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 matter how far behind I think I've fallen, I can always panicwalk into the studio and be confounded to see that half my section hasn't even begun the homework. It's like running the end of yellow traffic light, breathlessly thanking God you made it legally, and then watching in your rear view mirror as the three cars behind you cross the intersection too. Fortunately, even if my work isn't complete, it'll be more nearly finished than several others in my section, so I won't feel as bad, and hopefully won't get the brunt of Janice's disappointment. Or, y'know, not.

This is, I suppose, as good a time as any to describe our first project. It's an analytical precedent, and we are to produce nine diagram models of our assigned building, focusing not on its design principles as much as its organizational principles (as mentioned above, I'm doing Corb's Assembly at Chandigarh--a field/grid/hypostyle/lotofwork organization). This is something that makes me at once optimistic and disappointed. I have a deep-seated geeky love for precedents, and my project last semester of Louis Kahn's Fisher House earned top marks; at the same time, diagramming doesn't quite galvanize one's creativity much, which I think is essential at the beginning of the semester. Combined with the fact that I'm still not very comfortable at my new desk (it's, like, not in the same place) or with my new studiomates (this will take months), I haven't yet felt motivated to work. Thus my astounding progress. Well, that and a total lack of being arsed. Meh. Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde.



(Toothpaste for Dinner)