Hoo-ray, I finished the first project. I'm up doing laundry before tomorrow's field trip to the Timberline lodge and surronding area, since I've hit my two week mark.
(Some time last year I decided that I would simplify my life and get rid of a lot of extra underwear. I had enough underwear that I could go for about 5 weeks without doing laundry, which meant that once I actually got around to doing laundry, I had about 4 loads to wash, which took all day and was no fun. Now I'm forced to do laundry every 2 weeks or so, but it's only one or two loads, so it's totally manageable and I no longer dread it.)
I just had celebratory drinks and dinner at the corner pub with a bunch of the other single folks in the program. It was a good time, but surprise, surprise, all we did was talk about the program, and specifically about the other folks in the program. Still, good venting and relaxing time.
The review was super relaxed. To my disappointment, the U Oregon reviews are not juried, meaning that instead of having to stand up and present your project in front of a set of 4 reviewers and your whole class, you present your project at the same time as another student to one other reviewer. Therefore, your project is compared with this other person's by way of proximity, although your schemes may have very little to do with each other. The format allows the reviewers to give you some direct feedback, but it cuts down on the sometimes interesting tangents that reviewers can get on when they are discussing your project in a jury format.
I, and most of the other people I talked to, thought that the reviewers were extremely kind to us. While it's nice not to leave the room crying, sometimes it's helpful to just hear point blank what is not working in your scheme, rather than trying to figure out what someone doesn't like when they're trying to couch their criticism positively. The second reviewer I presented to was much more helpful and straightforward than my first reviewer. They both accepted my sliding premise. The first reviewer seemed uncomfortable with the lack of definable private space in the concept, but wouldn't just come out and say it. The second reviewer pointed out that the covered outdoor space on the south (lake) side of the project was pretty unresolved and needed more consideration as to how it fit into the overall scheme. No one seemed particularly concerned with the quality of the drawings or model, which I worked very hard on, although they did seem to be generally happy with the level of work I put in, which is all I could have hoped for.
Just to explain a bit, the scheme was for a house that would start out as the main house on a lakeside property and become a guest house when the real house is built. The building site was on the west side of the property, defining that edge of a preexisting foundation at a spot on the site between a fir forest and an oak savannah. We were given some pretty straightforward structural requirements, and I began by trying to set up a house on either side of a wall, but since we only had 300 square feet to work with, it clearly didn't work comfortably within the restrictions. So, I thought about how that wall might work, and asked myself what was the most perverse thing I could do to the inhabitants of the site. I thought of Peter Eisenman's house in which he divides the bed in two, and came up with the idea that the bed could slide under a wall and turn into two couches. Then my professor pushed me towards opening up the space (since it was less than 300 square feet, putting a foot thick wall through the middle of it actually took away a significant amount of square footage and cut out a lot of light), and I had to figure out how to create the two-couch condition without a wall, since I had adopted the language of sliding throughout the house and wasn't about to let that generating phrase get edited out yet.
So, the solution was to design a sliding counter/table/backrest that moved in the same direction as the bed. It generated the great praise from my studio instructor that it hadn't caused him to throw up yet, and that if I didn't do it now, I'd never do it, presumably because at some point I'd realize what an idiotic idea it would be. Well, that just made me more confident that it was the right thing to do, so I put lots of work into finalizing the plan, drafting beautiful drawings and crafting an impeccable model. As much as the Career Discovery program gave me skills to deal with this program, I think I may have overdone the amount of work I put into the project, and maybe in the future I can take it a little easier. One way or the other, I'm done with the project.
Tomorrow's field trip should be lots of fun, although it seems like an incredible amount of drawing to do in two days. I'd better get on top of packing and sleeping so that I can get there on time in the morning. Hopefully we'll get nap time at some point, because I can't keep going at this pace indefinitely...
Will try to get drawings/diagrams in a format that I can post them soon. The good news is that I'm set up to bring my computer into the studio, but that could end up backfiring by meaning that I never do real work. Oh, the double edged sword.