27

I am now 27.

I just fell in love with the BurdaStyle website, and especially the Ellen pants, which, should I ever get to make them, will probably be disappointing since I’m not a stick thin/5′10.” Working my way up to that, and looking forward to sewing again.

First phase of the project is almost done, so work is coming along. Portfolio is coming along more slowly, but progressing. I have a new layout that’s a bit more clear, but I’m still working on how to get some of the spontaneity of the old one in there. The projects are developing into better stories the more I work on them.

Sasha’s visit was wonderful, and I’m looking forward to her moving up to Portland.

Many more plans and thoughts. Finished Howard’s End, reread The Diamond Age (again), and started Rebecca.

Also, I put up the last year’s photographic highlights on my Flickr account.

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.

portfolio of my dreams

I am making a portfolio for getting a job this summer. I started out with great difficulty, and I now have eight pages that I’m very happy with, but that I just realized won’t print the way I expected them too. No worries, should be able to work around that easily, but it’s kind of poopy.

It’s always exciting to hit the print button on something like this, even when you know it’s just the black and white rough. This semester has been so heavy, it’s really come down to moments like this – hitting the print button at 1:24 in the morning to see the draft of the thing that you want to have looking beautiful by Wednesday at 12:00 – that I’ve had to learn to savor.

Making a portfolio is lovely in a way, because you get to reexamine your work and cast it in a new and different light. What did you want to say with that project, what were you learning? So far, this portfolio is about fabrication, concept, system, and observation. I’d love verbs, but I think I’m okay with these nouns. Looking at my projects with these nouns, I’m seeing new patterns emerge – for one, my delight in pattern that I never would have said that I possessed – I think it’s the joy of something orderly yet a little off-kilter.  I see the desire to make something exciting happen in section and the attention to detail that means something quite different than I always thought it did.

Attention to detail is now a mode of thinking about construction – carefully choreographing how materials dance around each other. Where will they kiss, where will they float past, where will they collide, where will they nestle? I always thought attention to detail was in the way one would precisely staple one’s paper; I never thought I possessed it (which, looking back, I’ve always been fairly precise with my stapler, at least when I thought it counted). I’m sure now that I do have it, in droves.

So, will the square format 11×11 set of plates get me a job? I never thought I’d make a square format portfolio, so I hope it doesn’t reflect poorly on me, as I thought it might (for no apparent reason, other than thinking that it maybe says you’re a square). I hope so – I’m going in with the recognition that it’s a work in progress.

I’ll let you take a peek.

Jens

Last night I headed up to Portland to see Jens Lekman in concert.

It was amazing, better than I could have ever hoped. The wait outside the venue was cold and I missed the chance to meet up with the Portland crew – it turned out that their midterm was 5-8pm. Inside, though, the opening band was good (Throw Me the Statue), and I slipped forward into the crowd as they played.

Shortly after they finished, Viktor Sjoberg came out and started to mix a bit on his laptop – it built up until Jens and crew came out with piccolos and flutes flashing and started off the set with Into Eternity. Here’s the rough setlist (the order is a bit jumbled):
Into Eternity
Opposite of Hallelujah
Your Arms Around Me
Sipping on the Sweet Nectar
The Cold Swedish Winter
Maple Leaves
Postcard to Nina
You Are the Light
A Strange Time in My Life (partial)
A Sweet Summer’s Night on Hammer Hill
Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo
You Can Call Me Al
Shirin
Pocketful of Money

I danced along to all of it, throughly enjoying the matching outfits, amazed at how faithful to the albums the performance was, but even better, which I didn’t think was possible.

I’m not sure how to put into words how happy it all made me, but, it did, beyond all reason. Here’s one reason, which the happiness is beyond, but which it rests squarely upon: I had the sense that as polished as the performance was, mistakes were ok, and more than that, being a little goofy, and able to laugh at the world and one’s self in a non-depricating way was really important.

That may not make a whole lot of sense, and I thought I was going to be able to write about the experience a bit more coherently, but I’m not sure that I can. Suffice it to say, it was entirely worth the very low ticket price, and the gas money and time committment of driving up from Eugene.

And now, off to sleep, having decided against the study abroad option, as hard as it was. Wish me luck on my structures test tomorrow…and wish me even more luck in getting through the rest of the semester – I think its really going to ramp up from here as we move towards the final.

Search for Meaning

One of many. We had our midterm on Monday (actually, we have a second one coming up in a week and a half – its nice to be able to re-scheme and have it reviewed before the final, so that you have some time to develop more fully). I got some not particularly clear feedback, but the gist is that I’m thinking about fairly drastic changes to my project. The project is a wetlands education complex on the western edge of Eugene. You can see actual information about this place and project here.

My basic scheme will remain the same, I think. I’m running site circulation up from the bike path on the southern edge of the site, through my linear hilltop grouping of buildings, and splitting it between an observation “telescope” and back down to the bike path. Three main buildings interface with the path – a staff building to house the office functions of the the various wetlands protection partners; a community building to provide a meeting place for citizens involved with the wetlands; and an education building where the school programs they currently run will have a permanent home.

Really, what’s in question is the making of the buildings. In my presentation, because of how schematic it was, it appeared that structure would run through exterior walls, and activities would take place within little boxes all related to each other through a single, thin interface.

My concepts, though, are much more about layering, about a switch-rich architecture. I’m not sure how to express this, though. In my desk crit today, Don and I discussed the method of creating simple superstructures with boxes inside that shape the overall shape and offer convenient ways to define specific rooms within larger, catchall spaces. However, there’s something about this method that I’m resisting. In some ways, it just seems too simplistic. It doesn’t have very much more depth to it than a more traditional room arrangement – although I guess that has in part to do with how the boxes themselves are constructed.

One of the other thoughts is to use the somewhat complex roof structures that I was beginning to develop and bring them to a more tight configuration that spoke clearly to the spaces they defined. There’s something I’m a bit uncomfortable about with the potential for not just exposing the primary structure, but making it do acrobatics. I don’t think this place wants to be ostentatious. I think this method has a lot of promise, since I’m not sure that it necessarily becomes ostentatious…

Thirdly, there’s an idea that I’m floating around with that I thought might be a bit Fay Jones, but when I looked at his work, it didn’t seem particularly relevant. Its a more delicate use of structure – a bit more on the stick framing side of things – but without the sheet-rock. I looked again at the Viikki Church and I think that its a good start. This is what I’ve been trying to get at with the Radical Tectonics, but I’m really not quite sure what I’m aiming at. The Atlantic Center for the Arts has some of it…and the building I took my original inspiration from, the Institute for Forestry and Nature Research in the Netherlands also has it in certain ways. I guess I’m trying to find something with a bit more depth to the wall than the first and a bit more simplicity than the second.

Well, I’ve fuffed on, and I’m not sure any of it is particularly clear. What it comes down to, though, is that I’m ascribing this great meaning to this doubling and tripling of the walls. That I want some kind of depth to these spaces, but I don’t know how or why.