Wheel of Classes

Studio selection day begins around noon, when the booklets containing the course descriptions of *most* of the classes offered during the semester are published, but more importantly, it contains the descriptions of the studios offered that semester. Why the studio options come out immediately before students have to choose is beyond me, but the only explanation I can come up with is that the school is so unorganized that they really only know what the final studios are going to be when the damn thing goes to print that day.

Anyway, you have an hour or two to peruse the listings and descriptions of the studios before the presentations. Mercifully, this semester the studio presentations were limited to a two hour window. Each studio professor gets up before the student body and pitches the studio, aided with powerpoint.

Afterwards, you are given 30 minutes to rank all 11 studios in your order of preference, and then you turn it in to a box.

The studios, quickly, were:

• A cancer recovery center, small scale, but on the topic of life and death and experience. Taught by a visiting professor from the firm Snohetta. 
• A studio proposing infrastructure/architectural responses to Jefferson parish of New Orleans, especially in regards to flooding, water, infrastructure, urbanism, and wetlands.
• Another SE Louisiana studio with a landscape focus on the area around the port. 
• A montessouri school, with connections to an art program, and famous educational architect Herman Hertzberger.
• An adaptive reuse of an monumental Masonic Temple in grand center of downtown St.louis
• A redevelopment of the Uffizi square in Florence, Italy with a city museum.
• A redevelopment of the Monte Carlo waterfront in Monaco, through the lens of Archigram and with the assistance of Denis Compton.
• A digital fabrication studio taught by some famous architect about something related to swarms, scales, biomimicry, but basically making big, swoopy forms that are on the cutting edge of how difficult it is to actually fabricate.
• A small medical office building in suburban st.Louis. Really. 
• An evaluation of Los Angeles, an urban studio, as to what it could be.
• A re-evauation of the parking garage typology.

My top three choices were the cancer center, the Florence center, and the St.Louis adaptive re-use. I got my second choice, the one about Florence.

This studio is taught by the same professor I had for Urban Books, and actually features a book as part of the design process. So it's going to be a lot of books this semester. I really like the professor, a Brazilian who is currently involved in research on Lina Bo Bardi. The only thing is that the studio seems very amorphous and undefined at this point, which I think was a bit of a disincentive. However, the studio will make a trip to Florence during spring break, so I need to decide if I want to money it up and go. I really want to. Florence was one of those cities where I passed through very quickly and regretted not spending more time there.

Saori got the montessori school, which was her second choice. She's in her 6-9pm structures class right now, a class I am very very happy to have been done with a few semesters ago.