In a way I envy those whose parents willingly facilitate their offspring's hoarding.

Each time I visit my parents I go through the same trunks, binning a little more than I did on the previous visit.

I'd like to think that future biographers will rue the school jotters that I threw away with their incredible doodles and profundities scribbled in the margins. Thing is, I have enough trouble holding onto things that I actually want and use. Last night someone stole my bicycle lights. In a way I figure that if I conscientiously recycled the detritus of previous years I'd have much better karma with the things that are part of my current and future years.

Thus, I vote for binning it all. The vacuum this creates will suck in better things from the future.

I agree with PsyArch. My laptop died on me wiping out 6 months of unsaved (duh!) work that was finally getting somewhere. After much shock and despair I realized it's just a clean slate and I am going to do it from scratch and do a better job at it anyway.
I also stopped taking pictures at that time in order to practice some restraint.

I keep all my notebooks because I find it amusing to discover that in reality I really don't have many ideas, they just resurface in different forms at different times!
I think we should have a thread with scanned images from people's old notebooks.

lb, please please take them out of the 'garbage' box and store them for posterity. I saw so because I recently realized that I lost most of my Undergrad and Grad drawings (most of the soft copies too), in moving around from house to house. I have also never been one to save drawings and models, but this really hurt me. Tried fixing the Hard Drive also, but to no avail, it had crapped out.
Thankfully I have one crappy portfolio and my Thesis booklet. Everything else, gone.

Im actually thinking of 3d-printing a model of one of my older projects...memories, memories...

lb, if you can, don't throw them away! everybody should have some storage of their notebooks, sketches, old projects, small items etc, if they have them...
it is not much to have few boxes with that kind of stuff. they don't take much space and you can eliminate some of it. i am sure you will, some day, look at them. even it is not for you, they might be important to angus. i never knew my mother wrote few poems without telling me. it is very nice to read them and i didn't know she knew how to draw.
we had my father's diaries and they were very sought after by the airforce museum back in turkey. these things are important and they are not clutter.
i know the storage consultants say if you didn't look at them for a year throw them but they are not junk. i say, if they survived all this time, you should keep them. at least the best of them.
there are some stuff deep in the garage i desperately need and i know exactly what i am looking for from twenty years ago. three short impressions a page or two long each about three cities. williamsburg, new york, los angeles and taos, new mexico...
my two cents.

i always keep.

in some ways it keeps me humble.

i like to look at notebooks from 12 yrs ago and realize how much smarter i was then.

i didn't keep the interim models, only pix of them, but i still have my very first model from first year. at least partly because i didn't know how to build a model and had done some construction, so i sort of built it like i knew a building might be built. that thing is solid!

instead of throwing away old slides/pix i was actually just this week thinking of getting a slide scanner. sure there are pix online, but these are MY pix, from MY point of view. who knows if i'll use them. so?!

along the same lines, i got a turntable that rips tracks to mp3 for christmas. i'm going to digitize all of my albums! think that'll make me get rid of the vinyl? heck no!

I would absolutely keep sketchbooks and slides, and here is why:

Your children and grandchildren will eventually want to go through them to figure out who you are/were and where they came from.

This sounds cheesy, but I happen to be knee-deep at the moment of actually scanning the thousands of slides from my grandparents' life, knowing that they only have a couple years left to live; they are fascinating, each a singular treasure, and I have slowly become more awe-struck to realize from whence I have sprung. The most insignificant things to you -- because they are merely a part of your life and you have lived it and remember it and therefore don't need it anymore -- will be absolutely without value to your descendents. Trust me.

My grandparents can't figure out why we're even bothering to go through this stuff, but I am so very, very glad they blithely trundled it all around with them through life.

yeah, i am in the keep pile, except for models - document and toss. slides and sketches are just too valuable. anything prior to my architecture education gets tossed, i just don't have room for sentimental crap.

I secretly love the television show Clean Sweep.

In that Sunscreen track by Baz Luhrman:

"Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements"

By that rationale, if it is a piece of love, an artefact of passion, a piece that when deciphered by future archaeologists gives the key to the fractal of you, keep it.

However much we are all in transition, the places we are going are the exaggerated echoes of places we have been or seen or dreamed. If the things over which you ponder transport you in that quandary to places you envision future joys, are reminders of seminal successes, are waymarkers for your children, keep them.



My initial reaction of "put it all in the bin" is, in part, a reaction to living in a space-constrained city, where only by streamlining can one get to the places dreamed of. Reduce ballast, demand of yourself only your dreams. Holding too tight to your past denies your present the hands, by which we live, to make the future.

[Don't leave your grandchildren (your) things, give them (your) time]

There is somewhere among my rational determinist take on life lived as a post-modern stoic epicurean existentialist, a superstition akin to the making of a "mojo", the making of quasi-totemic collections of things of power, symbolic and personal.

You will know your mojo when you find it. Do not throw it out. However, do not let it be compromised by things you mistake for precious.

I have kept a few models from school.

my son (7) uses one as a bookend and the other is at the office. As for sketchbooks they only take up a banker box or two and can be used as a door stop if need be.

My thesis resides in the bottom drawer of the flat file at the office granted I have't pulled it out in years.

While I may hold onto these forever, I still have 4 more years until I can throw out past cleint work!

My first year, first semester studio professor brought one of his college sketchbooks in to show us and it was fascinating. Like all sketchbooks, it was part self-centered drivel and part intriguingly difficult-to-identify sketches. We thought it was all kinds of exotic and it was a good spur to initiate us into the Sacred Rites of Sketchbook-keeping.

keep the sketch books and the slides....

i tossed some models over the years (and i'm a model freak)...but i got tired of moving them and around and having to be carefull and repair them on each rough travel.

i also tossed out alot of b.s. that i kept.... bed set/materials/hardware/etc...stuff that i collected over the years but never used for anything.

only thing i regret getting rid of is my larger power tools...table saw/air compressor/air tools/etc.... grrrr....

my goal is to be able to pack up everything in the next van/truck i buy and be able to move when needed...unless i buy a shop


b

PsyArch, you sound as conflicted about it as I am.

I have a too-big house that I want to fill with empty space.

But you're all right, a single box of slides and sketchbooks doesn't take *that* much space. I will cull the slides, though, so I don't have 15 oh-so-slightly-different views of the front of Plecnik's tomb.

The nice thing about revisiting that goofy grad school angst is it reminds me that our beloved grad students here on Archinect will, despite it all, survive and grow just as they are supposed to. Growing older is overall pretty cool.

at least keep a digital archive

I'd say definitely keep it--I don't really believe in a blank slate approach in general. I think there's always some context or history, whether it's pertaining to a design or to your life, and it's important to maintain an understanding or link to that context. I would, however, try to organize it. Just piling old things up isn't that helpful--it's cluttered and difficult to reference, but I think if you organize it, and selectively thin it out, you'll get the same sense of relief as you would from just discarding it all, but maintain the ability to go back to it when you like.

That's actually a really excellent point, FLM. Organization is key. Thanks.

I saved a lot of stuff from school and still have a good amount of it. It's been stored away and I haven't really looked at or thought much about it over the last few years. As I get older it seems less important to keep as much of it around. I'm sure I won't want to keep lugging it all around forever, though I'm sure I'll always want to keep some record of that chapter of my existence. I'd like to digitize but it's still not easy or cheap to scan things that are on sheets larger than 11x17.

I would never throw out a sketch book. While I love the term "grad school angst" my sketchbooks are like a journal of where I was at that moment in time. I also tend to write short quips ~ who was there with me, what beer we had a lunch, etc., and paste crap in there ~ a calling card or tourist tri-fold. I cherish those more than any photo album.

Also saved a lot of stuff from college. Notes and such that I thought would be useful someday in my working life. Back then I thought everything would be relevant for the ARE. Silly me. Now it's been purged down to one rubbermaid bin. It's interesting to read my college notes or look at old quiz questions. Unlike Steven, I often think about how stupid I was. I got THAT wrong on a quiz??

My current vise is saving scrap wood. Hey, someday I might need a small chunk of oak that size...this 1/4 sheet of plywood will be good for something, someday. I even have a box full of old basswood leftovers, which make decent shims. And can someone become a packrat of books? I never can find the heart to get rid of a book I've read. Never know when I might want to reference that. Then again, a full book case is different than an old stack of class notes.

My spouse often complains that our house is over 1/2 filled with my crap. When she moved to the states she had to do the ultimate purge and only kept what she truly was willing to move. A little different than merely moving state to state. In the end your memories are more important than the "stuff" but so long as I have the space to store it, most of it will be saved.

LB, I have a craft project for what to do with your excess slides. Don't toss them quite yet.

Give me a few days and I'll post pictures of what I* did with my parent's old slides.




*Disclaimer - I used the word 'I' liberally. It was really my sister's idea and I helped her execute the idea.

My sister and I wanted to do something special with my parent's old slides. She came up with the idea of making a lamp shade. The attached photo is of her lamp shade in her craft room.

Ten points to the first person who can find Oscar Niemeyer's work.

good one, vado. well played.

n_ second slide down on the left?

Ding, ding.

Also, the fourth down on the left.

Thanks for posting it, n_, I do think it's cool, and with a bunch of my black and white "weird textural surface" slides from Cranbrook I think I could make a very atmospheric lampshade....