So it's already mid-term review time at UIC SOA. The first half of our first semester has flown by. This is probably because of the unrelenting pace we've been working at, and the concentration on deadlines that's consumed us. But we've produced a lot of work in a little over 8 weeks. About half of us first-year MArch's are new to architecture(myself included), so the work of the first half of the semester shows a huge amount of progress in our drawing and modeling skills. Personally, I wouldn't have thought it was possible to learn so much in such a short period of time, but I guess the round the clock drawing, modeling, and thoery has paid off. 

So here's a quick run down and some thoughts about our first studio projects at UIC.

In our first semester studio taught by Paul Preissner and Kelly Bair, we are using 12 Aldo Rossi sketches from A Scientific Autobiography as, more or less, an instrument for drawing and 3D modeling with different programs. 

We started by redrawing the 12 sketches that were produced between 1962 - 1980. Rossi took 18 years to finish the drawings, whereas we took a little over a week.  In redrawing these hand-drawn sketches in CAD and Illustrator, we we're forced to fix Rossi's sloppiness in perspective, scale, alignment, etc. This was at times mind numbing work, but the intention was to get us comfortable with drawing in CAD and Illustrator fast. 

The second part of the project was to imagine the unseen sides of the 12 drawings. We did this by modeling all the drawings in Rhino in order to reverse and produce a worms -eye perspective of Rossi's buildings. This was a more speculative exercise that forced us to make spatial decisions based on the language of the existing sketches. The result was 12 compositions of floating Rossi characters. 

The title of the post is in reference to material we are studying in Bob Somol's theory course.  I feel like Gilles Deleuze's Body's without Organs(BwO) (not to be confused with this BwO) is an appropriate idea to summarize the nature, and mood of our studio at the moment. Not in a negative way, but i think our studio has been working as a collective whole in exhausting the content of the Rossi sketches. 

More on the rest of the Curriculum in the next post.....