It's the third day of week two.  I haven't gotten to sleep before 2am since classes started.  It's starting to catch up with me. 

Monday, as a class we created the grading rubric for our projects.  Around 20 criteria were thought of and then similar ones were grouped together and given an overarching name.  It ended up being three categories: concept, process and communication, each  being scored on a scale of 1-5.

We started a new round of assignments that build off of the previous assignments from last week.  The new assignment included reading and "unpacking" while defining the italicized words in the text below:

• What do we mean by the phrase "poetic intentions?"  As a starting point, we will say that by "poetic intentions" we mean those intentions that cannot be justified by appeals to logic or, to deploy a more contemporary phrase, instrumental reason.  these are also all of those intentions of aspirations that relate to the archaic Greek meaning of poiesis, the human act of making or creating.

We also had to read and take visual notes on the sections "Preface," "Introduction," and "Formative Ideas" in the book Precidens in Architecture.  All the conceptual stuff we've been reading has been playing into the models and drawings that we've been doing.  For this assignment, we had to make three models.  They had to be 8x8x8" inches, have a 2x2, 4x4 and 8x8 3D grid.  (Those are divisions, not measured size)  The goal was to make each cube to represent point & line, planes, and volume using bass wood, gray matte board and brown chip board, respectively.  All that stuff above is due today (Wednesday).

The cubes were a fun challenge to make for a number of different reasons.  First, it was hard to plan them out beforehand so I was making them each from a mental image and just kind of winging it.  Second, Elmer's glue and bass wood do not like each other.  I need to get some tacky glue or something because keeping pieces together was such a pain.

Today we had two critiques for the models - one as a class and one with our individual section leaders.  The class critique worked like this: everyone was given three pieces of paper and told to choose and critique three cubes, with the possibility of anonymity, using formal words and concepts that we went over earlier in class.  The individual critique was done by my section leader, Frank De Santis.  Although I wish he were more harsh on my projects, I did get some useful advice - focus more on the tertiary and quaternary elements because my models overall we lacking in those.  

In another post I'll explain the whole section leader situation, as well as the setup of the studio and some other random stuff that was established last week.  This post is getting a little long, so this'll be it for today.