Not quite, anyway, even if I have 157 hours until turn-in (thus the 5am posting time). There are many reasons I haven't been posting more regularly (that is to say, at all), none of which are particularly good, so I'll just move on to what I'm doing right now: a neighborhood civic center in Boyle Heights. I'll post some images and explanation when I'm done, but here's a little structural preview.


It's about as fun as it looks.

LAURIE OLIN, FASLA Founding Partner, Olin Partnership, PhiladelphiaThe City is a Landscape Too Wednesday, September 5, 6:00 pm QINGYUN MA Dean, USC School of Architecture Principal, MADAspam, Shanghai, PRCSpectacle Spaces Wednesday, September 12, 6:00 pm KARA J. BARTELT Principal, Lettuce Office... View full entry

First things first: while I’d written several stillborn blog entries over the past four(!) months, each of them have about four months’ worth of irrelevance by now, lost to either time constraints or self-consciousness. Education moves, after all, at a pace nimble enough to outrun both... View full entry

This announcement isn't really a big surprise for the students, who have been thriving on rumors since May, but I just walked into studio and found a neatly printed memorandum on my desk making the official announcement to faculty, staff, and students. I see now it's already been in the news here... View full entry

Our current project—and I do realize I haven’t updated on the previous two, which I have yet to document properly—is to create a ‘writer’s retreat’: a space scaled for one person on an isolated lakeside site. While we are furthering our investigations into... View full entry

I’m back in Los Angeles. Not that I just arrived; classes—specifically, studio—began the 21st, which I suppose means I’m a bit late with this blog, but I’m functioning under the excuse that I ‘had to get settled in first.’ Feel free to marvel at my... View full entry

Cambridge is lovely, of course. Since I've been here (a week and a day), I've seen enough Shakespeare, been to enough galleries, and drunk enough wine to last me... well, the summer. It's too bad, I suppose, that I'm getting acquainted with England in the most miserably hot July in memory, when... View full entry

My blogging reticence notwithstanding, the past few weeks have kept me rather busy. I am now working three or four five days a week instead of the planned two, which tells me either that I’m doing well or that my coworkers find my sunny personality irresistible. The firm is small, located in... View full entry

I know, I know, I promised these pictures ages ago, but my time has been ruthlessly consumed by summer fun. Highlights thus far include watching too much HBO (and empathizing with Michelle Pfeiffer’s architect character in One Fine Day when she trips and falls on top of her model on the... View full entry

A retrospective: divers & sundry things I have learned in my first year of architecture school (some of which should have been covered by common sense): Never work on an empty stomach. Clean your triangle. Again. There are such things as stupid questions, but that doesn't mean one should be... View full entry

There was a very good lecture by Margaret Crawford tonight, the last of the candidates for the deanship for the School of Architecture. Her lecture was very well organized and presented, I thought. She discussed her own background in theory, scholarship, history, and urbanism, as well as her focus... View full entry

Just in case there was any doubt left about the versatility of my incompetence: I've just learned that the Qingyun Ma dean candidacy lecture was last night and I completely missed it. I do regret not being able to update everyone; this decanal search business has brought a gust of urgency and... View full entry

I apologize for not updating as I promised on Peter Pran's decanal candidacy lecture. Yesterday we heard from Dana Cuff, the second out of four. The two are a fascinating contrast. My handwriting is too loopy and illegible to actually scan my notes as I'd planned, so here are the basic... View full entry

The gallery project is due this Sunday at 6pm, officially making this week charrette, in all its pimply-faced, heavy-limbed, and bleary-eyed glory. The final requirements are three rendered site sections, three diagrams, three rendered perspectives, one site plan, as many floor plans as necessary... View full entry

I suppose this is about as breaking as news can get in an architecture student's blog. Some of you may know that Robert Timme, our Dean of Architecture, passed away just this last October. Now the search for a new dean is almost over: the committee in charge of the process has four final... View full entry

A more human view of my site: From Childs Way. People. On my site. From McCarthy Quad. And (in spite of my intense shame) here are some very prepreliminary models: A sleigh! conceptual ground-plane manipulation model. I won't tell you how long this took me to make. Translated to the site. Oops... View full entry

Our final project of the semester is indeed an art gallery--we are assigned to choose for ourselves the precise nature of the art that would be hyphothetically displayed. The program is small: a main exhibition space, two video/audio rooms, reception, staff, restrooms, and storage. The site is a... View full entry

I admit this entry is written out of instinctual procrastination panic, but still. I'm dissatisfied with models as a mode of diagramming. I'm convinced certain things like circulation, grid relationships, and site proportion are best left to the drafting board. Which makes what I'm doing (or not... View full entry

I still haven't uploaded our project process photos for our Eladio Dieste light study, but to keep this entry from being too dreary and gifless, here are the (weirdly tiny?) Google image results: I'm not sure what to think about our finished project. The foam sheets we planned to use on the walls... View full entry

I do sincerely apologize for neglecting this blog for nearly a month. February was the cruellest month, mixing habitual underachievement with a hundred other anxieties. My studio work was unimpressive but not bad. Our third project was to create a farmer's market of so many stalls using a given... View full entry

Monday was pale yellow and torrid, and I unsensibly wore black. The first years gathered on the back lawn and had our stanchion installation: each studio section had fifteen minutes to collect all 98 pieces and arrange them into their design. Some groups had fairly straightforward schemes that... View full entry

So I'm all really excited right now because I was accepted into the Cambridge University summer program. I'm not entirely sure what the level of competition for admissions was, so perhaps I ought to save the self-congratulations for later, but I'd rather not. Yay me. The cool thing is that USC... View full entry

Project Two is weird. Each of us built a wooden stanchion and painted it white. Now we must design an organization of all 98 of these stanchions and install it on the back lawn of the architecture school. Building the six-foot high stanchion was miserable. I can’t conduct even the most... View full entry

No, I really do suck so much that I didn't complete Project One, which was diagramming the organization of an assigned precedent. It wasn't that the Assembly at Chandigarh didn't give me plenty of things to diagram, or even that I was hugely lazy or unproductive during charrette (okay, that was... View full entry

My Martin Luther King, Jr., PROCRASTAVAGANZA backfired (as these things do) and I just spent the last nine hours of my life carefully trimming and sanding each and every goddamn tiny column in the Legislative Assembly at Chandigarh. What's weird about architectural procrastination is that no... View full entry

Thank-you all for the helpful and compassionate response to my last post; I see that open-ended entries with questions are more comment-friendly than my typically closed and tiresomely whiney style from before, so I'll adjust. Yes, I am that vain. Today during studio it was announced that the day... View full entry

Faithful readers will remember yesterday's troubles with finding wood. I spent most of today in lazy apprehension about this, since I didn't want to show up to class the second day of the semester with incomplete work. But, having no car, friends in my new section, or knowledge of where to pick up... View full entry

Um, nothing much to say... here, have some rare picspam of a clean studio: Janice's section: Weird hanging cords are power cables; the thinner blue ones are ethernet. There are also ethernet jacks and power outlets in the walls: two for each desk. A power strip is a necessity. My new desk (I'll... View full entry

First days of the semester are always deeply unsettling for many reasons. I say that confident in my experience of, um, two first days of a semester so far. But it seems sensible enough. Today was dominated by my quest to replace my lost USCard, which not only works as a student ID but also as a... View full entry

Right, so were I a proper blogger this post would probably be well-written and elegantly introductory, but as long as this is a first post I'll take the opportunity to use inexperience as an excuse for poor quality. I'm too used to writing in the LiveJournal mode, which is, perhaps, not... View full entry