The lottery gave me one of two student seats at dinner with
Rafael Moneo tomorrow night, after his lecture. What should I ask him?

Lian

[Addendum: The lecture was great. It was called "Design Conditioned by Circumstance: The Advantages of Obstacles for the Architect." Michael Meredith described it as taking Venturi Scott Brown's argument, which was "promiscuous" and radical in its context and making it into a moral argument. I saw it not so much in terms of making an argument about complexity or contradiction, but about making a building that is a good neighbor and a good leader, that respects its context while making the buildings around it better also. He looked at four American institutional projects and talked quite a bit about how his intervention related to the existing context in terms of urbanistic questions of paths through the site, creating linkages, doorways, and thresholds in a campus, and so on.

The dinner was even better. I'll write soon...]

Hi Archinect! Since it's about that time again, I just wanted to share a few things about this school, and the M.Arch.I program, that would have surprised me at this time last year: 1. Building Construction courses, aka "City of Wood" and "City of Steel." I thought Scott Cohen was just humoring me... View full entry

When this project started, my goal was to have a clear direction from the beginning, and I took for this starting point the idea of urban fabric on the Greek island of Santorini. I was interested in stacking, nesting, and complexity in section, and the use of one building's negative space as its... View full entry

1. GSD Student Announce. It's an email list for the whole GSD student population (optional, but almost everyone seems to use it). It adds a substantial amount of bulk to our inboxes, but it's the voice of the school, and I just think of it as fiber: it just passes happily and healthily through... View full entry

As we lined up to get into Stubbins today, I asked my former buttmate*, James Martin, if he thought lunch was already being served. He said "this isn't utopia: we can have either Tschumi or free food, but not both." However, the fact of the matter was that today, we did get both, because Bernard... View full entry

Louis Kahn's Exeter Library. View full entry

So, to conclude our first project, we hauled all our models out to have a "round-table" discussion, in which talked about how they represented "bottom-up" processes dealing with the unit towards the whole, and how the investigations at the level of the unit and aggregations were more successful... View full entry

Hello Archinect! It’s hard to say which is more unbelievable, that over three weeks of this semester have already gone by, or that a mere twenty-two days ago I was on my winter holiday, watching movies and hanging out with friends. The thing is that one’s experience of time is... View full entry

Hello Archinect! So I'm feeling guilty for neglecting this blog. I have the usual excuses about being busy or trying to compose my thoughts, or whatever--but suffice to say that it's not you, it's me... and I’m going to do better now that I’m on the wagon again for semester two... View full entry

Hello Archinect, On Friday, GSD alum Andrew Hartness brought a kindergarten class to the GSD. They toured the facilities, were greeted by Dean Mostafavi (who talked to them about Career Discovery!), and got a lesson from Andrew on the different orthographic drawing types (plan, section, elevation)... View full entry

The Return of Nature is a symposium discussing "the question of architecture's autonomy in relation to contemporary debates." Each of the three panelists (a historian, theorist, and architect) presents a thesis, perhaps positioned polemically relative to the other two, and then engage in... View full entry

Hello Archinect, I wanted to follow up on last week’s post with some thoughtful prose about the GSD, my experience of it so far, and what I’m learning. But—and maybe this is the best sign that I’m starting to be a real architecture student—I can’t seem to muster... View full entry

Hello Archinect! Well, we’ve finished four short (12-14 days each) projects and are just starting our last one for the semester: a building/pedestrian bridge integrated into, and more or less based on, one of three locks that sit at the mouth of the Charles river. I say “more or... View full entry

Hello Archinect! Our second project, which was a house in a 7.5' gap between two existing gable-roofed houses, is finished. It was great to see what everyone came up with; this project required formal invention much more than the first one, which was more analytical, so there was a great deal of... View full entry

Oh goody. Preston Scott Cohen is grilling Thom Mayne in Piper tonight. He asked him about style. Mayne, presenting himself as someone who solves problems and steers a process without a priori formal notions, said "Oh, I don't think about style. I'm very ambivalent with aesthetics." PSC said "But... View full entry

Hello Archinect! A couple of quick notes from the Gehry/Brown conversation in Piper tonight. Joe Brown is great, but he is very PC and says the right thing; Gehry is more, well, Frank, so the notes and quotes I jotted down are from him: Gehry started by talking about how it's important to "stay... View full entry

Hello Archinect! It’s been three weeks since my last post, so I apologize for my absence. I’ve been busy! Our first studio project—the addition of an elevator to a 19th century building with convoluted staircases and other circulation patterns—has come and gone, and our... View full entry

Hello Archinect! We’re just over half way through our pre-semester horse and pony show at the GSD. It’s a long haul. On Wednesday we had international student orientation, on Thursday was a general orientation, on Friday we had more presentations and facility tours, and these will... View full entry

I printed out my dissertation today and put it in the mail, so now I can focus on my schoolwork and getting to know my new friends here! View full entry

Ok, today was the second day of the digital skills workshop and up until this point, were were supposed to model the Rietveld Schroder House in Rhino, mess around fitting it into its site, and then do some interior renovations to adapt it for two occupants--a "misanthropic academic" and a more... View full entry

Hello! Today was download/installation day, take two. I ran into some technical difficulties last week and had to re-partition and re- install Windows, then spent the afternoon with about 20 of my new classmates setting up Rhino, V-Ray, 3D-Studio Max, AutoCAD, Illustrator, and Photoshop, which is... View full entry

School is slowly starting to ramp up over the next few weeks: Tomorrow is the first of two sessions where incoming students can go to Gund Hall to have our mandatory lobotomies and microchip implants—uh, I mean, free software installations in Microsoft XP. Next Wednesday, our one-week... View full entry

I couldn't resist sending you all a quick note because... this is my first post from Gund Hall! I've been fighting insect infestations at my apartment and had to step out to regain some sanity, so I figured I might as well check out the new digs. As I ascended the trays, I realized that each one... View full entry

Hello again! Thank-you to everyone who left comments on my first post. I really appreciate it—and whenever you post questions, I’ll be sure to respond, whether by email or in this space. A couple of people asked why I’m pursuing an MArch after a PhD, and whether my goal is in... View full entry

I left Montreal and crossed the border between Canada and the United States on July 10, 2009, in the passenger seat of a mini-van driven by my best friend (I don't have a license), filled with all my worldly possessions, and headed for Boston. In just under a month I'll be a first-year M.Arch.I... View full entry