Studio - ing

The fantastic thing about school is that there is a great fountain of readily available knowledge, and you are only limited by your own personal capacity of absorption.

Firstly, studio: The material palette here astounds me with its variety. U of IL generally had basic chip board contour sites with monochrome basswood buildings. They looked complete and professional. Here, they do use chip and basswood, but they also solder music wire, pour plaster of Paris, concrete for that matter, wire mesh (expanded + woven), ocalux, string, sanded plexi, plywood, Spanish Cedar, trace paper, etc. And very few 'look' like buildings, but here, that's ok. Professors will not grille you about the feasibility of building, space for HVAC, and on the one hand I find that odd, on the other, it's liberating.

Theory: I'm TA-ing for a theory class in undergrad. I was nervous about it at first, because I haven't taken a theory course per se, but I've been doing some reading in the past year, and I picked up a lot through history courses. It is possible that U of IL focuses much more on intensive "precedent studies" for studio, and how to look at buildings. Perhaps that is why they do not bother separately teaching a course on theory. I also get a lot of theory from the "Common Course" we take with not just Architecture students, but also Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning, and Architectural History. The idea is that we all learn about our different majors to foster "interdisciplinary thought." I think it'd be more efficient and realistic to just lump 2 of our studios together rather than just rhetoricizing about working together all the time. We've got a pretty good discussion section. Heidegger, Jand Jacobs, all sorts of interesting names have come up. I feel like I'm getting a crash course in philosophy, not just from these courses, but also from a friendship I've struck up with a friend of my roomates who was a philosophy major in undergrad.

Random Classes: Today for example, there was an info session on using a program called ArcGIS, which basically allows you to map census data/geologic/climatic/etc. in innumerable possible formats. Yesterday, a guest lecturer told us about a giant research proposal she made about dealing with the water level rising issue as it pertains to New York, which is very pertinent to my particular studio because we are designing a building in New Orleans. The other day, I learned how to use a laser cutter. Etc.

Every so often, I do get out to ride. I've joined the C-ville Bike and Build listserve, and I went on a great 1 hour ride with a 4th year undergraduate girl who biked the Southern route this summer with my friend Will Godfrey. She knows the area really well, and she was really nice about tailoring the ride to fit my time frame.