i'm sorry to see it's been close to a month since i last posted.

when i undertook this blogging project, i really had no clue what studio time would entail. being away from home for long stretches means being away from my computer for long stretches too. looking back on my pre-studio life, i have to chuckle”¦ at that point i was reading forums (like archinect's or my beloved arseblog.com) and sending and answering email relentlessly. now i'm lucky if i can check email every day and game scores on weekends. i'm planning on buying a laptop over spring break to help remedy this situation. on one hand it's nice to get work done without the constant lure of the computer, but now i've realised that i NEED it to accomplish many tasks. i'll also likely firmly cast my vote in my own eternal and internal osx vs xp debate by buying a pc laptop, though i see so many mac laptops at school.

so a bit of time has passed”¦ we finished up exploration 3 with another all-section pinup, though this one's format has different. each student had a sheet with questions and we had to go around and engage 3 different works and fill in a bunch of info on them and do some quick sketching and diagramming. for my part, i felt like i was mostly babbling on. when i finally saw the sheets other people had done on my work, that really confirmed it was all mostly babble.

my project generated a lot of talk, but most of that was due to the fact that it was 4 feet long and slathered with an iron paint which i then applied rusting compound to. from a distance, it actually looked like a large nasty rusted slab of iron. the department head was put out since it wouldn't fit in the display case and attempted to chastise my instructor and me for letting me make it so big / making it so big. i thought overall it was a good project for me and the final jump to 1/4“ = 1'0” scale took it somewhere very nice – it actually started to come alive as architecture at that point rather than being an assemblage of chipboard pieces.

we're nearing the end of exploration 4 now. our final presentation / pinup is next friday night. we still haven't received word on the final specs expected of us. this exploration was all about deriving an architectural space from a fragment of text. we got to choose a city from italo calvino's “invisible cities” and work from there. early days brought a lot of mental / philosophical discussion with a studiomate over many of the aforementioned stella artois. moving from discussion to sketches and ultimately to model form was tough. i chanced upon a solution while diagramming that has provided a solid enough footing for me the past 2 weeks.

spring quarter registration came and went and i managed to secure a spot in shiga's studio. i didn't even have to kill or hurt anyone! will i regret this decision? let you know in 15 weeks. i just need to get through one more week and then i can sleep for 2 weeks over spring break.