The End. The Beginning.

Well. Lets begin with something that nearly killed all of us in the studio. The Proun. Well - its done and was critiqued all day last Monday. 20 or so people stayed up all night Sunday to get it all done after they dumped a little extra work on top of our insurmountable chaos. Four full scale [read poster size] drawings in pen and ink, one essay abstract, one research paper taking up some mental space although not actually due, and yes.....one immaculately constructed Proun. Some Prouns were 10-12 feet high - some were made out of 200 kilos of concrete, some cost students over 350 dollars just in materials.
Needless to say there were more than a few bleary eyed students resembling something out of a zombie movie on Monday; and also explains where I have been for almost two weeks.
One of my best friends was lucky enough to experience the hell that was the week prior to the due date. I really only got to hang out with him for a single day, the day he arrived, and he was pretty much on his own after that. He came all this way to check out Toronto and hang out with me and instead I worked 20 hour days the entire time he was here.
So what exactly have I been up to for a week since then you might ask? Well I slept for most of Tuesday after we all found out that History class was cancelled. Thankfully they sent out e-mails at 10:56am informing us of the cancellation for a class which started at 11:00. I think my dead-pan response was something along the lines of "Fuck you that is not funny" when Lisa told me. Other student reactions were quite similar in language and tone as we loitered in the lobby as a group not really too sure as to what to do with ourselves and our newly acquired 'free day'.
We were handed out an actual building for a project [AT LAST!!!] which involves Basswood and 3/8" industrial felt. I'll give details later but it looks like , dare I say, fun.

A Minor Defeat

I really hate it when you look at three and a half weeks of work and it looks like something you did in grade 8 shop class. I hate this conceptual crap. The Proun project quickly descended from something interesting to something I loathed in a very short period of time. I know I'm going to get ripped apart for it.... It's an embarrassing display of my 'skills and talents'.

There's no point getting all freaked out about it though. It's almost done. It's due tomorrow. And in 36 hours I'll never have to look at it again - and that makes me happy.

"I just want to design a building!!"

Flipping the Bird

There's something moderately pleasing about blowing off your supervisor who simply can't say anything positive and to bury oneself in work they can't figure out. She looks at it and can't say much - which means she's buried in thought - and then furrows her eyebrow while she criticizes any possible detail. But she's just doing her job, which is to push us as far as we can go before we crack. My Proun project is developing well albeit a little late in comparison to others. I could really use another week but that's life and that's fine with me.

The time mapping of the shoe went well. It was handed in this morning along with a time mapping of the TTC subway platform at Yonge and Bloor. For the subway I chose to track air pressure through the tunnel, the platform, and out the blast shafts which vent out onto the street. Everyone seemed to like this project the most so far and I wish I could have given it another full day to take it that much further.

I hope to get on the bike tomorrow and pound out some miles before it's too cold to go outside.

The Mood in the Room

It's like a bomb exploded in the studio in the past few days - both literally and metaphorically. Metaphorically because the workload has tripled in a few days and things are due all at once. Literary because the studio is a total disaster as a major construction project has forced us to use any available space as a construction and assembly area. The dust is thick and patience is thin, very thin. The level of stress is unbelievable, and even some of our professors are rescheduling things to lighten the load on all of us [one of my exams was delayed 2 weeks]. Back to work....

Last Man Standing

For the second time in three days I am the last one in the studio. There is one second year and that's it. Everyone else has bugged out and gone home. I guess this means I'm in for the long haul?

Time is Money

Professor: "Hey you! The bleary eyed skinny one over there! Yes, you. Want something else to do"
Me: "That's not even close to being funny."
Professor: "Great! Go stand at the Yonge and Bloor subway station interchange platform and track something over time over a period of six hours. Then precisely draw it orthographicly on museum board. It'll be due in a week."
Me: "I thought the project you were handing out was supposed to be an in class assignment, due at the end of the day."
Professor: "Yeah that changed."

I'm so busy it scares me. When they say stand on the subway platform and track something they forget about the numbers. Don't worry it's only 360,000 people a day going through there.

Time is money, and right now I'd pay anything to have more time.



and I have neither.....

Quiet Turkey

I awoke and sauntered over to the studio this morning. The weather has finally turned and before I left I happily dug out my scarves and gloves from storage and replaced them with my thin summer clothes. There was practically no one around and it took me a moment to realize that it is Thanksgiving today. It started to pick up once I got near the campus but only just. I decided to abuse the elevator to whisk me up to the top floor of the building where my studio space is located. After I unlocked the door I poked around the floor to say hello to my friends. Alas I was the only one on the floor except for two thesis students and one second year student. It is a holiday today but it was quieter than I would have guessed - no matter I just sat down and started working on rough models of my Proun and made myself some tea [in my Bodum teapot which has been getting a serious workout lately] now that the weather has cooled off. A quiet Thanksgiving so far, but at least I'm finally making progress and getting stuff done.

Affirmation

The other day I had the luck of attending a lecture given by Farshid Moussavi of Foreign Office Architects. In a blaze of 188 slides in just over 60 minutes she explored projects and recurring themes in her work post the Yokohama Ferry Terminal complex, for which her firm gained international fame. Her approach and analytical style leads to an architecture which does not have a direct link to aesthetics but to other factors such as location, environment, function etc...[Almost functional aesthetics - it's pretty and it also channels the rain water a specific way to a water filtration system and is in turn used in the water fountains in the building for example.] The diagrams and schematics she showed of her work was an amazing insight into a firm which does almost obsessive compulsive research into the project and it's possibilities. The result was an affirmation for me of what am I doing here and her lecture gave me fresh inspiration to continue exactly when I needed it.

The Other Project

We have another side project [not to mention various papers and such] which involves an athletic shoe. We are to subject the shoe to a natural or unnatural force and track the changes in shape the shoe undergoes through time via studies of cross-sections. Imagine a time-lapse photograph showing movement through time. Now focus just on the shoe. Now immaculately draw it to scale using rulers with no tracing of photocopies or any freehand drawing. Think about this. Look at your shoe. Not exactly a bevy of straight lines are there? You have six days.
Have I started? Well I found a pair of shoes on the street the other day, but have yet to make a dent in the project thus far. Well I did cut them into sections on the Ban Saw in the shop yesterday afternoon - the overpowering stench of burning rubber, which managed to overtake most of the building, from the shoes some of my peers were cutting was almost comical.

The One True Thing

Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce. Reduce it down to the one true thing that it is. Cut away all the fat and tighten it up. For this Proun to be successful the idea behind it has to be reduced to it's base elements. I have to clean it up, make it work. It's too much of jumble right now to make any sense to anyone.
What's that one thing that will meld it all together?
I have no idea.
But this is what I need to do.

"Wax on wax off" OR What exactly am I doing here?

That seems to be the question bogging down my mind as of late. This whole Proun thing has gotten out of hand so quickly I'm at a loss as to what to do [well almost]. I get this feeling that we should try to create something challenging and structurally beautiful. Yet when I get a great idea and try to capitalize on it my supervisor tells me it's too much. It's "the cart before the horse" as she said. Yet on the last project I wasn't challenging enough and was criticized for being too simple and obvious. I am definitely unsatisfied with my work to date and am feeling a little lost. There's not much in the 'teaching department' going on and I'm wondering exactly what the point of this school is. When do I learn something that is obviously relevant to my job as an architect? What is the point of this studio environment, a class that is deemed the most important aspect of the schooling process, when no one is teaching. I'm only getting at best [and usually less] 20 minutes of face time with my professor a week, and I'm expected to achieve so much in that time with little help, encouragement or supervision.
The rationality in my brain is still sitting in behind of all this confusion and despair quietly going "there has to be a point to all of this!". I'm still waiting for my moment like in the movie Karate Kid when all of Daniels ridiculous labor around Mr.Myagi's house makes sense in his training. I'm waiting for that moment when it all comes together. I need that moment. I'm going crazy here.
They haven't broken me down yet, but they have taken a serious bite out of me. I won't let them get the better of me though.

NEXT!!!!

Well after a blustery two weeks our first project is done. I didn't like the project and neither did most if not all of the class. However this next one is a doozy.
Alright everyone brush up on your Russian Art History. Back in the 20's and 30's several Russian artists started breaking down art into pure basic elements: line, color, plane, etc. They were looking for a new art - one that wasn't tied down to political ideologies, and nationalism [remember this is post World War and Russian Revolution where these two things were felt to be a key instigator in the death and destruction across Europe] One of these artists, El Lissitzky , came up with what he called a PROUN. It's an anagram from the Russian for "Project for the Affirmation of the New".
Any way......now that you are all caught up courtesy of the link to the Guggenheim above.... we are to analyze a specific Proun and build one based on experiments with possibilities conducted over the next few weeks. Now it's nearly impossible to build one of these due to the optic tricks involved - and to make our job more complex we have to make it move [without hinges, motors or any other commercially available tool].
When it comes to projects.......this is more like it.