The following pictures of pieces of paper color copied of 1993 Canon F-1 pictures of a white artifact on a black background pasted onto a grey, handmade chipboard portfolio depict this architect’s

a.    First aesthetic architectural experiment(1)
b.    First successful aesthetic architectural experiment(2)
c.    Ticket into the Ohio State University’s School of Architecture(3)



Notes:
1.    Because prior to the white chipboard model you see in the pictures, any and all “architectural” models I ever made were, in short, very well crafted boxes.
2.    Successful simply because both the instructor and TA’s went nuts over it.  It was really unexpected to me. 
3.    Out of around 60 applicants, my model and Paw Schmitzer’s were regarded by everyone as the best two of the lot.  This is not me being pompous.  It’s just what, inexplicably to me at least, happened.  I was this 20-year-old kid from Panama, who failed to get into the University of Panama’s school of architecture and then struggled at architecture school at another Panamanian university, USMA, before being accepted as a transfer to OSU from Florida State’s Panama branch, which I simultaneously attended.  After the initial Fall and Winter Quarters of English, Physics, Math and Introduction to Architecture, we finally come to Spring Quarter and Introduction to Design.  Eymen Homsi, our instructor, took us into the auditorium and said, in his incredibly soft-spoken yet savage, bespectacled, Syrian manner, “Today we're just going to show you a bunch of cool pictures.”  And started a slide show comprised of the most avant-garde architecture in place up to 1993.  My mind was utterly, completely, blown.  That was also the year I wrote my first e-mail.  So, while we did get magazines such as Architectural Record and L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui in Panama, as you may understand, with no internet, coming across works like those in the slide show was far more difficult than it is today.