Bonfire!

Liam has a tradition of building giant fires with the wood tossed from the Court Theatre stage set. It's also a goodbye get together for him, and soon to be myself.


It started out nice and tame. He had stopped by a cleaners to ask for some hangers to roast our hot dogs and marshmallows. I supplied marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers and felt very well prepared. He brought ... hot dogs, sausages, a pineapple, bell peppers, zucchini, onions, condiments: in short, a feast fit for kings and queens. Such a man. The veggies were for "foil pouches," something I haven't tried on a bonfire before, but I hope to replicate in the future.


Soon the evening was winding down and we still had a giant pile of wood left. So Liam threw the rest on to the fire and a giant conflagration ensued.


The fire was so hot that we all moved away from sitting on the stone benches to admire Liam's (pyro) handiwork. Some guy stopped by and asked us for a lighter. It was amusing to see Liam reach into the fire with his bare hands to pull out some embers, and then even more amusing to see the guy dart his face close enough to the flaming stick to light his cigarette.



Earlier on, Miles had amused us by attempting (and somewhat successfully???) roasting an egg over the flames. Actually, it exploded, leaving eggshell shrapnel on my face ... but Loren neatly outdid him later on by attempting to roast a chicken thigh on our "frankenstick." (hanger + stick)

All in all, a good evening.

Marriages and Bike Races

Rob and Lauren got married on Saturday! They are classmates from U of IL, and they are among the 36 people who studied abroad in Versailles with me for junior year. It is beyond a little surreal as they are my age!

It was a very short and sweet ceremony. Liz was super nice and drove me, and it so happens our friend from Versailles, Marine is visiting and came to the wedding too. Actually, Liz, Marine and I made a small detour to the Walgreen's on the way there ... Liz had gotten a framed graphic poster for Rob and Lauren, but she hadn't had time to wrap it. We felt super classy walking into the Walgreen's dressed for a wedding the way we were. We felt even classier wrapping the frame in the Walgreen's parking lot before heading to the reception.

The reception was in a beautiful eclectic village of reception type buildings. Our particular building felt like a large mansion with a gorgeous backyard. Hats off to Lauren :)

The best part was being able to catch up with everyone and taking lots of cheesy Versailles reunion type pictures together. Everyone seems so grownup and elegant all of a sudden, and I still feel like an affordable house builder/cyclist/hippie.

Today was the Evanston bike race, which is part of Superweek. I didn't actually race because I don't have a Storck, and non-Storck bikes were not allowed on the race car. In stead, I rode up to Evanston with Bernard, Loren Bo, and Joe to spectate.

Apparently this course is notorious for being quite dangerous. One corner in front of the Burger King is called the BK Stacker because of bottleneck corner. We checked it out while watching the men's 4/5 race, and it looks like they've put in a lot of effort to make it safer, notably pinching the road off with a parked car and cones before the corner as well as using plenty of old mattresses.

I was almost tempted to race just because some shop or team brought a fleet of Tarmacs for neutral support! The plan of action was, steal Liam's ancient, many times crashed Trek for a few laps, crash it out, get a Tarmac, and ride off with it.

UW-Seattle

Public Transportation - Even before I went to visit UW, I already felt more at home with Seattle. This didn't have that much to do with my having visited before, but rather because I was able to look up a method from the airport to UW campus using public transportation. I heart public transportation so much.

Rob Corser - Previously at the UVa Open House, people had told me that a couple of faculty members at UW had been at UVa. Heather had had him as a professor, so she introduced me to him in order that I could ask his opinion on where to go. First he asked me what I was looking for, to which I mentioned the Eco-Mod project as something that really intrigued me. He immediately told me to go to UVa rather than UW. Strictly in terms of academics, he thinks UVa is still stronger, and it was a good idea especially if I wanted to get a faculty position later in life. However, then he started to talk about all these great things about UW, such as how well the school is integrated with the professional, urban community, and how advanced the digital fabrication technology was compared to UVa. Apparently, it is quite possible to get a faculty position with a Masters degree in conjunction with a Master in Science degree, and a PhD is not as necessary as in the sciences.

Scandinavian Study Abroad - UW-Seattle apparently has very strong Scandinavian connections. They have well established study abroad programs in Copenhagen, Oslo, and perhaps Helsinki. Other programs include Zurich, Chandigarh (India), and Japan. I chatted a bit with Frieda, their resident Danish student who was there for 9 months on the exchange program: red-haired, tall, and a cute Danish accent that many people mistake for German. She said she was afraid to ride in Seattle because it was too hilly, but that in Denmark, she rode bikes everywhere, even in heels. I complimented her culture for doing so, and wished America would hurry up and follow suit. The ability to study abroad in Copenhagen appeals, especially to research the bike path system there (complete with curbs separating them from traffic and their own traffic lights).

UVa Undergraduate??? - So I'm sitting at the opening lecture, and who sits next to me but someone who went to UVa undergrad. Chris had gotten into UC Berkeley and UW, had studied abroad and worked in Copenhagen, and is currently working in D.C. He did think that the digital fabrication capabilities, especially in metal, are more advanced at UW, and he said the shop facilities were vastly better. UW seems to care more about keeping up to date with computer programs. Both schools care a lot about craft, but UW seems to be more specific in the craft of specific kinds of material, such as wood or metal in furniture. UVa was more a general sense of precision in model making.

Model Making Comparisons - I noted seeing many ultra precise-looking models around the studios. There are many laser cutters everywhere available 24/7. UVa's models tended to be more conceptual, more about massing, and general materiality rather than showing how each and every moment joint looked, or the bolts on steel trusses. They're both precise, but I guess the level of abstraction is quite different.

Studio Spaces - UW occupies a building extant since the Seattle World Fair of 1909 whose insides were entirely remodelled. The spaces were all separate rooms with locked doors for security reasons. They were more intimate, and I found they reminded me of the studios back at UIUC. I think I preferred UVa's studio spaces, all of which were joined together with atrium spaces. It was easier to rub shoulders with various students and professors. Also, landscape architecture students even shared the same space, making it a lot easier for the school to be actually multi disciplinary, rather than just on paper.

Happy Hour - College of Built Environments has a new home with a beautiful 4 story skylit atrium space, in which they hold a biweekly happy hour. A one time fee of $12 buys a glass cup, and then the beer is free until it's gone. By happy hour, my brain was once again melting from overload, and it was great just to be able to chat with new friends. We all got dinner on Capitol Hill with a group of local Seattlites. One asked me if it were going to be possible to ever design herself a beautiful home, to which I replied that architects are generally expensive, but she should consider adaptive reuse (or remodelling an older home) since it was a) sustainable, b) more affordable, c) contained more history and character. At some point, I found myself describing team tactics in a bike race, it's really quite a mystery.

Sleeping at the Airport ??? - Originally, the idea was that I would sleep at the airport because my flight was at 6:10am, but then it just sounded too awful. The bus would have worked out in terms of time, but I wasn't sure how sketchy the areas would be while it was still pitch black outside. Since I was saving a lot of money by staying at Heather's place (on an awesome air mattress provided by her roomate, no less - thank you sooo much Jamie!), I decided to cab it around 4:15am. I wanted to sleep, but my cab driver was talkative and kept asking me about Chicago and its crime rate. Eventually, I did find myself on board the airplane speeding toward Chicago.

WHERE WILL IT BE???

UVa

"Never a dull moment with Red."

Red and I met on the first day of ARCH 199, and I thought he was pretty cooky. We ended up building a cardboard Le Corbusier chair for the Halloween costume competition and studying in Versailles together with 35 other ARCH classmates for 9 months. Now we've gained acceptance to the same grad program. (He's a first year there now.)

Which is why, after flying into Richmond (rather than Charlottesville) to conserve money, Ben Hartigan (another UIUC classmate who got into UVa!) and I found ourselves in Red's green Volvo in an ever darkening, winding road wondering if we were in the beginning sequence of a horror movie. It turns out we had somehow missed our exit and made our way halfway toward a little town called Waynesboro. Eventually, we did wend our way toward the Virginian for delicious burgers, but not before we were absolutely famished.

For all of Sunday, Red played gracious host. He gave us the star tour of campus, drove us through downtown Charlottesville, and up to see Monticello. He also worked Ben and me over like his life depended on it. I should mention Red can be one of the most convincing people in the world if he puts his mind to it, and he knows it. If architecture doesn't work out for him (very unlikely hypothetical situation), he should consider selling luxury European cars. Driving us up by the Blue Ridge Mountains was a smart move on his part. We drove on this road that went uphill for a good 10-20 mins, and I imagined the beautiful climbs we had on Bike and Build ...

"Southern Hospitality"

The faculty student ratio at UVa is pretty amazing. They keep the number of students small to maintain a high level of quality in instruction, and generally the faculty live in Charlottesville and have plenty of time to breathe down students backs at all hours of the day.

During open studio hours, I wanted to peek over the shoulders of one particular professor giving a desk crit to a student and listen to their interaction. When he saw me stop, Professor Peter Waldman completely stopped what he was saying, turned to me with a smile, and said, "Hello, welcome to UVa, my name is Peter Waldman. Do you have any questions?" I mumbled something about what their project program was, mortified that my seemingly sneaky peek turned into such a huge intrusion.

Later on, Renee, one of the students in Red's studio was briefly describing the monastery they were working on, when we heard a commanding voice behind us, "Show them your site model too. They don't know what you're talking about." We turned around to face W. G. Clark, the gentleman terrifying Red at the moment, and who also designed one of the two new wings of the Architecture School at UVa. We introduced ourselves as Red's friends, to which he responded, "David's friends? Oh, I am very sorry to hear that you call him your friend." For all of Red complaining about how much W.G. seemed displeased with his lack of progress, and how intimidated Red felt in his presence, Ben and I decided that it was all lies. W.G. obviously really likes Red, and he was only trying to push his design really hard. Anyways, W.G. proceeded to lead us around to Tom's desk, summoned Tom to present his project too ("Red, you don't have the requisite models enough to explain yourself properly."), finally headed over to Red's desk so we could see his project. Ben and I thought we were free, but then he lead us over to the Venice studio to have the students there talk to us too. Yikes!

"UVa really likes model building."

Oh really? Red's known for his formidable sketching abilities, but not so much for his model building. Ironically, UVa students are known for their amazing model building skills, so he's been working incredibly hard to bring himself up to speed. He's gotten really creative! He even stole one of the books lying around to make a topo model (to which W.G. expressed great displeasure). A local cabinet maker donates all their scrap wood to UVa students (W.G. "prefers" Spanish cedar over walnut). I'm not much of a solid wood type person, but I did learn to make origami before I strung together proper sentences, and model building is definitely my forte design skill so I imagine I could pick it up quickly enough. I guess they must have liked the 1/4" scale section model I made of Seattle Central Library in my portfolio.

They are also known for melding digital and hand techniques. Professor Christina Hill said they were not so much about pursuing the latest most technologically advanced method of digital representation so much as figuring out what type of representation was best for what situation. Sometimes, those technologies are necessary to show special details, but other times, concept can be most palpable from some pen drawn lines on napkins.

"Bryan Bell sighting at UVa!"

The Eco-Mod projects have undergone 3 iterations at this point, and they are working on finalizing the design documents (or was it construction?) of Eco-Mod 4 to build over the summer. In brief, it is affordable, sustainable, modulor housing designed and built by students, this year for Habitat for Humanity (<3). And who do I see but Bryan Bell, there as the reviewer for this project, right with John Quale, the professor who began the project in the first place. Surreal ...

Epilogue

By the end of yesterday, I could barely string two words together to form a coherent sentence because of the action packed open house. I was glad to be able to go back to a surprisingly comfy Ikea "sofa bed" to sleep in with a yellow skirt-clad chihuahua to welcome me and my host, Fatima, at the door. All the sudden exposure to architecture and design shocked my atrophying architecture muscles out of hibernation quickly enough though, and by the time I was on the little aircraft bearing me back to Chicago, my brain simply wouldn't shut up about all the potential studios I could take next fall, and thesis topics I could pursue.

Commuter Bikes Change Lives

In the "recent updates" type post, I did not mention that about a week ago, Bernard and I went to Champaign-Urbana, IL to pick up my commuter bike. It deserves its own post.

The driving portion was uneventful, other than Bernard not believing me about which roads we could take from my place, (yea, I know I don't really drive, but I did make the trip down there several times a year for several years. Have some faith!), and the fact that I rudely fell asleep on the way there ... sorry. We met up with Priya, Amy, and Tim for breakfast at Courier Cafe. Milkshakes for breakfast? Perhaps not the best idea, but I have yet to try a milkshake made better than Courier's. Chocolate Peanut Butter ... mmm ... It was good to catch up with college friends over delicious fresh breakfast foods :D Also, Priya got me some awesome "I love sushi" bike socks, complete with images of delectable sushi on the ankle. And thanks to Tim for putting up with holding on to my bike this long, and Amy for keeping my leftover odds and ends til now.

So why did I ask such a big favor of Bernard to get back a rusty, creaky, heavy, unremarkable pile of old bike parts. Take today for example. I was able to stop at J's shop briefly to hear updates on the shop's progress, make it to the Medici on time for preliminary work info, and stop at Treasure Island for Bigelow decaf Vanilla tea, all within 2 hours. With my beloved blue Schwinn Worldsport, it took 20 minutes total to commute. Without the bike, it would have been an hour. How awesome is that? Plus, I get to work the orange striped socks fashion and retro red pleather messenger bag. It's all fantastically worth it.

Happy New Year :)

The high school friends seem to have developed a custom of hanging out together on New Year's Eve in someone's home to socialize and catch up rather than spend gobs of monies at a club downtown. We had another pretty good showing of people, delicious cheese and crackers, and many bottles of interesting liquids.

I have completed in entirety 9 of 11 applications for architecture grad schools, with one more portfolio to print off and two more applications to write up. The process got complicated by the advanced placement requirement of more documentation. I needed to bring up the graphic quality of much of my plans, sections, and elevations to the same level as the rest of my portfolio for consistency, and thus rather than smooth sailing since Dec 15, there were more all-nighters, gallons of hot tea, and 22 additional pages added.

Two unexpected guests stayed with me since Dec. 21. Shannon is in from Prague and missed her train to southern IL from O'Hare, so she ended up spending the night with me. We caught up, and she told me about some of the crazy adventures she's had while teaching English in Vietnam and Prague, Czech Republic. She lives next door to a Louis Vuitton, saw Catherine Zeta-Jones shooting a commercial down the street, and deals with teaching English to foreign people with good grace. Anita is in from Guatemala, and Tim and I convinced her that coming up to Chicago and socializing with other nerds from Lab School for New Year's would be more fun than sitting home alone watching tv. She's been working at a clinic attempting to alleviate malnutrition problems and having a difficult time trying to fix the world's problems with limited knowledge, budget, and resources. It's like Bike and Build on steroids.

Still got some more work to do before I can kick this bad habit of applying to grad schools, but then I will be free to sit back and anxiously worry while I await my fate for Fall 2009.

Rollers!

It's been a busy week.

Partway through, Rhino was giving me a super hard time, and Alex came to my rescue with SR4. Thanks, Alex.

Julie T. (not Padzilla) stopped by Chicago for an interview for med school, and Bernard took us and Julie's friend Hilary to get dinner in Greek town that night! Delicious delicious Greek food: Athenian salad, saganaki, spanikopitas, moussaka, lamb, rice pilaf, baklava, other foods. (We got the family dinner.) I spent the entire night trying to get Julie and Bernard to stop talking about science. Silly U of C science people.

I had to miss ET's birthday as a result of the IIT Open House on Friday, but she beneficently allowed me to buy her a lowly dessert in stead. Hopefully she and Emily had a good time at the AKT concert.

Robin and Laurel were in town for their mom's birthday, so we grabbed coffee/brunch at the Med. There's something about the East Coast that makes people very busy, I've decided. Robin has two jobs, much like Diana, and she's getting plenty of clinical experience for med school. Laurel is applying to grad schools too, but for cognitive something or other ... I wish I could remember the exact field, it's pretty unique. Sentence structure comprehension related to syntax ??? Out there.

I massively overslept for the ride, and so decided to try riding rollers for the first time this winter season. I was expecting to feel pretty unsteady because normally the first few times on rollers I am, but it was surprisingly ok today. I even broke my former record of about 40 min by rolling an hour. By the way, Kanye's "Stronger" keeps a cadence of about 104, Ciara's "1, 2 step" about 115, and "Umbrella" gave me a chance to cool down at around 87.

Engagment Party: Indian style

Priya visited this weekend to go to her roomate's engagement party, so I got to tag along.

We had some adventures getting there. Notably, Google Maps failed us both for the first time ever. It told us a wrong turn off from the highway, and we got all turned around headed east in stead of west, losing an entire hour in the process. Apparently the ceremony got started late, and it wasn't incredibly spectacular to watch anyways, but we did miss out on appetizers and we were ravenous by that point. People at our table kept laughing at me because I kept eying the dinner table, and Priya explained to them that I was a biker with a biker's appetite ... so true.

Priya mentioned that her beautiful turquoise outfit was going to pale in comparison to the Naperville Indians who were stylish, and when we got there, I could see what she meant. Although they're encrusted with beads and lavish arabesques and gold thread, there's something about Indian clothing that can pull it off without being tacky or cheap-looking.

Anyways, food was delicious (we ran to the front of the line when we heard it was being served ...), and there was dancing to bhangra and other awesome desi beats afterwards.

And for some reason, the drive back was SO MUCH EASIER ??? In stead of taking us on two highways and about 5 local roads, this time, Google planted us on I-90 within two turns. Why didn't it tell us to do that the first time around ?!?!?! We were confused, but relieved.

Cambridge - MIT - Harvard GSD

Carpenter Center !!!

Studios at Harvard GSD

MIT SOA -

Much fewer people here than at Columbia. The staff checking us in were wearing t-shirts, I noticed, and I was glad I was wearing pants rather than the skirt I brought.

Yung Ho Chang, the head of the architecture design department, introduced himself and the faculty using an animation of faculty faces superimposed on cartoon bodies: really playful! In general, the atmosphere seemed intense, but not as if people took themselves too seriously. The program is pretty small, only 25 - 30 people. What was really helpful was when they showed us the portfolios of people who got in. Do I have a chance? I have no clue, at this point.

The faculty presentations were 10 min each, and we had to choose to go to 3 of 6 available. I saw Mee Jin Yoon's (head of the M. Arch I program), Alan Berger's, and Sheila Kennedy's of Kennedy Violich Architects. M. J. Yoon showed us a project involving the conflict between "on-grid/off-grid" energy, using the Katrina victims as the means to study this phenomenon: figuring out how to provide off-grid energy to people where the grid was too damaged to use. Alan Berger studied how to rehabilitate a brownfield in Italy, and after presenting his research to the local government there, convinced of the need to follow through with his interventions. It was awesome how the designers could dictate what should happen, rather than developers whose general goals are economically motivated. Sheila Kennedy described photovoltaic powered organic LED's that could be woven into textiles and provide light and electricity. It was at the interface of technology, crafts, and architecture.

That evening, I ate dinner at Beer Works with Marty from Bike and Build! Shira couldn't make it because she had prior plans, but we caught up on events since reentering the real world, and about other Bike and Builders we had hung out with to that point. Beer Works brews their own beer, and it was excellent. I had an Irish something or other and the blueberry beer. Marty tried out the peanut butter beer??? It had only a hint of peanut butter, and mostly just tasted like beer, but creative certainly.

Harvard -

Walking toward Harvard's architecture building, I saw a building using glass bricks for windows, and smiled thinking, wow, a throwback to mid-century design. I kept walking, and stopped cold ... because I realized I was in the presence of greatness: The Carpenter Building is the only Corbusier-designed building in America. I stopped by ath Gund Hall for registration, realized I was an hour early, ran back and sketched like mad, only to remember how obnoxious it is to sketch Corbu buildings because they are so exacting. It was like seeing an old friend though. A Corbu building in America is the last thing I would have ever expected to see; I associate him so much with France and Versailles and William Curtis. It made my day.

More people here than at Columbia! The faculty presentations were a bit drier, but the students were spectacular. One PhD student was studying the intimate details of Type II diabetes in order to figure out a design for how best to deploy medical supplies to remote locations, which relates to architecture in the most abstract sense. A masters student with one of the most eclectic backgrounds I have ever encountered (also a former OMA employee) presented an urban study of a small Irish town, and how he used existing relics of pathways to reconnect the entire area in a mixture of historic analysis and modern design.

Later that day, I watched part of a studio review in process with Scott Cohen, head of the architecture department, and 5 other faculty members as critics. They spoke fast and animatedly about very abstract projects involving hotel design and facade vs. interior space, and they would even argue with each other about how they felt about each project. When they didn't like something, they said so quite bluntly, which was a welcome respite from how "nice" the reviewers were at UIUC.

It was an intense trip, and well-worth it.

COLUMBIA OPEN HOUSE !!!

I dropped off my bags at Lauren's house pretty early and had a chance to just sit on campus and absorb the atmosphere for the wee morning hours before the open house. It was nice.

On the stairs ... I ran into Maurizio ?!?!? a co-worker from 4240 Architecture!!! And Jason was there too! Turns out they're considering applying to grad schools for next year. And then at the student Q&A I looked across the room and saw Ben Brichta from Lab School !!! Small world, but to make it even smaller, he had taken the New York/Paris program at Columbia, and he had had Tricia for a professor, who I had had while I was at Versailles. CRAZY.

The faculty presentations about architecture were amazingly inspirational. One particularly memorable statement by one professor was: "the building was beautiful to begin with, all we had to do was not f*** it up." They all ran through slides very rapidly and spoke quickly and energetically about everything.

I met a guy named George who was at UC Berkeley for architecture when he complimented a sketch I did of the chapel during the campus tour. We might exchange info, since he's considering UIUC.

Aries, Lauren and I meandered as best as we could through the first year grad studios, but it was packed with open house people and existing students. It was funny, I was bashing mac computers at one point, and this guy turns around from using his mac and goes: I like macs. But rather than continue to look at more studios, Lauren and I opted to take a small break in a secluded courtyard around the corner and chatted about architecture, school, and people we knew. It was really nice to get away from the craziness of the open house just for a little bit.

As closing remarks, the Dean spoke a little about his take on the school, and he said the faculty and himself were speaking last when we were all exhausted because the school was about the students, and students should represent the school. We bring the verve and challenge the faculty to come up with interesting projects that we will design.

Afterwards was little hairy. I had to get to Penn station and find the Megabus, eventually finding out that I had accidentally bought a ticket for tomorrow in stead of today, causing me to frantically call up the megabus operators to fix the error. Then again, I wasn't that frantic. If there weren't seats, I was thinking I'd take an amtrak or find some other mode of transport. It was going to work out. I did get on the bus though, so it was fine.

On the bus, I met Natalie who's from New York and wants to get out and is thus visitng MIT's open house. All these architecture students are on a grad school pilgrimage right now, it's pretty crazy. Where is the holy grail of architecture?

And my cab driver talked about the 19 year long civil war in Somalia. It was really interesting to hear about, but I was just so exhausted by that point that I had a hard time paying attention. I did tell him to be careful when he visited Somalia in the near future.

I appreciated tonight's shower about as much as I did during Bike and Build.

New York - New Haven

Bernard was chauffeur extraordinaire for me today. I am incredibly grateful that I didn't need to navigate the train system and that we could decide our own schedule.

We started out really early, in case there was traffic. We actually got there really early, so we had a chance to grab coffee, wander around and explore the area. The campus area is incredibly reminiscent of the Oxford campus (I learned later that this was completely intended by the original founder). It was definitely a college town, but it had a permanence and stateliness about it. The shops were boutique-like and upscale compared to Champaign-Urbana. There were more people wearing skinny jeans and fantastic overcoats and jackets with glorious lapels.

At one point I remembered that this was where the Bienecke Library (the rare books library) was built, so I dragged Bernard over to see it. It wasn't technically open with construction on the inside, but we stepped in just briefly, and I was able to see the light seeping in through the marble panels ... This building definitely is not very photogenic from the outside. I liked it a lot more on site.

Nicholas' class apparently went overtime. The crazy thing is that as I was waiting for him outside the building, I ran into Professor Moon! I'd sort of forgotten that he had moved there from UIUC. We could only talk briefly, but he helped me find Nicholas, and we chatted a bit while Nicholas came to find me. I'm really happy for Professor Moon. U Illinois students didn't appreciate how good of a professor he is at all, and he deserves better. He was the type of professor who would try to get us to understand the theory and basis for what he was teaching rather than just give us equations to plug numbers into. I will probably remember how to construct a shear envelope for the rest of my life.

Nicholas looks to be thriving here. We caught up on how his job went back in Europe, and he gave me a concise and loaded tour from top down in the historic Yale School of Architecture building designed by Paul Rudolph. The resources available here for model making are amazing; there's a first year grad program involving designing an affordable home that is design/build; some studios coordinate crits with foreign universities such as Tongji in Shanghai and Hong Kong University; etc. etc.

Afterwards, I got together with Matt Lawlor from Lab !!!!! We shared some biking across America stories since he went with Habitat Challenge, caught up, and tossed around how other friends from our Lab School group were doing. He's considering math in stead of physics as a major, and he is considering staying in academia, which I find unsurprising. He had a way of making ridiculous intuitive leaps in class, but he was also able to explain things so it was really easy to understand. He looks like he's doing pretty good too :D

We began the drive back around 4pm just to make sure the traffic didn't hold us too much. Bernard dropped me off by the Grand Central Station, where I met up with Jeong and Lauren for dinner at a Mexican place !!! Delicious. Talked architecture, Versailles, school, working, Lauren's and Rob's marriage plans (!), all over shrimp burritos and refried beans. Oh it was good times all around.

AND BARACK OBAMA IS PRESIDENT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NEW YORK

I am sitting in New York right now: it's pretty unreal!

Briefly meeting up with Diana at her new work place on Bleecker st, and I was thrilled because that's the street that the movie "No Reservations" films the restaurant scenes. Oh, sentimental me. It's a nice area, I fit in a brief sketch while waiting for her to show up.

In the evening, I met up with JAKE CURTIS !!! for dinner. He found us a great Thai place, and we got to catch up on life and reminisce about Bike and Build. It sounds like work for him is going really well, and he's been hanging out with quite a few ex-Bike and Builders in the area. We may have had an incident with Gilbert ... hahahahaha, anyways, while walking around we ran into the New York Times Building and I nearly fainted. Renzo Piano in all of his quiet poetic splendor.

Pumpkin Cookies???

Yesterday, I baked J some cookies as various thanks for letting me join the team. He tries one and asks what's in them, so I respond, cinnamon and nutmeg (in addition to the usual chocolate chips, butter, sugar, etc). I told him too that a friend of mine from before thought they had pumpkin in them because of the spices. The next day, half the people think they're pumpkin cookies, and the other half think there's ginger in them! It's like I'm playing with their minds.

A really great ride up to Metropolis today. The weather was looking crumby, and we had an awful headwind on the way back, but it was just being able to do something I enjoy with people I like to talk to. The sesame bagel with honey and butter tasted especially good for some reason with my customary Earl Grey tea w/milk. Susan and I were talking, and she mentioned many of the other people she studied with at Univ of Chicago couldn't comprehend how she had time to ride bikes so frequently, and we agreed that it was just a different outlook on life. You could either stress out 24/7 about finishing what you're constantly working on, or you could step away for a bit, live a little, and then probably be able to work better/faster/finish your school work and be happier for it. I, for one, know that I'm getting more done because I'm part of the team right now. It gets me out of bed early, gives me a great start to the day, and structures it just enough that I don't allow myself to get lackadaisical. Also, I think just being able to associate with such motivated people as the U of C students really helps.

Tiffany sent me a postcard from Japan today! She and Max are over at the Tokyo Institute of Technology on scholarship right now, which is amazing. It sounds like they're having an awesome time.

The rest of my day: GRE prep, Rhino 4.0, and reading this article from the New York Times Magazine. It describes how the current agrarian sector of America is all petrol based, diminishing and unsustainable. At one point it describes that it was more economically efficient to specialize in one sector of agriculture, such as grains or animals: "But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all."

On Bike and Build, we rode through many tiny agriculturally based towns that looked tired and malnutritioned, so this article really struck home. To this point, I had made symbolic gestures toward organic foods, but hadn't really thought about the overall embodied energy of creating food, so I'm going to try to be more conscious about that now.

Busy People Accomplish MORE

The last 24 hours have been non stop movement!

It started last night when I saw the email from OSKA. It wasn't a definitive interview offer, but a request for more material: renderings, models, and sketches.

Now, anyone who knows me knows the latter two are not a problem. I am a laser cutter that runs on biofuels, and I crank out sketches like no one's business. Renderings however, were going to be a problem. I had put my best one in my portfolio, and looking back at the ones I used for my final project, they really just weren't going to cut it. I got back from the meeting around 9pm, and after bouncing around the walls for an hour or so (OSKA was interested in my portfolio ??? MY portfolio??? my PORTFOLIO ???) I got down to business of either cleaning up the existing renderings or creating new ones.

Around 5am, I set Kerkythea to render a fairly good quality image, and it was taking forever, so I decided to go out on the Tati bike ride. Yes, on zero hours of sleep. It was a fairly simple drills day, but there was an awful headwind on the way back. I tried one sprint, and then my legs reminded me about Sunday.

Back home, Kerkythea was STILL RENDERING! More correctly, anti-aliasing, but it was taking forever. I'm so glad I have two computers with CS3 installed. Anyways, I somehow managed to pull together 2 new renderings for one of my projects in Sketchup and Kerkythea, 2 diagrams from Rhino and V-Ray (!!! At last !!!), sketches of all kinds, the Mediatheque model photos, altogether in a very raw format which I sent off by ONE PM. Hopefully they'll be looking more for content, not layout ...

I caught the 1:45pm train to the Loop to go to Wired NextFest with Knute. It was really good to get out of Hyde Park and away from my computer screen. The projects were also a lot of fun!

The gateway exhibited the "Suitcase Pavilion" designed by Virginia Tech students: it can be carried in a suitcase!


Flowers bloomed where we stepped. It felt like Fern Gully but you know, technological.

CRAYONS for big kids! These "solid ink" cartridges don't require ink cartridges and thus creates much less waste. The ink prints by melting on to the page. We could write with them like crayons, so I wrote "yellow" with yellow all over the pamphlets (I'm 5 years old at heart).
They're video games, but rather than hurl bullets, you fly flower petals over green fields. It's supposed to be a retreat for those weary of urban stress.

Brainball is pretty hilarious. Two people duel by wearing straps measuring their brain activity. You win by pushing the ball at the center over to your foe with your "calmer" brain activity. Knute and I tried twice: I won both times. Clearly I had a huge advantage because I was zombie-esque from zero sleep. What was really funny was this random guy in the audience asked if he could try going against me, and I'm like, sure. I won. And then people were talking about tactics, and I'm like, dude, just don't sleep. It creates the perfect Zen-calm apathy.

And then I came home and my legs REALLY complained about Sunday. It feels good to have gotten that good of a workout. And it's also great to know that there are firms out there interested in my portfolio :D

Oh, and at Intelligentsia Coffee Shop, I took this sign to be a good omen (OSKA being in Seattle and my having biked there and all):

Old School.

Margaret and I got together for lunch today. I told her about my job finding woes, and she reassured me that she went through the same thing this past summer.

After lunch though, we walked over to the U of C Lab School and she showed me around her classroom. It's crazy to think that she's teaching kids as old as we were when we first met. (Well, we met in 2nd grade, and she's teaching kindergarten kids.)


She was busy putting together the activity for the afternoon: making fish! It's craft-making to teach fine motor skills and sharing etc. Watching her plan out the order of events, I thought she looked incredibly professional and put together. Yay, Margaret for finding a job and rocking it!

As for my job ...

Chillin in Chi-town

Much like the other times I have left the city, the first few days are full of old friends and catching up on news. So far, I've seen Jenny and Diana, and I got to chat with Red on the phone.

I met Jenny the same time I met Anita, two of the first people I ever met on UIUC campus. We were at the Campus Honors Program orientation at the beginning of the year, at which they pair a "senior sibling" with all the "junior siblings," just as a friendly face to be able to talk to throughout the year, or even later perhaps. My senior sibling never showed up ... so Jenny adopted me as another junior sibling.

Jenny's been stationed at an Indian Reservation through Teach for America at a school with a really high turnover rate of students and teachers. It sounded like an intense/difficult/rewarding experience. We compared her perspective about education in relation to low-income children with my research of education for low-income children. Also, Native Americans interact with American society really differently in the West Coast compared to the MidWest. At least those I met seemed pretty happy about the Res, and they were well integrated. My experience with those in the MidWest comes down to the huge struggle over the "Cheif" mascot for the Illini basketball team at UIUC: in sum, lots of tension.

Diana and I shared photos with each other. It looks like she's had an amazing summer down in South America, staying mostly in Argentina, but also making it through Macchu Picchu, Patagonia, and Uruguay, for example. Her photos of high altitude lakes, tropical forests, densely populated South American cities were all absolutely amazing. It was good to catch up.

I'm excited for Red and all of my other friends who are entering grad school this fall. He's on a trip from UVA to D.C. (I think?) to buy furniture for his empty apartment which turned into a sort of short roadtrip to see all of our other friends on the east coast now: Lauren and Aries in New York, and Shira in Providence. It's also always nice to be able to talk architecture with Red.

Finally, I've also been on a couple of rides in Chicago again! The Lakefront Path has definitely shrunk in terms of distance and scale. What used to be my "hills" are definitely just minor blips, and 35 miles feels like only half the ride I'm scheduled for. I rode with Will, one of the grad students who T.A.'d for the concrete class I took last semester. I've recruited him for Bike and Build! Apparently he's gotten hooked on cycling this past summer, and he's been one of the leaders for ESLARP for awhile, so it's right up his alley. Yay future Bike and Builders!

Another sense of perspective from Bike and Build: Nebraska is always worse. Will was shaking his fist at the wind today, and I was like, boy, ain't no thang. I'm really glad that I'm not in Nebraska right now, but I'm glad we went through it and survived. It was either Chad or Jake Schorr who began a "consider Nebraska" campaign: Looking for a job? -Consider Nebraska. Planning a vacation? -Consider Nebraska. Nebraska is now synonymous with unrelenting wind blowing in my ears, exhaustion at 12mph, perpetual purgatory of dry grassy rolling hills, deserted towns miles apart, long days, dehydration, and mental breakdowns. Nebraska, I'm glad you will always be there to be my scapegoat.