Today in studio we were deep in the preparation for critique week - which is, as far as I know, a unique SAIC tradition. Basically in stead of final exams or some such, a week before the end of term you present all of your work to five faculty members, and they give you formative feedback. I do mean all --- my paper on micro financing tall buildings right next to the eight bronze busts I made.

But I digress. One of the things we learned about in passing was radioactive Jell-O. "What is radioactive Jell-O?" you may well ask. It is that (as far as I know unique to architecture) tendency to diagram conceptual things into real space using blobs of color. I'll admit that I remain suspicious that it frequently has much explanatory power, but I began to understand today why it might have investigative power. Of course, that didn't prevent me from calling it bull#$! To my instructor, which led to an interesting discussion of communicative diagrams (he hates it when I use graphs, but is too polite to say bull#$!).

What interests me at the end of the day however is the way in which we are almost expected in graduate education to act as if we know it all, when, if in reality we did know it all, we certainly wouldn't be in graduate school. I think as a result some of us have a hard time realizing when we might be learning. So how about it archinect, got any good stories about only realizing you were learning after the fact?

p.s. this post in no way is meant to construe that I don't know it all, or condone the use of radioactive Jell-O.

Welcome to the newest kid on the block.... That's the view from our studio window. 12 stories up in the cupola of one of Sullivan's most famous works, and we get to watch both the construction of the infamous block 37 and the more banal transformation of state street. The best view according to... View full entry