Judgment Day

So three days ago we hit the culmination of our semester: the final review. As it turns out, the main component of an architectural education is the design studio. It is the design studio that takes up most of my time and it is the design studio that makes people do crazy things like stay up all night.

At no point in the semester are any type of grades handed out and the final review is the point where you showcase what you have learned for the entire semester. The best part is that this is done in front of a jury of outside critics whose objectives are first, to showcase everything they know and second, offer you some advice on your design methods. It is the former that really shatters a student's self-esteem but really, you can't take these sort of things personally.

If I have been delinquent in updating my blog it is because for the past two weeks I have spent nearly all of my time preparing for the final review. Just to give you an idea of what the atmosphere was like in Rand Hall in the days leading up to our review, one of my classmates didn't sleep for two nights. Yes, for three days he lived in Rand Hall and only slept with a keyboard as his pillow. I was so exhausted that the two days after the review, I didn't wake up until after 1pm and didn't extract myself from bed until the sun was setting.

Anyways, here are the plots from my final project. You can click on them to get a better look, in reality each of these panels was 3ft wide and 7ft long.
Note: We have only been working on this project for about five weeks and it is my first building project so be kind....

The project was to build a facility for visiting professors. The site was an existing structure on campus, a largely ignored, half completed building that houses Cornell's squash courts.

My project interpreted the site as two elements: the hallway and the squash court. Taking those two elements, whose existing state determines the current structure, and interpreting them based on the phenomenological aspects of the buildings, a new structure emerges as part of a dialogue between the two. The hallway became a twisted skewer, the cells became distinct units, and the structure that emerged was what you see in the renderings.

The intent of the facility was to invert the myth of an isolated intellectual by intersecting the professor's life with the life of the university.

I am happy with the way the presentation turned out but there are some rather fatal shortcomings in the structural manifestations of my ideas and the critics basically ripped me apart for them. ("So it goes." - Vonnegut)

~

Now I have just a week left and an overwhelming amount of writing to get done before that time is up... precisely what I am avoiding by writing this post but hey, studio is done and life is good.