May is nearly upon us, and there is so much work to get done, it's frankly terrifying.
So I took a deep breath, sat down, and calmly made a list of things to do.
Terror gives way to stark panic. This is because my to do list includes items such as "Move to Shanghai," to say nothing of my final exam for structures, final theoretical paper, and final presentation on post-modernity falling on the same day next week.
Apr 19, 2011
Apr 17, 2011
Night out
Friday night, after the architecture happy hour, Chuck drove us to Seki, a Japanese restaurant on the Loop. He was treating me to dinner in gratitude for helping get his driver's licence in the US. As a Chinese student who may only be here for a few years, even if he doesn't end up buying a car, there are huge advantages to having a driver's licence. On the one hand, he can now go to bars without having to worry about losing his passport, since he can just show his driver's license. Also, now he can drive other people's cars, or rent a car, which will give him a lot more mobility. It's actually to my advantage as well, as he's living pretty close by and I need to go to a doctor or a hospital or something, that he could drive me.
When I got licenced in Arizona, I literally drove around the block, making only right-hand turns, and then had to make a three-point turn marked by traffic cones. The guy giving me the test was a ADOT employee with a name badge. I passed handily. Arizona is pretty easy on that kind of stuff.
Not so much here in Missouri, apparently. Chuck failed his first two driving tests. The first one, he didn't physically turn around to back up, and the second one he was driving too slowly. All systems: go on the third, however. Apparently, this test is a lot more stringent. They ask you how to turn on the defoggers, the parking brakes, etc. even before you leave the lot. They were making several left hand turns in the middle of the lane in confusing traffic situations. I'm really glad I don't have to retest here, frankly.
Anyway, that was friday night, and after dinner I just watched Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles which has a few good moments, but was probably best experienced in the early 70's, when farting on screen and using phrases like "up yours, nigger," was revolutionary and boundary-breaking.
Saturday, back in studio, was a miserable day out, so a great day to stay inside and work. I worked on studio stuff from about 9-8, before a Freda, a friend of mine from studio, reminded me about the schoolwide end of year graduate student event. I never really pay attention to the emails that were sent out, but free beer and BBQ is a deal, especially for someone still on campus. Apparently Wash U is about half graduate students, which I hadn't realized, of course, only a tiny fraction showed up for the event. So I got there just as it opened, and it was like high school prom all over again. People standing around awkwardly. Name tags. Streamers and balloons and a few token decorations. (This year's theme was "Hip Hop Hoedown". Think bling and haybales.) Just what I get for being exactly on time. We got three drink tickets, good for cheap wine or bud light. I grabbed a beer and moseyed on over to the BBQ room. After eating, I was going to walk to the metrolink to catch a ride to Anita's birthday drinks at the speakeasy, but I was waylaid by a group of friends who convinced me to stay and chat and drink some more.
I eventually caught a ride with them to the Speakeasy in downtown. It's kind of a fun concept- An old office building lobby, renovated in art deco style, but you don't enter that way. You have to go around to the back alley, and ring the doorbell for admittance. There's a password (this weekend's was "Daddy") (it was on their website, plus the suggestion that you "whisper the password to the doorman"), which gives you reduced cover. $3 instead of $5. The bar is downstairs, below the elegant and empty lobby. Really cool bar actually. Much older crowd, and not nearly enough dancing for our nightlife chaperones. I drained the gin and tonic I'd ordered (toyed with the idea of ordering a gin fizz, given the surroundings), and hit the road again, this time heading for the more trendy neighborhood of central west end.
The Mandarin was a dance club and it was hopping. It exuded trendiness. Red walls, minimalist accentuated with Asian decor, dramatic lighting, throbbing beats, and roped off areas. I paid the $5 cover and passed on a drink at this place. It's kind of funny, actually. When 4e opened in Scottsdale, Chase and I both had to drop a $20 just to get in the door. I guess its another way of saying that St.Louis is not Scottsdale.
Anyway, the floor was packed, everyone was getting down, and I had a lot of fun dancing. Met up with some other familiar faces from my studio who hit the club circuit pretty hard, so that was fun too. The only crappy part was the fact that Mandarin closes at 1:15, and they don't segue you out. They flipped on all the lights, and made repeated announcements to basically pay your tab and get the hell out. By the time we'd all regrouped outside the club, it was nearly two and a group of us, including the heavily inebriated birthday girl, were showing signs of club fatigue, so we decided to call it a night.
Makes me want to get out more.
When I got licenced in Arizona, I literally drove around the block, making only right-hand turns, and then had to make a three-point turn marked by traffic cones. The guy giving me the test was a ADOT employee with a name badge. I passed handily. Arizona is pretty easy on that kind of stuff.
Not so much here in Missouri, apparently. Chuck failed his first two driving tests. The first one, he didn't physically turn around to back up, and the second one he was driving too slowly. All systems: go on the third, however. Apparently, this test is a lot more stringent. They ask you how to turn on the defoggers, the parking brakes, etc. even before you leave the lot. They were making several left hand turns in the middle of the lane in confusing traffic situations. I'm really glad I don't have to retest here, frankly.
Anyway, that was friday night, and after dinner I just watched Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles which has a few good moments, but was probably best experienced in the early 70's, when farting on screen and using phrases like "up yours, nigger," was revolutionary and boundary-breaking.
Saturday, back in studio, was a miserable day out, so a great day to stay inside and work. I worked on studio stuff from about 9-8, before a Freda, a friend of mine from studio, reminded me about the schoolwide end of year graduate student event. I never really pay attention to the emails that were sent out, but free beer and BBQ is a deal, especially for someone still on campus. Apparently Wash U is about half graduate students, which I hadn't realized, of course, only a tiny fraction showed up for the event. So I got there just as it opened, and it was like high school prom all over again. People standing around awkwardly. Name tags. Streamers and balloons and a few token decorations. (This year's theme was "Hip Hop Hoedown". Think bling and haybales.) Just what I get for being exactly on time. We got three drink tickets, good for cheap wine or bud light. I grabbed a beer and moseyed on over to the BBQ room. After eating, I was going to walk to the metrolink to catch a ride to Anita's birthday drinks at the speakeasy, but I was waylaid by a group of friends who convinced me to stay and chat and drink some more.
I eventually caught a ride with them to the Speakeasy in downtown. It's kind of a fun concept- An old office building lobby, renovated in art deco style, but you don't enter that way. You have to go around to the back alley, and ring the doorbell for admittance. There's a password (this weekend's was "Daddy") (it was on their website, plus the suggestion that you "whisper the password to the doorman"), which gives you reduced cover. $3 instead of $5. The bar is downstairs, below the elegant and empty lobby. Really cool bar actually. Much older crowd, and not nearly enough dancing for our nightlife chaperones. I drained the gin and tonic I'd ordered (toyed with the idea of ordering a gin fizz, given the surroundings), and hit the road again, this time heading for the more trendy neighborhood of central west end.
The Mandarin was a dance club and it was hopping. It exuded trendiness. Red walls, minimalist accentuated with Asian decor, dramatic lighting, throbbing beats, and roped off areas. I paid the $5 cover and passed on a drink at this place. It's kind of funny, actually. When 4e opened in Scottsdale, Chase and I both had to drop a $20 just to get in the door. I guess its another way of saying that St.Louis is not Scottsdale.
Anyway, the floor was packed, everyone was getting down, and I had a lot of fun dancing. Met up with some other familiar faces from my studio who hit the club circuit pretty hard, so that was fun too. The only crappy part was the fact that Mandarin closes at 1:15, and they don't segue you out. They flipped on all the lights, and made repeated announcements to basically pay your tab and get the hell out. By the time we'd all regrouped outside the club, it was nearly two and a group of us, including the heavily inebriated birthday girl, were showing signs of club fatigue, so we decided to call it a night.
Makes me want to get out more.
Apr 9, 2011
Three-hour nights and three great meals
So, after saying "screw it, I'm going to see Farnsworth House" all day saturday, it was inevitable that something else had to give. Sleep was the obvious candidate. In a day of 24 hours, any element that takes up more than six of them is going to be the elephant in the room. So, sunday night, monday night, and tuesday night, I averaged three hours of sleep each night.
The first day was terrible, the second not so bad, the third was simply surreal. One feels slightly loopy and a little drunk. There is a history of sleep deprivation- the Russians discovered its use as a means to break the will and mind in torturing political prisoners- the US government has picked up where the Russians left off. It's convenient that it can't be photographed and leaves no physical marks. I've read that certain artists use it as a means of working, the hallucinogenic properties in particular.
Anyway, the reason for all this was that we had a pin-up review wednesday with Francis Kere, the architect from Burkina Faso. This pin up (perhaps because I was stoned from lack of sleep) felt like the most productive day we've spent in studio, at least in terms of advancing and understanding our ideas. Kere loved all the projects, he wasn't really critical of any of them. However, the discussions we got into over each project raised questions of community focus, financing, etc. that many of us had simply never considered. However, given the length of the discussions, he was only able to review five student's work before leaving to prepare for his lecture that night.
The rest of the review session was essentially a student critique. DH gave us some criticism and then the floor was opened up to the rest of the studio. It's really the first time we've had a chance to see each others work where it is now, and to comment on it. Anyway. The comment's I received were a mixed bag, but overall very positive. The gist was essentially, "this project is too good for you to be allowed to screw it up."
Anyway, I slept really well wednesday night. I don't even remember anything about how I got home or what I did that night. Thursday night, Chuck, Allison and I went to get some Mexican food at the taqueria in the old taco bell northwest of campus, out off of Page road. Tinga chimichangas and jamaica. Good, sleepy Mexican food.
Friday night, after happy hour, I got roped into taking a second, smaller group of prospective students to dinner at Bar Italia. There were about eight students who couldn't make the main open house, so a condensed version was being offered, which included a dinner (and the requisite toasts) from the president of the architecture school as well as another distinguished faculty member (who has a tendency to name-drop, although he might be forgiven for actually delivering these people to the school).
Dinner was excellent. We got a private room, appetizers of cheese plates, olives, etc. Small salads with more olives, and our choice of entree. I went with the grilled salmon with polenta. Actually, what really got me into this gig was the chance to dine at the rather pricy Bar Italia. Quite good. I was disappointed to get chocolate mousse instead of tiramisu for dessert, but considering I paid nothing, I couldn't complain. I sat between a young and eager Florida student who I will probably see in the fall, and a young woman from Saudi Arabia and we talked about the differences between the architecture school culture of Saudi and the US. While they skate by on 45 cents a gallon gas, the students also face astronomical plotting costs at school, at least five times what we're paying over here. So, it was a sacrafice of a friday night, but it wasn't like I had a party to go to.
Today was sunny and muggy. I was totally unprepared. I still have my snow boots ready by the door. Yesterday was beautiful. Today was muggy and warm. Warm is nice. Sun is nice, muggy not so much. Don't we get a spring? Or is spring what you call the violent shifts between summer and winter in the midwest? Either way, after a productive morning of work, I succumbed to the beautiful lazy spring day and went for a walk in forest park to photograph the flowering landscape. Tons of people out and about, capitalizing on the warm weather and beautiful scenery. All the couples walking around holding hands, or laying side by side on the grass together really made me miss Saori. We're missing each others' spring.
My Vietnamese friend Hiep, who is, incidentally, one of the funniest people I know, had invited Chuck and I out for dinner for some Thai, but we joined our group with a group of other friends, including Dew, two other Chinese students and a Korean guy I don't really know, and we went out for all you can eat Korean BBQ. We went to place Seoul Garden out by the airport (why is the good ethnic food by the airport?). We pushed together a few tables and they basically filled with several hundred small dishes of traditional Korean fare, mostly pickled vegitables, kimchee, dried fish, beans, tofu, etc. and also never-ending bowls of rice. Then came the grills and the plates of thin-sliced meat. Our two tables must have gone through at least a dozen plates. Bulgogi, pork, marinated chicken, thin sliced beef. Really good. We got ourselves totally stuffed.
It was kind of amusing to find myself, once again, in a very international community. We had a large percentage of asia present: Japan, Vietnam, northern Chinese, southern Chinese, and Korea. Hiep asked me if I was oriented towards Asians and I was kind of stuck on an answer. I've never considered myself remotely Asian- I appreicate a lot of aspects of Asian culture, and a lot of my friends are asian, but I don't mimic Asian fashion, I don't do cosplay. I do drink a lot of tea, however. And really, most of my friends are more international in comparison with what would be considered straight-up American. I don't really know how to explain it.
On the one hand, seeing a culture and context with different eyes is incredibly liberating creatively and intellectually. I experience the world more fully when I'm traveling. There's also something vulnerable about international students that makes them very easy to befriend. They're also very open to new experiences and new ways of thinking (it's starting to sound like I'm starting a cult, actually) but there's also so much help I can do for them with so little effort on my part. I was and still am so touched by the kindness of strangers while traveling, both here and abroad, that I feel like I am in debt to the rest of the world.
The first day was terrible, the second not so bad, the third was simply surreal. One feels slightly loopy and a little drunk. There is a history of sleep deprivation- the Russians discovered its use as a means to break the will and mind in torturing political prisoners- the US government has picked up where the Russians left off. It's convenient that it can't be photographed and leaves no physical marks. I've read that certain artists use it as a means of working, the hallucinogenic properties in particular.
Anyway, the reason for all this was that we had a pin-up review wednesday with Francis Kere, the architect from Burkina Faso. This pin up (perhaps because I was stoned from lack of sleep) felt like the most productive day we've spent in studio, at least in terms of advancing and understanding our ideas. Kere loved all the projects, he wasn't really critical of any of them. However, the discussions we got into over each project raised questions of community focus, financing, etc. that many of us had simply never considered. However, given the length of the discussions, he was only able to review five student's work before leaving to prepare for his lecture that night.
The rest of the review session was essentially a student critique. DH gave us some criticism and then the floor was opened up to the rest of the studio. It's really the first time we've had a chance to see each others work where it is now, and to comment on it. Anyway. The comment's I received were a mixed bag, but overall very positive. The gist was essentially, "this project is too good for you to be allowed to screw it up."
Anyway, I slept really well wednesday night. I don't even remember anything about how I got home or what I did that night. Thursday night, Chuck, Allison and I went to get some Mexican food at the taqueria in the old taco bell northwest of campus, out off of Page road. Tinga chimichangas and jamaica. Good, sleepy Mexican food.
Friday night, after happy hour, I got roped into taking a second, smaller group of prospective students to dinner at Bar Italia. There were about eight students who couldn't make the main open house, so a condensed version was being offered, which included a dinner (and the requisite toasts) from the president of the architecture school as well as another distinguished faculty member (who has a tendency to name-drop, although he might be forgiven for actually delivering these people to the school).
Dinner was excellent. We got a private room, appetizers of cheese plates, olives, etc. Small salads with more olives, and our choice of entree. I went with the grilled salmon with polenta. Actually, what really got me into this gig was the chance to dine at the rather pricy Bar Italia. Quite good. I was disappointed to get chocolate mousse instead of tiramisu for dessert, but considering I paid nothing, I couldn't complain. I sat between a young and eager Florida student who I will probably see in the fall, and a young woman from Saudi Arabia and we talked about the differences between the architecture school culture of Saudi and the US. While they skate by on 45 cents a gallon gas, the students also face astronomical plotting costs at school, at least five times what we're paying over here. So, it was a sacrafice of a friday night, but it wasn't like I had a party to go to.
Today was sunny and muggy. I was totally unprepared. I still have my snow boots ready by the door. Yesterday was beautiful. Today was muggy and warm. Warm is nice. Sun is nice, muggy not so much. Don't we get a spring? Or is spring what you call the violent shifts between summer and winter in the midwest? Either way, after a productive morning of work, I succumbed to the beautiful lazy spring day and went for a walk in forest park to photograph the flowering landscape. Tons of people out and about, capitalizing on the warm weather and beautiful scenery. All the couples walking around holding hands, or laying side by side on the grass together really made me miss Saori. We're missing each others' spring.
My Vietnamese friend Hiep, who is, incidentally, one of the funniest people I know, had invited Chuck and I out for dinner for some Thai, but we joined our group with a group of other friends, including Dew, two other Chinese students and a Korean guy I don't really know, and we went out for all you can eat Korean BBQ. We went to place Seoul Garden out by the airport (why is the good ethnic food by the airport?). We pushed together a few tables and they basically filled with several hundred small dishes of traditional Korean fare, mostly pickled vegitables, kimchee, dried fish, beans, tofu, etc. and also never-ending bowls of rice. Then came the grills and the plates of thin-sliced meat. Our two tables must have gone through at least a dozen plates. Bulgogi, pork, marinated chicken, thin sliced beef. Really good. We got ourselves totally stuffed.
It was kind of amusing to find myself, once again, in a very international community. We had a large percentage of asia present: Japan, Vietnam, northern Chinese, southern Chinese, and Korea. Hiep asked me if I was oriented towards Asians and I was kind of stuck on an answer. I've never considered myself remotely Asian- I appreicate a lot of aspects of Asian culture, and a lot of my friends are asian, but I don't mimic Asian fashion, I don't do cosplay. I do drink a lot of tea, however. And really, most of my friends are more international in comparison with what would be considered straight-up American. I don't really know how to explain it.
On the one hand, seeing a culture and context with different eyes is incredibly liberating creatively and intellectually. I experience the world more fully when I'm traveling. There's also something vulnerable about international students that makes them very easy to befriend. They're also very open to new experiences and new ways of thinking (it's starting to sound like I'm starting a cult, actually) but there's also so much help I can do for them with so little effort on my part. I was and still am so touched by the kindness of strangers while traveling, both here and abroad, that I feel like I am in debt to the rest of the world.
Apr 1, 2011
Dancing directions
Peculiar travel directions are like dancing lessons from God.So sayeth a character from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which is a philosophy I have attempted to take to heart. Which is why, when a friend asked me if I wanted to go to beer school, I immediately replied "yes" and why today, when another friend came up and asked if I wanted to drive to Farnsworth House, an architectural icon and 4 hours from St.Louis, again I replied with the affirmative.
So I'm going to be driving to Plano, IL, with three Chinese students and one Spanish architect, Alfredo Paya Benedito to see the deeply contested work of Mies van der Rohe.
Should be an interesting day.
This comes on the heels of another interesting day. This morning started with a structures exam, which I actually felt pretty good about considering I only did about a third of the homework. Right afterwards, I got got chewed out by my studio instructor for not having enough work done. I lost a lot of time working for the GAC yesterday, taking prospective students to the hotel from the airport. After getting yelled at for a few minutes, I left studio and went to buy some model supplies. I bought around $40 of concrete and $20 of wood, and hauled it back to studio. Actually, I barely was able to squeeze the 10' board into my Prius, but I did it by wedging the board in diagonally all the way up to the dashboard. Got back to studio, quickly sliced the board into 2' sections in the wood shop, and then took one of the prospective students back to the airport for his early flight out of town.
It's been kind of fun shuttling kids around. They have this nervous/eager look to them, they look so young. The way the whole thing worked is the school rented minivans and SUVs for us to drive, and we would send in a greeter to the terminal to collect the students while the driver hung out at the cell phone lot or circled. My greeter was one of the most stoic and taciturn students I've seen in the school. In the car ride, I was making all the conversation with the student. At least he hung in for a long time.
Anyway, after I got back to campus, it was time for happy hour (free beer for this time/mixer with the prospective students) (also where I was approached and asked about Farnsworth house), then there was a lecture by Juhani Pallasmaa on comparative phenomenology/existentialism in literature vs architecture, followed by a very nice dinner in Holmes Lounge, the very nice beaux arts former reading room of the library. Everyone calls it Hogwarts. Good dinner, mediocre wine, (but after a few beers at happy hour, who really cares?) and good desert. Our table was dominated by the presence of one of our senior professors who has a tendency to name-drop and to monopolize conversation. It was an interesting study in the subtle art of putting down other schools while appearing to be balanced, especially in the context of quietly selling the school to the three prospective students at the table. Actually, most of what he said made sense to me, and I frequently agreed with his assessment of the school and its comparison to other campuses.
After dinner, more free Blue Moon beer at the Blueberry Hill bar.
Mar 29, 2011
The $5 Hon. Brewmaster
A quick recap of the past week or so:
Spring break in Phoenix was far to short to spend the time I wanted to spend with friends and family, and far to short to get the amount of work done that I should have gotten done for school. Still, I had a great time, fattened up a bit more to get me thro ugh the long months of studio, ate some good Mexican food and had a mai tai at the Trader Vic's in Scottsdale. I forgot what it was like to be hot so I had to buy a pair of shorts and flip flops while I was there, while it snowed in St.Louis.
The weather has been a mess- absolutely all over the place. In Phoenix, the spring is already consistantly cool then hot, but in the wintertime, you have four seasons compressed into a day in a predictable way- its winter when you wake up, spring by the time you get out the door, summer at lunchtime, and fall when you get back home. St.Louis weather is also seasonal, but apparently in several day chunks at a time. We go from a few days in the 70s to a few days of a blanket of snow with everything in between. On any given day I don't know whether to wear my canvas sneakers, shoes for rain, or snow boots.
Studio is feeling more progressive. After no studio desk crits for 2 weeks, I was really sweating the monday after the week after classes resumed. But the professor liked what I was doing an encouraged me to continue and to really push the boundaries of the project, and work between the scale of a planner and architect and civil engineer. So that was good.
Despite being introduced to a wealth of great source material of which contemporary architecture is built on, I wrote an abysmal paper and turned it in as a rough draft for my history and theory of the AA class. But its embarrassingly bad. I'm beginning to worry about my GPA. (but not too much as I've pretty much got to get below a B- in every class to really threaten my scholarship)
At the forefront is structures, which has a test this friday for which I have not yet begun the homework. I would have had the test tomorrow night, but things as they are, there is another option to take it friday instead.
The graduate architecture council (GAC) is like the student council in high school, except in this one we can organize events with booze. I humbly submit that I was nominated to be a VP of Professional in the GAC, ran, and won in a schoolwide election. Actually, I asked to be nominated, and I ran uncontested. As did all the other nominees. But its really not a popularity contest, it really means that people who want to do something, get to do something.
As VP of Professional, one of my duties is be the guy architects who attend lectures go to after the lecture to make sure they get AIA continuing education credits. I'm also given the mantle of organizing a firm crawl, which I think I wrote about in this blog previously, which is no small task in itself.
Speaking of the GAC, we are acting as student representatives when the school has its open house this weekend, really starting thursday, so I volunteered to drive students from the airport to the hotel in Clayton. I can't believe its been a year already since I came as a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed youngster of only 25.
And so on. Oh well, structures awaits.
Spring break in Phoenix was far to short to spend the time I wanted to spend with friends and family, and far to short to get the amount of work done that I should have gotten done for school. Still, I had a great time, fattened up a bit more to get me thro ugh the long months of studio, ate some good Mexican food and had a mai tai at the Trader Vic's in Scottsdale. I forgot what it was like to be hot so I had to buy a pair of shorts and flip flops while I was there, while it snowed in St.Louis.
The weather has been a mess- absolutely all over the place. In Phoenix, the spring is already consistantly cool then hot, but in the wintertime, you have four seasons compressed into a day in a predictable way- its winter when you wake up, spring by the time you get out the door, summer at lunchtime, and fall when you get back home. St.Louis weather is also seasonal, but apparently in several day chunks at a time. We go from a few days in the 70s to a few days of a blanket of snow with everything in between. On any given day I don't know whether to wear my canvas sneakers, shoes for rain, or snow boots.
Studio is feeling more progressive. After no studio desk crits for 2 weeks, I was really sweating the monday after the week after classes resumed. But the professor liked what I was doing an encouraged me to continue and to really push the boundaries of the project, and work between the scale of a planner and architect and civil engineer. So that was good.
Despite being introduced to a wealth of great source material of which contemporary architecture is built on, I wrote an abysmal paper and turned it in as a rough draft for my history and theory of the AA class. But its embarrassingly bad. I'm beginning to worry about my GPA. (but not too much as I've pretty much got to get below a B- in every class to really threaten my scholarship)
At the forefront is structures, which has a test this friday for which I have not yet begun the homework. I would have had the test tomorrow night, but things as they are, there is another option to take it friday instead.
The graduate architecture council (GAC) is like the student council in high school, except in this one we can organize events with booze. I humbly submit that I was nominated to be a VP of Professional in the GAC, ran, and won in a schoolwide election. Actually, I asked to be nominated, and I ran uncontested. As did all the other nominees. But its really not a popularity contest, it really means that people who want to do something, get to do something.
As VP of Professional, one of my duties is be the guy architects who attend lectures go to after the lecture to make sure they get AIA continuing education credits. I'm also given the mantle of organizing a firm crawl, which I think I wrote about in this blog previously, which is no small task in itself.
Speaking of the GAC, we are acting as student representatives when the school has its open house this weekend, really starting thursday, so I volunteered to drive students from the airport to the hotel in Clayton. I can't believe its been a year already since I came as a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed youngster of only 25.
And so on. Oh well, structures awaits.
Mar 13, 2011
Arizona light
There is something special about the sunlight in Arizona. At the Rick Joy lecture, he was struggling to put it into words "the light in Arizona isn't yellowish, like you see in Arizona Highways magazine, it's pure white," or something along those lines. He's right. It's this phenomenally pure, brilliant white light. Driving from the airport, I was transfixed, drunk on the shadows cast on the freeway walls, by how the sunlight shaded the various faces of passes into nearly graphic elements. Coming from St.Louis, if light is like media, the light in St.Louis is like an old VHS tape- filtered, grainy, hesitant, uncertain. Phoenix light is like a HD-DVD or BluRay. There's this leap of clarity and rendering. Architecture looks great in Arizona light because it renders everything so cleanly and purely, and everything stands in sharp relief against the deep blue sky.
Mid Review, Recovery
Last week was a rough week. Saori decided to spend next semester in Buenos Aires, there was the triple disaster to strike Japan, and I had a mid review Friday.
Mid-review is a juried review of work done up that point in the semester. Some people think that its actually more important than the final review as there is still a chance to develop the project based on the feedback you receive.
The work flow of this studio has been a bit atypical- we began with several weeks of studying the city from an infrastructural and topographic standpoint, trying to understand New Orleans in relation to water that comes from the sky, from the river, and catastrophically from the sea. There was a week-long site visit where we went to New Orleans, listened to lectures, and visited critical sites in the city infrastructure. After we returned, we embarked on a further study of a particular area of the city which lasted about two weeks, which culminated in the creation of an analytical model and a conceptual model of the area of study. This gave us 13 days in which to individually select our own sites and programs and begin work to present to the mid-review. So there was a lot of work you could say embedded but perhaps not apparent in the works we presented friday.
I got about two hours of sleep wednesday night, and four hours thursday night. I sacrificed my other schoolwork. I gave up on trying to organize my board and instead focused on the creation of 1/8" scale concrete and wood sculpted sectional models of my proposal, in addition to a physical model at 1/32" scale.
The review went badly. I presented so poorly my studio professor felt compelled to jump in and "rescue" me and my project, which is actually pretty humiliating when you think about it. It is either an indication that my presentation is failing my project, or that the teacher has suggested so much that became manifest in the project that he feels himself vested in the work.
Actually, it really doesn't matter as there is very little original in my project, which is kind of how I've situated the project. Here's the abstract:
After the review, Chuck and I grabbed a beer and a burger at Blueberry Hill restaurant/bar and I crashed pretty hard when I got home. Ended up sleeping about 11 hours. Saturday became a day for recovery and cleaning as I prepared for my spring break trip to Phoenix.
This morning, I got up at what would have been 3 am to catch public transit to the airport for an early flight to Phoenix. I forgot how hot Phoenix is, even in spring break. It was a high in the 80s today, and I didn't even pack shorts or sandals.
Mid-review is a juried review of work done up that point in the semester. Some people think that its actually more important than the final review as there is still a chance to develop the project based on the feedback you receive.
The work flow of this studio has been a bit atypical- we began with several weeks of studying the city from an infrastructural and topographic standpoint, trying to understand New Orleans in relation to water that comes from the sky, from the river, and catastrophically from the sea. There was a week-long site visit where we went to New Orleans, listened to lectures, and visited critical sites in the city infrastructure. After we returned, we embarked on a further study of a particular area of the city which lasted about two weeks, which culminated in the creation of an analytical model and a conceptual model of the area of study. This gave us 13 days in which to individually select our own sites and programs and begin work to present to the mid-review. So there was a lot of work you could say embedded but perhaps not apparent in the works we presented friday.
I got about two hours of sleep wednesday night, and four hours thursday night. I sacrificed my other schoolwork. I gave up on trying to organize my board and instead focused on the creation of 1/8" scale concrete and wood sculpted sectional models of my proposal, in addition to a physical model at 1/32" scale.
The review went badly. I presented so poorly my studio professor felt compelled to jump in and "rescue" me and my project, which is actually pretty humiliating when you think about it. It is either an indication that my presentation is failing my project, or that the teacher has suggested so much that became manifest in the project that he feels himself vested in the work.
Actually, it really doesn't matter as there is very little original in my project, which is kind of how I've situated the project. Here's the abstract:
Anyway, I got some good comments and a lot of negative comments, but it is a very complicated moment in time and in the city where I'm proposing my project. In this sense, its very satisfying as I feel like I'm proposing something with a much higher level of sophistication that simply creating a new type of raised house.New Orleans was founded at the navigable juncture of the gulf and the Mississippi river. People and trade would float up St.John’s bayou from lake Ponchartrain, down the 30’ wide Carondelet canal to the turning basin at the edge of the French Quarter, and move through the city overland to reach the banks of the Mississippi river. This was the conduit of the city. Since, this conduit has been broken, replaced by the industrial canal which serves as an urban bypass, and the Carondelet canal filled in. This urban canal was the home of a wide promenade, the Carondelet Walk, which is one of the few water edges of the city where water was an amenity instead of a threat or nuisance.
This project’s goal is to re-establish the historic conduit that linked lake (and gulf), city, and river in a way that brings the urban fabric to water at a human scale. The method I propose to do this is to tie together several urban projects in various stages of actualization in New Orleans with an infrastructural architecture at the locus of these projects- where the Broad St. community revitalization efforts intersects the Lafitte Greenway project, in immediate adjacency to the Lafitte Housing project.
Waggoner & Ball’s Lafitte greenway proposal includes a recommendation by the Dutch Dialogue’s workshop to extend Bayou St.John to pump station 2 and pump it back out the river via the under used Orleans canal. This proposal builds on all of the above projects: building housing along the extended bayou, and providing a navigable channel in the bayou to allow boat traffic to reach a dock at the end of the bayou where it meets Broad st. at pump station 2. The dock then becomes a node, where pedestrians and bicyclists from the green belt can transfer to the water and vice versa. Additionally, this project proposes widening the median along Broad st. beween Canal and the pump station, which would tie into community redevelopment projects along Broad st such as the conversion of an abandoned grocery store into a new grocery store and urban farm and convey people to the the streetcar line and thus connect to the rest of the city of New Orleans.
After the review, Chuck and I grabbed a beer and a burger at Blueberry Hill restaurant/bar and I crashed pretty hard when I got home. Ended up sleeping about 11 hours. Saturday became a day for recovery and cleaning as I prepared for my spring break trip to Phoenix.
This morning, I got up at what would have been 3 am to catch public transit to the airport for an early flight to Phoenix. I forgot how hot Phoenix is, even in spring break. It was a high in the 80s today, and I didn't even pack shorts or sandals.
Mar 4, 2011
The Crusader
Another friday posting...
We had desk crits today and we were in general torn apart, debased, and lambasted for both the lack of work and its low quality. I must commend my studio professor for his dedication to the craft and the studio-the energy and frustration with us he brings to tear us down at every single class would not be sustained by someone who didn't care as much. I myself have grown such a thick skin to it, that I don't even feel the difference between a good and a bad review. There are no good reviews, although today, I got a desk critique which was essentially, "you're proposing something architectural, which is commendable, but you're still lazy, sloppy, and have no sense of color or graphic design." I also took the last spot on the sign up sheet, with my review well beyond the normal "studio" hours, so I got my professor at the end of the day. By the time I got down to happy hour downstairs, they'd sold out (here's a tip: they're buying less beer) but one of my studio mates, Sam, had bought me a beer and saved it for taking the last spot on the list. And really, at the end of the day, its not like we're going to be fired. We could all get C's which would require us to retake a studio and would kill our GPAs and financial aid situations, but that's besides the point.
Actually, its kind of nice to be part of a studio which is not the typical "post katrina New Orleans design a raised house" kind of studio. It's not a "make it right" project- its really a studio that awkwardly stumbles between infrastructure/civil engineering, planning, and architecture. The project I'm proposing has my own programming, but could be a fairly sophisticated insertion linking several previous proposals and developments for the site area.
Anyway, got a long week ahead of me, with a mid-review friday, and the sound of falling rain is making it hard to stay awake.
We had desk crits today and we were in general torn apart, debased, and lambasted for both the lack of work and its low quality. I must commend my studio professor for his dedication to the craft and the studio-the energy and frustration with us he brings to tear us down at every single class would not be sustained by someone who didn't care as much. I myself have grown such a thick skin to it, that I don't even feel the difference between a good and a bad review. There are no good reviews, although today, I got a desk critique which was essentially, "you're proposing something architectural, which is commendable, but you're still lazy, sloppy, and have no sense of color or graphic design." I also took the last spot on the sign up sheet, with my review well beyond the normal "studio" hours, so I got my professor at the end of the day. By the time I got down to happy hour downstairs, they'd sold out (here's a tip: they're buying less beer) but one of my studio mates, Sam, had bought me a beer and saved it for taking the last spot on the list. And really, at the end of the day, its not like we're going to be fired. We could all get C's which would require us to retake a studio and would kill our GPAs and financial aid situations, but that's besides the point.
Actually, its kind of nice to be part of a studio which is not the typical "post katrina New Orleans design a raised house" kind of studio. It's not a "make it right" project- its really a studio that awkwardly stumbles between infrastructure/civil engineering, planning, and architecture. The project I'm proposing has my own programming, but could be a fairly sophisticated insertion linking several previous proposals and developments for the site area.
Anyway, got a long week ahead of me, with a mid-review friday, and the sound of falling rain is making it hard to stay awake.
Mar 3, 2011
On phones
I got a new cell phone battery in the mail today. It cost me about $6, delivered. But then again, my cell phone is about three or four years old now, and its not an iPhone. I can actually change my cell phone battery. I remember a time from about six or seven years ago up until really the last two years, when the first iPhone sparked the first real shift to smartphones, when phones were really cool. They slid, they opened in strange new ways, there was this emphasis on the object, on hinges, screens, buttons, form. How it felt in your hand and how you interacted with it. Now it seems the world of cell phones are coming down to two types and each year, the phones look more and more like either an iPhone or a blackberry. One is a hideous banal slab, brutal. Rectangular. There's no fun, no play, no humanism. It has a form that suggests it fell out of a computer, or that it slots into something. Remote controls are more interesting and human. The RIM blackberry is a monster, a wide, flat freak of tiny buttons.
I like my phone. It's a Sony-Ericsson, a joint venture between the Scandinavian and Japanese brands. It's not a crappy motorola or an unknown Chinese or Korean brand with the AT&T or Verizon logo on it. I liked Nokia phones too. Well built, logical, intuitive. I had a Nokia cell that had an LED flashlight built into it. And they work nearly anywhere in the world. I want a quad band phone because I want to use my phone when I travel. But I'm getting technical here. I really want to talk about form and anthropometrics and ergonomics.
This phone is a slider. The top half slides open to reveal the keyboard in the front, and a camera in the back, which is protected by the slider when its closed. When my phone rings, I snap it open with a flick of my thumb and that answers the call. To hang up, I snap the phone shut. There's something about that physical connection, that gesture that connects me a lot more to what the phone is doing. I just don't get that tapping a glass surface. There's no feedback to tell me that the phone is doing anything.
What really annoys me is that some phones are still being designed and made that aren't clumsily aping the slab or the monster, but they are not for sale at network stores. They almost all sell slabs and monsters because (gasp) they make more money when you buy the overpriced data plan.
Tinga Alejandro- casi tinga, pero no
Tinga is a Mexican dish, I think northern or central, which I somehow managed to almost miss in nearly twenty years of living in Arizona. It's a kind of shredded, slow cooked chicken or beef with peppers and chilis and some other ingrediants. I had it the first time prepared by a friend of mine's grandparents, who are Mexican, down south of Tucson. It is fantastic stuff. So I tried to make it.
My tinga was made from ingredients that I tried to remember in a grocery store, based on my memory of a crock pot variation of the recipe in a comment thread of a recipe I found online. So its pretty far removed from the tinga I remember. I ended up using chorizo and pork neck bone meat, instead of beef or chicken, and poblano peppers instead of chipotle. And I probably messed up the ratios too somewhere along the way.
Tinga Alejandro is made with two cans of green chilis, one roasted, a half of a poblano pepper, a half of a yellow onion diced and sauteed with two cloves of garlic, and two tomatoes, charred on the stove and then smashed. Plus the 2 pounds of bone meat and the pound or so of chorizo.
I let it all cook for about 12 hours. The end result was really quite soupy, much more soupy or stew-y than I remember. I slapped it on some corn torillas and a dollop of sour cream, and it was so runny it ate through the torilla and most of the meat fell out onto my plate. It was still pretty good. Really really rich flavor. I put away my plate and got out a bowl, and threw some tortilla chips instead and ladled out some more of Tinga Alejandro. Pretty good, actually. Not quite as spicy as I wanted it. Up the chilis next time maybe. I think I was supposed to have some adobo sauce and chipotle pepper somewhere in there too. Next time.
Anyway, the main lesson here was: don't use pork neck bones. It makes a delicious and rich meat that falls off the bone, but then you've got to pick the bones out. I spent about fifteen minutes with a fork fishing out bones and bone fragments. Pulled out a few dozen, some about the size of a fingernail.
After dinner, after I pulled out the meat trying to separate it as muhc from the liquid as possible, I poured the liquid into my bowl and ate it as a soup. Unbelievably rich. It probably has about half of the rendered fat from the chroizo and pork. Quite tasty.
My tinga was made from ingredients that I tried to remember in a grocery store, based on my memory of a crock pot variation of the recipe in a comment thread of a recipe I found online. So its pretty far removed from the tinga I remember. I ended up using chorizo and pork neck bone meat, instead of beef or chicken, and poblano peppers instead of chipotle. And I probably messed up the ratios too somewhere along the way.
Tinga Alejandro is made with two cans of green chilis, one roasted, a half of a poblano pepper, a half of a yellow onion diced and sauteed with two cloves of garlic, and two tomatoes, charred on the stove and then smashed. Plus the 2 pounds of bone meat and the pound or so of chorizo.
I let it all cook for about 12 hours. The end result was really quite soupy, much more soupy or stew-y than I remember. I slapped it on some corn torillas and a dollop of sour cream, and it was so runny it ate through the torilla and most of the meat fell out onto my plate. It was still pretty good. Really really rich flavor. I put away my plate and got out a bowl, and threw some tortilla chips instead and ladled out some more of Tinga Alejandro. Pretty good, actually. Not quite as spicy as I wanted it. Up the chilis next time maybe. I think I was supposed to have some adobo sauce and chipotle pepper somewhere in there too. Next time.
Anyway, the main lesson here was: don't use pork neck bones. It makes a delicious and rich meat that falls off the bone, but then you've got to pick the bones out. I spent about fifteen minutes with a fork fishing out bones and bone fragments. Pulled out a few dozen, some about the size of a fingernail.
After dinner, after I pulled out the meat trying to separate it as muhc from the liquid as possible, I poured the liquid into my bowl and ate it as a soup. Unbelievably rich. It probably has about half of the rendered fat from the chroizo and pork. Quite tasty.
Mar 2, 2011
Tada(o)!
Today was the easiest wednesday of my semester so far. Two classes were cancelled for unrelated reasons, so I had an unproductive morning and finally decided to do something and so I drove down to see Tadao Ando's Pulitzer museum.
It's a very simple building, what makes it really compelling is the craftsmanship and detail. The spaces created are really not so sublime, but I spent ten minutes staring at the connection of how a framed wall meets a concrete wall and how they meet the floor. Astoundingly meticulous craftsmanship of the workers (Ando actually brought some Japanese construction workers to help) and the crispness of the detailing. It's nice if you can get away with it- the construction cost for the museum has supposedly never been released. Really, there are only a few simple materials in construction. There's wood, concrete, brick, steel, gypsum board, paint, and a variety of "surface treatments" like stone or tile or whatever. The Ando building is made of probably the same materials you have in your home. But its like a master chef with a lot more deliberation. There must be an Ando, but there also must be the craftmen, not just contractors, but real craftsmen, to translate the fine detailing into reality, and also of course, the wealthy client, without which there would be no Ando or craftsmen.
It's a very simple building, what makes it really compelling is the craftsmanship and detail. The spaces created are really not so sublime, but I spent ten minutes staring at the connection of how a framed wall meets a concrete wall and how they meet the floor. Astoundingly meticulous craftsmanship of the workers (Ando actually brought some Japanese construction workers to help) and the crispness of the detailing. It's nice if you can get away with it- the construction cost for the museum has supposedly never been released. Really, there are only a few simple materials in construction. There's wood, concrete, brick, steel, gypsum board, paint, and a variety of "surface treatments" like stone or tile or whatever. The Ando building is made of probably the same materials you have in your home. But its like a master chef with a lot more deliberation. There must be an Ando, but there also must be the craftmen, not just contractors, but real craftsmen, to translate the fine detailing into reality, and also of course, the wealthy client, without which there would be no Ando or craftsmen.
Mar 1, 2011
Show me the Moneo
Monday night, I went to the jam-packed lecture by the world renowned architect Raphael Moneo, where there were so many people crammed into the hall, they sat in the aisles and had to be cleared away from sitting in front of the doors. I was underwhelmed by the lecture at first- Moneo at his age has a weak voice and a heavy accent, not improved by our stellar sound system. It was an odd selection of works he presented, three laboratory science buildings recently completed in three Ivy League schools. I gradually got into the lecture, less taken by the architecture of the work as much as I was by the enthusiasm and passion Moneo brought to it. It was also personally interesting to me in that I'd spent two years working on a similarly programed building. Student's reactions were underwhelmed and the aisles gradually cleared before the two hour lecture ended.
Last friday, we had our first real review for studio. How does one rate critiques? Was it instructive? Perhaps. Was it fun? By absolutely no means. There are a few teachers in this school who seem to have a certain view of architecture that is so meticulous and distilled that there is no room for personal enjoyment. It is architecture of space shuttle construction, without the space shuttle. It is an understandable reaction for a compromised and weak profession which has nearly given everything away to consultants and contractors, but this more often than not comes across as bitterness which leads to the piss-on-everything attitude I find so frustrating and deadening.
For this review, I created ten scale models of various edge conditions of water meeting land in New Orleans (natural bayou, Mississippi river pier, drainage canals, underground culverts, etc) with the intent of then taking these pieces and somehow with their juxtapositions, create a new language for how water meets land. New Orleans, for those who have never considered it, is a city in a delta between a lake and a major river, and yet there is more richness in the relationship between urban context and water in downtown San Antonio, Texas. At any rate, I ended up with just the pieces and not the wider idea, so we were justifiably criticized for having a "conceptual" model that was less conceptual than our abstracted "literal" model.
I was commended for the physical models I made. The most praise I got out of that review was for the level of craft. I bought a douglass fir 4x4 post and sliced it up and sawed it up in the band saw to create the various "natural" or pervious landscape. It was then sanded to perfection. The hard, impervious parts of the sections I cast out of Rockite, which is a kind of anchoring cement, in formwork made of styrene. These bits and pieces were played with by all the reviewers during our presentation. If you want to engage the reviewers, make toylike models.
A note about casting- In my undergraduate at ASU, in our first semester of studio, we were introduced to pourstone, another brand of anchoring cement, which I practiced into a skill mostly using foamcore formwork. Creating a mold out of styrene requires lots of patience, craft with the cutting and welding of the styrene, and a ton of toxic weld-on, which chemically melts the styrene, is cancer causing, and does lots of other nasty stuff. The formwork was easier with the foamcore, but the product far inferior- if you want beautiful cast concrete architectural models, you have to go with the styrene-rockite method. I tested both for this project. The generic anchoring cement came out looking like a rusty steel plate. The rockite came out looking like polished granite. Absolutely beautiful and crisp.
Saturday night, Chuck and I took the bus to a themed party at a friend's apartment. People in my studio have a hard time understanding why I take the bus when I have a perfectly good car and a parking permit. Anyway, the theme of the party was the twentieth century. Come as any decade, kind of thing. The vast majority of guys, myself included, went with the 30s-60's professional male. White shirt, black pants, narrow dark tie, fedora, and optional suspenders. Fun. There are still Chinese students who come up to me and tell me that they've heard I've lived in China, and I flash my rusty "I speak a little chinese" back for their amusement.
I was dismayed to learn so late that the study abroad programs here are free. There is the regular tuition, and whatever it costs to get there plus living expenses. Early my first semester, I attended a lecture by the study abroad program coordinator who never made this clear. The massive numbers thrown up on the screen for the program cost were inclusive of tuition that we were already going to have to pay. If I had known this, I would actually considered more strongly going to Helsinki. It would leave me a little bitter if there were any bitterness left.
Got a fun book in the mail today: Kitch: an Anthology of Bad Taste which happily enough is for school. My final paper for the AA class concerns populism and architecture and so it seemed an appropriate source material. Should architecture submit to the public's taste or challenge it and make taste?
Last friday, we had our first real review for studio. How does one rate critiques? Was it instructive? Perhaps. Was it fun? By absolutely no means. There are a few teachers in this school who seem to have a certain view of architecture that is so meticulous and distilled that there is no room for personal enjoyment. It is architecture of space shuttle construction, without the space shuttle. It is an understandable reaction for a compromised and weak profession which has nearly given everything away to consultants and contractors, but this more often than not comes across as bitterness which leads to the piss-on-everything attitude I find so frustrating and deadening.
For this review, I created ten scale models of various edge conditions of water meeting land in New Orleans (natural bayou, Mississippi river pier, drainage canals, underground culverts, etc) with the intent of then taking these pieces and somehow with their juxtapositions, create a new language for how water meets land. New Orleans, for those who have never considered it, is a city in a delta between a lake and a major river, and yet there is more richness in the relationship between urban context and water in downtown San Antonio, Texas. At any rate, I ended up with just the pieces and not the wider idea, so we were justifiably criticized for having a "conceptual" model that was less conceptual than our abstracted "literal" model.
I was commended for the physical models I made. The most praise I got out of that review was for the level of craft. I bought a douglass fir 4x4 post and sliced it up and sawed it up in the band saw to create the various "natural" or pervious landscape. It was then sanded to perfection. The hard, impervious parts of the sections I cast out of Rockite, which is a kind of anchoring cement, in formwork made of styrene. These bits and pieces were played with by all the reviewers during our presentation. If you want to engage the reviewers, make toylike models.
A note about casting- In my undergraduate at ASU, in our first semester of studio, we were introduced to pourstone, another brand of anchoring cement, which I practiced into a skill mostly using foamcore formwork. Creating a mold out of styrene requires lots of patience, craft with the cutting and welding of the styrene, and a ton of toxic weld-on, which chemically melts the styrene, is cancer causing, and does lots of other nasty stuff. The formwork was easier with the foamcore, but the product far inferior- if you want beautiful cast concrete architectural models, you have to go with the styrene-rockite method. I tested both for this project. The generic anchoring cement came out looking like a rusty steel plate. The rockite came out looking like polished granite. Absolutely beautiful and crisp.
Saturday night, Chuck and I took the bus to a themed party at a friend's apartment. People in my studio have a hard time understanding why I take the bus when I have a perfectly good car and a parking permit. Anyway, the theme of the party was the twentieth century. Come as any decade, kind of thing. The vast majority of guys, myself included, went with the 30s-60's professional male. White shirt, black pants, narrow dark tie, fedora, and optional suspenders. Fun. There are still Chinese students who come up to me and tell me that they've heard I've lived in China, and I flash my rusty "I speak a little chinese" back for their amusement.
I was dismayed to learn so late that the study abroad programs here are free. There is the regular tuition, and whatever it costs to get there plus living expenses. Early my first semester, I attended a lecture by the study abroad program coordinator who never made this clear. The massive numbers thrown up on the screen for the program cost were inclusive of tuition that we were already going to have to pay. If I had known this, I would actually considered more strongly going to Helsinki. It would leave me a little bitter if there were any bitterness left.
Got a fun book in the mail today: Kitch: an Anthology of Bad Taste which happily enough is for school. My final paper for the AA class concerns populism and architecture and so it seemed an appropriate source material. Should architecture submit to the public's taste or challenge it and make taste?
Feb 22, 2011
Second crunch
One step at a time. This has been a busy week. We have a review this Friday for which we are on charette. After a crappy desk review last friday, we had a relatively good one monday, which gave us some direction to what to have for friday. The answer is: a lot of work. Monday night, I made a run to Lowes and bought cement, a 12' long cedar 4x4, which is actually a beautiful piece of wood, some lexan which we wasted $22 on because it cant be laser cut, buckets, mixers, etc for making concrete, and drove it all back to campus.
Good lecture by architect Rick Joy, which is ironic because I've been to his studio twice in Tucson, studied architecture in Arizona for damn near 7 years, and I've never seen him or heard him speak. We're actually quite lucky- this is the only lecture he's doing this year. He put some nice work up on the wall, and reiterated that architecture is hard work, and really the only way to distinguish yourself is to work harder and smarter than all the other architects.
Anyway, today our mid-century modern class went on a field trip, you can see the photos I took here. Really an amazing building. Actually, its the most beautiful building I've seen in St.Louis so far. Really quite sublime.
After the fun field trip, it was back to studio work, where I sliced up some of that cedar post, ran it through our band saw, and sanded it down. Its a nice piece of wood. The grain and color remind me a bit of of salmon sashimi. It's quite nice, especially the crisp corners.
Then I went back to studio and made a test wall of concrete. In my undergraduate, I used anchoring cement to and foamcore molds. I got pretty good at it, but styrene molds really is a huge improvement. Holds is shape a lot better, gets a crisper, smoother, surface, but its harder to fabricate and harder to take the mold off. On the other side, its not such an imperative to take the mold off so quick like it was with the foamcore. The test came out nice, a little rough where there was an unclean edge of the styrene.
Anyway. It's 9pm, and I've got a damned long day at school tomorrow and much to get done before then.
Good lecture by architect Rick Joy, which is ironic because I've been to his studio twice in Tucson, studied architecture in Arizona for damn near 7 years, and I've never seen him or heard him speak. We're actually quite lucky- this is the only lecture he's doing this year. He put some nice work up on the wall, and reiterated that architecture is hard work, and really the only way to distinguish yourself is to work harder and smarter than all the other architects.
Anyway, today our mid-century modern class went on a field trip, you can see the photos I took here. Really an amazing building. Actually, its the most beautiful building I've seen in St.Louis so far. Really quite sublime.
After the fun field trip, it was back to studio work, where I sliced up some of that cedar post, ran it through our band saw, and sanded it down. Its a nice piece of wood. The grain and color remind me a bit of of salmon sashimi. It's quite nice, especially the crisp corners.
Then I went back to studio and made a test wall of concrete. In my undergraduate, I used anchoring cement to and foamcore molds. I got pretty good at it, but styrene molds really is a huge improvement. Holds is shape a lot better, gets a crisper, smoother, surface, but its harder to fabricate and harder to take the mold off. On the other side, its not such an imperative to take the mold off so quick like it was with the foamcore. The test came out nice, a little rough where there was an unclean edge of the styrene.
Anyway. It's 9pm, and I've got a damned long day at school tomorrow and much to get done before then.
Feb 20, 2011
On Architecture Schools
Today was an interesting day of firsts.
I used the laser cutter for the first time. Ever. When I was at ASU, which had one laser cutter, it was a pretty big deal to use it and pretty much only upperclassmen were allowed access to it and they really only used it for final models. I was never interested in it because it was such a machined product, it sucked the life out of a handmade model, it made our architecture look like something mass-produced in China. I was also biased against it in that kind of luddite-pride-conflated-with-technological-ignorance. I just never learned to use it as a tool.
Three years down the road, at Wash U, with three laser cutters, people use the laser cutters even for desk critiques, which is pretty much every week. Almost everything at this school is laser cut, and the smell of burning plastic and wood is prevalent. I still don't like it- it is useful for cutting contour topographies, but I would never want to use it for buildings.
There is a kind of material palate native to each architecture school- the laser cutter is obviously one of them. Back at ASU, there were the usual basswood, chipboard, and cardboard models. But there was also use of concrete and plaster, which I have not seen here. Wash U is a lot more toxic- the heavier use of laser cutting opens up a wide range of plastics to form, burn, (and inhale). HDPE, acrylic, plexiglass. Styrene is in huge use here. It's kind of a neat material to make models from- one ends up with a smooth white object, but the glue is a toxic nightmare with the consistency of water that chemically melts the styrene to bond it. Students apply it with metal syringes and they call it "poison". The MSDSs for it are terrifying.
Actually, I had to make a run to Walgreens to pick up some syringes, as I was in fact, cutting styrene and needing to use poison to put it together. Walgreen's sells a variety of medical grade syringes, and pretty cheaply too, actually. I'm not sure how I came across when I asked "do you sell syringes? I need a syringe with a large resivoir." but oh well. At least they are pretty cheap, although the long sharp needle is a constant safety concern for me. I move very carefully and slowly with the syringe. The only thing I would imagine worse than ingesting this poison is accidently injecting it.
I'm taking a history of the Architectural Association class which has an incredible amount of reading as homework. However, the readings are absolutely astounding and astonishing, texts that have shaped architecture and proposed ideas that strike me as incredibly radical compared to those of which I have been exposed as a student. Bourdieu's Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which is an extremely intense look at why we judge taste the way we do. The AA, Peter Cook, and Alvin Boyarsky who set themselves up at heretics- there's a reason why we don't read them in school:
Peter Cook- "You have to be some kind of nut to create good architecture."
Alvin Boyarsky- "I think students working together in large studios is one of the most stultifying things that you can imagine- that's why so much architectural education is so poor. It's trade union stuff. You know you go into a studio and students are all working on the same project. They more or less decide how many sheets of paper they're going to hand in and how its going to be drawn. They watch each other every day of the week, every hour of the day to see what's new, so that there are never any novel moves possible and the teachers can walk around the studio in each other's shoes, saying approximately the same things."
Boyarsky gets better: "I would never use professional standards as a measure for education. I mean, if you think of what all those whores out there are doing....professionalism is a curious thing. You get some crummy office that's been doing the same thing for ten years- figuring how to get through the codes or whatever, and just because they're doing it, that doesn't make them professionals."
Boyarsky, by the way, was the director of the AA, who really lead the school out of its worst state imaginable in the mid 1970s to the institution it is today.
I used the laser cutter for the first time. Ever. When I was at ASU, which had one laser cutter, it was a pretty big deal to use it and pretty much only upperclassmen were allowed access to it and they really only used it for final models. I was never interested in it because it was such a machined product, it sucked the life out of a handmade model, it made our architecture look like something mass-produced in China. I was also biased against it in that kind of luddite-pride-conflated-with-technological-ignorance. I just never learned to use it as a tool.
Three years down the road, at Wash U, with three laser cutters, people use the laser cutters even for desk critiques, which is pretty much every week. Almost everything at this school is laser cut, and the smell of burning plastic and wood is prevalent. I still don't like it- it is useful for cutting contour topographies, but I would never want to use it for buildings.
There is a kind of material palate native to each architecture school- the laser cutter is obviously one of them. Back at ASU, there were the usual basswood, chipboard, and cardboard models. But there was also use of concrete and plaster, which I have not seen here. Wash U is a lot more toxic- the heavier use of laser cutting opens up a wide range of plastics to form, burn, (and inhale). HDPE, acrylic, plexiglass. Styrene is in huge use here. It's kind of a neat material to make models from- one ends up with a smooth white object, but the glue is a toxic nightmare with the consistency of water that chemically melts the styrene to bond it. Students apply it with metal syringes and they call it "poison". The MSDSs for it are terrifying.
Actually, I had to make a run to Walgreens to pick up some syringes, as I was in fact, cutting styrene and needing to use poison to put it together. Walgreen's sells a variety of medical grade syringes, and pretty cheaply too, actually. I'm not sure how I came across when I asked "do you sell syringes? I need a syringe with a large resivoir." but oh well. At least they are pretty cheap, although the long sharp needle is a constant safety concern for me. I move very carefully and slowly with the syringe. The only thing I would imagine worse than ingesting this poison is accidently injecting it.
I'm taking a history of the Architectural Association class which has an incredible amount of reading as homework. However, the readings are absolutely astounding and astonishing, texts that have shaped architecture and proposed ideas that strike me as incredibly radical compared to those of which I have been exposed as a student. Bourdieu's Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which is an extremely intense look at why we judge taste the way we do. The AA, Peter Cook, and Alvin Boyarsky who set themselves up at heretics- there's a reason why we don't read them in school:
Peter Cook- "You have to be some kind of nut to create good architecture."
Alvin Boyarsky- "I think students working together in large studios is one of the most stultifying things that you can imagine- that's why so much architectural education is so poor. It's trade union stuff. You know you go into a studio and students are all working on the same project. They more or less decide how many sheets of paper they're going to hand in and how its going to be drawn. They watch each other every day of the week, every hour of the day to see what's new, so that there are never any novel moves possible and the teachers can walk around the studio in each other's shoes, saying approximately the same things."
Boyarsky gets better: "I would never use professional standards as a measure for education. I mean, if you think of what all those whores out there are doing....professionalism is a curious thing. You get some crummy office that's been doing the same thing for ten years- figuring how to get through the codes or whatever, and just because they're doing it, that doesn't make them professionals."
Boyarsky, by the way, was the director of the AA, who really lead the school out of its worst state imaginable in the mid 1970s to the institution it is today.
Feb 18, 2011
Friday Night Life
Friday night in the big city- and another studio session ends so frustratingly I have to leave the building for awhile. Happy hour with the graduate architecture council is a welcome relief with the $1 beers. The weather is not as warm as it was yesterday, but it is still a welcome change from the icy misery of January. Home and a hot smoked sausage sandwich with an episode of BBC's Life. Life, which was from the same producers as Earth, follows roughly the same format, but is less sublimely edited, and spends less time on its subjects- with a bit less of the distance Earth kept. Another episode, served with a gin and tonic. Here, where the Earth cameras panned away, the Life cameras keep the stock rolling to watch a chinstrap penguin get flayed in slow motion by a leopard seal, or the carnage of a dozen Komodo dragons tearing into a dead water buffalo. It's incredible, compelling footage, all of it, and one can understand the value of spending several months to capture ten minutes.
Feb 17, 2011
Haircut day
Last week, temperatures dropped as low as 9 degrees in St.Louis. Today's high was in the 70s. After this miserably long winter, these warm breezes strike me as odd- I no longer trust the weather. It's sad that this spike of spring is tainted by my memory of an inch of solid ice covering every surface. But I'll get what I can take with this crappy climate. I wore a coat today by force of habit, although it was merely cool when I headed home from studio. The windows in our apartment are open tonight, to circulate the air. I hope the days of high gas bills are over.
Today, being Thursday, I have no classes, so it was a working day of trying to get stuff done. Not so much studio stuff got done, but I fared better on my personal list. My hair was getting a little long, and finding an hour can be such a challenge later in the semester, so I went out and got a haircut. A classmate had recommneded this place called Cutters&Co., so I decided to give it a shot. At fifteen bucks, its really not much more than a CostCutters or a SuperCuts haircut. I made an appointment an hour or so before I drove down. The shop is a bit hard to find- its in the basement of a very nice hotel- the Park Plaza hotel, a few miles east of school on the edge of the Central West End. They validate your parking, and for $15 (student rate) you get a coke or a beer, scalp massage, hot facial towel, shampoo and cut. A pretty sweet deal, even factoring in a tip. Apparently they get a lot of students from the universities as their clientelle is pretty much by word of mouth only.
Afterwards, I stopped by Straubs, a gourmet grocery store, and picked up some chocolate and a few boxes of tea before heading back to studio with the windows down.
Today, being Thursday, I have no classes, so it was a working day of trying to get stuff done. Not so much studio stuff got done, but I fared better on my personal list. My hair was getting a little long, and finding an hour can be such a challenge later in the semester, so I went out and got a haircut. A classmate had recommneded this place called Cutters&Co., so I decided to give it a shot. At fifteen bucks, its really not much more than a CostCutters or a SuperCuts haircut. I made an appointment an hour or so before I drove down. The shop is a bit hard to find- its in the basement of a very nice hotel- the Park Plaza hotel, a few miles east of school on the edge of the Central West End. They validate your parking, and for $15 (student rate) you get a coke or a beer, scalp massage, hot facial towel, shampoo and cut. A pretty sweet deal, even factoring in a tip. Apparently they get a lot of students from the universities as their clientelle is pretty much by word of mouth only.
Afterwards, I stopped by Straubs, a gourmet grocery store, and picked up some chocolate and a few boxes of tea before heading back to studio with the windows down.
Feb 16, 2011
Beer Wednesdays
I had a really irritating professor in high school who would refer to Wednesdays as "hump day", as in it is the day, once you are on the far side of it, there is a clear view to the weekend. It sounded so damn lazy to mentally frame your entire week in relation to how far away you were from the weekend. Sure, maybe he hated his job as a teacher, and maybe he had a really fulfilling weekend life, but it seems to me that if you spend five days out seven thinking about two days, that's a lot of lifetime.
Anyway, for me, Wednesdays really are "hump days" in that if you look at my weekly planner, there are large chunks in the middle of the day every week except for Wednesday, which is a solid bar of green from 9am until 9pm. It's an ordeal, and not just from the length of the day.
This morning I got up at 8, got ready for school, and was out the door at 8:30. Driving. Wednesday's and Fridays I usually treat myself to driving to school instead of walking to the bus or bicycling. Today was special because there was a group of undergraduates who were selling "pancake breakfasts" to fund-raise for their upcoming service spring break to New Orleans. They're going to build a urban farm hut, whatever that is, as a compliment to the chicken coop a previous group of students had constructed. Whatever the cause, I was sold at "pancake breakfast."
I was actually the first customer of the day and they were still working out the kinks in the pancake-production process. Astoundingly, it seemed like one of the two students staffing the electric griddles they had set up on folding tables had never made pancakes before. Actually, he admitted it, and I wasn't impressed with the pancake making skills of his associate either. The surge protector blowing and the griddle turning off in the middle of cooking my pancakes probably didn't help either.
This is kind of turning into a "so there I was, eating pancakes" story, so I'll skip a bit. The pancakes were good and they gave me some coffee. I think they might have actually made some money, too.
First class of the day, at the crack-o-dawn hour of 9am, was my Architectural Association class, where we talk about various articles, papers, and books associated with the AA. This is a tough class, and there are some really smart people in it. The readings are devilishly hard, lengthy, and complex. An decent understanding of modern and postmodern theory as well as critical theory is pretty much prerequisite in order to have any idea of what the authors are going on about. It's a good glass, and when I struggle through the readings and catch a glimpse of what the author is trying to show, I'm always staggered with the power of the ideas and why these readings have never come in front of us before.
So there's three hours of that, which is pretty brutal, and then I have a break for an hour before my next block of time, which is four to five interrupted hours of studio. Really its closer to six, as I'm usually scrambling straight out of the AA class to jump into whatever I'm supposed to have done for studio. And studio is usually a mix of struggling to understand what I'm supposed to be doing followed by a struggle to understand how I'm supposed to do it, followed by a struggle to understand why we should be doing it in the first place. And then I brew a fresh cup of tea.
Immediately after studio, we file downstairs en masse to structures II, which is actually a wonderful chance to attempt to learn something with a definite answer. It's almost kind of like sudoku, you don't have to think, you just follow a process to arrive at an answer. I'm usually pretty beat by this time, and so by the time 9pm rolls around after three hours of structures, I'm so happy to have my car there to drive me home, I could dance. Or weep. And Suki is always so happy to have me come home two hours later than usual to feed her.
Feb 14, 2011
B(l)anking out
Today was finally nice enough to bicycle, so I layered on my hoodie, scarf, and windbreaker and threw on my 20 pound backpack stuffed with my laptop, peripherals, and binders. First stop was the bank to make a deposit, which entailed biking up and down two hills. By the time I got to the bank, which is about a mile away, I was out of breath and drenched with sweat and most disconcerting, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I was also boiling inside of all my layers. I had to sit down outside on the sidewalk for about five minutes in front of my bike to catch my breath, and then I couldn't remember my own address. (but I could still recall my social). Had to sit down in the waiting room for about ten minutes while I drank the bottle of water the bank gave me. Biked very carefully to school, which was a long gradual downhill run.
Biked home very cautiously tonight, no problems. I think I'm just really out of shape, especially for strenuous activity. I thought my walking every day was good, but its clearly not keeping me ready to bike. So I'm going to keep biking (albeit with a much lighter load, avoid the hills, and watch what I'm wearing!).
Biked home very cautiously tonight, no problems. I think I'm just really out of shape, especially for strenuous activity. I thought my walking every day was good, but its clearly not keeping me ready to bike. So I'm going to keep biking (albeit with a much lighter load, avoid the hills, and watch what I'm wearing!).
Feb 13, 2011
The Hater
Some of my more astute readers have probably noticed this more than myself, but I've realized that I am really having a hard time giving this city a chance for me to like it. Do I want to like St.Louis? This question is giving me pause, which is odd since I'd think any idiot would want to like the city he's in, regardless. I wish I liked St.Louis as much as I liked New Orleans, so I guess the answer to the previous question is a qualified "yes."
Additionally, when I moved out here, I was bitter about attending a school that in my mind, was towards the bottom of the list of the schools to which I applied. Since, I've realized that I'm at a fantastic school and have come to appreciate the quality of the courses, faculty, and most of all, the students. But that initial bitterness became associated with the city itself.
It's also hard for me to look at the city and appreciate it on its own terms. Coming from Phoenix, Arizona, I can't help but note the spectacular lack of ethnic diversity (and the food culture which it brings), as well as the bitterly miserable winters. Phoenix is a boomtown, still on ascension. St.Louis has fallen a long way and is still struggling to cope with that trauma. I'm having a harder time finding what makes this city a great place to be.
In theory, I should like it a lot more- there's a lot of craft breweries, the meat and cheeses are great, and there's a lot of great old architecture with lots of potential. The people here are generally friendly, and there's some supposedly great local cultural ammenties. Movie theaters with bars and old leather couches for seats. The city museum. The bar and club scene. Downtown revitalization. A day-by-day struggle and attempt by the city to redefine itself which is really a fascinating and fantastic thing to be a part of.
And I've felt really disengaged from all of that. There's a Tado Ando designed museum here where he brought in Japanese concrete workers. There aren't that many US works by Ando. I havn't been there. Ditto for the contemporary art museums. Ditto for the downtown citygarden, hailed locally as a fantastic urban public intervention. Mom had to drag me up to the top of the arch.
I don't even really hate this city- it not like Tulsa or Memphis where my initial reaction was to get through it as quickly as possible with as little contact with the city as possible. It's just kind of there, like a dog you always pass in the street without bending down to pet it. I've never lived someplace where I've been so ambivalent.
Part of it may be that I don't want to get attached to it, as stupid as that sounds. I don't really know what I want to do architecturally anymore, so I can't really say with any reason that I don't want to work in St.Louis, but for me it feels like "if I'm working in St.Louis, I might as well be working in Phoenix."
And I'm sure that if I was born and raised in St.Louis and moved to Phoenix for school, my reaction would be completely the same, chastising Phoenix for its St.Louis deficiencies. It's also hard to find love for a city that I never see. My world revolves around studio and so my interactions with it are the spaces between. Walking through the St.Louis weather in mid-January. Trying to find a decent place to get some food after studio. Waiting for the bus. Pizza runs to Papa Johns. Grocery shopping and personal property taxes. The urban form out here in U city is pretty bland. This is my interface with the city, and with that in mind, it makes it an uphill battle as far as city appreciation is concerned.
Also mixed into this is my general moodiness and the lack of vitamin-D producing sunshine. I hate feeling so miserable and apathetic- nobody wants to hang around someone like that, least of all me, especially since I subscribe to the belief that people who are unhappy choose to be that way, and I don't want to think that I'm the type of person who chooses to be unhappy.
So I guess that really I can't wait for St.Louis to grow on me- too late for that. I have to make more of a concerted effort to appreciate things that are uniquely St.Louis, perhaps starting with the list of the five things that make me happy:
Additionally, when I moved out here, I was bitter about attending a school that in my mind, was towards the bottom of the list of the schools to which I applied. Since, I've realized that I'm at a fantastic school and have come to appreciate the quality of the courses, faculty, and most of all, the students. But that initial bitterness became associated with the city itself.
It's also hard for me to look at the city and appreciate it on its own terms. Coming from Phoenix, Arizona, I can't help but note the spectacular lack of ethnic diversity (and the food culture which it brings), as well as the bitterly miserable winters. Phoenix is a boomtown, still on ascension. St.Louis has fallen a long way and is still struggling to cope with that trauma. I'm having a harder time finding what makes this city a great place to be.
In theory, I should like it a lot more- there's a lot of craft breweries, the meat and cheeses are great, and there's a lot of great old architecture with lots of potential. The people here are generally friendly, and there's some supposedly great local cultural ammenties. Movie theaters with bars and old leather couches for seats. The city museum. The bar and club scene. Downtown revitalization. A day-by-day struggle and attempt by the city to redefine itself which is really a fascinating and fantastic thing to be a part of.
And I've felt really disengaged from all of that. There's a Tado Ando designed museum here where he brought in Japanese concrete workers. There aren't that many US works by Ando. I havn't been there. Ditto for the contemporary art museums. Ditto for the downtown citygarden, hailed locally as a fantastic urban public intervention. Mom had to drag me up to the top of the arch.
I don't even really hate this city- it not like Tulsa or Memphis where my initial reaction was to get through it as quickly as possible with as little contact with the city as possible. It's just kind of there, like a dog you always pass in the street without bending down to pet it. I've never lived someplace where I've been so ambivalent.
Part of it may be that I don't want to get attached to it, as stupid as that sounds. I don't really know what I want to do architecturally anymore, so I can't really say with any reason that I don't want to work in St.Louis, but for me it feels like "if I'm working in St.Louis, I might as well be working in Phoenix."
And I'm sure that if I was born and raised in St.Louis and moved to Phoenix for school, my reaction would be completely the same, chastising Phoenix for its St.Louis deficiencies. It's also hard to find love for a city that I never see. My world revolves around studio and so my interactions with it are the spaces between. Walking through the St.Louis weather in mid-January. Trying to find a decent place to get some food after studio. Waiting for the bus. Pizza runs to Papa Johns. Grocery shopping and personal property taxes. The urban form out here in U city is pretty bland. This is my interface with the city, and with that in mind, it makes it an uphill battle as far as city appreciation is concerned.
Also mixed into this is my general moodiness and the lack of vitamin-D producing sunshine. I hate feeling so miserable and apathetic- nobody wants to hang around someone like that, least of all me, especially since I subscribe to the belief that people who are unhappy choose to be that way, and I don't want to think that I'm the type of person who chooses to be unhappy.
So I guess that really I can't wait for St.Louis to grow on me- too late for that. I have to make more of a concerted effort to appreciate things that are uniquely St.Louis, perhaps starting with the list of the five things that make me happy:
- Family and close friends
- Travel
- Good food
- Music
- Making other people or creatures happy - (I guess this is where design comes in)
Hey, look at that, design and architecture didn't even directly make the list. There's a kind of satisfaction, a purposeful groove I get into when I'm designing, but its too complicated, too frustrating to call it happiness.
And lets just leave it at that. I've been accused several times this semester of overthinking. And perhaps over-blogging falls into that category as well.
Feb 12, 2011
Dinner at Arnaud's
Yesterday was our last day in New Orleans, so a small group of us decided to find someplace nicer to eat. Not Commander's Palace kind of nice (not that we could get into CP friday night anyhow), but still a nice dinner. To make a long story short, our studio instructor wanted to meet and chat with a few students over cocktails and he recommended the bar in Arnaud's. Nice place, very old school, with white mosaic tile floors, and the waiters all wear white ties and tuxes. Cigars on display in old cabinets, cocktails with ingredients you've never heard of, and the service is exemplary. Anyway, we grabbed a a few sofas in the corner and ordered a round of sazeracs.
A sazerac, for those who don't know, is a locally famous drink, of which New Orleans seems to have a limitless number. There's the hurricane, the hand grenade (an ever popular concoction seen all over Bourbon street in a grenade shaped container), but the sazerac seems to be an altogether more elegant drink, not typically served in a plastic cup for street consumption. It is a cocktail of rye whiskey, sugar, and bitters. It's not a big drink- it took up less than an inch of the very cold highball glass it was served in, with a razor-thin sliver of an orange.
I'm not a big whiskey drinker, but I figured "when in New Orleans", and its not like I was chugging this thing. Sazeracs are very strong drinks, and we pretty much sipped those suckers for about an hour. And by the time we were done, we were really feeling it. So we decided to transfer over to the zagat-rated restaurant. The waiters found a table for us in the jazz room, so the seven of us grabbed a long table towards the back of the room. Another round of drinks was called for - Tanqueray and tonic, an old favorite, for me.
The jazz was great- they were far enough away that we could converse normally, but still contributed to the overall feel of the place. I ordered the crabmeat Karen, which is crab and mushrooms stuffed into puff pastry which is crab-shaped. It was quite good. What stole the evening was the bananas foster, which they prepared tableside. I was dying as I watched our waiter fry up the bananas in the brown sugar and rum in the butter, and then the whole thing flambe'd and served over vanilla ice cream. It was unbelievable. I can't make up my mind if it was better than the ethereal, sublime cafe du monde beignets.
All in all, it was a great culinary capstone for the trip.
Feb 9, 2011
NOLA
It's wednesday night in NOLA (New Orleans LA), and I'm sipping a hurricane from a plastic cup. New Orleans is one of the places in the country where you can walk around with booze as long as its not in a glass container, and bars stay open pretty much as long as they want to. This particular hurricane came from Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, one of the oldest buildings in the French Quarter, although I have difficulty believing that the bar was founded by the pirate Jean Lafitte. However, I have come to appreciate the role myth plays in architecture. After all, it is entirely possible that he did found it. Anyway, at this bar, we got into a discussion with two gentlemen who told us that this was in fact the case, and furthermore, that this was the best place to get a Hurricane in the Vieux Carre, and specifically, that one should always drink it through the straw with the least mixing possible. Of course, one of them was a tour guide, and the other was a horse and buggy driver.
The vieux carre is terrible driving. Every other street is one way, and often streets are blocked off. Which is why, one night coming back from a day of touring, I found myself going the wrong way down a narrow one way street. And of course, with our professor's warning about getting arrested in New Orleans (not advised. They put everyone they arrest in one large room together) we of course are doing this creative driving right in front of a cop. Amazingly, he doesn't follow us or pull us over. We probably just looked like the stupid lost tourists we were.
The night we got into town, we walked to Cafe duMonde a few blocks away. We split a bunch of beignies and just about died. To call them doughnuts would be profane. Sweet, chewy, flakey, fluffy, warm, and coated with powered sugar, so we all end up with these crazy white powder grins like we're coke fiends.
We wandered around cemetery one, just north of the vieux carre, and all the elevated mausoleums. What does the XXX signify on the walls of the voodoo priestesses?
Monday night red beans and rice for dinner one night, take out from the counter at the back of a vieux carre 24 hour corner convenience store. Cheapest meal I've had here, including breakfasts.
Jumbalaya Supreme at Coops, including crawfish, smoked ham, shimp, and sausage. Served with a cold local beer. Wow. Spicy. Delicious.
We did do one night on Bourbon street. Fascinating street, I don't need to do it again anytime soon. A bit of Vegas on a small scale. I was reminded of the hedonistic town for the boys in the Disney movie Pinnochio. We went to a bar called "The Beach" where there was a rodeo whale ride behind the stage, a fat, annoying dude with a mic wandering around trying to boost booze sales, and $5 bottles of bud light. Bit of dancing. Didn't stay too long.
The hotel is cute, two floors, two courtyards. There's four of us to a room, sharing two queen sized canopy beds. Hotel Provincial. Great location, valet parking, a few blocks from Jackson square.
Tonight I walked to canal street in the rain, and kept walking looking for a bus shelter from which I could catch the St.Charles st streetcar line. Until I realized that they were marked by small narrow signs on a few poles. The street cars are great. Old clanking bits of metal and wood. Reminds me of the street cars of Lapa in Rio. Wood seats, light bulbs. But so slow. I could probably walk faster than these cars. Oh well, just part of the way of life of the big easy. A massive woman in silver paint, a professional human statue, advised me where to get off to meet Ayumi and Tim, Saori's sister and brother-in-law, for dinner. They took me to eat some good Lebanese food, and then were kind enough to drive me back to my hotel.
First day, we stopped by a po'boy restaurant. Good stuff. Expensive. Tell me, why does a Poor Boy cost $9? Is it because that's what you are after you buy them. The fried shrimp were dancing out of that po'boy though.
Lectures and discussions by a parade of notable luminaries where the fields of architecture, urbanism, politics, sociology, economics, geological/hydrological history, landscape, and drainage intersect. Where it is crucial to distinguish the difference between hydrology and hydrography. More than a few have offered to buy our acrylic model of the topography of the city of New Orleans. We'd be idiots to sell it.
Pumps. Lots of pumps. Tours of the pumps that keep the city of New Orleans from drowning in rainwater, groundwater, and storm surges. Pumps that are mysterious and silent, pumps that can cripple the city if they fail.
At New Orleans University, we were threatened with arrest if we didn't climb down from the floodwall by the old lighthouse.
Feb 1, 2011
St.Louis is Standing By
Yesterday, Washington University took the unprecedented step of closing the school due to inclement weather. This is something that hasn't happened in 15 years, so this is a fairly significant indication of what the school is expecting. They closed the campus at 3pm yesterday to allow us to get home and avoid rush hour (it was also beginning to have freezing rain), board up the windows, stockpile bread, whatever. The weather media was also blowing this way big, using words like "disaster," "historic," "cataclysmic," and so on. So far what has materialized is about a quarter inch of ice on everything and a few inches of snow. That's it. I came in to school today to get some work done and I took the city buses, which are running with few exceptions. This morning the winter storm warning was cancelled and replace with a blizzard warning. It is getting colder, but not break-out-the-old-brandy-we're-going-to-die kind of cold.
Of course, the gods of irony are going to make sure now that my frozen corpse is discovered like that of the poor squirrel, frozen solid, leaning into the wind with its paws covering its face.
On a lighter note, I'm going to New Orleans sunday. I'm still a little concerned about the road conditions getting out of town, and I'm hoping that the major interstates will be clear by the time we leave sunday morning. It's going to be an epic trip. We've got two cars (one of them is mine) and 7 drivers/passengers between us. It's about an 11 hour drive down, so we'll definitely be sharing driving responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the trip, actually. Down south, following the course of the Mississippi river to its delta, traveling through some of the poorest areas of the United States.
Of course, the gods of irony are going to make sure now that my frozen corpse is discovered like that of the poor squirrel, frozen solid, leaning into the wind with its paws covering its face.
On a lighter note, I'm going to New Orleans sunday. I'm still a little concerned about the road conditions getting out of town, and I'm hoping that the major interstates will be clear by the time we leave sunday morning. It's going to be an epic trip. We've got two cars (one of them is mine) and 7 drivers/passengers between us. It's about an 11 hour drive down, so we'll definitely be sharing driving responsibilities. I'm looking forward to the trip, actually. Down south, following the course of the Mississippi river to its delta, traveling through some of the poorest areas of the United States.
Jan 30, 2011
How to export a GIS file to autoCAD
Here's the situation: you have a bunch of GIS data with extensions like .shp and .xml and you know that its got to have elevations and topography in it because the damn file is labeled new_york_contours. But you're an architect, and you don't really know GIS that well, and you want to convert the GIS file to something you can take into autoCAD. Here's what you do.
- First of all, you'll need arcMAP, which is a program. There are other programs for handling GIS data, but this is what I'm using. Start with a blank template.
- Add your data. Click on the icon that looks like a bold black cross superimposed over a yellow diamond. This will give you a directory that none of your stuff is in, so you need to find the icon in that window that says "add folder location." Click on that to find your folder which contains the data you need. Open up the data. I usually use the shapefile, which has a .shp extension.
- This data will come in as a layer by name ( "new_york_contours") on the left layer window of the screen and you should be able to see it. If you don't see anything in the main window, like a topographic map of new york, make sure you're zoomed to the extents by clicking on the globe icon at the toolbar on the top.
- Right click on the layer in the layer window on the left, and say "open table attributes" or something like that. A giant spreadsheet will pop open.
- Look for a column that has elevation data in it. Usually it will be called "ELEVATIONS" or "HEIGHTS" or something like that. If you don't see any columns with data that makes sense for elevations, you're out of luck since it means the file doesn't have elevation data as part of it. Once you locate the column you're looking for, go ahead to step 6.
- What you are looking for now is a table column called "LAYER." if it has it, you can skip down to 10 If not, continue to 7. It's almost like a "Choose your own adventure" book.
- Up in the top left corner of the spreadsheet thing there's a button called "add field." click it. You're going to basically create a new column for your spreadsheet. Give it the name LAYER and use "short integer" as the drop down menu. Click ok.
- You should now see the new column. Mouse over the word LAYER until it turns into a down arrow and click to select the entire column. It will be empty. Right click on the word LAYER and select "Field calculator" which will add values to this column. In field calculator, the left hand pane will show the columns of the spreadsheet. Double click on the one that has the elevation values, and it will appear in the panel below. Make sure "number" is also selected, although it should be by default. Click ok.
- It may take a few minutes but then the LAYER column should have numbers in it, and if you did everything right, the numbers should be the same as the ones in the elevations column. Click ok.
- Open up the arcMAP tool box. Its icon has a tiny red tool box. Open up "conversions" and click on "convert to CAD". It will give you a new window. Drag the named layer (new_york_contours) from the left handed panel with the layers into the new window to add it to the layers for export. Specify where you want the file to be saved and what version of CAD.
- Click ok. It may take awhile to export the data. If it works, you will see the same layer of data overlaid in a new color over the old data, so you'd see a green new york contour map over a red new york contour map, for example.
- Open the CAD file and the check the layers. If everything worked, each topographic level should now be on its own layer.
Jan 26, 2011
The walls that bind
Sakuya sounds like she's sort of settled in. Apparently they were surprised to find out that their apartment is also a storage repository for 22 chairs, a half-blind old cat, and several pianos. For their two bedroom flat, they are paying about 1400 Euros, so she and her roommates are apparently not real happy. (However, cursory checking around for alternative Helsinki apartments comes up with a similar or higher cost). Outside of her apartment, it sounds like she is having a lot of fun, making new friends with the locals, and trying to keep up with the American program director who apparently speed walks through the city. It still feels awkward here, I'm still stumbling along like I've lost a phantom limb, this gaping hole in my life.
My AA class, thats the Architectural Association in London, the world-renowned school of architecture, has ten students. Seven out of the ten, that's 70%, are Chinese. There are a lot of elective credits, and there are a significant population of Chinese students here, but it seems statistically odd. I can think of several reasons for this- students may get into a certain class and suggest it to their friends, there could be a wider interest in the AA in China compared to the US as the US is less willing to acknowledge that there are good or better schools outside of its borders, it could be that by the time these students who have a harder time with English, got their classes arranged, that it was the best of the classes that were left over. Anyway, at any rate, I applaud their dedication to the art and theory of architecture, and if I'm struggling to finish the hundred pages a week of reading, I can only imagine what they must be going through.
My AA class, thats the Architectural Association in London, the world-renowned school of architecture, has ten students. Seven out of the ten, that's 70%, are Chinese. There are a lot of elective credits, and there are a significant population of Chinese students here, but it seems statistically odd. I can think of several reasons for this- students may get into a certain class and suggest it to their friends, there could be a wider interest in the AA in China compared to the US as the US is less willing to acknowledge that there are good or better schools outside of its borders, it could be that by the time these students who have a harder time with English, got their classes arranged, that it was the best of the classes that were left over. Anyway, at any rate, I applaud their dedication to the art and theory of architecture, and if I'm struggling to finish the hundred pages a week of reading, I can only imagine what they must be going through.
Long Days: Reprise
Well it looks like I've gone a week without blogging. It's been a pretty busy week.
Studio is different from the typical studio, but then, its all typical. As I might have mentioned, the focus of this studio is on the transformational power of infrastructure, particularly water infrastructure, in New Orleans. So we're really being asked to look at infrastructure as architecture, or architecture through the lens of infrastructure. We're at the tail end of a larger effort called "gutter to gulf" which is a series of studios studying the problems of New Orleans and particularly why Katrina was so devastating, and how architectural interventions can help the city. This is, at least, going beyond the proverbial "Katrina Studio" designing disaster relief housing. This studio is in conjunction with the "Dutch Dialogues" which were a series of workshops in the years after Katrina which brought in Dutch experts and representatives to present how the Netherlands have dealt with issues of flooding, subsidence, and living productively with the same water that could quite literally wipe them off the map. There have been six studios leading up to this, so believe you me that there is a serious quantity of work already done for us. We are the studio that supposedly are going to be the ones to tie everything up.
As an interesting side note, post Katrina, the US didn't stoop to actually ask anyone for help or advice from any nation who had successfully dealt with the same issues. However, the Dutch Ambassador immediately came knocking and offered assistance and expertise in the days after the disaster struck. It was it seems, in repayment of an old debt: the invention of the screw pumps by a New Orleans civil engineer which made the lake swamps drain-able and habitable were sent to Amsterdam and Rotterdam and essentially created the physical ground of much of the Netherlands.
Anyway, our studio is also working in conjunction with some architects in New Orleans and also a masters of Landscape architecture from the University of Toronto. One of those students, a woman, is apparently very skilled at working with GIS, or global information systems, a sophisticated mapping technology. When her name was brought up in studio in the discussions of accomodations in New Orleans, I commented to the group including the instructor, "oh, she must be the GIS wizard." Of course, when you pronounce the acronym, it came out sounding something completely different, and I believe I turned bright red after I realized what I had just said. The instructor waved it off.
Anyway, that was part of today. My wednesday classes begin at 9 am and pretty much run until 9 pm. Let's just say its a pretty long day. A very theory intensive 3 hour session on the AA followed by that light and fancy-free class called architectural studio, followed by structures II, which ran over today. So by the end of the day today, I was ready for a little pizza and beer. No classes tomorrow.
I'm actually already a little behind, which is not the best way to end the second week of school. I didn't finish my structures homework, and I didn't finish my studio readings either. My excuse of having a hundred pages of AA theory to read notwithstanding, so I'll get the overdue stuff done tomorrow.
Last weekend, or last friday I should say, we went out with some friends to an ok mexican restaurant on Cherokee Street, which is an interesting old part of St.Louis called Soulard. Afterwards, a much smaller group of us had a pint at Stable, which is a brewhouse in the old stables of the closed Lemp brewery, which was right across the street.
Studio is different from the typical studio, but then, its all typical. As I might have mentioned, the focus of this studio is on the transformational power of infrastructure, particularly water infrastructure, in New Orleans. So we're really being asked to look at infrastructure as architecture, or architecture through the lens of infrastructure. We're at the tail end of a larger effort called "gutter to gulf" which is a series of studios studying the problems of New Orleans and particularly why Katrina was so devastating, and how architectural interventions can help the city. This is, at least, going beyond the proverbial "Katrina Studio" designing disaster relief housing. This studio is in conjunction with the "Dutch Dialogues" which were a series of workshops in the years after Katrina which brought in Dutch experts and representatives to present how the Netherlands have dealt with issues of flooding, subsidence, and living productively with the same water that could quite literally wipe them off the map. There have been six studios leading up to this, so believe you me that there is a serious quantity of work already done for us. We are the studio that supposedly are going to be the ones to tie everything up.
As an interesting side note, post Katrina, the US didn't stoop to actually ask anyone for help or advice from any nation who had successfully dealt with the same issues. However, the Dutch Ambassador immediately came knocking and offered assistance and expertise in the days after the disaster struck. It was it seems, in repayment of an old debt: the invention of the screw pumps by a New Orleans civil engineer which made the lake swamps drain-able and habitable were sent to Amsterdam and Rotterdam and essentially created the physical ground of much of the Netherlands.
Anyway, our studio is also working in conjunction with some architects in New Orleans and also a masters of Landscape architecture from the University of Toronto. One of those students, a woman, is apparently very skilled at working with GIS, or global information systems, a sophisticated mapping technology. When her name was brought up in studio in the discussions of accomodations in New Orleans, I commented to the group including the instructor, "oh, she must be the GIS wizard." Of course, when you pronounce the acronym, it came out sounding something completely different, and I believe I turned bright red after I realized what I had just said. The instructor waved it off.
Anyway, that was part of today. My wednesday classes begin at 9 am and pretty much run until 9 pm. Let's just say its a pretty long day. A very theory intensive 3 hour session on the AA followed by that light and fancy-free class called architectural studio, followed by structures II, which ran over today. So by the end of the day today, I was ready for a little pizza and beer. No classes tomorrow.
I'm actually already a little behind, which is not the best way to end the second week of school. I didn't finish my structures homework, and I didn't finish my studio readings either. My excuse of having a hundred pages of AA theory to read notwithstanding, so I'll get the overdue stuff done tomorrow.
Last weekend, or last friday I should say, we went out with some friends to an ok mexican restaurant on Cherokee Street, which is an interesting old part of St.Louis called Soulard. Afterwards, a much smaller group of us had a pint at Stable, which is a brewhouse in the old stables of the closed Lemp brewery, which was right across the street.
Jan 20, 2011
Snow and Studio
Today was very different from yesterday. With the waiver of my HAL class, I am "free" all day thursday. "Free" in the sense that I don't have any scheduled classes, although I'll still be working all day. Sounds like thursday could be my studio production day. Tuesday will be busy working on stuff for my other wednesday classes, it seems like. Anyway, today when I got up, I was treated to a world covered in seven inches of snow. It was still snowing from the night before, and the snow didn't really let up until around four pm, so it was a very wintery day.
Anyway, I'd been wanting to go visit Forest Park, the "central park" of St.Louis, in the wintertime, and I figured under the snow would be the best time to see it. So I set out a bit after nine, with my boots on, the waterproof, insulated boots I picked up at the beginning of last semester. It a slow but surreal tromp to the metro station, the neighborhood transformed by the thick cover of the dry powdery snow. There is something special both in the beauty of the black stark trees against the white snowy field, and also in the delight that I get from appreciating that beauty.
A short metro ride later, I was tromping into the heart of the park, where there is a vast, Versailles-inspired bowl, with a massive art museum at the crest of the bowl, and a series of interconnected picturesque lakes and bridges at the bottom. It is a massive public space used periodically for concerts, but today, it was filled with kids, free on a snow day, tobogganing down the slope. It seems the use of the bowl as a sledding park is supported by the city; a low hay wall had been erected at the bottom of the bowl to prevent sledders from careening into the lake, and several fires were burning in fire rings up at the top for parents and kids to warm up.
For a Phoenix native, there is a real pleasure to wade through calf-deep virgin snow in vast fields and woods. I trekked through the park like this all the way to the westernmost edge of the park, which is the doorstep of my college. Caught a bus back home, picking up more Suki food along the way. Check out Facebook for photos- find me and friend me if you're interested.
For the rest of the afternoon, I lounged a bit, printed out the readings for my AA studies class, realized I had about a hundred pages to read, assimilate, correlate, and analyze by next tuesday, and lounged no further. I shoved the snow out of the driveway and sidewalk, and cautiously moved my snow-covered car to the garage after carefully salting the driveway.
Drove to school again around six to do more reading, and then wandered upstairs for the Moste Ancient and Sacred Drawinge of ye Deskes. Actually, they first started the lottery system last semester. I lucked out- in my studio of 13, I was the first one drawn, and thus got the first pick of desks. I picked a desk with a great big window, and good access to the aisle. As it turned out, Chuck got the desk next to mine, so we'll be seeing rather a lot of each other. Still not sure why we have to wait until 9pm for these shenanigans. There are no noon classes, so why not do this at noon?
Anyway, I'd been wanting to go visit Forest Park, the "central park" of St.Louis, in the wintertime, and I figured under the snow would be the best time to see it. So I set out a bit after nine, with my boots on, the waterproof, insulated boots I picked up at the beginning of last semester. It a slow but surreal tromp to the metro station, the neighborhood transformed by the thick cover of the dry powdery snow. There is something special both in the beauty of the black stark trees against the white snowy field, and also in the delight that I get from appreciating that beauty.
A short metro ride later, I was tromping into the heart of the park, where there is a vast, Versailles-inspired bowl, with a massive art museum at the crest of the bowl, and a series of interconnected picturesque lakes and bridges at the bottom. It is a massive public space used periodically for concerts, but today, it was filled with kids, free on a snow day, tobogganing down the slope. It seems the use of the bowl as a sledding park is supported by the city; a low hay wall had been erected at the bottom of the bowl to prevent sledders from careening into the lake, and several fires were burning in fire rings up at the top for parents and kids to warm up.
For a Phoenix native, there is a real pleasure to wade through calf-deep virgin snow in vast fields and woods. I trekked through the park like this all the way to the westernmost edge of the park, which is the doorstep of my college. Caught a bus back home, picking up more Suki food along the way. Check out Facebook for photos- find me and friend me if you're interested.
For the rest of the afternoon, I lounged a bit, printed out the readings for my AA studies class, realized I had about a hundred pages to read, assimilate, correlate, and analyze by next tuesday, and lounged no further. I shoved the snow out of the driveway and sidewalk, and cautiously moved my snow-covered car to the garage after carefully salting the driveway.
Drove to school again around six to do more reading, and then wandered upstairs for the Moste Ancient and Sacred Drawinge of ye Deskes. Actually, they first started the lottery system last semester. I lucked out- in my studio of 13, I was the first one drawn, and thus got the first pick of desks. I picked a desk with a great big window, and good access to the aisle. As it turned out, Chuck got the desk next to mine, so we'll be seeing rather a lot of each other. Still not sure why we have to wait until 9pm for these shenanigans. There are no noon classes, so why not do this at noon?
Jan 19, 2011
A Long Day At School
Today was a tumultuous day of ups and downs. Even the weather, which began cool, turned brilliantly sunny, and then to a heavy snowfall in the evening.
My day started at 9AM, with my class which covers the AA in London. This class covers the pedagogy of the AA, its notable faculty, and notable students, and investigates how theory and practice and student work contributed to the production of some of the biggest architectural names of the 1990s and beyond. (Hopefully the answer isn't: "they had a trendy pub").
That class was short in deference to me and a classmate who had a conflicting class at 10:30 in the form of that HAL class I was mentioning earlier. This I suffered through, all the while thinking "no way, no way, no way." After that class let out at noon, I checked the balance of my student card, bought a cup of chili for lunch, and was pleasantly surprised to find ASU had emailed me the syllabus I needed. I quickly printed it out, photocopied my transcript (which I had on me on the chance I could waive out) and dashed to the madam professor's office. She looked it over, almost cursorily, and allowed me to waive.
It felt like a prison reprieve. I tried not to dance out of her office on my way to a celebratory coffee drink. It was a good drink to have, because at 1:30, we entered the great lecture hall for the studio presentations. This three-hour affair sees all the professors of each of the 12 option studios present the work their studio will be undertaking. (After taking two fundamental studios, grad students of any year get to pick and choose the studio they want to take each semester, hence the term option studio.)
I'd pretty much made up my mind of the top six choices. Really there was one and two, which looked really really cool, and everything else, which looked ok to not so interesting. My first choice was an adaptive reuse studio which would take an industrial site in St.Louis, an old brewery, and turn it into a data center and digital arts museum. Just because this studio was not cool enough, there was also a week long field trip to the netherlands to work at the Delft, which is some institute that I've never heard of but has a cool name. Of course I didn't get in to this one.
My second choice studio was a project in central Florence involving the creation of a monestary and a contemporary art museum, considering the religious texts for traditional monestaries, contemporary arts museums, vertical typologies, and contextual issues in dense, ancient cities. And a week in Florence, as well. By now you may have guessed I didn't get into this one either.
I got my third choice (half-full, some people got their seventh choice out of 12) which seems like it deals with designing stuff for post-Katrina New Orleans. I did put it third, but honestly, in the field of architecture, the post-Katrina New Orleans project is almost mandatory. It's almost as bad as shipping container architecture. The spin on this one is that it seems to involve political boundaries and infrastructural systems like water drainage networks. Downside- we're basically picking up where the first two studios to take this course, and another university left off. Upside- I get a trip to New Orleans out of it, and to be honest Ive been wanting to reconnect with my birthplace a bit more.
At the very least, I can have benets and chicory coffee at cafe du monde, and really, what more can you ask from a studio?
Anyway, that was fun times from about 1:30 until 4:30, and so I wandered around, checked emails, and did some stuff online until my 6:30 class, structures II. This class made me nervous since I'd waived out of structures I, since I took it over 4 years ago at ASU, and I hadn't taken any structures classes in over 4 years. The professor of this class is really fun. The licence plate of his convertible actually spells out "structures" and he explained things a very clear way that made me confident that I could figure this stuff out. But it was a long class, that goes until 9pm.
By then, there was an inch of white stuff on the ground, with much more white stuff coming out of the sky, so it was "alec learns to drive...On Ice!" all the way home. I did ok. Some swerving coming around corners, but I took it reall slow, and I took the less hilly way home, and instead of attempting to slide down the ramp to my garage, I parked it on the street. I'll shovel, sweep, and salt tomorrow morning I think (since I dont have to go to the HAL class workshop tomorrow!!!).
Also waiting for us when we got home (besides a hungry and irritable cat) was a hot crock pot full of oxtail stew I'd been cooking for over 24 hours. Good stuff. Extremely filling. Nice dish for a cold winter's night.
My day started at 9AM, with my class which covers the AA in London. This class covers the pedagogy of the AA, its notable faculty, and notable students, and investigates how theory and practice and student work contributed to the production of some of the biggest architectural names of the 1990s and beyond. (Hopefully the answer isn't: "they had a trendy pub").
That class was short in deference to me and a classmate who had a conflicting class at 10:30 in the form of that HAL class I was mentioning earlier. This I suffered through, all the while thinking "no way, no way, no way." After that class let out at noon, I checked the balance of my student card, bought a cup of chili for lunch, and was pleasantly surprised to find ASU had emailed me the syllabus I needed. I quickly printed it out, photocopied my transcript (which I had on me on the chance I could waive out) and dashed to the madam professor's office. She looked it over, almost cursorily, and allowed me to waive.
It felt like a prison reprieve. I tried not to dance out of her office on my way to a celebratory coffee drink. It was a good drink to have, because at 1:30, we entered the great lecture hall for the studio presentations. This three-hour affair sees all the professors of each of the 12 option studios present the work their studio will be undertaking. (After taking two fundamental studios, grad students of any year get to pick and choose the studio they want to take each semester, hence the term option studio.)
I'd pretty much made up my mind of the top six choices. Really there was one and two, which looked really really cool, and everything else, which looked ok to not so interesting. My first choice was an adaptive reuse studio which would take an industrial site in St.Louis, an old brewery, and turn it into a data center and digital arts museum. Just because this studio was not cool enough, there was also a week long field trip to the netherlands to work at the Delft, which is some institute that I've never heard of but has a cool name. Of course I didn't get in to this one.
My second choice studio was a project in central Florence involving the creation of a monestary and a contemporary art museum, considering the religious texts for traditional monestaries, contemporary arts museums, vertical typologies, and contextual issues in dense, ancient cities. And a week in Florence, as well. By now you may have guessed I didn't get into this one either.
I got my third choice (half-full, some people got their seventh choice out of 12) which seems like it deals with designing stuff for post-Katrina New Orleans. I did put it third, but honestly, in the field of architecture, the post-Katrina New Orleans project is almost mandatory. It's almost as bad as shipping container architecture. The spin on this one is that it seems to involve political boundaries and infrastructural systems like water drainage networks. Downside- we're basically picking up where the first two studios to take this course, and another university left off. Upside- I get a trip to New Orleans out of it, and to be honest Ive been wanting to reconnect with my birthplace a bit more.
At the very least, I can have benets and chicory coffee at cafe du monde, and really, what more can you ask from a studio?
Anyway, that was fun times from about 1:30 until 4:30, and so I wandered around, checked emails, and did some stuff online until my 6:30 class, structures II. This class made me nervous since I'd waived out of structures I, since I took it over 4 years ago at ASU, and I hadn't taken any structures classes in over 4 years. The professor of this class is really fun. The licence plate of his convertible actually spells out "structures" and he explained things a very clear way that made me confident that I could figure this stuff out. But it was a long class, that goes until 9pm.
By then, there was an inch of white stuff on the ground, with much more white stuff coming out of the sky, so it was "alec learns to drive...On Ice!" all the way home. I did ok. Some swerving coming around corners, but I took it reall slow, and I took the less hilly way home, and instead of attempting to slide down the ramp to my garage, I parked it on the street. I'll shovel, sweep, and salt tomorrow morning I think (since I dont have to go to the HAL class workshop tomorrow!!!).
Also waiting for us when we got home (besides a hungry and irritable cat) was a hot crock pot full of oxtail stew I'd been cooking for over 24 hours. Good stuff. Extremely filling. Nice dish for a cold winter's night.
Jan 18, 2011
Half-full days of school
I've come to believe that you live in the world you choose- it really is a case of choosing to see the glass as half empty or half full. Right now, though its difficult to see anything but a dingy, cracked glass with coffee stains and a few cloudy drops hugging the bottom corner. Even if it is on top of an ocean of water.
The weather isn't helping. It's a few degrees above freezing today, and the piss-mist of rain splattering the gray city forecasters are warning will freeze tonight. I'm irritated about my class schedule. I'm not looking forward to Structures II, I think that will be a tough class as its been awhile since I've taken structures, but that's not the main thing. There's this class we'll call HAL that deals with HVAC, acoustics, and light. This sounds absolutely identical to a class I took at ASU. I have the binder for the class every single day's presentations in it, and I have one of the two syllabi, as the class was taught by two professors at ASU.
However, the professor here, let's call her rigorous, (glass is half full, remember?) is apparently unwilling to accept anything other than both syllabi in order to waive me from the class, and so I'm not happy with the current situation. Additionally, the HAL class overlaps with the class that I really wanted to take, the one class that has any appeal to me at all this semester (we'll see about studio). I called ASU and they told me who I needed to email, so my sincere hope is that they're currently working on getting me that syllabus and sending it to me in the next few days. Today or tomorrow would be nice.
However, I can't be in both classes simultaneously, so I will probably attend the start of each class. I hate it, but the madam professor also acts personally and has an excellent memory. If I don't get anything from ASU within the next week, I'm pretty much screwed into taking the HAL class since I will either be dropped from the class I want to take from my not being there for the full class or already have too much of a workload to catch up to it.
The third option is to simply say "screw it," and only attend the class I want to take. If ASU comes through in the two weeks, then I can take it to madam professor, and if she refuses to accept it, I can take it up with the head of the department who will hopefully intercede on my behalf. There are, of course, obvious risks. If ASU doesn't come through in two weeks, and if I continue to skip the HAL class, I'll fail, possibly lose my scholarship (if it drops my GPA enough), etc. etc. so I'm not going to do that. I could drop the class entirely, but I'm not sure of the ramifications as it still infuriatingly has to go through madam professor.
For now, I will wait. And send polite email reminders to ASU if I hear nothing by thursday. So you can see why I'm less than exuberant about the beginning of this semester. And don't even get me started about how much I miss Saori.
Half-full. Half-full.
Jan 17, 2011
Highlights from the UK pt II
Best moments from traveling the UK continued:
- Strolling down Brighton Pier in the seaside city of Brighton, from which you can see the white cliffs of dover. Amusement park piers are the same the world over. Tacky arcades, cheap amusement park rides, a profusion of fried stuff and ice cream for sale. In sum, great stuff, especially with the sun beginning to set over the channel. I bought a few fresh hot donuts only to have one snatched out of my hand by the most aggressive seagulls I've ever seen.
- After strolling through the fields around the small village of Haslemere, enjoying a traditional country breakfast in one of the small coffee shops on the small high street. Tea service, baked beans, grilled tomato, ham, sausage, and toast. Reading the Haslemere Herald which headlined the local community theater and the possible fate of Sir Author Conan Doyle's home nearby.
- Wandering through the oddly eclectic home/museum of Sir John Soane. Soane was the most famous British architect of his time, in the early 19th century. He was a fervent neo-classicist, and quite literally filled his home with greek, roman, and egyptian fragments of architecture, sculpture, busts, and curios. Lots of architectural experimentation too with skylights, tiny galleries and courtyards, mirrors, and niches.
A Wee Bit o Haggis and Treacle Tart
While in the UK I attempted to sample the local, traditional fare as much as possible. This meant I ate fish and chips a few times, and a ton of meat pies. If there is one word to sum up British cuisine, I would say it is heavy. Steak and kidney pie. Mushroom and steak pie. Sausages and mashed potatoes. The vegetables are always steamed or boiled, mostly potatoes, carrots, and brussel sprouts. Heavy gravies, thick and flaky crusts. The tastes were always good, but its pretty much "stick to your ribs" every meal.
I stuck with local ales as much as possible, which gave me mixed results. Some of the ales were so stout they could be confused with Guinness, while others were much pale. Almost all of them were served at a cool but not cold temperature, which was a little different for me. I did really like an extra bitter beer we got in one of the villages in Surrey, and while in Scotland, I drank a lot of 80/- (eighty shilling) beer.
At one of the Edinburgh pubs, the last day we were there, I got the "wee taste of haggis" (cater to tourists much?), which was a very small portion of the infamous dish served with neeps and tatties (mashed turnips and mashed potatoes). Served with a wheat cracker, but no traditional prunes. It was actually not bad. If you made a slightly runny meatloaf with liver and kidneys, then you'd get a pretty close idea of what haggis tastes like. Of course, this is the tourist version, so instead of boiling everything in a sheep's stomach, they probably just added a few dashes of sheep's stomach extract.
The last night in the UK, we went to a country pub/restaurant. This was in an old house, and it had low wooden ceiling beams we had to duck under as we walked back to our table. Actually, first we sat in easy chairs by a small fireplace and drank our pre-dinner tipples. I had my typical local Enlgish ale, Tay got his usual Kronenbourg, and Brit got her usual hard apple cider, although it was unusually unfiltered which gave it a really nice flavor. For dinner, we hit all the British countryside favorites like were a group of feasting young lords. Roast pheasant, roasted potatoes, ales, treacle tart, bread-and-butter pudding. Treacle tart is pretty good stuff actually. Reminded me a bit of the gooey butter cake of midwest fame.
Overall, I would say that British food is unfairly maligned, perhaps because it is contrasted with French and Italian cuisine. It's not bad, some of it is quite good, but it is more of a particular character.
Jan 14, 2011
Highlights from the UK pt. I
I'm finally back stateside, in Ponca city, Oklahoma, after nearly two weeks in the UK. So far I've been through no less than eight airports, and I can tell you that I am so incredibly happy to be driving the eight hour trip to St.Louis tomorrow morning.
Broadly, I spent a few days in the villages around London, a few days in London, a few more days of villages and towns, a few days in Edinburgh, and a few more days in London. My favorite moments from the trip:
Broadly, I spent a few days in the villages around London, a few days in London, a few more days of villages and towns, a few days in Edinburgh, and a few more days in London. My favorite moments from the trip:
- Wandering the cobblestone streets and alleys of Oxford, which were dark, misty, and severe with the gothic architecture of the ancient campus spires looming overhead.
- Christ Church College in Oxford, which was an amazing campus which was the inspiration for Hogwarts with a dining hall lined with with the glowering portraits of the famous graduates including Kings and Queens of England. We were one of the last people admitted to see it, and we got trapped in a loop for awhile looking for the exit. Wandering around the giant courtyards, cathedrals, halls, and arcades in the dark punctuated by sparse lanterns was really wonderful.
- Buttermarket square in Canterbury is where three narrow streets lined with old shops and pubs come together at the gate to Canterbury cathedral. It felt right out of the middle ages.
- Canterbury Cathedral was is a phenomenal piece of architecture, a unique cathedral split into three levels, with the nave two flights of stone stairs up to the apse. Not one, but two crossings, and cavernous crypts. An extremely contentious site in the history of Christianity in England.
- The Tower of London: taking the tour, wandering the grounds, walking the battlements, the Crown Jewels.
- Starting the new years eve early with several pints with Tay and Brit at the Albion Pub in downtown London, not far from St.Pauls Cathedral.
- New Years Eve in Central London.
- Brit got us a hotel about two minutes from the embankment on the Thames, right across from the London Eye, which is where they shot off the fireworks. Walking back to the hotel after drinks at the pub, there were already huge patrols getting set up to handle the crowds, errecting barricades at various street junctures. The deal was that there were several areas along the Thames that were designated firework viewing areas, and later that night, at a selected time or when a viewing area reached a certain population, the barricades would go up and no one else would be allowed inside. Our hotel gave us a pass that allowed us passage through the barricade like a VIP.
- We got to our hotel fine, where there was already a huge line for the Sherlock Holmes pub next door. We hung out in our hotel room for awhile and then Tay and I set out for food around 9pm. By then, all road traffic had been blocked off, and the streets were absolutely filled with people. It was scary and exhilerating. We fought our way along the streets, looking for food with no luck.
- First, as the heart of London is mostly government and ministry buildings (think parlement and big ben) there were limited options to begin with. The line at McDonalds stretched out the door, across the sidewalk, and across the street. Tay and I walked for awhile before calling it quits and hitting a pub for a pint so Tay could use the bathroom. By the time we got back, the viewing areas were totally full, so we had to use our pass and explain to several police that we had our hotel in there before we were allowed in.
- We picked up Brit and headed out to the Embankment at 11:40PM. The policy of crowd control was effective. It was just the right amount of people, so we could see and weren't squeezed to death. There was a DJ working the crowds and broadcasting music, and we had a great view of the London Eye and the south bank. At one minute till, a massive countdown clock was projected on a tower next to the eye and started ticking down.
- At 12:00, the biggest, best fireworks I've ever seen commenced. It was fifteen minutes of finale, huge. Disneyland times ten. They shot off fireworks from the eye and from nearby. It was fantastic. You couldn't help but be blown away. Afterwards, they played Auld Land Syne (which is Scottish, incidently) and everyone sang. Finally, we got the supreme value from the hotel by simply walking five minutes to get to our beds, where the rest of London faced a long difficult trek through congested tube and buses.
- Ghost town walk through London. I got up with Tay and Brit and after they took off, I wandered the empty streets of London at 9 am. There was not a soul in Picadilly Circus. The streets were as desolate and errily silent as 28 days later as London slept off its revelry from the night before.
- Westminister Abbey is pretty amazing mostly for its history and the dead entombed there. It is the amazon.com of notable British dead. Handel, Issac Newton, Charles Darwin. Ancient Kings and Queens including the tomb of Edward the Confessor, Elizabeth, and Mary, Queen of the Scots. More impressive than the slick St.Pauls.
- Visiting the Tate Modern which struck me more powerful as architectural space rather than art gallery.
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