This year started with a bang. In addition to the Kivi Sotamaa studio and the Baumer class, both of which I will discuss in detail later, we were offered the opportunity to take a seminar with K. Michael Hays of GSD fame. The class focussed on the architecture of the 60s, for the most part, which a special focus on the manifestations of desire in the work of architects like Eisenman, Hejduk, Rossi, Tschumi, etc.

We spent a lot of time discussing Lacan, but also had many forays into things like VSB, Roland Barthes, Thomas Pynchon, Chomsky, Saussure, Bertolt Brecht, Derrida, Tafuri, etc. We were basically exposed to the material that Hays is fashioning into his new book on desire in this period of architectural history...

Hays is a very pleasant professor, which is to say open-minded and willing to explore any avenue of thought as it pertains to the discussion. References from outside the discipline were welcomed and encouraged.

Our final project was open-ended; we were charged with the task of using the thematic material of the class in any way we deemed necessary to make a graphic argument. Chad Shepherd and I thought we would tackle Rem Koolhaas and OMA, since we hadn't talked much about the early work of Rem in class. It seemed that he was particularly relevant to the discussion and perhaps we could look at the work of OMA through the "lens of desire."

We began by looking into the Voluntary Prisoner Project that Rem did at the AA, but soon our subject matter ballooned into the entire ouevre of OMA. Drawing from a variety of cultural touchstones, each with their own particular embedded social and political meanings, we hoped to convey graphically the idea of "big other" as it relates to the work of OMA; that is, we tried to find the Lacanian object of ultimate desire.

Here you see the results.