The semester is over. Okay, so I have an exam on Tuesday and another on Wednesday, but for all intents and purposes it is complete. On Wednesday I submitted my thesis proposal, which topped out around 10,000 words. As soon as I get it compiled and PDFed I'll link it from here so anybody interested in perusing through(or actually reading it) can. It feels really good to have that complete. While it'll be in the back in my mind through out winter break, I'm going to distance myself from it. Hopefully that will allow me to come back to it with a fresh perspective as I work on resolving my thesis with my design project.

Studio is also complete. Last night my studio presented our revitalization for East 10th Street in Indianapolis to the Community Board of Directors at the Boner Center. It was fitting as the Boner Center is directly in the heart of our revitalization. It was the first time in 11 semesters of architecture school that I presented to somebody other than a jury of fellow students and professors.

During the presentation we presented design guidelines along with before and after photos/renderings of our designs. Each group showed a short Powerpoint that covered their blocks of work. To wrap it all up we played a 5 minute drive-through animation of the new revitalized 10th Street with rehabbed historic buildings and new construction. Once I get a copy of the animation I'll try to make it available for viewing here, but its a very large file so that may not be possible. I'll also link my groups Powerpoint.

I think the Board was quite impressed with the amount of work we were able to cover in just 10 weeks. They had a lot of questions that revolved around public transportation and parking. While we discussed those briefly at the beginning of our studio (proposing a trolley hop) we decided that focusing on the built structures was more important to how the studio was structured. And we believed that any revitalization would render the car unnecessary by providing a redundancy of uses so walking trips would span no more than 3 blocks. We were very successful in achieving our goals of returning the "street wall" and providing places for live/work.

Now its time to relax.