FIRST CRIT!

Dear Friends,

My apologies for my absence from this blog recently. I must warn you that this post will also not have pictures...at least not yet. This past Saturday I thought I was going to be so on top of my game. I came back to campus, camera in hand, ready to finally get some pictures of studio and campus and get some studio work done. Well, to my surprise studio was locked (yes, on a Saturday afternoon...you can imagine my shock and dismay!) and my camera was not accepting my SD card. So all that to say I don’t have any relevant pictures I can add to this post yet.

One of the main reasons I wasn’t able to post anything last week was that we had a crit on Friday.  For those of you unfamiliar with architecture talk that just means we had a review of our work we have been working on recently. We did a precedent study (which is a study of another architect’s work) of different housing projects (as we are studying housing development in my studio here this semester). My group studied Coderch’s “Torre Valentina” which was planned for the coast of Spain in the late 50s but was never built. We had to make models of this housing project as well as produce a brief and propose concepts for housing based on the concepts of Coderch’s project as well as from our own ideas.

So for those of you who don’t know, last semester wasn’t my strongest semester. My last crit left me feeling less than enthusiastic about architecture and just school in general really. I was frustrated to say the least. Anyway, I really felt that when I came over here I wanted to give myself another chance to enjoy architecture. I’m glad to report I think I found some of that lost enthusiasm for the art. I was kind of nervous that I might shy away from conversation in the crit because I’m new and such....but I’m not one to shy away from conversation when it comes to architecture.

The crit ended up going REALLY well! I was so pleased! I actually felt prepared and rested....two things that are hard to come by during crit time for me usually. It was a group of four of us who work on the project. (On a side not, I was really happy we started with a group project cause it gave me an opportunity to get to know people right away.) There was really more like 3 of us though because one guy would never show up. That leads me to my next point.

Things in the architecture program are very different over here. I think a big part of that is for most of them education is free. It sounds great in theory but I have witnessed the negative effects it has. People are not nearly as competitive here, which is saying a lot considering I would not consider Judson competitive compared to most US architecture schools. People will just not show up to studio and it’s not really a big deal...especially with group projects cause the good students do the work and their partners just kind of slide under the radar. People also do not “live” in studio. Studio closes at 10 every night and I guess isn’t getting opened on the weekends either. We have more official hours of studio (20 hrs of class a week) but people are only in studio outside of those hours when a project is due soon.

Their standards for presentation are also very different. At Judson, doing a sketch drawing for a final drawing means it must be one fantastic well thought out sketch. I guess one cold say their presentations are more “artsy”. It has definitely opened my eyes to other ways people see things. This is not mean to put their work down, but a lot of what becomes final work I would consider unacceptable....not because it is not done well. Let me clarify. A model in my mind could be built very well out of balsa wood or chip board. However, I would never consider that model acceptable for a final model, because that is how my mind has been trained. I guess you could see it as a hierarchy of materials and methods. That has probably been the biggest adjustment when it come to studio.

We are launching ahead with a visit to our proposed site for the next project. Looking forward to it and hoping to have pictures to show soon!

Cheers!