrowding in Chinese pools, I added three olympic sizes swimming pools and a massive lazy river about 20 meters wide by a 500 meters long. That's a long way, that's half a kilometer. That made the reviewers really sit up and take notice.

Got some good feedback, and I might remember some of it. I'm so out of it today from the sleep deprivation.

After review, one beer at happy hour, and then I went over to a friend's for a steak dinner and we all watched Tekkonkinkreet. Good stuff.

The biggest news of the day is actually my mother's news: she passed the Arizona bar exam, the culmination of years of hard work and dedication. It's a tremendous achievement, and I'm really proud of her.