stephanieNY

Yesterday is over, which means that studio is too. Our review lasted nine hours, I repeat, NINE HOURS. We started at noon (with moi) and sat through 12 presentations and critiques until 9:00. I woke up this morning sore...actually sore...as in my muscles. It felt like I had lifted weights yesterday with the back of my neck, shoulders, and back. Tomorrow I'll get back in the game of finals, but for today my body and mind need a little couch and tv action respectively.

Then, get this, on Saturday my studio class is regrouping and "debriefing" in New Canaan, Connecticut at Philip Johnson's Glass House...awesome. I am now willing the raindrops to disappear under Saturday's forecast.

Today's "12 on" turned into more of a "16 on". 'Twas extremely fruitful.
Here's one of the drawings I made. (This is my addition to the Jackson-Pollack house. My project is about suspending spaces...hence the exo-structure).

I got to school today (Sunday) at 6:45. I saw exactly 4 other people on campus on my way in. 3 of them walked into the architecture building before me, and the fourth was leaving the architecture building. We might be the only ones that don't observe weekends, even when they're 80 degrees.

Starting last week, I put myself on a 12 on, 12 off schedule for finals. I go to school for 12 hours, and leave for 12 hours. Some call it 6-to-6. I get up before the sun does, and pass out right after prime time TV. When I told people here about my plan, someone said "That's like Jacob, he goes into military mode at finals time. 6 on, 6 off, except I think it's more like 8 on, 4 off." Funny enough, Adam (Army-trained) had suggested the same tactic. Hah. A sustainable schedule is key since "finals" essentially start now and go for a few weeks. It's deadline after deadline with little time to recover in between. It looks something like this:

Studio final review this week...whew.
papers, animations, reports, and presentations due the next week....whew
Second-Year Comprehensive Portfolio Reviews the next week...whew.
End of the Year Show the last week, where we design and construct an exhibit to display our studio's work from the semester....WHEW!

And theeeeeen it's over. I don't mean to complain. In a way, this is all really fun and exciting. It's the time of year/semester where everything you've been working on gets completed and you can finally stand back and look at what you've done.
But I have to admit, in the stress of it all, I daydream a lot of being back in the North End in a few weeks, kickin' back with a brewksi, possibly unemployed (I'll worry about that later).

These are two of the drawings that we are handing in today for our Building Systems class. The quality is kind of crappy in the preview mode, but if you expand it with that 4-arrow button, you can pan around it in better quality. I spent most of the semester building the 3D model, and my group member, Mustafa, worked his graphical genius in the first image (that I tried to emulate in the second). I'm not a big fan of the building, but I am a big fan of my group and of our pretty drawings that we made. Now we just need to present these in a few weeks and hand in a technical report. Half of one class down, three and a half to go!

The computers they provide us with at school are not quite up to par, RAM-wise. Like me, my computer gets really overwhelmed easily when it has a lot to do. I'm restarting right now for the third time today.

This week is like the beginning of the end of the semester. It's when my nice, comfortable schedule of getting all my work done during the day and going home at night like the rest of the world falls completely and hopelessly apart. So, this is me filling every minute with something. My computer is restarting...I'll write a blog post. I send something to the printer...I fill up my water bottle and use the bathroom while I'm up. You get the jist.

Building Systems drawings are due this Friday. Our semester assignment was to analyze the crap out of a built building, understand it structurally, mechanically, spatially, etc. Good luck making sense of the crazy building my group got stuck with. Stay tuned for some sense-making drawings later in the week.

I just crunched some numbers, and this is the ratio of my years spent in school, to years spent not in school in the past eleven years. That means I've primarily been a student since 1998. Jeeez. The numbers would change drastically if I broke it down by semesters, or seasons, or months, but these are more powerful. Either way, the point is that I just can't stop going to school.

I came to thinking about this today as I was filling out yet more forms to do with my finances. I had to list how much money I have borrowed each year in all of my higher education. There were just enough lines for me, but I had to alter the fields. Not that I think I'm such an unusual case, I just think it's funny because I don't particularly like being in school. I really love working. I wish you could get a degree from becoming really good at something you've mastered at work. I think they call it an apprenticeship. That's what I want. And that way I could get paid for learning instead of the other way around. And maybe I wouldn't have to fill out all these darn forms.

The past, say...six times that it's rained, I've forgotten to bring an umbrella to school and I end up walking home in the rain, returning to my apartment soaked. Today, I knew it was supposed to rain at the end of the day, so I proudly packed my umbrella.

At about 6:00, a fireman casually came into studio and told us the fire alarm was going off and we needed to evacuate. I took the opportunity to peace out for the day. I intentionally left my umbrella on my desk for another rainy day since the promised rain had never come. When I got outside, rain! It actually started after I looked out the window from upstairs, and before I got to the front door! I would've gone back up to get my umbrella, but I couldn't go back up, with the "fire alarm" and all. I walked home anyway.

The casual fireman is a whole other story. There wasn't an actual audible alarm going off. So the fire station was alerted, the men came, and then the people in the building were clued in. Good thing it started raining.

I'm taking this class the second half of this semester called Bargaining Table. Kind of a silly name, but a really awesome class. We're learning about Environmental Impact Statements and the players involved in getting big city development projects passed and actually built. It's a pretty skewed system. So a developer hires a federal agency to do a reeeeeaaallly in-depth analysis of the effects of their proposed development on the neighborhood in every sense (shadows, noise, air quality, jobs creation, affordable housing, etc.), and they put together this enormous report. In the end, a project is either passed because of its benign effects, or not passed because of its adverse effects. But the thing is, the people that write the report are ultimately the people that either pass or deny a project. So, you guessed it, the reports are considerably biased and few projects actually get denied. Fascinating.

Our project in the next few weeks is to create an interactive tool in Adobe Flash that community organizations would use to educate the public about the EIS for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, so that they can debate knowledgeably, instead of just picketing "Not in our backyard".

Aaaaanyway, I'm going to put together a sweet Flash animation in a few weeks. I'll post it so that you can play around with it, and maybe next time someone tries to build an office tower in your backyard, you can fight it hard with the facts.

I finally nailed down a design concept, with a general idea of the structure and form. My project is attached to the house and knocks out a bay window. (Take that historic preservationists!) That way we can walk from the Pollock's living room straight into a long gallery space that will jut out from the central axis of the house. Also, my project is like a cage within which the spaces will hang and hover above the ground. If we were worried about preserving the grass, I'd be all set. At first the cage was steel, since hanging all that load from above instead of resting it on a foundation would be pretty heavy. But now it's a lot of wood, at least until someone who knows better tells me it's not possible. Next step: walls.

At the same time that I walked out of the architecture school on campus today, a young guy left the engineering school on his phone. We merged paths and I overheard his phone conversation as he walked behind me across campus. It went a little something like this (read with inflection at the end of each statement):

"I can't believe we have to deal with architects...Engineers and architects are like so different...Architects don't really know how to build things...All they do is design something that looks good...We are the ones that need to actually build it, like make sense of it, and put it together so it doesn't fall down."

Yeah, you're kind of right. That is more-or-less how things work. I'll design something and you make sure it stays upright. I was tempted to ask him why he wanted to be a structural engineer if he felt so inconvenienced by architecture. I didn't because (well, I wouldn't) but this monologue suddenly turned into another that involved a girl that was giving him "mixed signals" and wouldn't return his call. Heehee.