Returning, Moving On

I’m going to write something because I’d really like to return to blogging, but I’m out of practice. At a point, life just got too complicated to tell about. It’s not that the plot was so convoluted, more that the characters all got a little out of hand. But, we’re beyond that now, and in fact, the plot has also straightened itself out quite a bit.

I am a Master now. Finishing grad school has been a bit anticlimactic. It was wonderful to have the celebration in June, and I do feel done, for real. However, I now feel the weight of the Internship Development Program (IDP) and licensure bearing down on me. I have a job, which I am very happy about both because the economy is bad enough that it’s rare for a recent grad to be offered a job, and because said job is actually interesting and closely related to what I want to do in the long run. However, I’m acutely aware that it’s not a job that can get me closer to actually being an architect, and it’s not a job of the type for which I have been preparing myself for the last three and a half years. So, despite enjoying it, I very much am continuing to wonder, and occasionally actually work towards figuring out, what I will do next.

So, it’s portfolio making time.  It’s time to organize a game plan for applications, to get recommendations in line, and to feel a little untethered from the future, which, as you know, I like to have some grasp on.  All of that is fine: the portfolio is taking shape and I like where it’s going.  The rest I can deal with, and may even enjoy.  But, there’s one thing I’m really struggling with – where to be.  Theoretically, I’m likely to move when I get a job in an architecture firm.  My current plan is to first apply to the set of firms at which I would most like to work, which are primarily in cities on the west coast and in the UK.  Here’s the issue, though.  Rent runs out on the 15th of next month, and I’m not sure what to do at that point.  I will almost certainly not have another job – fine, because my current job will still exist through January.  But, do I move somewhere else in Eugene?  I can, but I’m starting to feel like I want to move on sooner, rather than later, and not move all of my stuff just to move it again.  I can’t really afford to move to one of the big west coast cities on my current salary, though, and that might also end up meaning that I move just to move again.  I could see going home, but what about all of my stuff?  Do I lighten my load of worldly possessions – can I afford to sell everything just to buy more things wherever I do settle next?  And the same goes for moving back to Vermont, which I would love to do, but where I am unlikely to find a job, probably would have to pay some rent (unlike Florida), and where I would be split between friends in Burlington, Brattleboro, and Great Barrington, Mass.  The reality there, too, is that I don’t know if any of those friends have the same spaces in their lives for me as I would like to imagine they do.  Could any of them live with me on their couch/in their kitchen for any significant amount of time?

The likely answer – stay in Eugene.  I’ll move soon enough to a new place, and in the mean time, didn’t I promise myself that I’d spend my time Being Here?

It’s one of those decisions that I keep coming back to, though.  One of those unresolved questions that niggles me throughout the day, in part because it is unresolvable. Since it will be resolved in the next month, because someone else is taking over my house, I guess I just have to live through the uncertainty.  Would that the plot were still twisting, not just aiming straight into the murk.

***

On an entirely different note, played at Spawnfest this weekend, which was very good – both fun frisbee and fun time partying/hanging out with the teammates/laughing at Vern Fonk and Bawls and playing 20 questions.  Excited to get into better shape, although somehow I keep missing my running dates and workout times.  We went 6-1, but unfortunately the point differentials on Saturday put us into the B-bracket, so we only took 9th (out of 34? teams).  Read a lot of the Huddle last night in an exited frenzy to get back to being really useful on the field.

Little victories

We picked a theme for HOPES 15!  It’s “Thinking Small,” and here are the bits I’ve been working on so far:

Solving our ecological problems will require massive change, as Bruce Mau has suggested.  Yet even as we must think big, we must also remember to think small.  Visions are accomplished incrementally; details are important; impacts must be studied and limited; the meek among us require protection.  Join us as we consider the meaning of “local” and “appropriate,” as we ponder the ripple effect.  Help us contemplate nanotechnology and microclimates.  Plant the tiny seeds to grow the revolutionary change.

 

Topics:

Scale – buildings, economies (Schumacher), “local” discussion

Nature – microclimates, invertebrate communities, guerilla gardening, agricultural questions

Activism – small change/massive change, beginner’s steps (Radical Simplicity)

Ethics – Nanotechnology, appropriate technology, design for the meek/forgotten, design for children

Other – Visioning: what’s the importance of thinking small and thinking big, what can we miss by doing too much of one/the other?; Finding focus in an interdisciplinary field

We’re already gathering ideas for speakers, too.  I’m very excited about this topic: I think that it’s amazingly open ended, yet gets to really important questions and still maintains a core idea that’s very strong.  I can imagine that when we share this idea with everyone (after we come up with a manifesto that’s a lot less cheesy and a lot more focused), people will immediately think about something interesting, and that’s pretty good.

 

Right after the HOPES meeting I headed to the fields for our last game of the season in the A-league.  Rumpus was holding even with Strike Force Seven when I got there.  We kept it pretty even, but they put up a couple of points on us as the game was coming to a close – 5 minutes left and we were down, but we came back even and finally won at universe point.  There was something amazing going on.  At one point, I laid out for a disc I knew I didn’t have, but that was the moment where I decided to go all in.  I think pretty much everyone else was there with me, too.  

So, Rumpus Room is spring A-league champions.  After the game, we headed back to my house.  I got to throw my first party in my very own house!  We had pizza and I made cookies as folks showed up.  A full-party game of Apples to Apples developed, and we just had a good time together (and with players from Kremlin, the other team that we hung out with all season).

 

This morning, I taught my last section for Architectural Context.  It’s pretty amazing to have two semesters of college-level instruction under my belt.  I can’t imagine how long it takes until you really feel like you’re in the right place, like you’re really the one who should be talking.  I feel like that at certain moments, but I think that’s just because I’ve never been afraid to give my opinion, not because I think my thoughts are so worthy of professorial consideration.  One way or the other, I’ll just have a little bit of grading left.  Summer is coming on quickly.

 

So, there are three bits of info.  Lots more going on – other productive meetings, work plans for the summer, obsessive checking of Facebook as if there were actual people there that I could see and talk to, hitting the upload limit for my Flickr account, excellent cooking, and productive errand running.  Hopefully, with such great things happening, and a full weekend coming up, this little sore throat and stuffy nose go away.  And, on that note, I shall get to bed now.

I am posting

because it’s been a long time.  School is really packed, but less so now that I dropped my Pritzker Prizewinners class.  I think I’ll catch up with work this weekend, though, and I’m getting to work on studio again already, so I’m very happy with the decision.

Part of the reason I’m behind is because last weekend I played with the Fighting Merkins at Winter Thing, a little tournament here in Eugene.  We came in second to a bunch of high schoolers heading to junior worlds in a few months.  More than that result, however, the weekend was a fantastic amount of fun.  Good to play again, with those folks especially.

It’s late at night and I just spent a couple of hours doing structures calculations/organizing my gmail account/uploading photos to flickr/researching jobs opportunities and classes for the ecological design certificate/mostly doing structures calculations.  Point being, I’m not very eloquent.  I did have to break the no blogging spell, though.

More and more and more.  Soon.

To Estonia and back

The big news this weekend is that 12 of us headed to Estonia for two nights. We left Friday afternoon and got back this evening. I’m currently using the internet in my room in my apartment, although it’s clearly having some issues, so is probably not ready for the next Flickr upload.

So, Estonia… We landed in Tallin and managed to go from a pretty decent position in the passport line to dead last because of the apparent disregard other people had for the line we were forming. When we finally left the port, we headed to Old Town, and as soon as we walked through the city walls it really did feel like we were in a different world. Between our hostel and the city gate, which were no more than 3 city blocks from each other, we strung out in a line taking photos of the turquoise trim on the chartruse building, the herringbone basement doors, the extremely tall church tower and the extremely bumpy cobblestone streets. We checked into the hostel, enchanted, made up our beds and went out to find some dinner.

Our first dinner was at the African restaurant, which we found after a significant amount of walking around looking at posted menus (an activity that seemed to be a theme of the weekend). Having eaten on the boat, I held off, tasting only a bite of Michael’s lamb kabobs and drinking a rather large beer. Post dinner, we headed out on the town to find a suitable place for drinks. Along the way to the beer hall we stumbled into a little chocolate shop and got little truffles. They had a great big window seat, outfitted with lovely cream and brown felt pillows. So I had my dessert before dinner, since I then ate a bratwurst at the Beer Hall. Despite the fact that the tap built into our table dispensed mostly foam, we had a great time at the Beer Hall, taking another batch of photos in the low light, and laughing at the Austrian dancing wait staff.

The next morning Michael and I headed out on the town, stopping through galleries, churches, the medieval market in the Town Hall Square, and many, many museums. We climbed the Town Hall tower, visited the former Dominican Monastery, and watched glassblowing before running into some friends and heading to the Texas Honky Tonk for lunch. After a third meal that comprised an Estonian take on another country/continent’s cuisine, I vowed to eat Estonian for dinner. Our afternoon was more enjoyable than our morning – we visited the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design and the Museum of Estonian Architecture, then walked back through town and up to the Toompea area, where we happened to walk into Aleksander Nevski Katedraal during a service. There, with incense thick in the air, we stood in awe, listening to the incantations of the service in silence and feeling the intensity of the sacred space.

After a suitable time, we ambled back down the steep street to the square to meet up with the rest of the group. Although we had plans to eat at Old Hansa, the medieval themed restaurant just off the square, we looked at the menu an rethought the plan. I think we did a pretty extensive loop after that, scouring the menus for a combination of a) somewhat authentically Estonian food, b) vegetarian options, and c) a reasonable price range. In desperation, we headed toward the Italian place someone had noticed that afternoon. Determined, though, I continued to look at menus all along the way, and found one that seemed to match our stringent requirements right around the corner from the Italian place. When, after everyone else had seated themselves, Michael and I announced that we were going to head to the Estonian place, four of the six at the table decided to join us.

We ate a very tasty meal at Kloostri Ait, and enjoyed the relaxed ambiance after the long day of sightseeing. It was one of those experiences that you wanted to just last a little bit longer. After dinner, we walked back around the corner to pick up our friends at the pizza restaurant, who were standing to leave just as we arrived. Everyone agreed to return to the chocolate shop, where we thoroughly overindulged, and then we ended up in the town hall square at an outdoor cafe with beers in hand by another round of sidelong consensus building. We had a short stint of carousing, then headed back for another nights’ rest.

This morning, we slept in, then went to Kompressor for authentic Estonian pancakes. Michael and I shared so that we could split a smoked turkey and a raspberry and sweet milk. Afterwards, we went to Kadrioru park to visit the KUMU. We agreed that it was very much like the Kiasma in a lot of ways, but I thought that it was a little more difficult to relate to some of the art, in part because of an even greater cultural divide than at the Kiasma, but also because I think there was a larger collection and we saw it much more quickly.

After the museum, we headed back to the boat, where passage was even less eventful than the trip to Tallinn, due to better weather and the knowledge that we needed to be at the beginning of the customs line. So, all in all, a solid trip, despite some difficult to categorize feelings about the Tallinn city museum and thanks in part to the luck of hearing the organ playing in Oleviste Kirik.

One of the great things about going away is that it can make a place that you’ve only lived in for 10 days seem like home. Tomorrow morning I head out on a site visit, and studio finally starts in earnest. This past week we had lectures from Juha Leiviska, a current Finnish master, and Samuli Miettinen, one of the principles of the up and coming JKMM Architects. We visited Leiviska’s Vallila Library and Daycare Centre to sketch, and drew some Aalto buildings, as well.  July 4th we celebrated by grilling on a disposable grill over a stormwater grate next to the bay and playing a riotous game of frisbee late into the evening and then watching a few brave classmates jump into the evidently quite warm bay.

I’m hoping that studio will really kick in to gear this week, since we don’t have that long to design, and have an extensive and complicated program to balance while working with a partner. Anyway, life is full of twists and turns (we’d originally planned to go to Åland this weekend), and I’m sure tomorrow will be no different.  I better get to bed…

Memories

Thought I’d do something to help myself with children’s furniture: I’m going to try to post a memory of my childhood every day.

Number 1
I remember that my brother and I used to make radio shows. I think we probably only did it once or twice, but one day in particular, we spent hours with the tape recorder. We did funny voices, made jokes to one another, and pretended to be pirates. We sat in the front room of 649, on the sea green carpet, next to the black L-shaped bookcases that we had.

I’m a bit frustrated with school lately, but have other good bits that I’m saving up – a great but tiring weekend of frisbee at Gandy Goose (3-3, finished 4th place out of 16); the first goslings of the season yesterday at the Millrace; Michael making me a very tasty stir fry for dinner Tuesday night.

HOPES is happening this weekend, so tonight I’m heading to the first keynote lecture. I need a quiet weekend soon!