The Phoenix Sky Train Because We Were Too Stupid to Get it Right the First Time

Today was a reasonably productive day.
I got an email back from TB with the contact info I'd been waiting for. She must have just given birth, so that's crazy. I'd already outlined cover letters for them, so it was a matter of modifiying it for the recipient and sending it off. Crossing my fingers on these two offices. And HdM.

Aside- I hope that someday if/when I have my own firm and I'm a Reasonably Famous Person, I would be as nice to my staff (although pay them a little better). Her past few emails to me, a former intern, have begun with apologies for returning my emails so late.

I also printed off some application materials for Barkow in Berlin. Trying to figure out why that name was so familiar, flipping through past emails I realized I heard him speak at Wash U in the lecture series. He was showcasing a building with a flow-y digital fabrication concrete facade.

I also made up a flier for my Revit tutorial services, and I got to make my own contact information in QR code format. Check it out:

Will the wonders of the modern world never cease?

Anyway, I caught a bus to ASU and wandered through the halls putting a few fliers up in high traffic areas. Or at least the areas I remember highly trafficking.

It's been ten years since I started doing architecture. Over ten years. And it began in the two ugliest buildings on campus, architecture north and south.  I did run into someone I knew, a professor who taught a class ostensibly about unleashing creativity, but was actually more like life coaching sessions. We took the Meyers-Briggs test, did guided meditation exercises, learned more about ourselves (not all good discoveries), identified our values, and ultimately wrote mission statements based on those values.

These were not mission statements like "I am dedicated to the Quality pursuit of Excellence" but actually more like paragraphs to act as a compass in what we are attempting to do, valid for a five year span. Mine expired, although I do feel like I have clear idea of what I am supposed to be doing, obviously different now than when I took the class upwards of seven years ago. Anyway, I thanked him for the class because at the time, it was one of the best courses I'd taken in school. I remember one day after class we were handing in some assignment, he commented on my full name- "That's a really good name! You need to take good care of it!" I assured him I was doing my utmost.

Anyway, after ASU, I walked over to Mill, which of course is constantly changing. It's hard to get a feel for the direction- it feels like the average storefront lifespan on Mill is about six months. I was surprised that Urban Outfitters was still there, and the pizza restaurant we all went to for fourth of July. A sad omission was the shuttered E-joy cafe, which apparently had had new owners. It was the late night go-to for iced coffee drinks during studio. In general, Mill is still the same combination of boutiques, bars for boobs, bars for cheap beers, bars for good beers, livehouses, and fast food: it's just become a lot more polished as the years have gone by.

I stopped at a bar called C.A.S.A. which was an upscale bar with a "foodier" menu, which meant the bar fries were fried in duck fat, where I downed a glass or two of Four Peaks' Arizona Peach Ale. In general, I'm not a huge fan of flavored beers, but the peachiness is very light, the ale is pale, and the combination is fantastic on a sunny, warm afternoon.

I stumbled to the light rail station and caught that to the downtown. On the way, I took a detour to check out the new airport sky train. Arizona is staggeringly stupid in the way things get done. For example, if Arizona wanted to dig a hole, they would give the digger the handle, and wait and see how the hole-digging goes before they would waste money on the shovel-head.

A reasonable city would have said, let's take the light rail through the airport so that when someone gets off the plane, they can take the light rail straight to the entertainment, education, and business districts which the light rail was apparently created to serve. Instead, the city governments decided to run the light rail past the airport and create an entirely new rail line to connect the light rail to the airport. It took years and years to create the new line. In the meanwhile, the transit authority made the sensible decision to run large shuttle busses out to the light rail stop. This was actually a pretty workable solution. You never had to wait long for a bus, and the busses stopped at each terminal.

Now the sky train is open, but it only goes to terminal 4. I happen to know for a fact that the sky train was intended and may someday connect all the terminals. For now though, I hope that they maintained the bus shuttles. If not, once you get in terminal 4, you have to schlep your luggage across the terminal, downstairs, and back outside on a lower level to wait for a shuttle bus to take you to your terminal. Once you have already taken the sky train. And don't even ask about Mesa changing it's mind about having the light rail extended in a straight line the extra mile to the center of it's main city center, I can't even tell you.

So what's the experience like? It's easy, it's free, it's got that 'taste of water' architecture which is indistinguishable from any major international airport. The obligatory walls of glass at least provide ample views of the airport and mountains and downtown, which is a happy accident. 

Anyway, in downtown, after poking through the dia de los muertos events being set up, I realized I've seen about all I want to see really, and I didn't want to hang around and wait for the mariachis for two hours. So I took a bus back to mom's house.