A sudden wave of anxiety washed over me as I found myself standing alone in the driveway of a seedy motel among a crowd of well-dressed creative types. From an outsider's point of view, it must have looked like a typical college party. Red Solo cups and beer bottles littered the ground. Groups of friends huddled together in tight circles. Music blared from multiple directions, one from an unseen DJ and another from a downstairs motel room. However, if one looked or listened carefully, one would notice that this wasn't your ordinary college function. Everyone was too good-looking and sharply dressed, not trashy in any way. Conversations revealed key words such as "figure ground", "Python script", and "Oculus Rift". Even though this wasn't a college party, the event was a one-night stand to remember. 

One-Night Stand LA took place in the Holiday Lodge Motel in Los Angeles.

One-Night Stand LA; organized by SCI-Arc alumni Ryan Tyler Martinez, William Hu, and Anthony Morey; featured various projects "exploring different forms of media, but also new possibilities for architectural strategies of subversion". This one-night stand for art and architecture exploited the humor of the event's location and name (e.g. using images of condoms on Instagram for advertisement). TALL (Kyle Branchesi and Shane Reiner-Roth) remade paraphernalia that are found in all motel rooms, calling their piece the Museum of the History of the Motel. Other participants, on the other hand, used their given motel rooms as mere exhibition rooms, where their work had little to nothing to do with the setting. 

A close up of TALL's imitation night stand, lamp, and Bible.

Sarah Newby's paintings on the balcony of a motel room

As I get closer to finishing undergraduate school, these types of events impact me more greatly than they would if I were to experience them two or three years ago. The anxiety that hit me previously came with a reminder of my future's uncertainty. Sure, I know what I want to do with my life for the next few years: work for two, grad school for one, and then teach after that. However, I ultimately want to continue to challenge the classic view of architecture through experiments similar to what has been done during One-Night Stand and Treatise.

I am afraid of leaving school, where I have the protected opportunity to carry out my investigations and architectural disputes. I simply have to remind myself that I can continue to do such things outside of school, as long as I dedicate my free time to this. In some ways, I am also afraid of doing this alone. Although I prefer to work independently, my peers who are simultaneously carrying out parallel and tangential explorations comfort me because they understand the motive behind the work. Those with different agendas may not see the point in things such as this one-night stand for art and architecture. I suppose I simply have to remind myself that this will always be the case. While architecture is a broad subject, only those within its bubble will have the slightest bit of understanding, and even those people may not comprehend or care about the smaller topics within architecture.