This Week's Work 02

Week 02: Lectures, The Deep End And the Long Term, Shaping Seams, Studio, Architecture to Architecture

After spending the weekend with IIT friends from Paris, and thankfully being allowed to switch my media studies courses, my academics this week started to look up.

-----------------Lectures-----------------
I missed most of this week's lectures for stupid things, like a 2 hour long "orientation" to the Digital Prototyping Lab, but the one I did sit through was Peter Cook's "How To Be A Young Architect."
Peter Cook is currently the director of the Bartlett, but has long been involved at academically the AA and was a founding member of the revolutionary thinkers of Archigram. He's one of those people that every student and professor knows (of).
He's an incredible lecturer, and his presentation, though not the most informative, was probably the most relaxed, comfortable, and enjoyable I have gone to. It was a "lunch time" series, so it was very very informal and he just kind of talked about a few points to remember or realize when becoming a 'young architect.'
Things like: your business card says a lot about you, so make it personal and make it represent the kind of work you want to do. your location says a lot about you, so avoid "the office" if you want to stay fresh. the dangers and benefits of working under the Starchitect. the banality of over-photoshopped work, but that there's "no excuse for a tacking looking board."
He was crass, he was frank, he was politically incorrect... and it was wonderful.

-----------------The-Deep-End-And-The-Long-Term-----------------
After 20 minutes of running up and down 4 flights of narrow, mountainous stairs in search of either my Publish tutor or the photographer, I finally found the class and met Goswin Schwindinger, the quirky but personable tutor for The Deep End. We spent the class flipping through a slideshow of images the students had taken that week, laughing and making fun of each other, and talking about the more successful photos. It was such a pleasant surprise, and while the class is not about the mechanics of taking a picture (there has been no instruction yet on setting up frames, settings, etc) that is all to come. We will slowly take more and more scripted images so that our final image is one scene that we have completely fabricated and arranged.
I've taken a few, but not many that I'm completely satisfied with.
Here are a few:

Haze on the window pane. My view in the evenings


Green Gloom on Gower Street


Please ignore how creepy it is that I was photographing people through a window.


Jackie and Rafal leaving, come morning, on their way to Mumbai.

-----------------Shaping-Seams-----------------
This is my tutor's media studies course that I have picked up for no credit. We are learning modeling in Rhino, and I'm working on breaking apart and re-seaming a strangely shaped piece with Mike, another VSP. The purpose of the class is to learn Rhino modeling and to think of how, in fabrication, large pieces of CNCed pieces come together in inconspicuous ways. We are drawing inspiration from fabric for our piece and hope to do something very soft, flowing, and layered.
We haven't started working on it yet.


-----------------Studio-----------------
Everyone in my section is great, and we have a nice little studio culture going. Though it's painful sometimes, we all spent the week in our attic space working on the Plate 1 submission (that was due Friday), beginning to work in 3d (with Rhino), and crafting the first bullet points of our Manifesto/Narrative.

My final submission looks a bit like this:


My space is Panoptic Deformation and I will be exploring shifting spaces, distorted perception, and commenting on the lack of 'Nature' in the city.
Because I expressed so much interest in the narrative, I have been advised to work on that over the weekend. What I'm beginning to really love about the AA is not only the freedom to pursue the stuff of your fantasies, but that you are encouraged to work on whatever you think is interesting, in whatever way works for you. This leads to wildly creative projects that the students are devoted to and passionate about, with mountains of work and process behind every decision. So while the resultant architecture is always a bit fantastic, there is no denying that each project is very, very good. It makes sense then, that only after letting each student do what interests them most personally, can you begin to judge and compare where their strengths, interests, and opinions lie. You can then label "good" "better" "best" or find the truly ingenious.
The other part of studio, which is a bit tedious but so simply brilliant, is that we have to keep an organized "White Book" of all of our process, iterations, and opinions about the work we've done throughout the term/yera. The examples we've been shown are 2 inch thick bound masterpieces of research, discovered logic, and aesthetic thought. Having this available during a presentation frees up the final boards to only show images in the spirit of the final result, beautifully crafted and compelling.
[It is also like putting together my portfolio of the year as I go along!]

-----------------Architecture-to-Architecture-----------------
Brett Steele, the Director of the AA, gave our lecture this week on the evolution of plan and architect's roles as Information Organizers. This was related to our readings about conceptual art and architecture, trying to understand the meaning of formal components, searching for a universal language of form, and the definition of conceptual architecture.
It's all incredibly interesting, but sitting through discussion makes me feel completely ignorant and unread because the students at the school are so well versed in architectural theory. If there were anything I could change instantly about IIT, it would be a stronger emphasis on reading theory.

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