get low

The length of the day here in Helsinki takes some getting used to. It only really feels like its starting to get dark around 11 at night, and the only time it's really dark is around midnight. By three AM, the sky is already getting light again. So in a way, its very nice- the extended dusk and sunset means that it stretches out time that can be spent outdoors. Saori and I took a walk a few nights ago after 10, and it was still very light out, just wandering around the peninsula that she lives on. It's past 10:30 here, and there's still direct light on most of the building across the plaza.

On the flip side, I'm very sensitive to light when I'm sleeping, so Saori lent me her sleeping mask and I pretty much have to use it if I want to sleep.

Saori's roommates have both left, so Saori and I have the place to ourselves. Well, and the ancient, half-blind cat.

There is something very understated about Helsinki, which I understand is a characteristic of Finnish culture and national character. It wasn't until yesterday afternoon, when we went to the cafe on top of the 12 story tall Toroni tower that I realized how low-rise the city of Helsinki really is. When you think about it, 12 stories in a capital city is nothing. My apartment in Buenos Aires was taller than this tower. However, the convention of the city keeps almost every building at or below six stories. There is something really nice about this as you get a lot of light and sky- it makes for a much more open feeling street level. At the same time, there is also a pretty high density since the buildings take up everything they can up to that six story height limit.  It contributes to this feeling of quaintness to Helsinki, like a pre-elevator city.

From my limited stays in Oslo and Stockholm over five years ago, Helsinki strikes me as the most laid back and least cosmopolitan of those scandinavian cities. Its character is hard to define-  There's the beaux arts and neoclassical architecture in the faded pastel hues of Tsarist Russia as well as a tendency towards the rustic and rough hewn granite. But the atmosphere is more bucolic and nearly provincial- its much cleaner, much more friendly, and much less tense than St.Petersburg. The lowness of the city and the way the people here interact with the city and the outdoors kind of reminds me of downtown Salt Lake City, although at much higher density. Pretty much the entire city is between four and six stories.

 Lots of public space. Plazas abound for a city that is covered with snow and ice most of the year. On a sunny day like today, Finlanders flocked to the sidewalk cafes and lounged at the outdoor tables in a Parisian style. Actually, they're pretty much everywhere outside- in the parks, on benches, on monuments, on the steps of the churches... When I last passed through Scandinavia, hurting from the high VAT, especially as a backpacker, I saw people everywhere lounging out of doors on those summery days. I immediatly jumped to the conclusion that the Scamdinavians, as I called them back then, were living the good life in welfare states, lounging off the of tax dollars of visitors. Actually, they are hard workers who genuinely care for workmanship, and who can blame them for wanting to enjoy the limited sunshine and summer that they get?

Helsinki

I've made it safely to Helsinki. Although the individual legs of travel were pretty short, it was actually a bit of a trek to get over here.

Thursday morning, mom dropped me at the airport in Phoenix at 5 AM for my flight out. It was about a three and a half hour flight to Chicago in the middle seat. Got in to Chicago around noon and ended up having a six hour layover. O'hare is a really ugly airport. It's almost like it was supposed to be High-Tech but ended up looking like a sad parody of victorian train station. Had a pizza and a beer for lunch while I waited for my flight. Flew to London also in a middle seat. For someone who has been on 12 hour flights before, a six and a half hour long flight is almost nothing. Got a few hours of sleep, which was great. Didn't even finish reading all of my books.

Dad picked me up at the airport in London and drove me back to his house, where I had a shower and a great breakfast and a nap for an hour or two. Dad pretty much had to drag me out of bed when it was time for lunch. We actually ate at a pub in Guildford, right on one of the meandering streams. England is so green and lush right now. Really pretty. Dad put me on the train in Guildford and it was a short ride to Gatwick airport for my cheap flight to Helsinki. I crammed my messenger bag into my backpack to comply with the "one bag" rule. Hello, EasyJet. The flight to Helsinki was pretty short, about two and a half hours long. When the messages over the intercom started being in Finnish, it made me crack up a little bit- Finnish sounds a bit like English spoken backwards with too many Os and As.

Finnish airport looks a lot more designed than Heathrow- there is wood everywhere, clean Scandinavian lines, sleek design in wood, steel, and glass. The bus into town was easy to figure out- I walked outside the terminal and the bus sign said "Helsinki train station". About $5 for the city bus. The ride in was about 30 minutes- even well past 9 o clock at night, the sky was a dark blue dusk, but still light enough to see by. Tall, skinny trees grow densely wherever there is a patch of forest.

Saori met me outside the train station. It wasn't too cold or dark yet outside on this friday night, and there were tons of Finns just hanging out outside. Poeple here seem to really take advantage of the public space. Lots of public plazas here.

For some reason, my variation on jet lag meant I was pretty wide awake around 10pm, so we walked over to an outdoor bar and had a beer. It was wierd to think of myself in Helsinki since a little over 24 hours before, I was in Phoenix, then Chicago, then London. Took a streetcar back to Saori's flat where she lives with two other guys in the program. One of them, Phillip, had already taken off for St.Louis.

I've been having a hard time falling alseep, partly from my jet lag, but also from how early the sun rises and shines directly into Saori's room. So it was little surprise that we ended up getting up around noon. Saori led me on a walking tour around the city- we stopped at Cafe Ursula on the coast for a very nice snack and coffee. Smoked salmon and dill on rye toast, trying to keep the aggressive sparrows at bay. Really a beautiful day. We made dinner at Saori's apartment- Salmon soup, before heading out to catch the final football match in the European cup at a sports bar. There, we met up with a bunch of Saori's classmates, many of whom will be continuing on to Buenos Aires in the fall.

Today, we woke up late again, so we decided to make a day of research and packing. Saori needed to buy a new suitcase since her old one broke, and I needed some long sleeve t shirts, so we went shopping for most of the day. They have the cheap fashion stores H&M here like they have circle-Ks in Phoenix.

Afterwards, we had a cup of coffee at the Cafe Aalto, in a bookstore that he designed before heading back home. Everything closes in Helsinki on Sunday nights anyway, and Saori wanted to get started packing things up.

So right now, we're trying to figure out what to do with our time here in Finland. The problem is that its so expensive to go anywhere.  We shall see.

Did tuesday really exist?

I think this has been one of my least productive days in about six months, but if I write it out, maybe it makes it sound like I'm actually getting something accomplished.

Today I went for a jog, washed some dishes and loaded the dishwasher, took a walk to the open desert to take some photos, and made a spagetti dinner out of leftovers. Oh, and I watched about a dozen episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist, an action anime series, on Netflix. At least I'm taking a break to do something else every third episode.

Proof that I left the house. Could have been photoshopped,
but the lighting and edge of the hair are pretty good.

Party at Mom's

Got up around 5 am yesterday morning and dropped mom off at the airport. She's flying to Florida to check out apartments. I dropped her off at the bus pick up for the terminal off of Washington- with my limited experience driving, it seemed like a much more palatable idea than driving into the airport. There is some irony to the fact that the airport, which was initially designed to reduce the distance between the car and the airplane, has simply created a very complicated and confusing traffic situation.

I drove back home, the first time to drive stick solo, and crashed. In bed.

It feels really weird to have mom's place to myself. I almost feel like I'm sixteen with my parents gone for the night, like I'm going to watch R-rated movies and eat ice cream, or do some kind of mischief.

Got up around ten and ran a few errands before meeting Tay and Britt at George and Dragon for a pint and some pub grub. Later, I met up with my coworker and her husband at their new guest house/condo for dinner. It was great to see them and she made  a really really good okonomiyaki, which is a Japanese dish, kind of like a cabbage, noodle, and egg pancake with various meats.

Afterwards, Tay and Britt came over to mom's house and we drank some wine and played a lot of cards. They stayed over, and in the morning after Tay woke up at 11, he made us a wonderful breakfast/brunch of french toast. Surprisingly good, actually. The rest of the day was predictably lazy. We did get out to run a few errands, and then I cooked everyone sausage jambalaya (from a box, but still good) for dinner before they took off.

Tonight I worked on my urban books application- there's a very popular elective in the fall which is made of art and architecture students which is kind of a sketching studio that makes a book with the subject of St.Louis. This year, apparently there were so many applicants, that they instituted an application system, where you have to submit a page of work and a paragraph saying why you want to take the class and what your expectations are. I figure I've got a good chance since I've already overheard people saying "applying for an elective? forget about it!" (at least, I'm hoping that the application will keep a lot of people from applying).

I also started watching Fullmetal Alchemist which is required otaku no anime. It's waaay to easy to watch entire seasons of things with Netflix, and this thing has about fifty episodes. I watched eight of them tonight, they are actually only about 20 minutes long, but they're kind of disturbing, not a great thing to watch right before you go to bed. Which is part of the reason why I'm writing this after 2 am.

Cityscraped

I caught a ride into Tempe with mom today and worked my way downtown by walking and lightrail. My objective was the replacement of Patiots square park, Phoenix's downtown public plaza. Patriots square was underutilized partially because downtown was so depopulated. Its really difficult to have a living city where nobody actually lives. However, as an advocate for public space, I don't think ripping the entire thing out and replacing it with a shopping center was a great idea. I understand that it is a means of attracting people to the downtown, but this thing is an island, focusing inward around two small plazas. It's very cut off from the city around it, save for the street which cuts through the center of it. Surround it with parking, and it could be anywhere in the metro sprawl. It's also extremely targeted- this was a public space that was for everyone which has been transformed and redeveloped into a space for upper-middle-class 20-40 year olds. There's a Lucky Strike bowling alley/lounge, very hipster, along with stand up comedy club instead of a movie theater, and an urban outfitters. It's Mill avenue wrapped around itself. The boutique hotel opens later this year, as does the gourmet grocery store which will sell $5 jars of imported mustard.

I'm probably more acutely aware of the social implications of public space than most people, so it bothers me when I see public space being replaced with private space. Even on this saturday morning, I was watched by the security guard patrolling the perimeter, while a posted list of regulations detailed what was permissible in this space. A not so subtle reminder that you are here by the grace of your wallet and are liable to deportation if you appear otherwise. I guess I'm just an advocate for the city being for everyone, because really everyone is contributing to the city, and to throw up something like Cityscape tells the other 80% of the population they don't really matter.

Anyway, went back to Tempe and got an Arizona Peach beer at Four Peaks. If you asked me what my favorite beer was, I'd have to ask you "when?" Today was a really hot, dry, sunny day in the mid-90s, and sitting in the cool shade of the bar, and drinking the cold pint of the golden, slightly hoppy, fresh, and hint of peach beer was incredible. It's the only place to get it in the world, and I'm not upset because its also the best conditions to be drinking it in.

Post-graduation

The week continued.
After the party, not a whole lot happened.
Mom started going to bar prep classes on tuesday. I caught a ride with her into town.

What the hell else was I going to do?

This week, mom would go to bar prep courses, and I'd wander over the architecture library and stake out a table. A week after graduation, it was pretty quiet. Free wi-fi, comfortable, light, and possibly the largest architecture library in the US, it made a nice base to figure out what I was going to do this summer.

It sounds like there is just not much work here. A friend of mine who recently graduated from the architecture grad school at ASU confided that few, if any, have been able to find jobs. Taylor and Brit, encountered an army of applicants while chasing down Craigslist postings. Everywhere I go, it seems I overhear someone looking for a job. So Phoenix is not a great place to be jobwise.

So, part of the time at the library I spent job hunting. Applied to a few places around town, and also a few places in the UK. Not much luck. It's tough to be really enthusiastic about since really at this point, I'm only really available to work for a month.

Got a slew of rejection emails from the firms that bothered to send them. Actually, one of the senior designers from Rick Joy's office sent me an incredibly warm rejection letter which actually made me feel good reading it.  No word yet from Sir Norman Foster. Something tells me that I will not get a personalized rejection letter from atop the Gherkin.

I also spent awhile figuring out my school finances and travel plans. Thursday, I booked my tickets to London and Helsinki; made further arrangements possibly to see Salt Lake. Whatever this summer is, it is definitely NOT going to be dull.

Being in Tempe also allowed me the opportunity to meet up with old friends. Had lunch with Sal and his girlfriend one afternoon, and then Tay and Brit the next day, and actually had lunch with my dear friend Dr. Morton, who was my history of architecture professor at ASU. It was good to catch up and see what adventures he's been up to and to update him on what we've been up to in St.Louis.

The other thing I've been doing is learning to drive stick.
Mom has this car. It's about the size of a box of matches, yet has the turning radius of an aircraft carrier. When you get in, the seats are so low they're actually below the level of the street. It has the visibility of a deep sea submersible. If you've got rope to tie it down, the trunk is large enough to hold a golf-ball. If you want to see what cars are around you, the best bet is to stick a camera out the window and snap a quick shot. Best of all, it's got an manual transmission.

Last summer, mom attempted to teach me how to drive stick, partly in my anticipation of having to drive a manual transmission truck to move out to St.Louis. We spent a few hours driving around the nearby church parking lot, endlessly shifting from first, to second, stopping. Shifting to first again, to second, ad nauseum. Actually it was good practice. Thursday, we did a few laps around the church parking lot. And then I drove back to mom's house which was new. The next day, I drove to Tempe. I'm still sweating bullets the entire time, occasionally killing the car, and occasionally swearing. But I'm getting better. I'm told its just a matter of practice.

Realistically, I need to know how to drive stick. When I was in Argentina, a group of us took a bus trip across the country to Mendoza, aiming to reach Las Lenas, an ski resort high in the Andes. The bus took us as far as Mendoza where I found a car rental place a mile from the bus station. Guess how many automatic transmission vehicles they had on loan? Thankfully, there were two people in the group who not only knew how to drive stick, but were old enough to go on the rental agreement.

the Revolutionaries

It's hard to get my head outside of architecture school, and far to easy to lose contact with reality and the world going by outside, so it was not without a great feeling of "what? how can they be graduating?" upon the realization that I needed to buy tickets to go to my brother's and mother's graduation.

My brother, whom my parents were deeply concerned with whether or not he would even be admitted to ASU, has graduated summa cum laude, a distinction, I might add, that I did not attain. I have seen him mature so much in four years both intellectually and socially- becoming the man I knew he would become. Now, Taylor is preparing for another quantum leap- come fall, he will be attending the 23rd best law school in the country. If he was crawling before he went to ASU, he graduated striding purposefully, but now he will have to full out run. But he can do it. He has the combination it takes to succeed- the razor sharp intellect, the warmth and charisma, and the determined drive; if he engages with law school, the engine that is Taylor will blow us all away.

These three years have been a different kind of challenge for my mother. I already knew she had the determination and the rationality and the intellect that would make her a great lawyer, but she had to re-learn that she possessed these qualities, and she had to overcome her fear of alienation as a later-in-life student where the average age would be half of her own age. And she did fantastic. Not only did she make many friends across the age spectrum, she also had stellar academic achievements- most notably her willingness to be lucky combined with great writing skills which brought her a position on the Law Journal and later as a note-and-comment editor. She has worked incredibly hard and she has done it. Now, like Taylor, she faces a new challenge which I am confident she will overcome. A new program, in a strange new place, filled mostly with accountants as she begins work on her tax LLM.

Two revolutionaries. Leaving their victories in Phoenix behind, they take their fights onward....

Summer break: After review to Ahwatukee

Hmm what have I been up to in my lazy start to summer?

Last tuesday: final review, then out to $1 burgers and drinks at Bar Louis with the rest of the studio. (of course, after you add blue cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, sauces, etc it's more like an $6 burger, but the idea is the thing). Just one drink since I'm so stoned on sleep, so I catch a ride back home with some other people. Severe sleep deprivation is like an alcohol multiplier. I crash on the couch with a beer and watch part of Brazil before calling it a night and getting some much deserved sleep.

Wednesday: spent most of the day clearing out studio, finishing other school projects, burning discs of work for school records. Drinks and a casual pot luck at our instructor's house near Soulard. Really pretty part of town. Really gentrified. All old brick buildings south of downtown St.Louis. Lots of trees, narrow streets, and bars. House was predictably nice modern. Eames and Corbu chairs. $2000 rare architect's monographs. Nice kitchen. I brought beans I'd made in the crock pot with some smoked ham hocks. People really liked it. Not quite as good as Jonathan's (Sam's boyfriend) jambalaya, which was terrific, even though it had mushrooms in it. I ate a ton. We were all thrown out around 11. Kind of bittersweet as I would not see many of them for the better part of a year as they will go abroad.

Thursday: finalized burning discs and cleaning out my desk, which involved lots of sorting, throwing things away, and hauling stuff to my car. I hope I got everything. Aired up Saori's tires and drove around her car for awhile since I'd be gone for awhile. Against my better judgement, I went to a rave-themed party at a friends house, knowing full well I had a 7am cab to the airport the following morning and still had not packed for Phoenix, and potentially, Scandinavia. Oh well. The party was fun. Lots of poppy trance music, black lights, masks. I got blisters on both my feet from dancing on the wooden floors. Around midnight, the party was broken up by police who told us they'd received noise complaints from neighbors. That's the second time in a month I've been to a broken up party. We cheerfully filed out and while most people moved on to another house to party, I went home. After all, I have to be responsible and there was that flight tomorrow, er, in a few hours.

Friday: got up at 6 and quickly packed. Slipped my passport into my jeans so I wouldn't forget it. Packed quickly, going down the list of essentials I'd written the day before. You really only need two things to travel: money and a passport. Everything else is replaceable. Threw together a haphazard set of clothes: hot clothes for Phoenix, long sleeves and a wool cardigan for the UK and Helsinki, a few dress shirts and pants in case I found a job, sandals, slip on sneakers, and workplace slip-ons. And suki. Oh yes, did I mention I was bringing my cat?

Cab was early, which turned out to be a good thing.
I stuffed Suki in the airline approved pet carrier, grabbed my backpack and my suitcase, and hopped in the taxi. We were halfway to the airport when the part of my brain that knew I had my passport in my jeans finally met with the part of my brain that knew I'd changed my jeans before leaving. Even without tickets booked for international travel, I needed to have that option open so I had us turn around and I made a mad dash back into my apartment. Luckily I'm one of those people who just budgets in extra time for stuff like this, so we were totally fine for time.

I really hate air travel, and Suki dislikes it much more than I. Getting her through security was interesting. I have to take her out of the carrier and carry her through the metal detector. While I waited for her carrier to get through the xray scanner, I set her down in the gray tray and people just stared at us. She still had her lion cut which made the whole thing more strange. She didn't really fuss at all until the plane pulled back from the gate. She didn't like the noise, she didn't like the motion, and when the plane roared and accelerated into a take-off, she completely became unglued. Howling and screaming like a baby, turning around and around in her carrier. My seat companion laughed and clucked at the poor creature, and the woman in the seat in front of me rang for the air steward.

We were asked to move to a seat in the back due to the woman's allergy to cats. Although two random strangers told me that if Suki hadn't started meowing, she probably would never have noticed. I didn't care. I went from a middle seat to a middle seat, and the two guys I sat between didn't complain. Suki quieted down after awhile though it could have been from shock. She was unhappy at landing too but it wasn't as bad as takeoff.

We actually had a stop in Denver but we were staying on the same plane. It's actually a great deal- when you stay on the same plane, at least on Southwest, you have first pick of any seat. Any seat. So me and my cat moved right up the first or second row and the window. Suki's take off from Denver was actually a lot more mild than from St.Louis, I was surprised. Suki was pretty quiet the entire time. Maybe she remembered that she didn't die the first time.

Got into Phoenix around noon and both my grandmothers picked me up. I'm lucky to have such great women in my family. Drove to mom's house and Suki extracted herself from the carrier to find her unwelcome cousin, Zara. Zara's relationship to Suki is a lot like Nermal's relationship with Garfield.

Updated portfolio

Day 6 post-review: I assembled a new portfolio for job hunting.

And here it is.

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture

Review

Today is Tuesday, May 17. By the time you read this, I will already be dead. Seven days ago, we had our final review for studio. Architecture studio review is the classic tradition stretching back at least half a century (but where did it start?) whereby at the end of the term, students present their work in a representational manner with models, animations, drawings, renderings, in addition to an oral presentation to a jury, typically made up of architectural professionals.


Hours of sleep friday: 6
Hours of sleep saturday: 4
Hours of sleep sunday: 0
Hours of sleep monday: 4

Size of my final boards: 11'4" x 7'
Cost of printing: $200
Cost of prints that printed wrong that I couldn't get a refund for: $60.

Critics on my review: 6



I guess I've never really thought about why we do it this way. In the "real world" professionals present their work to people who are not architects, and at any rate, the intent is to "sell" the product of architecture, so the review isn't that. The alternative, that the review is about the critique of the students technique and theory, strikes closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really make sense when you consider that the review is the last thing you do for studio. There might be a good exchange of ideas in a presentation, directions the student might take the project, aspects unconsidered, tweaks and variations to explore.... but that time is not built-in. It's not part of the architecture school culture.


One of the critics for our studio was a landscape architect who early on in the day started talking about her "fantasy two weeks," amending it to professional fantasy two weeks after a humorously awkward pause. She was talking about a two week period after a review where a student might actually keep working on the project based on the feedback. What struck me was, why don't we do it? Do we need the time to develop the project up to the final review? Was there once an underlying idea that students would actually go back and revise their work? As a student, I can safely say that the vast majority of architecture students mentally checked out the moment they sat back down in their chairs, and that what was actually discussed in the review gets dissolved in a hazy mist of exhaustion mingled with two week fantasies of drinking, relaxing, and sleep. Which is why I have people take notes for me when I get critiqued.


It gets tricky though- suppose your entire project is suspect, or the underlying assumptions you have built the architecture on are invalid. One of our classmates was told that his project would kill many people as well as cause the destruction of the the greater part of New Orleans. I think this might have been stretching it, but suppose it were true. What is he going to do for those two weeks? There's also the issue of fallibility. Who's to say the critics are right? So much of what we do is subjective and dependent on unspoken convention and theory.


I guess review is about clarifying your own thinking- it pushes you to confront, understand, simplify, and synthesize your own thoughts about design and architecture, which is really the point of studio. Any studio. The projects don't really mean anything. Peter Cook said it best- words like Urbanism are just words to get the ideas behind them to move.


It's always interesting to hear the way students describe their reviews, especially given the ambiguity about their purpose. What exactly is makes a "good" review then? Or a "bad" one? In the context I just described, a bad review would be one where the critics do nothing but rave about how good the project is, and a good review would be one where the project is ripped apart to its most basic level and all its ideas exposed and challenged.


As a student, it gets emotional. The relationship between your project and you is tense- at the end of the semester, you hate your own project. Its an idiot thing, terrible, ugly, stupid, boring, and trite. Why did you even think it would work? You must be a terrible designer. But its too late to start over and there's too little time to tweak it into something good or interesting. You work on it numbly, filled with a mute loathing and dream of just finishing so you can sleep. But its also your baby. It's your work, your blood on the model, and its your tired eyes staring back at you from the beautiful six hour rendering. So you hate it, but its your work and emotional and drained and exhausted, it is too easy to conflate your project with yourself and get defensive about it in a review. Every time, I have to remind myself that its not about getting the reviewers to like me or my project. I have to tell myself this all the time. 

Today, as I attempted to create a DVD of work I've done over the semester as the final bit of this semester, I was overcome with rage at the computer lab's inability to successfully burn the files. I was audibly cursing the machine, slamming doors, striding angrilly back in forth in the halls to get my backup DVD after it screwed up the first one to the point of unusibilty. I think part of what was happening was the flood of pent up frustration was seeping through.

This has been my most frustrating studio ever- I can't think of a time when I was filled with more anger. There were moments in the semester where I had to leave the building. I think I ended up with a good project, but the frustrations I met along the way were not the kind that lead to increased productivity or radical, good design.

It's the end of the semester- everything is done, and there is the bittersweetness of the end. Many of my friends are leaving for semesters or even a year abroad. It's sad that so many of them will out of my life for so long, and graduate school is so short. But Saori gone, my closest friend and love, I feel a little more jaded, as though the cynic in me recognizes the shortness of time in school and still stays detached. But still, the semester fades out and people leave without you knowing about it, so you never know if the last time you'll see someone for the year is passing them in the hall.

Summer has arrived- bringing with it the vacant sort of complacency of my idyllic summers with relatives in Oklahoma. But its also hugely depressing and demotivating as my summer plans for a fantastic internship in Shanghai fell through, and now I have to contend with the ambiguous planning for a summer which I am already losing faith in.

I am so happy studio is over- there's really nothing like that feeling of accomplishment when you finish the jury critique and everyone heads back to studio, happily chattering about how much sleep they're going to get, what bar they're going to to celebrate, the celebratory meal. The heady combination of believing you've worked hard and accomplished something combined with the anticipation for the revelry, rest, and celebration to follow.

This weekend was for haircuts. I got mine done at Cutters & Co. at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in CWE. I don't mind plugging them because I think its a great deal. For the student package you get a beer, a haircut, and a thorough shampoo with a hot face towel for $15. That's what you pay at CostCutters to be attacked with clippers.

So its a lot shorter now. And you know who else got their hair a lot shorter? Suki. Her mats were out of control, so I took her in for her annual shaving monday morning before studio. So now the little lion is back. The groomers commented on what a strong cat she was for her age after wrestling with her to shave her belly.  She looks almost like a monkey now with that tufted tail. Her body is so tiny in proportion to the fur, so it looks like her paws and head got enlarged.

And of course, the weather is not cooperating. I've given up on trying to enjoy spring. I'm just going to have to wait for summer to get here. Tonight there is a frost warning. We had a few days of 80 degree weather literally about two months ago. This cold weather is beyond ridiculous. So to keep Suki sans her fur coat from freezing, I've had to turn on the heater.

Classes are wrapping up. I'm almost done with all my structures homework, we'll see how the test went. And a few minor things I need to write for my mid-century modernism class. And of course, studio.

I feel so worn out- I'm being harassed daily for not having my images on my boards lining up. Well, they're in progress- its idiotic to line them up when the proportions are changing! It's just irritating. I wish I could just work on my project in peace in this last week.

I feel so tired already. It's only been two days with six hours of sleep- the rest of the time I've been fairly well rested. I think that this summer is getting to me. My dreams are already going haywire- I haven't had this level of dream intensity since I was a teenager. I just need to sit down and do something, and I think I'll feel a little better.

For now, I'm just beat. My final presentation is next tuesday, which gives me effectively six days to get this project wrapped up in both the model and the presentation boards. My boards themselves are going to be huge. At this point, they're 11'-4" and 5' high. This is just about 60 square feet. I'm probably looking at around $100-$200 just to print. And I'm going to have one of the smaller boards in the studio. I know one classmate is going to have close to 22 linear feet of boards.

It's 12:42 AM, and I've just finished dinner: a bowl of ramen. (However, a good Samaritan came around the studio handing out carrots, fruit bars, and sorbet cups, so this is supplementary). I'm going to brush my teeth, hit the hay, and probably be out before 1:00 AM. My alarm will go off at 7 AM and I'll get up shower, quick bowl of cereal, and off to studio again....

Subconcious contamination

It's been a pretty intense ramping up into the final semester. Stress levels really going up, especially trying to figure out summer and trying to get into final production mode for school. It's been coming through in my sleep- all of a sudden, I'm having incredibly intense, realistic, bizzare dreams; like every night. One night I dreamt I was on the super huge train to Shanghai. Anyway, its felt very much like a world spinning out of control, but I'm worried I'm feeling too relaxed about it- I'm really not doing much about saving my own summer. 

I'm actually not too worried about my final project- we had a review with Sung Ho about a week and a half ago and he said he really liked the project (I want to see a quarter scale model on monday) and Derek really likes the project. I guess I like the project, although I feel like I'm not really pushing all the implications. We'll see.

Still have some minor misc. stuff for my Mid-century class, I need to re-write my paper for AA for monday, and finish the strucutres homework- and then I'm pretty much done for the semester other than studio. Our review is a week from tuesday, so I'm going to get a better layout for my boards this weekend. Board graphics were always one of my weakest skills I think. 

I've got a pretty sectional model out of wood. It's been a wood and rockite semester. The final model should be pretty nice. Revit and photoshopped renderings, yeah.

Took the structures final this morning- so happy it was not cumulative. It was multiple choice- which has ups and downs. On the one hand, I don't have to do much work like working out problems and I'm actually better at concepts rather than problem solving with numbers and formulas. There's also the advantage of knowing how to make multiple choice questions work for you. The downside is that there's no partial credit. So we'll see. I got a 89 the first test, a 94 or 96 the second test, and I'm hoping to at least make a 90 on this test. It'd be nice to get an A in structures. 

The approaching storm...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

 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.

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.