School: March 2005 Archives

I am going to spend April Fool's Day on a college campus with 17,000 undergraduates.

shudder

At Smith, exams worked differently. You had a week or so to take exams, but you could mostly take them when you wanted, because you went, checked the exam out, did it, then checked it back in the right amount of time later. A good, well-enforced honour code and trust in the students meant that if you had two easy exams, you could do them the same day, and study for the one hard one the rest of the time.

The last week of classes at Cal Poly is traditionally called "Dead Week" in the College of Architecture, for reasons which seem to be lost to antiquity. Anyway, the last day of Dead Week is when all the studio crits are held. Noel came down Thursday night so he could see my presentation. And now you get to see it (well, the pictures from it, at least), too. But first, some scene setting....

I actually finished building my model today, on time and on schedule. I was the only student who managed it, and I did it by not spending the first week screwing around like my classmates.

Today I did the kitchen and living room, both of which relied heavily on pieces built for other rooms (like cabinets and bookshelves. I also made some backdrop walls for the photos, which naturally I will be posting here as I work on my presentation. I'm so glad that I don't have to rush on this, because I have 200 doctor appointments this week and Noel is coming down Thursday night to see me and go to my presentation/crit. This will be his first visit during school, and I'm very excited.

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Our final project for studio is a live/work space, and last week I made the "work" part of the equation. The thing that's due is a bunch of photos of the space, so I'm going to re-use a lot of the pieces for the kitchen and living room, which are all that remain to be built.

And of course, I have photos. Some actually taken with a decent digital camera instead of with the cameraphone.

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Lots of model-building today. I finished my framing model for practise (the final is going to be open-book! And open-notes!), and also did a bunch more work on my final model for design. Our "deliverable" is actually a set of photos of the model, so today I changed my strategy on the advice of one of the teachers and began "building towards the photos": basically, building only what I need to get the photos I need for my final presentation.

I must say that building out of balsa wood lends a finished look to the model that cardboard lacks. Some photos....

My desk in the studio is a bit cluttered right now, because we're in the middle of a couple of teeny-bits-of-balsa-intensive projects. In studio, we're designing a house to fit in an alleyway downtown, through a process of writing stories about how the space is being used (it has to be a live/work space for ourselves) and then creating models that fit those stories. Very interesting, indeed, though you should hear the grousing and complaining about it, all from people who don't have itchy pieces of tape stuck to their backs.

In professional practise, which also takes place in the studio, we're building a framing model of a sample house. We already did a set of working drawings (though not a very complete one), so we have all the measurements. I'm almost done with mine except that I keep running out of materials because it certainly takes a lot of STUFF to make a weensy little house, where STUFF is balsa wood.

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