Thoughts and Developments

Getting ready to go to sleep so that I can wake up early for Sectionals tomorrow. I’m feeling pretty guilty that I’ve let myself get totally out of shape, and a bit worried that things won’t go so well tomorrow, but all that I can do is give it my best.

I put together my dresser today! When we got back from exploring estate sales this morning, the replacement part was waiting on the front porch, so I spent the rest of the day assembling the thing. It looks good, and hopefully it won’t fall apart…

I put lots of pictures on my Flickr accountyesterday, and if you haven’t gone to look at them, you ought to. They’re not beautiful art shots, but there are some fun experimentation shots that I could doctor in Photoshop if I wanted to make them a bit more vibrant, and some pretty decent candid photos, that probably should also be run through Photoshop. Speaking of which, I uploaded my Adobe Creative Suite 2 yesterday, and I feel super powerful. Will feel even more powerful when I know how to use it.

Sarah and I climbed Spencer’s Butte on Wednesday, and I played in my first A league (frisbee) game Wednesday night. The A league here’s pretty good, so I’ll look forward to that. I’m also going to play in the C league on Sunday, so I’ll be back to disc twice a week, which means that if I fit in one more workout, I’ll be in position to maintain my health a little better this semester.

I added a wish list page (look in the top row of options) and took down the photo links page because the former seemed appropriate to start, thinking forward to Christmas, and the latter was no longer helpful because I’m now using Flickr.

So, off I go. Room’s almost under control, house is almost under control, still a bunch of loose ends to tie up before Monday, but am going to play frisbee and go to the Ozomatli concert instead.

Flickr, I hardly know her

Couldn’t resist.

As we speak, I’m uploading my first set of photos to my new Flickr account.  Very exciting, but a somewhat slow process.  The photos just happen to be – you guessed it – pictures of my cube house.  Because of that, some of them required serious photoshopping, since they’re photos of flat drawings.  Hopefully they come out o.k. online.

What to say, what to say. On Saturday, I went to Speaking of Women’s Health, a conference which my stepmom Debbie helps organize.  It was really fun to be able to go with so many of the women in my family, and the speakers that I saw were very good.  It’s inspiring me to be ever more careful about sun tan lotion and perhaps to take up shaving since part of the gift bag is a very nice razor.  Debbie did a great job, and I’d definitely go again.

I’ve just blogged a photo from Flickr, so I guess that will show up before this post.  But I don’t want to have to individually blog each photo I post, so I’ll have to figure out a way to finesse the system. I guess I’ll just recommend that you, dear reader, look at the set to which the photo I blog belongs.

So, I guess that after all I don’t have much to say, because I’m now burned out on all this technology.  I’m rereading Diamond Age, one of my most favorite books, speaking of technology.  I left the Bible with mom, but I think she might get me a copy of that translation as a gift, which will be interesting.  And today I took some pictures of flowers around the house before my battery ran out to both test out my new memory card (hooray) and to get to know my camera in a more than business relationship.  Those, of course, will be uploaded to my new Flickr account at some point, perhaps when I am again using my fast little Mac.

Ok, off to edit the Flickr post and go get dinner.

Cube House Drawings Layout

Cube House Drawings Layout 

Here’s my first attempt at blogging from Flickr. This is the photo of all of my drawings from the Cube House project. It shows how the three pages related to each other. I chose to draw in pen on double matte mylar, which turned out to be really fun. The drawings have life to them because the lines aren’t ruled exactly straight – if you look closely you’ll see there’s quite a bit of wobble. But, that wobble gives them a nice hand illustrated look. Also, using pens means keeping a steady line weight. Unfortunately it also puts limits on how light and dark you can go. I used six weights of pen, but the one complaint I heard about the drawings was that there was not enough variation in line weight. I would have liked to poche (fill in with shaded or, in this case, solid tone) the structural members in the plans and diagrams, but since I was holding off on that for if I had enough time, I didn’t get to that. I think that would have solved the line weight problem.

Reflections

I’m going to put a bit of concerted effort into thinking about my first term of grad school.  First, let me whine for two seconds – I miss my PowerBook in all its speed and beauty!  At least I have a computer to be going on.

So I broke my cardinal rule of blogging, which was that it doesn’t matter how long, you should have a post up pretty much every week.  But, while time managment got a little close there, I actually learned pretty precisely how long it takes me to do certain tasks, how much faster I can go in some situations than others, and how I can be wiser with my time in general at school.  Also, how much I feel like doing anything else when I’m done with work, to which the answer is not very.

Watching all of the married students, I definately had a revelation that I was spending way more time at the studio than was really necessary.  In part, I get social time there, and really enjoy hanging out, poking around at other people’s projects or doing work that could be done elsewhere in that social situation.  But, towards the end of the semester, I realized that studio needs to be studio time – aka, when I’m there I’m focused on my work.  Once I’ve completed my goals for the day I can go home, even if the project as a whole is not done.  Steady work does actually turn out to be more effective, since my mind needs time to percolate, as my 11th grade English teacher used to say.

I think in large part that revelation came about when I headed up to Kleinman.  I still had to edit my paper and add in all of the images, plus I was reeling over the Wednesday night redesign of my cube house, and gearing up for the final haul.  But I went to the tournament and had a great time and didn’t end up in any worse of a position school-wise (how likely was I to catch up on drawing homework that weekend anyway?). 

At the same time, I realized that I don’t have the energy to do much more than retain important friendships that I already have, and that with smarter use of my school time, I should be able to do the phone calls and emails that I really enjoyed this past year in Vermont. It’s been tough to join the frisbee team and not have time to really become friends with my teammates.  I definitely still feel like I’m outside the scene, even though I always feel welcomed.  So, keeping up with the Oberlin crowd, the Brattleboro crowd, and those folks I deal with day-to-day in Eugene should be enough, and I’m not going to go looking for new folks in the fall. Oh, and keeping up with the workouts will doubtless take up lots of time too, and is really important since it feels dreadful to be so out of shape.

Some of the other technique oriented things I discovered – when working, it’s always good to keep moving.  There is a pace that’s natural to maintain, when you’re in flow, and it’s not that you can intentionally get there, but you can do a lot to help yourself get close.  I found that as I did my final presentation, I made work circles: I got my model mostly done, so that if I had to turn it in I’d only be partially mortified, then I got my drawings almost all the way done, then I finished the model, then I put final touches on the drawings.  All the while I was making design decisions. 

That way of working turned out to be really effective – you spend all of your time doing something and none of it worrying about how much there is to do.  It came out of the feeling that I don’t play enough with the problems before I go ahead and attack them (which is why I keep doing total redesigns at the last minute) and the advice to constantly switch media.  If you’re drawing, make a model, if you’re modeling, write a narrative, if you’re writing do some diagrammatic analysis, if you’re diagramming, go look at precidents. 

One thing that Mike (my professor) wasn’t helpful with was process work.  I found that the way I interacted with him most successfully was by asking him very direct and specific questions, and that led me away from taking the time to explore and process. I’m reading Graphic Thinking for Architects and Designers now to try and get a bit stronger on the open-ended sketching and analytical diagramming, because I think those two skills could help me out a lot on doing my own process work.  My summer at Harvard was invaluable if only for their emphasis on generating designs from the process work, and thus their instruction in different angles of attack.

Process work is prehaps the most fun part of school, but it’s by far the most daunting.  You sit down with a clean desk and your new assignment and you have two weeks to turn that vague idea you had during the presentation of the assignment into presentation drawings.  You know that you’ll need time to do those final drawings and craft the final model.  You’ll need time to get the structure and the concept working together.  You’ve got to work pretty fast to get something out on the page, but it can’t get fixed too soon.  I think that, in fact, other than noting initial reactions, I perhaps shouldn’t be “designing” anything for the first day or two.  That’s the time for exploration.  There’s so much to understand in any of these projects that two days isn’t close to enough time to explore, so I should at least be giving it that much time.  I guess that in the fall we’ll have one project for the entire semester, and I’m not sure whether that will be broken down or not.  If it is, I’m vowing, right here and now, to note my initial reaction then make a concerted effort not to try to design anything for quite some time.

There’s a sort of pressure to have something on the page that comes from both the looming deadlines and the other folks in the studio who are all talking about what they’re doing and asking what you’re up to.  I want to be a part of that conversation, but I’m realising that it needs to remain constructive.  There are some people with whom you can have really great discussions and get wonderful ideas, but when they ask you what you’re up to, it’s ok not to have a floorplan to show them.  I think I’d actually feel even more like I was doing my work well if I instead showed them some serious site analysis or a great set of sketch models.

Which, by the way, were one of the great triumphs of the final project.  Towards the end, I finally got the idea of how to make quick sketch models.  One of the reviewers at the final review (not one of mine) suggested that one should make at least six sketch models before you get anywhere near choosing a scheme to work.  While I don’t think they meant to imply a magic number, it’s an indication of how important it is to work in three dimensions from the beginning of the design project.

It was also gratifying to hear that my final scheme seemed “comfortable” to both of my reviewers.  They both seemed to like the design very much, and I think that a lot of that came from trying some of the ideas from Synthesis 9.  I guess I’ll put more up about my final once I’ve got a way to upload the photos.

Actually, this is probably way too long and I should shut up.  I’m not sure I got to the real meat.  As usual, a few thoughts before I hang up the towel: I’m focusing on the work and ideas next semester.  No matter how frustrating the professorial or organizational situation, no matter how annoying my classmates, I’m in school to have the pleasure of interrogation, to form opinions and explore alternatives.  I talked to the boys of South Main last night, (which was great and I’m very excited about visiting VT), and felt like that level of intellectual conversation is vital to my life and I need to transfer it out to Oregon if I’m to feel at home/like I’m getting what I came for there.  And on that note, the other book I’m reading right now?  The Bible.  A little light summer reading.

More soon, as always. 

The Close of Another Chapter

I’m officially done with my first semester of grad school, and in fact I’m already a few days into my vacation.  I’ll be bopping all over the east coast in the next few weeks, and I didn’t bring my laptop for security reasons, but I’ll probably still be writing more often than when I’m in school.  Especially since I have a lot to ponder after this first semester.

Since I last wrote, I finished the paper, went to the tournament, scrapped the design I was working on for an entire redesign of the cube house, completed the final design including model and three sheets of ink on mylar drawings, completed my sketchbook, had my exit interview, and started these intercession travels.  There’s a lovely picture of Herman and Ruth at the tournament that you should check out as a teaser to further stuff…for now I’m going to go enjoy pizza and conversation with the fam, who just walked in the door – Liz and Ricky and B.  Lovely!

Study Break

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?

The Rollercoaster Ride

Arg!

I’m running behind and feeling overwhelmed. I had a beautiful concept for the tower project , complete with variations . Then, I started to engineer in the stairs, the railing, and the top observation deck, and just couldn’t figure out an elegant way to keep the very scuptural skeleton clear while making it an inhabitable building. So I ditched it and completely redesigned.

I reintroduced the triangle stairs, added a CMU wall for strength, capped it off with a triangle observation deck. After significant tweaking, it regained the upward thrusting arms on the forest side, and got fairly well proportioned. It’s ok, but I wasn’t that excited about it. It relates pretty well to the wall house, but it’s pretty static and doesn’t have the gracefulness of the more sculptural tower. I wish that I had stuck it out with the other concept, but at least I didn’t have to feel like I was muddying up that idea. Perhaps the dual tripod will have its day in the sun.

As far as making friends goes, that’s been pretty successful, and I’m starting to feel like I’m creating a fairly comfortable group for self. Here’s a picture of what happens when grad students are playing in the studio:
That’s Charlie, decked out in vinyl drafting board cover, some very cool paper that has little slits cut into it all over so that it stretches out, and holding Kyle’s concept model. It was over 100 degrees this weekend, and they turned off the A/C in the studio Friday-Sunday. Suffice it to say, it was disgustingly hot and not conducive to work, but quite a bonding experience. Also, Friday night I got about 15 people to come with me to Prince Puckler’s, the local homemade ice cream shop, where they have Sundaes with the local chocolate shop’s fudge for $2.75 on Fridays. Yay for ice cream.

I’ve gotten housing for the fall with a girl named Sarah. It’s a two person house that she’s currently living in, and I’ll need to start collecting furniture, but she’s got the common rooms covered. More on that later, I’m sure, but good to have a place to transition into.

And now, I must get back to work. The next part of the project, a cubical house, is entirely uninspiring to me. I spent the morning making a little cube with volumes carved out, and while it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, I was fuming the whole time about my professor and the assignment in general. After talking this weekend with brother Dan, I’ve started to feel like I should have looked a bit harder and visited the schools. I think that in the fall, my misgivings will prove unfounded, but right now I’m doing a bit of the old regret thing. Anywhoo, the cube making took longer than intended, and I ended up not having as much time for drawing/napping as hoped. So, with a two hour nap under my belt, I now have about 10 hours of drawing to do. No, I won’t get it all done, but I’m going to try for a solid two hours of work.

Oh, there’s so much more to say. An abrupt realization this weekend: there are more people my age in this program (about 60) than I knew of in Brattleboro, although thinking about it a bit harder, I realize that with the School for International Training, there were many more people that I didn’t know. Still, gives a sense of scale. Off I go.

Finally, a weekend

This weekend has been lovely. Compared to pre-architecture school era (or PASE), I worked a whole lot, but now that I'm in architecture school era, (or ASE) it was a relaxing weekend.

We had four things to do this weekend - a precedent study of three braced-frame towers, a midterm analyzing a building, a model of a set of code-compliant stairs, and a presentation of our drawings from Timberline lodge. Plus, I probably should have caught up in my sketchbook and put the rest of my trees into my site model, but I didn't, and I feel o.k. with that decision.

It turns out that other than the presentation of the drawings, this was actually quite an inspiring set of assignments. I created a set of triangular stairs, which sort of went beyond the call of duty, but made the assignment more interesting for me. Unfortunately, as I went along, I lost a bit of interest, so the construction is a little less than fine hand joinery, but it suffices, gets the idea across.

Then, for my midterm, I analyzed the Glasgow School of Art, by Charles Mackintosh. This turned out to be an easy assignment because the building is pretty awesome. Something I'd like to visit sometime - Mackintosh was one of the reasons I decided to go to architecture school. I'm not really sure how to sum up what I wrote, other than that I hope it's not over the top, but at least it's the midterm, which was sort of just assigned to help us get started for the final, which is a 15ish page essay on the same building; I'm now about 3 pages in.

The tower precedent study was what really got me though. There I was, sitting in the introductory lecture on the tower project (the next building on our imaginary lakeside site, to be adjacent to the wall house), hearing this assignment and thinking about how little I wanted to go look at water towers, etc. But once I started looking for towers, after getting sidetracked thinking that I'd study the Rundetaarn and other Copenhagen towers, I found some pretty awesome ones. Here's my list:

• Tour d'observation, Berinzenne (1995) and Tour d'observation, Gedinne [aka Millennium Tower] (2001)
• Suchov – Turm, Technische Berufsschule Zürich
• and a fourth one that I didn't follow through with due to a paucity of images, Aussichtsturm "Lothurm", Magglingen

A great contrast to the Mackintosh building, but also fun to find these very new pieces of architecture and be able to annotate them freshly, without having in mind all of the commentary of former critics. So, overall, a good exercise.

In addition to all this schoolwork, I got a chance to look at a potential house for the fall (very nice, but perhaps a little out of my price range, depending on what we can bargain with the landlords); eat birthday cake and nachos, in that order, with Shannon and Brian (two of my new, non-school friends who are dating and happen to have the same birthday); laze about in bed a good deal; go to a winery in Salem for a concert; and go on a couple of runs (in which I realized just how much sitting in the studio I have been doing). So, I'm feeling fairly well recharged for getting back to school tomorrow, and I'm also feeling ready to make those pesky change of address calls...

Hooray for R and R, in whatever small doses it can be found.

All Drawn Out

Back from our two-day trip all around Oregon, and I'm all drawn out. We stopped at the High Desert Museum, Warm Springs Museum, and Timberline lodge yesterday (Tuesday) and today (Wednesday) we left the Timberline lodge and drove to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Multnomah Falls. At each stop on Tuesday we drew interior, exterior, and detail drawings, plus we were supposed to draw diagrams of the landscapes and a section of our drive from Eugene to High Desert and from Warm Springs to Timberline. Today, we only had to draw at the Columbia Gorge Dicovery Center (plus finish the Timberline drawings), so we got to just enjoy the falls and the Vista House.

As much as it was a bit of overkill, and a lot of riding on the bus, the trip was enjoyable. Still, it was exhausting, because when we weren't drawing, we were all still in the getting to know you mode. I think it's particularly strange - we've spent a lot of time together, but in individual pursuit of the same goals, rather than in collaborative work towards a single accomplishment. That means that we have a lot to compare, rather than a solid baseline shared experience. So conversation tends to revolve around school, or other points of comparison (in particular, our opinions of each other, which makes me feel like I'm in middle school again, but sometimes our previous lives), rather than moving into new territory. It's somewhat frustrating because it takes a lot of work to continue the conversations, but the payback is relatively low. I'm looking forward to some mellowing out of the group.

One high point - last night I stayed at the Silcox Hut (7000 ft elevation) on Mt. Hood. Twenty-six of us shared the bunk house. I signed up late, so I was on the floor in front of the huge fireplace. Before we went to bed and after a good hour of casual conversation in the fireplace hall, Jake and Eric (the guy I was going to live with originally) were headed back out to sled a bit more on some lunch trays they had lifted earlier in the day. Kyle and I headed out with them, and we had a great time sledding down Mt. Hood on the tiny little trays. Throughly out of breath and much colder, we headed back in to the warm fire. It was a nice little snippet of time without the pressure to impress anyone, and some much needed physical activity after the long day of sitting.

I have a couple of drawings I'm very happy with, some that are quite a bit more rough to put it charitably, and lots that I didn't get done. I hope to clarify tomorrow what level of detail and preciseness vs. expressiveness and expansiveness we need to be capturing, which is probably a question that I should have asked before the attempting the assignment. Oh well. On a happy note that relates both to the drawings and to this little bloggy-poo, I was doing my reading today and came accross this quote from Edward Fischer: "Judged by the days, life does not make sense. Judged by the years, things add up and a plan emerges. A good reason to keep a journal is to have the consolation of seeing patterns form." A lovely sentiment, if expressed in a melancoly mode.

Hoping to get some fun/free time this weekend, along with doing a lot of drawing, starting the next project, writing the History/Theory midterm, and dealing with loose ends that have been hanging since the beginning of the term. Good news, though - I can now take my computer in to the studio, which means that I can spend even more time there...

One down...

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.

Alive and Kicking

I never would have thought a week and a half would feel so long, but it seems more like I've been in school for a month and a half. We started right in with a design project, and without explaination of how to draft or make a model. They changed our schedule so that we now have class from 8:00-6:00 with a one hour lunch break, and it's pretty brutal, because at the end of that time there's inevitably a pile of homework to do. So, long story short, I've either come home around 12 a.m. and read for another hour, or around 9 p.m. and crashed out. Then I generally get up at 6:30ish. It's quite an adjustment to make, and one made more difficult by the strange eating habits it fosters.

Part of the difficulty is that this past weekend I went to Potlatch, in Seattle (You should know not to take frisbee pictures seriously). I worked in the studio all day Friday, and got to the fields just before midnight. Caitlin Cordell and I shared a tent at the fields. I played with Entropy Punch, the Oberlin reunion team. We quickly dispatched our first opponent on Saturday, and then settled in for a deadly second round bye. Meanwhile, one of our six women went to the hospital and was told not to play for the rest of the day as the result of an inconclusive shoulder diagnosis. Down to five ladies, we played and beat Denial, the Eugene team I'm about to become part of, and Smells Like Tacoma. By our fourth game, we were pretty beat, and indeed we got beaten by a California team. At the end of the game, in an attempt to revitalize myself, I chugged about a quart of pickle juice - let me recommend that you never do such a thing. I felt miserable the rest of the evening, but that probably worked in my favor, since I avoided the hangover on Sunday morning.

Sunday we lost one, won one, and lost one. Our win was pretty exciting: we were behind 13-7, and pulled out the energy to win 16-14. At the end of our games, I went to find my ride, only to discover that they had already headed home and weren't answering their cell phones. So, I asked around until I found some other Eugene folks that were heading home, and ended up getting to see the finals, in which Bomb (Carleton reunion team) bested Vagabonds (Portland), but not getting any work done.

I guess my bad luck in getting left was karmic repayment for my good luck of winning the bookstore's Book Award, which gave me $400 worth of books and supplies! So, as soon as I get a spare moment, I shall take in my receipts and get money back that I've already spent, and in the mean time, I'll keep buying the supplies I need without worrying about where the money to pay for them comes from. Super sweet.

So far I am enjoying the program, particularly the history and theory lectures. I'm excited about my current design for our first design problem, although I'm anxious to work out all the details. The problem is to build the first of three structures on a lakeside site. The site slopes down to the lake, with a fir forest to the north, a fern gorge to the east, oak savana to the west, and the lake to the south. Our house, the "Wall House," is on the western edge of the "bench" (a preexisting foundation structure), and acts as a gatehouse, temporary house for the owners during the construction of the other house, and a guesthouse. The house is 300 square feet of less, with requisite attached outdoor space and strict structural requirements. I've been working a lot with sliding, and had the queen sized bed sliding underneath a wall to create a condition of two couches, but the professor strongly suggested that I get rid of the wall since it's such a small space. I think I'm going to heed his advice, but now I have to figure out how to create the two couch condition, since I'm determined not to have a murphy bed and I'm also not digging the futon option.

So, I'd better get to sleep so that I have brain power to tackle the task at hand and not cut myself with an X-acto. Oh, and I have big plans for posting more photos and drawings (did you see my photos from our field trip?). Once I get my computer set up to work in the studio, I bet I'll be posting more often. Until then, I'll just keep wondering around looking lost whenever I'm not bent intently over my cardboard and cutting mat.

Waiting, Anticipating

It's time to play the waiting game, and so that's what I'm doing. Everything for the past two days has seemed so geared towards Monday and beyond. I cleaned the kitchen at the house, got that P.O. Box and figured out tuition, and ordered a whole bunch of books.

In that shopping mindset, I got excited about replacing my broken cameras with a new digital. I did a ton of research (aka read a lot of customer reviews on Amazon) and I've got a front runner, the Canon PowerShot SD600 6MP Digital Elph Camera with 3x Optical Zoom. It seems to have all the capabilities I would likely need through a couple of years of grad school, including some manual abilities, plus it's lightweight and portable enough to just take along on fun trips, plus it's not too super expensive. This is a big decision for me, but also a fun way to while away a day...

Which didn't really need whiling. I did a sprint workout in the middle of the day, after making some split pea soup. The workout was great, mostly since I could see how after three weeks of working out I would be in very good shape. That's a big motivator for me. Also, I have found a workout partner who will definitely challenge me. She's a physical therapist, so she seems to know every possible variation on each exercise, which adds flair and adventure to something otherwise potentially dull and painfull. After the workout, I headed to the market on the bike that I've started to fix up.

So, all in all it was a productive day, but really, what it comes down to is sort of a holding pattern. I'm avoiding resume tweaking (the architecture students I hung out with tonight said that they couldn't remember anyone working during the first summer), trying to decide whether to play in the summer league, and opening a new bank account.

Here's the exciting thing though: soon I'll be writing about real thoughts and ideas, rather than giving a list of what I did in my day. I know you'll miss knowing about how much fun it was to darn my socks, but you'll be oh so intrigued to hear what I really think of Loos' voyeuristic designs. Perhaps this weekend I'll get a chance to listen to the Shiguru Ban keynote address from the HOPES conference and respond. That would be nice.

Also, one last tidbit. Tonight I got invited to a salad party. This is a party in which the host, who is probably a gardener, supplies the greens, and the guests each bring a favorite salad topping to share. What a lovely idea - everyone should have one!