for those of you wondering i went to the university of Illinois.

chicago

I agree about the dumb things people do like Posting the same topic three times....

Just messin dude......

triangles sounds pretty good, as concepts go.

i.m. pei anyone......?
j/k
but really.

Triangles?!?! Brilliant!

*pops open Guiness*

maybe it was bruce goff's kid? grandkid?
[img[http://www.searinghouse.com/images/drawings/medium/Triangle_print_cream.jpg width=418[/img]

jamchar, i feel you bro, about half the students at uf gave eye rolling ideas for their projects, unfortunately, they are the ones who make perfect employees for those architects who have sold out and build crap for developers or are just trying to make a quick buck for themselves. and then they go on to be successful at building crap themselves and laugh at everything that holds any architectural value. i ask myself everyday why they dont just get a degree in construction and leave the designing to people who actually care.

"I am a pirate." One of our 'esteemed' faculty members discussing how cutting edge and cool he is, although he is actually a major douche.

A juror @ our final crit this spring thought a fellow student's project reminded him of a Mayan Temple. He said, " I feel like there should be a priest in there holding a stone dagger high above his head ready to sacrifice a human life...I can hear the screaming." I don't know about dumb but it was interesting considering the juror was quite serious about his comment. The Stup may be I and my fellows students who pay money to hear this.

hey ... looks here like you're going to graduate after all !

there is this one lecturer/juror member that seemed to liken most projects to a rat houses...i laughed the first time i heard it - then it just seem corny

I forgot full dialogue

S: it's effective (either cost or circulation wise)
P: it's effective? your building is elevated. do you know how much it costs to have a building elevated above off the ground?
S: well... i elevated because of geo-thermal
P: (turning red) do you even know what geo-thermal is?

anyway, it's always fun to see stubborn and unique student arguing with critiques. =)

From a review in undergrad:


Critic (looking up from copy of 'Golf Digest' that he had been flipping through for the entire review): Why didn't you just make it symmetrical?

Student: I don't really like ... symmetry ...

Critic: Do you like your face?

Crit: Those Concrete Columns do not have a large enough diameter, they could never handle the load.

My comment: Do you ever go to the main Univesity Library. A puzzled look on his face. So I carry on, well there the exact same size as the columns in the Univesity Library with the same structural bays, and that place is full of books so I'm sure the dead load far exceeds the loads being applied on this building. I believe the columns will do a fine job of holding up the structure.

That Associate Proffessor happened to be bagging a female friend of mines girlfriend. He saw me having a drink with her the week before so I think he came into that session with a chip on his shoulder. Next week he was dumped by the lady, and I always put a smile on my face when ever he encountered me in the hall way.

i'm not going to go into any other than my own, as most of them were said by my good friends. that said, let me try and piece together a dumb comment i made at asu, 3rd year, when pushed pretty hard against a wall:

"Well, it's just something about learning how to design. I feel that sometimes, in order to understand how to do things the right way, you must actually first do them the wrong way. And that's why I felt that this would be the best approach, because I knew this project would never be built."

or something like that. but it does get better. one of the reviewers, a woman from sci-arc, cut me off with an obviously disgusted and quick "what". after this, my own professor who is actually someone relatively prominent in academia [i won't say who] cut her off and said he didn't want to go into that, and then went on about how much he liked my project, and explained how it was some sort of reflection of my personality, and then referred to me as being like some type of genius.

le bossman is definitely like some kind of genius...or maybe like some kind of genie...i'm not sure the difference

good architects borrow, great architects steal



wait...no, that was the best

trace don't you mean great architects repeat the same thing they've done for the last five years in order to keep in large orders from prestigious clients who want the thing they did five years ago repeated in their site location?

The dumbest thing I ever heard, this one guy I knew outside of school told me

"why are you pursuing architecture, you know in 10 years computers are going to be doing it all, there will no longer be a need for architects."

computers can design buildings ?! what the hell am i doing with my life!

Mies who? From a 4th year B.Arch student.

Oh man. We had this one professor who used to get all pissed off when people used sexy models for scale figures... One final review she blasted this Frat boy for using all half naked women in his renderings.

When she asked him why he felt that is was necessary to use nude women as scale figures and not nude men, he said

"I wouldn't want the nude men to distract people from focusing on the nude women in my renderings..."

"Everybody likes JUGS!"

This was one kid's opening line to his thesis presentation in 4th year industrial design. He was designing a musical instrument that had something or other to do with musical jugs.

Oh, and the powerpoint image was of a female torso in a bikini.

Classy.

dia, i'm not sure who looks worse with that one, the student or the school? ouch.

"Put a sexy woman in the image" from a client.

Everyone loves a sexy woman.

Thank God.

765...hilarious!

my own personal favorite was something i said...

i'll set up the story...so anyways, we had 4-5 girls in our studio... and three in particular would not stop complaining about the workload, type or work etc. anyways, it was towards the end of the semester when they were complaining about a deadline to a professor who was pretty young, pretty reserved, but always nice and thoughtful. so they're bitchin and moanin to the prof...and i say loudly:

maybe there should be a seperate studio... for girls... that's EASIER!

that shut 'em up pretty good... enough for me to here a faint "oohhh"... and i look over to see the dean of architecture, who happens to be a woman, looking at some of our models. well, i felt like a sexist bastard and i thought i might not graduate. anyways, that's the dumbest thing i probably said at school...er wait, could be ever, let me check.

My dean and prof drunkenly confessed to me at a bar that he loves gigantic breasts, and that he's happy with his third wife because she has huge breasts and his first two wives had small ones.

I don't remember asking him anything about it, but there it was.

so i guess you know what "concepts" to use in his studio.

In History of European architecture:

Prof: What sort of differences do you see between these two buildings?

Moron: Well the one on the left is painted yellowish the one on the right is more whitish, and the one on the left is alot bigger with more windows.

we had a guest lecturer once... a jazz musician- kind of more like an inspirational guest lecturer, not an architect.

he told us his five favorite jazz musicians. then he asked a kid in the first row his five favorite architects...

he only came up with two. not because he didn't have 5, but because he couldnt think of the names of five architects. (i'll cut him some slack, it was a first year, first semester students... but still)

the jazz musician let him have it... told him he might as well quit now because if he couldnt even think of the names of five architects, he clearly wasnt invested enough.

oh and my personal favorite, coming from a juror i had on my second year studio project:

juror: so you have a courtyard there?
me: yes
j: with no roof?
m: well, yes, that is a courtyard.
j: so what happens if you want to watch the sunset and it's raining?
m: i think that answer is pretty obvious? unless i should expect the sun to be out when it is raining.

what is jazz?

Slant I heard the same thing about Alvar Aalto. One of my former bosses visited his studio with his wife and Aalto just couldn't take his eyes off of her yammers.

2nd year Studio Crit:

while holding a model in the air, spinning it around...

"it has to make architectural sex"

design III, fall 2005. This guy who never came to class pinned up his work, which was all draw on a large sheet of cardboard. yes, you read it right, he sketched his "drawings" that were awful, right onto the cardboard. the project title that he placed in the middle said "a bazaar's design".

Our design professor then said, "what's a bazaar's design?". the student then said, "it's the project title" with a weird look on his face. "son, if you would have came to class and followed the syllabus, you would have noticed the project's new name, the white room". Great times with a bunch of slackers, who later dropped out.

A bitch of a teacher not paying attention to where she was walking stepped right on someones chipboard model, crushed it.

Without any remorse she looks right at him and said if you built that properly it would have supported me.

One project I did had these slats on the roof, so there were essentially stripes of light on the interior, so pointing to a rendering I jokingly introduced my project by saying: "My concept was zebras."

Jamchar, sounds like a prof at my school, first year prof, who actually i respected a lot...

she made a comment once which was hysterical... made on purpose mind you, but still worth telling...

for our final first semester project we were to develop 'passages' which were to be set up in sequence... an interactive kind of exhibit...
anyway, in the run up to this thing we all of course built small scale models of assorted materials... one person chose to build their model of bass wood planks and sticks but used a hot glue gun to stick it all together. subsequently all the joints had big globs of hot glue around them. First year prof walks to the model covered in hot glue and begins to talk about it. A question from the student arose... something to the effect of, how much weight do you think this part could hold? the prof replies, "well judging from the size of your ( hot glue ) balls, alot..."

one of the dumbest things i've said was @ my final thesis review!

i didn't include some small support spaces on my model but i showed them in my drawings.

when asked about this, what was my reply?

"because i didn't want to make my model look ugly!"

this was in defense of my thesis!

ha ha ha, luckily i had a good project (@ least they thought so) so i came out alright!

There are a couple of guys who are always good for a laugh, especially during final review. One's a frat-daddy who you want to hate with your whole being, but you can't help but love. The other's a total ass without a single redeeming factor.

Frat daddy Crit:

Walks in with a "final" model obviously made in the last two hours from poster board, hot glue, and various dry foods. It spins by way of a small R/C motor. There are micro machines and army men as entourage in the model.

C: What the hell is that?
FD: It's my model. It spins. Do you like it?
C: What's the suicide rate on that building?

a few little gems from the total ass:

C: What are all these arrows on your plans and diagrams?
Ass: It's "movable architecture".
Critiquer just looks at him like he's waiting on the punch line...
C: You can't rebuild the Barcelona Pavillion with room dividers on wheels and call it architecture.

C: This diagram is pretty...um...interesting. What is it?
Ass: I diagrammed light.
C: Huh?
Ass: I said I diagrammed light.
C: I got that part. I just don't get how the hell you diagrammed it and what exactly you were diagramming.
Ass: Well I just drew the light.
C: How the hell did you measure the light? What, are you doing your projects in the physics lab? Last time I checked you can't just whip out a ruler and measure light waves.

+-, cut the kid some slack. He knows 7 architects now.


there were two dumb things said at that lecture.

Lecturer: "So the Pantheon is your favorite building, why?"

Student: "Because it is old and has columns" (Or was that our first year profesor's favorite building. Where's the knee pads kid.)

funny rfuller ...cause I had several professors who actually told us to diagram light (though I understood the effects were the actual study). Studio 3...the catalyst of an entire semesters work was a diagram of light...

Well, that's not to say that diagramming light isn't an honorable pursuit and something you can learn a lot about. I wish I had visuals. It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. Words cannot describe the madness that was the ass's light diagram.

We have a "light box" project at TTU where a whole studio is based off of light diagrams...this guy just kind of missed the boat completely.

yeah, it's one thing to actually study the solar azimuth/angle, etc. and it's another thing to diagram light by just drawing a yellow line @ 45 degrees.

hahahaha

yeah ours was about diagramming the pattern of light from photos taken on the hour (every hour) for 24 hours (that was fun- not really).

that pattern was abstracted

the abstract pattern became form

became architecture

insert program

blah blah blah

finals.

...did some cool graphite and conte renderings though.

ha ha ha, @ "insert program"

sadly, that was how a lot of projects i saw while in architecture school came to be. (i'm not excluding myself, by any means!)

the basic formula goes:

use some half assed diagrams to generate a form.

insert architectural program into said form.

tweak as necessary.

hey, presto, you've made architecture!