The Presentation

I presented well. Saori said this was the best presentation she'd ever seen me give. I didn't stutter, I didn't stop and repeat the same words or have to re-begin sentences. I kept the line of the narrative arc straight, and to the point. I stayed calm, interested in what I was presenting, but not over-passionate.

Except for one moment when some of the ideas behind the concept were challenged when I unleashed the fiery rhetoric in a short but passionate exhortation. "We're already tinkering with these systems- with global warming there can no longer even said to be purely natural processes anymore. It is time to bring our design to an expanded field of architecture" and so on. After I unloaded that, I thought I'd gone too far, but I talked to people afterwards who said it was impressive and demonstrative of my passion.

The critics gave me a wide range of feedback. They were impressed with the level of depth and research I'd undertaken. They thought my single conduit drawing of the water system was amazing. They liked my renderings. They weren't sold on the experiential qualities of the space I was creating. If I was trying to make something that feeds back to the people the quality of the river which has biological implications, then it was too subtle with the rise and fall of the arcs.

I got a lot of push back in particular from one critic who proposed that I vaporize the river to be inhaled by visitors to the site. To that, another critic added, "And nobody would come." To a certain extent I do agree, the project needs to strike a balance between the tension (a big buzzword of my review) of the dangers the river poses, or at least the connection of the river to the person, and the need to make this place an attractor. At one end of the spectrum, I could create an amusement park pier with a few placards of information. At the other end, I could create a device that grabs random passers by and drags them through the river to emphasize the point that you are connected to the river whether you like it or not.

At the end of the review, my instructor praised my work over the past year, saying that to pursue a project without really knowing what the outcome would be required a lot of courage. He also said that I was crazy and privately afterwards, told me that he was happy I was moving on. It's not that he's glad to be rid of me, but the kind of project and area of the work I was doing is relatively uncharted and very difficult to critique because it is straddling newer places in architecture. It's easy to critique a library because you can immediately compare it to every other library you've ever seen and you know basically what the point is, and there's a lot of precedent for how it can act to carry out it functions.

So the review came very quickly to an end- I think it might have actually lasted longer than the 30 minutes, but it flew by for me.

The critic who wanted to vaporize the river for inhalation came up to me afterwards and gave me his card- it turns out that he's also very interested and passionate about the same kind of water infrastructure systems and he wanted to collaborate on some work for a publication. He runs a pretty well known firm in Chicago. So that felt pretty good. I'm going to get in contact with him and see what he has in mind.

I was so happy. To be done, to have finished with a project I felt was really good, to have finished with a strong verbal presentation and defense. No euphoria, no tears of joy or release as I saw at the end of some other presentations, but a kind of satisfaction of summation. It is a high, but not a dancing off the walls high. And then I went in to watch the next presentation.