So I'm behind on posting my goal of 1 submission per week... no big deal.

NEWS: My boyfriend Jed, also an architecture student at the KA (dept. 2) entered an international contest for housing/urban design hosted by COARQ and... got honorable mention! Woot woot! And there was much rejoicing.

See his submission here (first entry on the page)

What did we do last week? A lot, actually. We have a new instructor in the department this year and he gave an introductory lecture on writing your own program. Then set us up with some exercises to help us write down and figure out our semester project goals and our own personal learning goals.

The exercise dealt with the questions: WHAT, WHY, and HOW.

Starting with WHAT as a base point, we identified what we were interested in, what the problems were, what we wanted to learn about, what our vision for the site was, etc. Then we moved up and wrote WHY we were interested in that, why the problems were relevant, why we wanted to learn.... you get the idea. It sounds really simple and IT IS. But it's one of those exercises that you never really get encouraged to do in architecture because it's all about instant inspiration and drawing it out.

Sometimes, though, it's really helpful to write it out. Clarify the parameters of your interests, and identify--if not exactly WHAT you want to do, at least what you DON'T want to do.

I wish I had done this with all my projects.

Anyways, taking this newly acquired self-awareness about the project, we used it as a basis to make our own program explaining all the questions and goals in detail. What methods we were going to use to solve our problems, and so on. In the end, we all gave a short 3 slide presentation of the basic outline of our intentions. I found it extremely helpful, especially since I'll be doing this all over again in thesis, and presumably in my career as well!

So, here's my WHAT WHY HOW slide show: