One hell of a week… but today, was pretty awesome. I woke up to take test on concrete beams, had a 30 minute break to clean my apartment and do laundry, returned to school for a three hour class on glass detailing, had a team meeting about building a house this summer, went for a six mile run, and then returned for a two hour symposium with Kevin Roche and Christopher Hawthorne. (funny quotes to come)
Those were all the things that I had planned and expected myself to do during the day. But, what came after was unexpected. I went to the usual post-lecture cocktail in the exhibition space and ran into my TA from last semester with a cluster of other students. For the next hour and a half we were completely engrossed in conversation about archi-politics, which led to dinner at a local sushi joint. What I loved about this evening, is that we were constantly talking about ways to improve our environment, whether through Yale specifically, or through our own stance on design. One fellow student has started a company based on potluck style dining experience for graduate students. Students essentially create a community by sharing ideas over cooking and eating while enrolled in various graduate fields of study. Another student argued the value of free hand drawing and the increased failure to produce being a purely technologically dependent artist… ie the writer who can’t write without a computer… which is a bizarre realization. Another student criticized the “game-playing” politics involved in the critic-practitioner relationship.
While we were all passionate and sometimes upset about certain aspects of our “profession,” we all more or less spoke with an undertone that we care. We, as designers, care about the way people live their lives. We care that people get together, that they produce, and that they have integrity. I really can’t think of something I’d rather be doing than reinforcing those ideals. And, I truly believe design/ architecture is able to do that.
To send my message home… after dinner, it was no question that we grab coffee on our way back to studio. There is nothing more than doing that can get you to where you want to be and what you want to accomplish. It was that moment when we all returned to school at 11:30pm on a Friday night, that I realized I was happiest. And now at 2am, I am still am excited about what I am doing and working towards.
