So aside from our Aldo Rossi centric studio, we've been super busy with the rest of the first semester curriculum at UIC.

Our Technology course has been rivaling our studio workload with a series of structural studies. The course is lead by Lluis Ortega, who is also new to UIC, coming to chicago via Barcelona. The studies usually look at one pre-digital project/building and one more contemporary response dealing with a same set of issues or techniques.  Those of use new to the discipline had to learn very quickly ways to represent techniques, materials, architectural intent, etc. 

Here's David Mulder's and Anh Pham's pavilion/installation in response to Greg Lynn's Blob Wall and Aalvar Alto's brick facade variations. 

I think this approach to production by first looking back to a historical precedence, then looking at contemporary responses to the issue, then finally positioning our design or arguments within that genealogy, is typical of the working order around UIC. 

As mentioned in the previous post, we are getting a strong dosage of polemics in Bob Somol's theory course. As we're progressing from the Avante-Garde to Modernism to Post-Modernism(or whatever you'd like to call it), the polemical genealogy becomes more and more difficult to keep track of. 

We're given one elective choice in our first semester, and I chose to take Jimenez Lai's 'Morning Cartoons: Weekly Amnesia'. Cartooning is a really nice break from the deadlines and technical drawings for studio and technology. We start out by talking about a certain architectural topic, like figure/ground, shape, suburban, etc, then we draw around that topic, then finally we talk about everyones drawings.

Jimenez invited us over to Bureau Spectacular to make up for some lost classroom time. There was much B.S.ing had...

Helvetica grew tired of all our semantics.