(Kent State University)

Sorry for the lack of updates (mostly project-specific) as of late.. things have been very busy throughout the school. I guess I'll just give a quick run through of everything that's been going on..

3 of the 4 spring design lectures have passed. M1/DTW was fun to see, with a lot of design/build work from start to finish which I always love to see. Eddie Jones was a great speaker.. however I wasn't a fan of his personal professional pedagogy.. one that didn't involve any conceptual ideas behind the projects, just simply making good aesthetics and doing exactly what the client wanted with no personal ideas superimposed.

Anderson Anderson spoke tonight. There work was great to see, and very interesting nonetheless.. but as someone pointed out to me pre-lecture, they are horrible at speaking.

Evan Douglis is to come, April 11. That will be exciting.


I have also been working a lot on an exhibition project with professor Marc Manack. He has started a student work exhibition at his gallery in Cleveland, this being the inaugural event to the hopefully yearly project. Each year will showcase student work pertaining to a specific theme, this year being ornamentation and surface design. You can read more about it on the postcard.. I am in the show, and with that comes the responsibility of putting the show together with the other students. I've been assigned to the fabrication of the display.. which I always love to do.

As for school work (because sometimes in the midst of this extra work I forget I have school), things have been going rather rough. I can't necessarily pinpoint it to a specific reason, be it this exhibition, organizations, other classes, or personal things, whatever. All I know is that I have had a general lack of motivation, which is seems to be the general feeling of everyone else in the studio, as well.

We've been working on a spa/rec center for downtown Kent, and spent a rather large amount of time on site analysis, conceptual diagramming, and precedent studies. I am not upset at this, in the least.. this was my favorite part of the whole project.. it just left our time very limited for working on actual design of the building. I felt like there wasn't enough time to work on it partially due to time, and the fact that we had a rather large assignment every class.. which led us to have to make, make, make and not have much time to actually think about it.

Our final reviews were yesterday, and overall I thought they went all right. Nothing exciting, nothing too engaging or informational. Just, ok. I am disappointed that I never pushed myself to the level that I normally do for studio. The overall feeling of studio was "just do it, and move on to the next project where I'll do better." Hopefully things are better for this next project..

That's enough for now.. have to go study for my arch history exam tomorrow!