Taking a risk, Taking a break

Ian Chodikoff, the editor of Canadian Architect Magazine came up to me after my year end presentation and told me "It's really good. Aggressive. Good work." As did Bruce Kuwabara, Bridgette Shim, and Diana Balmori.

I was extremely nervous going into my final review as I had very little resolved with about 9 days until my presentation. I didn't have a building. I had a lot of research and a lot of ideas but nothing had developed over the previous weeks.
On the last day of school my studio supervisor Bridgette Shim came up to me and told me with a smile: "You have a lot of work to do."
I have stated earlier that I was going to dive into a classic 'student project' complete with all the customary trappings: crazy visuals, aggressive ideas, a complete lack of reality....
I even added things that were quite unusual for an architectural poster/panel: such as a girl in a bikini wearing a gas mask. Now I could explain it all and I could make it all make sense, but it was just so different from anything anyone had done all year that I wasn't too sure as to what to expect.
"You have got balls of steel." was Johanna's response when she saw my panels which were equaled by my model which was so large and conceptual that the main roof surface [which I had made out of a stiff galvanized steel mesh which I laminated to a black canvass fabric] started to pour off the edges of the site model and onto the floor - piling up around the feet of the critics.
All in all my fellows students were quite engaged in my project and really got behind me on it. But none of them knew how the critics would take it.
In the past eight months I've seen what I thought were good projects get destroyed by an agitated panel of critics. I though I was totally setting myself up for this as there were obvious holes in my project [The main issue I had was the major problem of detailed plans of where things went like change rooms, restaurants, retail spaces etc... I had ideas and some areas were demarcated but the specifics were lacking].

The project was so big that some things needed to be left behind or ignored for the greater good. It was a lesson for all of us in the successful representation of our projects and how to show off our ideas the best way possible. No one could do everything on the massive list of things they asked us to do. So instead we have to edit the list down to the most important things there and try to blend things together to make the list smaller. So if I could somehow come up with a diagrammatic sectional perspective drawing instead of a diagram, a section, and a perspective I could in fact have three things in one drawing instead of having to do three drawings. I tried to make sure I got 4 hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks of school and somehow I got it done to a point where I felt I could present it.
I'll post the panels here in the next day or so....