In Case You Were Wondering

I am still alive

I am in Barcelona until Monday, at which point I fly to Brussels and probably take the train to Ghent.

I am having a pretty awesome time on my trip.  Recent highlights - visiting the Alhambra thoroughly; all of Seville (except perhaps the Metropol Parisol, aka the main reason I went); playing with the Grulitas in Lanzarote, both on and off the field; walking around Sagrada Famiglia and finding both Modernista and pre-modernista gems in random Barcelona streets.

The best food I have eaten is the Bon Bon tapas from that awesome restaurant we visited on Sunday night after a nice walk from our apartments on Lanzarote (wherein I explained linoleum and everyone listened with apparent interest).  The bocadillo here in Barcelona the first day I arrived.  The cake-first meal I had with A and J in Cologne, with possibly the best berry cake in the world, then cabbage roulade with delicious pumpkin mash.  Also, the meal they cooked me with orange-garlic salad, duck with orange sauce, and fruit cobbler.  Pastries in Paris, pretty much without exception.  Jamon Iberico.  Tinto de Verrano.

Seville is beautiful, walkable, full of interesting buildings, laid back, and sunny, and if I'm not married in 3 years I'll learn Spanish and move there because it's full of the most handsome men I've ever encountered in one place, and I've played in a lot of frisbee tournaments.

I have met so many wonderful people on this trip, which is something I was really worried about.  I never feel really good writing about them, though...suffice it to say, sometimes it's quite difficult to say goodbye to someone you've know for really only a few hours, or someone you're getting to be with again after many, many years apart.

Blogging while on a trip is hard to do - when I have a thought, I'm usually out walking around, and don't want to stop to record it; frequently I'm without good internet connection; often there's too much to say.  Occasionally there's not enough to say.  Some places are disappointing or require more processing or are overwhelmingly awesome.

You can see a through-line from the vernacular architecture of the area around Chur and Peter Zumthor's buildings.  I wish more buildings were like his best works.

It's an amazingly difficult thing to keep architectural pilgrimage sites maintained.  So many hands want to touch, feet walk through dirty from the trek there, gum and trash magically accumulate, birds poop, sun and rain and snow fall, stones and mortar fall, metal expands, times change.  Sometimes, these days, it's also difficult to see anyone enjoying them in real time.  Everyone has their cameras out, to the point that I wonder what is actually coming through, but nonetheless/and, I feel compelled to take my own pictures to fit in.  Sharing the space with so many camera faces can be very odd - it's not exactly what I imagine when I think of creating great buildings for people to enjoy.

I kept up with photo documentation of my trip until I arrived in Paris.  I have Milan, Cinque Terre, Sagogn, Lauterbrunnen, Basel, and Lyon (including all side trips) through rough edit, but Paris gave me a huge backlog.  Cologne, Barcelona, Lanzarote, and Seville will be up someday. Maybe.

East of Eden is a fantastic book.  99% Invisible is an amazing podcast.  I was a little annoyed by but also quite enjoyed the Alchemist, and enjoyed without reservation the Book Thief.  Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is almost too funny to listen to on public transportation.  I am so grateful for podcasts.  They are free, insightful, entertaining, easy to get and delete, short, and they give you a dose of English whenever you want one.

My French helped me survive, but is not conversational.

My portfolio is under construction.  This whole website is under construction.  Sometimes you start projects at really inopportune moments, but at least you have started them.

I'm very happy to find myself eager to start on my Portland adventure.  I'm not hurrying through this part of the trip, but it's been very reassuring to have conversations with people where I tell them where I'm from and I know that I'll have as much exploring to do when I get "home" as I am doing here.  I'm still keeping my ears open for places that call my name here, though.

I think I'm staying within my budget.  I have occasionally skipped something I wish I hadn't, but such is life.  I feel like I've had some really excellent luck on this trip.  I've stuck quite closely to the plan I made ahead of time.  Sometimes I wonder if I'm drifting around too much, not engaging enough, and sometimes I realise that I haven't been going out on the weekends much - only when I'm with friends, really.  Then, I try to listen hard to what I'm really feeling.  Mostly, I'm not sure what it is, but it's good practice and every now and then, I hear something.

Summer

A month has passed since my last post, and a lot has happened, to be sure.  The most notable of which must be the fact that I am gainfully employed, full time, as a designer at an architecture firm in Eugene!!!

Yes, that gets three exclamation points.  It’s been keeping me busy, which has resulted in the radio silence on this blog, and complete lack of effort on the portfolio website, but I can’t say that I’m too sorry about that.  As you may know, finding another job in Eugene wasn’t my intention, but all of the pieces kind of fell into place.  The women’s utimate team that seemed just out of reach for the past four years is finally coalecsing, and I felt very sad at the prospect of leaving town without having a season with them.  We came in second at Solstice, the tournament here in town, and we absolutely had a blast.  I also got a great new housemate, and hey, well, I got this job, and I really like it.

I’m working at Nir Pearlson Architect, and in the short time I’ve been there, we’ve submitted two projects for permitting.  Next week I’ll turn in the third, and I’ll do it by myself because Nir, my boss, is in Israel for the next two and a half weeks.  I’ll be manning the office alone, working on a few other projects and trying to keep everything going while Nir’s gone.  I think I’ll take the opportunity of the slight lull to make sure that my IDP hours for this job get counted, and to actually work on that online portfolio.

Summer in Eugene is pretty nice – I’m eating cherries as I type, and heading to a barbeque in an hour.  I’m enjoying working with Nir, and I know he’d like me to stick around a while longer and work on a few more jobs.  But although this job, this frisbee team, this housemate, and these cherries are fortuitous and fantastic, I still wonder how long it can last.

Up at Potlatch last week, I was reminded again of life in the city, and the different opportunities to take advantage of there.  Yesterday I spent the afternoon and evening with friends and we talked about San Francisco and Portland, and about living in the city.  I’m trying my best to be here, but, if you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’ve been having a tough time with that for some time.  I just want to peek ahead, find out where the plot’s going, but unfortunately that’s not an option.  So, I guess I just keep doing what I’m doing until it stops working.  And, I guess that after a few more weeks of just enjoying employed life,  I’ll start thinking again about the long-term plan again.

In the mean time, Potlatch was tons of fun, seeing all the little babies together a few weeks ago was fantastic,  I’m looking forward to Seaside and some sore beach legs, I can’t believe I get to play in Labor Day with my ladies, and I’m still hoping to head to Colorado to visit the brother.  I’m also hoping to get a few more hours of sewing in in the next few weeks because I keep buying patterns and fabric, so I keep needing to make beautiful things.  I’m catching up on Mad Men and thoroughly enjoying Friday Night Lights, and I’m trying to catch up with people I haven’t seen in a while, too, whether it be through email, phone calls, or unexpected visits.  So, in sum, life is full, and I’m going to do my best to get the most out of it.  I hope you’re doing the same – summer is so short, so love every minute of it!

Rain, progress

I’m at home right now because it’s raining, and it has been for several days.  Usually I’d be at the frisbee fields, but having gone over there and seen that they were a little more lake-like than is optimal, I found out that our team postponed our game to mid-June.  I was looking forward to the social time, and to running around for a bit of exercise.

I’ve been quite focused the last few days, finally accomplishing some longstanding goals.  I completed my portfolio revisions to my satisfaction.  While I may still work on some of the diagrams I had in mind and didn’t have time to realize completely, I’m very happy to have updated the work to show a few more key skills and ideas.  In addition, I quickly put together a web portfolio.  I’ve wanted to do that for a while, but using GoLive was never that pleasant, and I always seemed to need workarounds to accomplish the actions I was trying to achieve.  While my new effort is elementary, and obviously blog based (I may yet shell out for the hosting so that it can just be rachelauerbach.com and not rachelauerbach.wordpress.com), it gets the job done and has been fun to produce.  It was always tedious to get anything made in GoLive, let alone something that looked even remotely decent, so it’s nice that making this new portfolio was fun and easy, and that I know enough from the old days of html to make it a little better than basic.

[note.  I've just been trying to add a simple slideshow to my portfolio blog and have been foiled.  WordPress doesn't allow javascript, so even though I could script exactly what I want, I am stuck with only being able to use the somewhat clunky slideshows they allow with shortcode.  Maybe it is worth it to pay for the hosting... or maybe I'll just have long galleries.]

The other big milestone for the week was sending out several applications today, all to firms that are quite interesting to me.  It’s been very isolating to not have a job, and especially now that all of my friends who are in school are working overtime to get ready for finals, I sometimes feel like even my social life doesn’t make up for sitting alone all day, every day, working in front of the computer.  Now that I’ve got things to send, though, I can go back to a more varied routine, with time for sewing and reading.  I can also set up some more informational interviews, and hopefully something will progress to the point where I get hired and am once again part of a team – where at least I’ll be sitting with other people all day, every day, even if I’m also working on the computer all day, every day!

On a final note, though I delayed it because I didn’t go back to school this year, I’m doing my annual rereading of Atmospheres and Thinking Architecture now.  So many projects floating in my mind!

A Strange Place

Here are a few things that are rolling around in my brain:

Accumulation and accretion, with the world just getting more and more full of things. And then, the passing on, too.

Desire becoming reality, and other things also becoming real – with my growing perfume collection, I am sampling many scents, and sometimes feel as though there’s something real there. When I taste wine, I often get very physical words coming to my mind – wine for me can be round, soft, or tall. I’m not getting that the same way with perfumes, but I think that if I smell for long enough I’ll be able to articulate things a bit more. I’ve been enjoying the strangeness of them, the leather and sweat and smoke. My favorites are the ones that surprise you over and over again, making you think that there’s a corner somewhere close by that you’ll turn and find something real. The one I’m wearing right now, though – Patou 1000 – I lean in to get a deeper draw, and it smells like someone peed on me. Weird. I can’t get enough from 5 inches out, but right up close, whew! Yet, I’m going to put a bit more on before I go out.  Wherever that corner is, it’s a strange place.

Plus, trying on all these perfumes is probably just a little bit of an intensification to that who am I and what am I doing here feeling that I haven’t been able to shake, even when for a little while, I thought I might have that answer. Today I was useless, and far from figuring out any answers, I just avoided the question altogether. Thought I was making some progress, but still pretty lost on the whole subject of what to put the majority of my energy into. I can’t help but think, though, that at some point this question will be answered, and that a bit of psychic reworking never hurt anyone in the long run. Watching a lot of the videos at the99percent.com has/hasn’t helped.

The conversations that we have with ourselves – I saw Moon last night, and that little phrase kept rattling around in my head.  It’s a must see, and I felt like it was perfectly resolved, despite what many of the reviewers said at the time.  It made me very sad, but then, I also felt very appreciative afterward.  I imagine that’s a part of what I liked about A Serious Man, too.

I’m heading out, and already running late.  I’ve been thinking of several of these things for a while, now, though, so had to get a little ramble out.  No doubt you’ll hear more about perfumes, accretion, and life courses soon, whether or not you wanted to.

Oh, and props to the President for a sweet speech on Wednesday, and for finally having what NYT liked to the Prime Minister’s Question Time, (the reference to which seems to have disappeared from this article) which I have always hoped would happen in our own country.

Who are these buildings anyway?

I’ve been reading Sweet Juniper like it’s my job, and I just had a realization while looking at this, and also thinking about what my mom said the other day.  I’ve long thought about writing about buildings, and I know that I’ll do “real” writing about buildings like I did in my Architectural History classes.  I’ll write about the way that light enters a room, I’ll write about the juxtaposition of materials, I’ll write about the spaces they enclose and the spaces they occupy.  But I also want to write building fiction, and I think I know a little more about that now.

These days, we talk in our profession about how buildings should be built to last.  How they are investments, or ways of sharing our values across time.  We say, or the Europeans say to us, that in Europe, you don’t build with the idea something will come down, you build so that it can stay up, even if it needs patching and fixing.  Buildings are bigger than us, and I think that it makes sense that they would have a longer life span than us, the same way very large trees and whales and elephants do.  And, they’re even less able to care for themselves than plants, which are immobile but have some pretty kick-ass ways of feeding and repairing themselves.  So, as long as we’re in a symbiotic relationship with buildings, we keep them warm and weed-free, and they keep us safe and dry.  But, they also observe us in a way we sometimes notice, and they watch each other and the part of the world that they can perceive (I don’t really believe that real buildings do any of this, these are now my fictional buildings, and maybe, a little bit, what I’d like real buildings to do, too).  They are our memory keepers.  But, I think they’re memory keepers that keep the full experience within them.  A photo album is full of snapshots, a treasure box full of the little objects, but a house, it’s inhabited by ghosts, and those ghosts are both what is good in life and what we would normally like to forget about in life.

So, I think that’s what these buildings in my stories, whenever I may eventually write them, will be – the keepers of the ghosts, the large and sort of helpless, but intensely wise by the time that they’re abandoned, beings that see everything that we do, all the objects we cherish and the arguments that we have and the plants and animals that we don’t really understand, and the way that we’re mostly confused, and keep most of their opinions to themselves.  Maybe that’s a little why we get sad when we knock them down, even when we know they have to go – we know they’ve seen a lot and have stoically endured it.

What my mom said – “It seems as if for most people, like myself, buildings once created become things, possibly very lovely and appreciated things, but still things, whereas for you, buildings once created become creatures, beings, alive and organic and able to act upon other creatures, interact with them being to being.”  What do these ones think about us?  Do they miss their neighbors?

Putting things out there

Warning: next three paragraphs deal with the intractable issues of work and social life.  For something actually interesting and new, skip to the photo.

I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but for quite some time to come, I think my main job is actually putting myself out there.  It’s actually been a lot of fun to put together the portfolio and teaser and resume…and I’m sure the cover letters will be fun in hindsight, too.  Now we come to the part where I actually send them all out, though, and that’s a whole other story.  I’m less than excited to send them into the abyss, to ask for jobs that don’t exist and to profess how wonderful I am to people who can’t really care.

I can’t help but feel a reflection of this work life issue in my personal life, too – I may know all sorts of people here, but I’ve yet to rebuild a group of friends of the sort I had in Oberlin, Vermont, or, in fact, that I pretty much developed here, pre-graduation.  Not to mention that there’s a good chance that I’ll move to a whole new place and actually have to make an even bigger effort towards friendship than I do here now.

I’ll admit, part of it is a problem of commitment.  I’m not sure where I want to move, not sure what I want to do, not sure who I want to spend my time with, so in some ways I’m not making a strong case to anyone, let alone myself.  Howard’s recommendation of actually writing out a five year plan or two seems like a great one.  I vaguely know where I’m going and what I’m doing, but defining things a bit more, while having an alternative plan, seems like a good way to stop faffing and actually move confidently towards doing the things that I want to do.  I feel like I’m back in high school with all this self definition and worrying about who I’ll be friends with.  Thought I was over all of that.

On another note, I saw this today:

Along with five other lamps, it’s part of an impressive graduation project, Light Movement, by Noam Bar Yohai.  Each of the lamps employs wood, elastic bands and heat-shrinking tubing, with metal components to weight them.  They are each adjustable because of the friction of the tubing, weight of the metal, tension of the elastic bands, or flexibility of the wood.  I think Yohai has done an excellent job of exploring this object as a series of mechanisms.  For me, they come to a pleasing level of refinement – they seem like abstracted models of joints: skeleton, sinew, muscle, and nerve poised before some action.  Tell me what you think, and perhaps, if you’re ambitious, compare and contrast with Moooi’s Brave New World lamp.

Going Grey

Not me.  I just returned from Greenbuild, which was in Phoenix, and hopped off the plane at Portland.  I’m visiting Sasha, who’s got a new blog, but who’s been sick since she arrived here.  We had a lovely time last night eating lentil soup with Kyle, Adrienne and Sean, and a delicious breakfast this morning with Sean and Adrienne.  But, after walking around a bit, I have determined that Oregon has gone grey.

I’m ok with that, but I kind of wish it hadn’t happened while I was gone.  It seems too abrupt.

We stopped in to Bolt and Close Knit briefly, and I think we’ll see A Serious Man this afternoon.  It’s the kind of day that you want to watch movies and be surrounded by soft warm things.  I’ve always enjoyed getting away from the cold in December when I visit home – for me, being away from Florida is the only way I’ve learned to appreaciate it.  But, missing those few critical days, I am sad to come back and find myself in winter.

Although some things at the conference were, frankly, a waste of time, I think that overall it was quite worthwhile.  Despite the fact that I didn’t show my portfolio to anyone, I did get the sense that if I pursue a job with some intensity, there are jobs to be had, and also showed me again that the route I take might not be so straightforward.  I am very glad to have finished my portfolio and updated my resume in time for the conference, since it frees me up for time for other projects.  I’ll be working on a new skirt this week, and I’m also going to start learning a 3D modeling software.

We’re about to head out, but photos of Phoenix will be up soon!

Returning, Moving On

I’m going to write something because I’d really like to return to blogging, but I’m out of practice. At a point, life just got too complicated to tell about. It’s not that the plot was so convoluted, more that the characters all got a little out of hand. But, we’re beyond that now, and in fact, the plot has also straightened itself out quite a bit.

I am a Master now. Finishing grad school has been a bit anticlimactic. It was wonderful to have the celebration in June, and I do feel done, for real. However, I now feel the weight of the Internship Development Program (IDP) and licensure bearing down on me. I have a job, which I am very happy about both because the economy is bad enough that it’s rare for a recent grad to be offered a job, and because said job is actually interesting and closely related to what I want to do in the long run. However, I’m acutely aware that it’s not a job that can get me closer to actually being an architect, and it’s not a job of the type for which I have been preparing myself for the last three and a half years. So, despite enjoying it, I very much am continuing to wonder, and occasionally actually work towards figuring out, what I will do next.

So, it’s portfolio making time.  It’s time to organize a game plan for applications, to get recommendations in line, and to feel a little untethered from the future, which, as you know, I like to have some grasp on.  All of that is fine: the portfolio is taking shape and I like where it’s going.  The rest I can deal with, and may even enjoy.  But, there’s one thing I’m really struggling with – where to be.  Theoretically, I’m likely to move when I get a job in an architecture firm.  My current plan is to first apply to the set of firms at which I would most like to work, which are primarily in cities on the west coast and in the UK.  Here’s the issue, though.  Rent runs out on the 15th of next month, and I’m not sure what to do at that point.  I will almost certainly not have another job – fine, because my current job will still exist through January.  But, do I move somewhere else in Eugene?  I can, but I’m starting to feel like I want to move on sooner, rather than later, and not move all of my stuff just to move it again.  I can’t really afford to move to one of the big west coast cities on my current salary, though, and that might also end up meaning that I move just to move again.  I could see going home, but what about all of my stuff?  Do I lighten my load of worldly possessions – can I afford to sell everything just to buy more things wherever I do settle next?  And the same goes for moving back to Vermont, which I would love to do, but where I am unlikely to find a job, probably would have to pay some rent (unlike Florida), and where I would be split between friends in Burlington, Brattleboro, and Great Barrington, Mass.  The reality there, too, is that I don’t know if any of those friends have the same spaces in their lives for me as I would like to imagine they do.  Could any of them live with me on their couch/in their kitchen for any significant amount of time?

The likely answer – stay in Eugene.  I’ll move soon enough to a new place, and in the mean time, didn’t I promise myself that I’d spend my time Being Here?

It’s one of those decisions that I keep coming back to, though.  One of those unresolved questions that niggles me throughout the day, in part because it is unresolvable. Since it will be resolved in the next month, because someone else is taking over my house, I guess I just have to live through the uncertainty.  Would that the plot were still twisting, not just aiming straight into the murk.

***

On an entirely different note, played at Spawnfest this weekend, which was very good – both fun frisbee and fun time partying/hanging out with the teammates/laughing at Vern Fonk and Bawls and playing 20 questions.  Excited to get into better shape, although somehow I keep missing my running dates and workout times.  We went 6-1, but unfortunately the point differentials on Saturday put us into the B-bracket, so we only took 9th (out of 34? teams).  Read a lot of the Huddle last night in an exited frenzy to get back to being really useful on the field.

Little Victories

We picked a theme for HOPES 15!  It’s “Thinking Small,” and here are the bits I’ve been working on so far:

Solving our ecological problems will require massive change, as Bruce Mau has suggested.  Yet even as we must think big, we must also remember to think small.  Visions are accomplished incrementally; details are important; impacts must be studied and limited; the meek among us require protection.  Join us as we consider the meaning of “local” and “appropriate,” as we ponder the ripple effect.  Help us contemplate nanotechnology and microclimates.  Plant the tiny seeds to grow the revolutionary change.

Topics:

Scale – buildings, economies (Schumacher), “local” discussion

Nature – microclimates, invertebrate communities, guerilla gardening, agricultural questions

Activism – small change/massive change, beginner’s steps (Radical Simplicity)

Ethics – Nanotechnology, appropriate technology, design for the meek/forgotten, design for children

Other – Visioning: what’s the importance of thinking small and thinking big, what can we miss by doing too much of one/the other?; Finding focus in an interdisciplinary field

We’re already gathering ideas for speakers, too.  I’m very excited about this topic: I think that it’s amazingly open ended, yet gets to really important questions and still maintains a core idea that’s very strong.  I can imagine that when we share this idea with everyone (after we come up with a manifesto that’s a lot less cheesy and a lot more focused), people will immediately think about something interesting, and that’s pretty good.

Right after the HOPES meeting I headed to the fields for our last game of the season in the A-league.  Rumpus was holding even with Strike Force Seven when I got there.  We kept it pretty even, but they put up a couple of points on us as the game was coming to a close – 5 minutes left and we were down, but we came back even and finally won at universe point.  There was something amazing going on.  At one point, I laid out for a disc I knew I didn’t have, but that was the moment where I decided to go all in.  I think pretty much everyone else was there with me, too.  

So, Rumpus Room is spring A-league champions.  After the game, we headed back to my house.  I got to throw my first party in my very own house!  We had pizza and I made cookies as folks showed up.  A full-party game of Apples to Apples developed, and we just had a good time together (and with players from Kremlin, the other team that we hung out with all season).

This morning, I taught my last section for Architectural Context.  It’s pretty amazing to have two semesters of college-level instruction under my belt.  I can’t imagine how long it takes until you really feel like you’re in the right place, like you’re really the one who should be talking.  I feel like that at certain moments, but I think that’s just because I’ve never been afraid to give my opinion, not because I think my thoughts are so worthy of professorial consideration.  One way or the other, I’ll just have a little bit of grading left.  Summer is coming on quickly.

So, there are three bits of info.  Lots more going on – other productive meetings, work plans for the summer, obsessive checking of Facebook as if there were actual people there that I could see and talk to, hitting the upload limit for my Flickr account, excellent cooking, and productive errand running.  Hopefully, with such great things happening, and a full weekend coming up, this little sore throat and stuffy nose go away.  And, on that note, I shall get to bed now.

letting it go too long

what do you get? way too much to actually write about.

Seeing Barak in Eugene, and being so inspired that you campaign for him for hours in the rain, snow, hail, and occasional sun. I hope I’ll write about him more once I get wireless in my…

New apartment that I moved into on Thursday and have gotten 90% organized in. Thanks to the fearless four – Renee, Jake, Truc, and Stacey – who made the move from old to new take just about four hours! Photos coming soon…

Which I didn’t take on either of my two trips to Portland this break. Trip number one, I visited Herman and Ruth, enjoyed the excellent okra stew and Herman’s amazing flatbread as well as his amazing dutch oven bread and the divine sheep/cow cheese that they shared with me. We went to Ikea and did several hours of shopping…

Which also happened somehow on trip number two, after I picked up Emily from the train station and we had an excellent lunch at Besaws, but before we drove back to Eugene along the coast, which made me wish I had gone to the coast a long time ago, and made me promise myself I’d go again soon…

but which has the fault of not always having a strong cell signal, so that a call with Stefan was cut short. We’ve made a date to re-call, though, so I’ll surely get to hear his news, as I did…

when Joe Little called out of the blue. He’s moving to D.C., so I’ll have one less reason to visit Chicago, but one more reason to visit D.C. Which I don’t have a great desire to do right now considering…

The current state of our government, and if you didn’t, like me, obsessively listen to NPR this last week, you should at least hear ;this week’s This American Life.

Anyway, this term I’m taking it easy. Just doing a practicum with Gary Moye Architect;, taking Roman Architecture and Architectural Precidents 2.0, teaching Architectural Contexts, organizing and attending the HOPES conference, and taking a short class on Graphic Statics. It will give me enough time to play some frisbee, I hope, and celebrate Ruth’s retirement, I hope, and maybe even visit Oberlin for a reunion…

And maybe, if I’m lucky, I can read some novels this semester. I hope.

Portfolio of My Dreams

I am making a portfolio for getting a job this summer. I started out with great difficulty, and I now have eight pages that I’m very happy with, but that I just realized won’t print the way I expected them too. No worries, should be able to work around that easily, but it’s kind of poopy.

It’s always exciting to hit the print button on something like this, even when you know it’s just the black and white rough. This semester has been so heavy, it’s really come down to moments like this – hitting the print button at 1:24 in the morning to see the draft of the thing that you want to have looking beautiful by Wednesday at 12:00 – that I’ve had to learn to savor.

Making a portfolio is lovely in a way, because you get to reexamine your work and cast it in a new and different light. What did you want to say with that project, what were you learning? So far, this portfolio is about fabrication, concept, system, and observation. I’d love verbs, but I think I’m okay with these nouns. Looking at my projects with these nouns, I’m seeing new patterns emerge – for one, my delight in pattern that I never would have said that I possessed – I think it’s the joy of something orderly yet a little off-kilter.  I see the desire to make something exciting happen in section and the attention to detail that means something quite different than I always thought it did.

Attention to detail is now a mode of thinking about construction – carefully choreographing how materials dance around each other. Where will they kiss, where will they float past, where will they collide, where will they nestle? I always thought attention to detail was in the way one would precisely staple one’s paper; I never thought I possessed it (which, looking back, I’ve always been fairly precise with my stapler, at least when I thought it counted). I’m sure now that I do have it, in droves.

So, will the square format 11×11 set of plates get me a job? I never thought I’d make a square format portfolio, so I hope it doesn’t reflect poorly on me, as I thought it might (for no apparent reason, other than thinking that it maybe says you’re a square). I hope so – I’m going in with the recognition that it’s a work in progress.

I’ll let you take a peek.

Charge

I have retreated, and now I am ready to charge.

The end of this semester was quite abstract. I worked extremely hard on my studio final, completing several plates of highly detailed black and white pencil drawings. My presentation was a success; the architecture it conveyed was only marginally successful. My reviewers variously had little to say on the subject, or they told me that it was “unconvincing,” “too polite,” and looked residential on one side and like a library or airport on the other side. My professor, however, seemed happy with it, and told me to be a little less self critical, so maybe it’s not so bad. I believe that the work will be displayed in the Hearth (the little cafe in the middle of our school) at the beginning of next semester, which is actually very flattering.

After the studio review, everything else I had to do seemed strangely removed. I think I was reeling a bit from the criticism at the review – I’ve become so used to the Oregon style of review that even though I was excited to get a critical review, I was almost completely unprepared for it. So, I wrapped up the Kahn seminar, the seminar on urban architectural ecology, and my structures class. I have to say, smashing the two foot tall balsa wood tower that Sarah and I tied laboriously together with hemp rope was the highlight of the week. All in all, though, even with the low level of energy I had at that point, and the horrible cough I’d picked up, the end of the term was pretty satisfying.

And this weekend, after I finally finished cleaning out my studio, I turned right around and headed to the retreat. We went up to Odell Lake, and in the lap of luxury we played a lot of games to “get to know each other” and then we organized the Environmental Control Systems class that we’ll all be teaching next term. Simultaneous to my retreat, the Vermont crew got together in Leyden and partied. A shame to miss it, but duty, and tuition, health insurance, a stipend, and professional growth all called.

So, I’m not sure that any of that information will be particularly exciting to my readers, who must be clamoring for something fantastic after such a long hiatus. But sometimes life is pretty much just surviving the wicked cough you’ve got.

I’m heading back to Florida in a couple of days. Perhaps life will be exciting there – I’m really looking forward to seeing the fam, especially the bro. I’ll try to get some excellent pictures. Speaking of which, I put a couple more photos of Finland on Flickr, and I’ll continue doing that over break; also, when I get my scans stitched together, I’ll put up my final boards from this term. Finally, If you’re feeling very generous towards me, please refer to my updated wish list page. There are many ways you can demonstrate your love for me materially, and I encourage you to do so.

Search for Meaning

One of many. We had our midterm on Monday (actually, we have a second one coming up in a week and a half – its nice to be able to re-scheme and have it reviewed before the final, so that you have some time to develop more fully). I got some not particularly clear feedback, but the gist is that I’m thinking about fairly drastic changes to my project. The project is a wetlands education complex on the western edge of Eugene. You can see actual information about this place and project here.

My basic scheme will remain the same, I think. I’m running site circulation up from the bike path on the southern edge of the site, through my linear hilltop grouping of buildings, and splitting it between an observation “telescope” and back down to the bike path. Three main buildings interface with the path – a staff building to house the office functions of the the various wetlands protection partners; a community building to provide a meeting place for citizens involved with the wetlands; and an education building where the school programs they currently run will have a permanent home.

Really, what’s in question is the making of the buildings. In my presentation, because of how schematic it was, it appeared that structure would run through exterior walls, and activities would take place within little boxes all related to each other through a single, thin interface.

My concepts, though, are much more about layering, about a switch-rich architecture. I’m not sure how to express this, though. In my desk crit today, Don and I discussed the method of creating simple superstructures with boxes inside that shape the overall shape and offer convenient ways to define specific rooms within larger, catchall spaces. However, there’s something about this method that I’m resisting. In some ways, it just seems too simplistic. It doesn’t have very much more depth to it than a more traditional room arrangement – although I guess that has in part to do with how the boxes themselves are constructed. 

One of the other thoughts is to use the somewhat complex roof structures that I was beginning to develop and bring them to a more tight configuration that spoke clearly to the spaces they defined. There’s something I’m a bit uncomfortable about with the potential for not just exposing the primary structure, but making it do acrobatics. I don’t think this place wants to be ostentatious. I think this method has a lot of promise, since I’m not sure that it necessarily becomes ostentatious…

Thirdly, there’s an idea that I’m floating around with that I thought might be a bit Fay Jones, but when I looked at his work, it didn’t seem particularly relevant. Its a more delicate use of structure – a bit more on the stick framing side of things – but without the sheet-rock. I looked again at the Viikki Church and I think that its a good start. This is what I’ve been trying to get at with the Radical Tectonics, but I’m really not quite sure what I’m aiming at. The Atlantic Center for the Arts has some of it…and the building I took my original inspiration from, the Institute for Forestry and Nature Research in the Netherlandsalso has it in certain ways. I guess I’m trying to find something with a bit more depth to the wall than the first and a bit more simplicity than the second.

Well, I’ve fuffed on, and I’m not sure any of it is particularly clear. What it comes down to, though, is that I’m ascribing this great meaning to this doubling and tripling of the walls. That I want some kind of depth to these spaces, but I don’t know how or why.

Return to the Prosaic

I’ve been told that I’ve been missed by my vast readership, so here I am, trying to write over the past month and a half.

I’ve gone for two runs since I returned to the US on the 6th, and I’ve started a large book, and generally kept a low profile, since I needed a vacation from my vacation.

I finished the term, and was glad to have that done. My studio partners and I submitted our project to the competition, despite many last minute revisions and extreme difficulty with the printer. The moment of truth came when I was helping Michael cut his presentation boards during the long wait for my boards to print. I held the ruler as he cut – and in his sleep deprived state, slipped and sliced my finger. The cut opened up the floodgates, and everything that seemed wrong about our studio, and about our trip to Finland, and really, about the world, just hit me and, in typical fashion, I lost it. Then, eventually, I stopped crying, and we sent off our project, which did print in the end; we made a lovely model; we had a fun send-off party; the cut, which wasn’t actually very deep, healed; and I think that after all, the experience let me get over some of the silly things that weren’t ideal about our trip and enjoy just how worthwhile and once-in-a-lifetime it was.

We set out after Finland on our travels. We visited Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bergen, Oslo, and the Lofoten Islands, with boat, plane, train, and automobile. The overwhelming feeling was that everything was much more expensive than we’d expected. We saw many fascinating things, despite our attempts to economize, and of course, many pictures will eventually make their way to Flickr. Highlights include going to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark and pretty much all of the Lofoten Islands/Norway.

If there is some sort of overwhelming reply of curiousity about the trip, I can add more details, but since I think I can pretty much count on sharing stories personally with most of my vast readership, I’ll leave it at that. These experiences will undoubtedly surface in the future as they’re now a part of me.

Three more overall highlights from the academic portion of the trip – the lecture series we had was wonderful; our model of the sauna we measured at Kiljava was archived in Finland’s Museum of Architecture; I learned AutoCAD in two days thanks to my studio partners.

So, now that I’ve vaguely covered that vast and interesting part of my life, I’m once again on solid ground to keep reporting to you the prosaic and mundane…thank goodness.

Not What I Expected

Life rarely is.

Didn’t expect to measure a smoke sauna – it makes you smell like smoke, and it might get you a little grubby with soot, and you’ll likely have a backache by the end of the day.  Smoke saunas are dark, so you’re also likely to feel some eyestrain.  Makes you wish you’d have gotten the chance to take a smoke sauna after all that work…

Didn’t expect to upset my boyfriend by drawing – it turns out that when you’re so much of a perfectionist that you can’t let anything happen differently than you envisioned and you can’t admit that you’re making life impossible for those around you, you can really bug people.

Didn’t expect to eat great meals all week on 30€ – including homemade ice cream sandwiches and a meal of grilled salmon, reindeer and lingonberries, mashies, cauliflower, and mixed berries with cream/ice cream.

Didn’t expect to want to be with the aforementioned boyfriend significantly more after our long, tense discussion of many of the things that often come between us.  Then  less when he seemed unable to consider forgiving my aforementioned stupidity about the drawing.  Then more when he showed himself more than capable of that forgiveness.

Didn’t expect to read Harry Potter so soon to its release date – did expect to enjoy it, and succeeded, despite feeling quite guilty as I repeatedly slipped away from social time post-dinner and post-sauna.

Didn’t expect to get to go to Rauma’s Lace Week, let alone the Night of Black Lace – and didn’t succeed, since the tourist book printed the wrong date for the event, and the city of Rauma turned out to be almost a ghost town because everyone had partied too hard the night before.

Didn’t expect to be quite as disappointed as I was by The Simpsons Movie.  Don’t know why.

Didn’t expect to have a delicious desert of Buckthorn sauce over ice cream at a fairly fancy restaurant in Rauma at the end of the strange day of finding ourselves a day late for the big party.

Didn’t expect to miss out so completely on Gingerbread building.  Or to be so enchanted by the Turku castle.  Or to spend so much of the time thinking about past places and people.  Didn’t expect to forget the name of the street I lived on in Brattleboro (Elliot St.) or the ones I lived on in Oberlin (Pleasant and Cedar).  Or to be so nostalgic about both places during such a supposedly exciting trip around the world.

Didn’t expect to ever be so confused about so many things.  Still awestruck by life, though, so don’t worry too much yet…

Blog from Michael's

It’s sunny today, and I’m yet to head out, but soon I will go do something outside in order to gather up the rays. Or maybe I’ll go to the mall.

It’s the final weekend of lots of sales here in Finland, and I need a new bathing suit. Tomorrow morning we’re heading for a summer cabin, where we’re going to measure some saunas so that we can make scale models of them in wood, and bake gingerbread so that we can make scale models of famous buildings out of it. We’re going to be working hard, I tell you. So, add to my shopping list a scrubby brush, and maybe a pair of pants that’s another size up.

We’re actually going to be working with a professional model maker and photographer, and the gingerbread models are for a new book of his in which we will be credited. I’m quite excited because I’ve always wanted to make overly complex gingerbread houses, ever since I first saw O.H.I.O.’s gingerbread displays. Also, because when we get back to Helsinki, we’ll be using the posh model shop to create high-quality wooden models of these saunas, so I’ll get some actual instruction in model making and be able to make some high-quality models for next term’s project when I get back to Eugene.

This past week we toured around Jyväskylä and environs, taking in some of Aalto’s earliest works (including a small church and the Worker’s Club) as well as some of his master works, like the Säynätsalo Town Hall and the Expermental House. We stopped in Tampere along the way and saw a hideous library and a lovely church, done by the same husband and wife team. Needless to say, the sketching regimen was somewhat intense, and my camera slowly drained out of batteries and got overstuffed with photos. Of course, the first thing that we did upon returning to Helsinki was to visit the Viikki wooden church and the experimental housing and teacher training college that were also in Viikki, in order to take photos and sketch a lot more. And after that, we went to the Rock Church (yes, it’s carved into the bedrock of Helsinki) for a little more sketch and shoot. Today, no more of that.

Actually, today I’ve been planning the trip at the end of the term and writing emails. Got a email from Ellen, my room mate at Duke the summer after 8th grade, which was really exciting. Replying to her sent me off on a little trail, and I emailed 5 Chicagoans in all.

So, I’m off, and what the hell, maybe I will head to the elementary school in Leppavara to sketch and shoot, since it is so nice outside after all.

Finland in a Funk

Studio has kicked in, and I’m in a funk. There’s a huge amount of program, and it’s quite difficult to understand because of translation issues. It’s also difficult to pull out the kind of conceptual basis for the school that I’d really like. My partners and I have made some progress, but a lot needs to happen before tomorrow’s review.

It’s been a rainy weekend, and I’ve sort of laid low. We grilled out again on Friday night, then I went out on the town with a couple of the other girls. The night started out well, with a fun band and good drinks, not to mention getting out of the 6€ cover. When we headed down to the second bar, though things got a bit rougher, so I headed home, but not early enough to avoid having to pay for the night time train charge of 5€. So all I really did of note this weekend was to head to the National Museum, where I wore my shoes thin looking at everything. This weekend, more than in a long time, I wished I had a good novel!

The past week, though, we headed to Turku. On the way we stopped at Paimio, Aalto’s TB sanitorium, and at a couple of chapels. My favorite was the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a concrete building that used several daylighting elements to acheive a space for mourning that seemed much more moving to me than the other funeral chapel that we saw. I also decided to prepare my case study on the recently completed Turku Library, and my partner Erika and I are hopeful that we’ll be able to talk to the architects (the firm that I mentioned last week, JKKM) about the process and the final project.

So, I posted photos from last term on Flickr, and Michael has posted photos from Finland up to this point. I’ve also uploaded my final presentation from last term, that shows my furniture Twist. It’s my intellectual property, so don’t go getting any ideas!

Ok, I’m going to go make lunch then light a fire and get some studio work done.

To Estonia and Back

Hey, it’s been a while, but I’m back on the blog.

I’m on Michael’s computer (we got back together a couple of months ago – shortly after the last blog) in a building built by Alvar Aalto, in a University partially designed by him, in a city that’s right across the bay from Helsinki, in Finland. Yes, I made it to Finland, safe and sound. Travel went fairly smoothly, with just a short delay in Amsterdam due to windy weather; although I landed in Helsinki with less than 15 minutes to the bus departure, I still caught the bus I had planned to take way back in the U.S.A.

When I got to my apartment, I found out that I had one of the smoother trips, as some people had lost luggage, or had to put down a deposit on the supposedly pre-paid apartments, or had significant delays/reroutings in their flights. It took a day to get the keys to the room, so I spent a night sleeping in the hallway on the chair pad from a housemate’s room, but no harm done. Unfortunately, we’re not all at the same site, and some of my classmates have housemates who are from different programs, including Michael. I think that would be great if it were true for all of us, but as it is, it sort of seems like an extra stress for those classmates who aren’t going to be quite as clued in to what’s happening in the program.

A few more quick gripes – really, everything is expensive, it’s no joke. Luckily, there are store brands and a cheap lunch at the University, plus on Tuesday we should be able to get transportation passes so that we don’t have to keep shelling out for each trip.

Also, we haven’t yet gotten internet in our apartment, which we are apparently supposed to have right off the bat and for free. Like many things, we’ve run into bureaucracy in solving the problem, which wouldn’t be bad except that in general, it’s inflexible and unhelpful and everyone’s on vacation.

Now, onto happy things – my apartment (and everyone’s in fact) is quite nice – one big window in each bedroom, and a balcony off the kitchen. There’s a shower room separate from the bathroom that has it’s own heater. That way you can turn off the water as you lather up and you don’t get frozen. Our fridge was a moldy, smelly mess, but we cleaned it today. Unlike in London, there’s plenty of space for everyone’s food in the fridge. Above the sink are the traditional drying racks, which make for a nice clean countertop since you don’t have to have a dish drainer hanging out. My housemates are great, and I think we’re going to head out on the town tonight…which is going to cut this posting short.

That’s probably a good thing, since I’ve got lots to tell about the end of last semester (at this rate it may never get told, but that’s ok, too) and even more about being here in Finland. But right now, I’m going to sign off, and be here.

Suomi, Here I Am

Hey, it’s been a while, but I’m back on the blog.

I’m on Michael’s computer (we got back together a couple of months ago – shortly after the last blog) in a building built by Alvar Aalto, in a University partially designed by him, in a city that’s right across the bay from Helsinki, in Finland. Yes, I made it to Finland, safe and sound. Travel went fairly smoothly, with just a short delay in Amsterdam due to windy weather; although I landed in Helsinki with less than 15 minutes to the bus departure, I still caught the bus I had planned to take way back in the U.S.A.

When I got to my apartment, I found out that I had one of the smoother trips, as some people had lost luggage, or had to put down a deposit on the supposedly pre-paid apartments, or had significant delays/reroutings in their flights. It took a day to get the keys to the room, so I spent a night sleeping in the hallway on the chair pad from a housemate’s room, but no harm done. Unfortunately, we’re not all at the same site, and some of my classmates have housemates who are from different programs, including Michael. I think that would be great if it were true for all of us, but as it is, it sort of seems like an extra stress for those classmates who aren’t going to be quite as clued in to what’s happening in the program.

A few more quick gripes – really, everything is expensive, it’s no joke. Luckily, there are store brands and a cheap lunch at the University, plus on Tuesday we should be able to get transportation passes so that we don’t have to keep shelling out for each trip.

Also, we haven’t yet gotten internet in our apartment, which we are apparently supposed to have right off the bat and for free. Like many things, we’ve run into bureaucracy in solving the problem, which wouldn’t be bad except that in general, it’s inflexible and unhelpful and everyone’s on vacation.

Now, onto happy things – my apartment (and everyone’s in fact) is quite nice – one big window in each bedroom, and a balcony off the kitchen. There’s a shower room separate from the bathroom that has it’s own heater. That way you can turn off the water as you lather up and you don’t get frozen. Our fridge was a moldy, smelly mess, but we cleaned it today. Unlike in London, there’s plenty of space for everyone’s food in the fridge. Above the sink are the traditional drying racks, which make for a nice clean countertop since you don’t have to have a dish drainer hanging out. My housemates are great, and I think we’re going to head out on the town tonight…which is going to cut this posting short.

That’s probably a good thing, since I’ve got lots to tell about the end of last semester (at this rate it may never get told, but that’s ok, too) and even more about being here in Finland. But right now, I’m going to sign off, and be here.

Memories

Thought I’d do something to help myself with children’s furniture: I’m going to try to post a memory of my childhood every day.

Number 1
I remember that my brother and I used to make radio shows. I think we probably only did it once or twice, but one day in particular, we spent hours with the tape recorder. We did funny voices, made jokes to one another, and pretended to be pirates. We sat in the front room of 649, on the sea green carpet, next to the black L-shaped bookcases that we had. 

I’m a bit frustrated with school lately, but have other good bits that I’m saving up – a great but tiring weekend of frisbee at Gandy Goose (3-3, finished 4th place out of 16); the first goslings of the season yesterday at the Millrace; Michael making me a very tasty stir fry for dinner Tuesday night.

HOPES is happening this weekend, so tonight I’m heading to the first keynote lecture. I need a quiet weekend soon!