Taking a quick break from writing a paper to say hello to myself, remember that I am a real person, not just an automaton that goes from task to task, doing whatever she is told.
Actually, I’m quite enjoying writing the paper – the one about the Glasgow School of Art – as I did a sizable amount of research and got a feeling of actually being there. Strange, though, that I know how different it must be to visit than to look at photos and imagine. It’s a good exercise, though, because it’s fairly analogous to the design process. Yes, I make models, but a fair bit of what I do is sit and look at what I’ve drawn and imagine the reality it implies. Each drawing brings me a step closer to what that reality might be like.
Drawings become like notes on the imagined places in my head (in fact we have a book called Visual Notes which I recommend, and want to get more thoroughly familiar with, but which addresses more the notation of actual real places). Yesterday, I did just go outside and sit with my eyes closed, imagining that I was approaching the site of my Cube House (the third part of the compound we’ve been designing). I felt kind of dorky, but it worked. I’d become familiar enough with my rough plans and sections and my sketch model that I could start imagining the places that they enclosed, complete with patterns of light and material choices. Pretty cool!
The drawing class we had was very helpful, and perfectly timed to make that envisioning exercise totally worth the slight embarrassment I felt. They told us how to trace over pictures to get perspective shots of an imagined building. It’s sort of like a collage, you just take the lines you want and then add the rest from your brain or from another underlay of a different photo. I made some very convincing drawings of my buildng, and called it a day.
This whole thing was in part inspired by Mackintosh’s moves on the facade of the Glasgow School of Art, and by that building in general. I do hope that I always have a history class to feed me inspiration! I’m planning to really start a scrapbook sometime soon…
Speaking of inspiration, I bought plane tickets for a trip home to Florida, then up to visit Grandparents in Massachusetts and friends in Vermont. The South Main gang will be on the verge of moving out of their house by the time I head their way, so I should be in for another lovely, melancholy saying good-bye party. The trip as a whole has been inspiring me to keep plugging away – I’m so close to being done with my first semester! I’ll finally have time to change addresses and close my old bank account!
Also, I’m heading to Kleinman, a tournament in Portland, this weekend, which is my main inspiration for trying to finish my paper tonight. We all know how much work one gets done at frisbee tournaments.
Also, I just added a link to Practical Action, the British group that works to get appropriate technologies out there, in use. Check out the gravity ropeway on their front page. All my designs should be so elegant.
So, I was thinking that I’m not feeling challenged enough by the school, but then, I was thinking harder, because that’s what Rachels do best, and I realized that I need to meet the challenges they are giving me head-on, and then I can see how I feel from there. Basically, that means no more whining about anything, ever, and the resoluteness to stand up for what I believe to be true and right, coupled with the intelligence to know when I haven’t got a clue and the flexibility to hear and enact valuable changes to my opinion.
Doesn’t that sound like a set of traits that everyone would be better off displaying?