stephanieNY

Today, I signed up for an interview with an architectural firm that's coming to our school on Saturday. I'll get dressed up, bring my portfolio, and pretend I'm on a real interview, but I won't be. They're not hiring. They're only doing informational interviews with the full disclosure that they are actually not hiring at this time. Six firms are coming to this event, informational-interviewing students all day, and then not hiring any of them. Thanks. Thanks for this....opportunity?

Why am I going? Because I'm terrified of interviews and I figure if this one's a flop it doesn't matter. And I'll probably learn something and feel more confident going to the next one....one that has the promise of an actual paycheck at the end of it. Or maybe I'll nail it, maybe they'll be so blown away by my work and my poise that they'll call up headquarters and tell them to put aside 100k and a desk with a view. Maybe.

This is the number of days until graduation. The campus is already transforming in preparation. The grounds crew is sprucing up the area with proper fences to contain the crowds and new shrubbery to impress them. This time, I don't have to sneer at them when I walk by out of resentment for the people that it's for. This time, I can smile and wave instead.

But now, it's time to go into my end-of-semester military mode schedule. 12-on 12-off starts tomorrow. I'm kind of excited for it. It's very satisfying when you start producing final images of a project that you've been working on all semester, and I imagine producing final images for my final studio will be that more fun.

Finally, my final finals.

I don't often find myself needing to sit on the floor, but when I do, I know that I want this.

I have a couple questions for this guy though.  Do you carry that around in your bag at all times, like reusable grocery bags?  Or do you bring it for special sitting-on-the-ground occasions?  Where are you in this picture?  And why aren't you sitting on whatever everyone else is?

This is the second time in the past month or so that I've come across the guy who designed this, Alejandro Aravena.  I looked at his housing projects as a precedent to my studio project this semester.  

This site is making me laugh. Poetically pretentious photos of design-y people alone in their modern homes, (mostly from Dwell magazine), with hilarious captions.  I like Dwell, but they definitely have a sort of smug style of photographing these people in their architecture that reeks of importance or ostentation or something, while pretending to be all down-to-earth.  

Like this one....bwahaha

I've gotten side-tracked on my search for a watch that I started last fall. After I wrote that post about my dream watches, and even received a "pick out a watch for your birthday" birthday present from my parents in December, the pressure was too great to find the perfect one. I abandoned my dreams of buying vintage on Watchismo that I had been fawning after, since all the awesome ones have awesomely enormous price tags.  Now I'm on Ebay and totally addicted.  I'm into these mens mid-century, art-deco-y gems.  These three are Russian Soviet watches. 

Apparently, the Soviet era was a big watchmaking time in Russia.  I read that it started with the Soviet military and space program needing hefty watches to sustain in extreme conditions.  I doubt these ones sat on the wrists of any astronauts or Soviet soldiers, but they're made by the same Russian manufacturers at the time.

So here I am, putting more pressure on by writing more about the subject and dragging this all out.  Just get one already, right? I think I may go with the third one up there.  I looooove the numbers and the lines...like really good graphic design in a watch.  It may be a little hard to tell the time, but I think the admiration I'll feel when I look down at my wrist will make up for it.

...is the distance that Adam and I walked around NYC this past weekend.  I guess it's not all that much, but when you walk 15 miles leisurely, you're not really leaving a lot of time for much else.  We managed to squeeze in some bowling, some flea-marketing, and some eating and drinking....aaaaand we crossed a few things off our list of things to do.

Bowling Friday night turned into a wild goose chase for the bowling alley that was supposedly around Port Authority.  Turns out it's IN Port Authority. (Wild goose chase for bowling alley= 3 miles.) 

Walking the highline on Saturday led us down to the meat-packing district for lunch, from where we embarked on a trek back up half the island.  (Down the highline and back up past Midtown = 5 miles.) 

Goofy subway schedules on Sunday forced us to walk across the park to get the 4 train on the East Side up to the Bronx for lunch on Arthur Ave. (To and from the 4 trains = 7 miles.)

I was curious, so I mapped out our routes today on Google Earth.  I was putting off doing real work and got carried away.  Now I don't have much to show for studio, but at least I have this really helpful map of my weekend.

And some pictures:

We don't have any baskets in the apartment, but we have these red bowls.  So Adam and I had bagels, OJ, and easter bowls yesterday morning.  Happy Spring.

I also handed in my final icon designs last week.  I settled on 4 modes of transportation...kind of generic, but I wanted to create something that I could use in my studio project somehow.  From fastest to slowest, it's train, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian.  I was really into the Munich Olympic icons that I posted about.  They used straight lines at 45 degree angles to represent the moving figures.  I set up a 14x14 grid and used quarter circles to turn all corners.  The tree was my favorite (until someone in my class told me it looked like a smiling elephant...thanks.)  

Ok, this is the last one. My other two classes won't be "down" til May. But today, I finished my final renderings for my third 1/2-semester class, so that means it's pretty much over. The assignment was to create a set of three renderings of an architectural project, whether it be your own or something designed/built by someone else. I modeled and rendered Alvar Aalto's Experimental House in Finland.

So in my renderings, there's a creepy lady that lives there by herself.  I got a little carried away with the whole fire-pit-at-the-house-in-the-woods-at-night scene and ended up adding a creepy lady to each image.  She changes race and dress in each image, and she's either waiting for guests to arrive or she just killed her guests. I'm thinking it might be the latter.  She's crazy.  Take a look...you'll see what I mean.

Since I was doing this on the other side of the camera in all my pictures from Brazil, I posted some pictures that others shared that will prove that I was there with the rest of them (plus some really great shots that I missed). Here.