little glimpse of the last of things

i have to go through the rest of the photos and fix them (the lighting was so yellow...gross)...and photoshop out the dead bugs that died on all my models. but coming soon, a glimpse of what i've been up to for the past month and a half or so... somehow the photos don't do it justice, but hopefully it'll give you an idea of my sweat and toil.

in other news, i will be in boston for the summer! come visit and i'll actually have time to entertain you!
some general goals for the sunny days to come:

1) review my leed knowledge, which has lain dormant for...almost 2 years??
2) explore the nooks and crannies of boston
3) find the best brunch
4) really use my kitchen
5) learn to play the guitar
6) learn to sail
7) actually exercise in some fashion (preferably through dance or runs along the river)
8) take weekend camping/hiking trips
9) learn spanish
10) design something cool in masonry
11) work on a revamped portfolio...and perhaps a website
12) help my mom renovate the house...or at least pick out paint colors
13) visit people!

ambitious? perhaps. ah well, i'm still looking forward to a summer that will most definitely be more relaxing than this past year. a reflection on the year to come...once i gather my thoughts. or, once i find my thoughts after they've scattered.

listening to music whose lyrics i don't understand, strolling leisurely through boston, getting turned down by cab drivers

to infinity...and beyond!

rendered w/ the latitude of algeria...just because

so close to being done! we just had our final project review for our building tech class this morning, and now just one more to go on wednesday...

for this project, we had to design a long span roof that would cover 30,000 SF of space. no program, just pure structural integrity (hopefully). my partner mallory and i were interested in designing an unreinforced masonry dome that would act purely in compression. i have to fix the texture mapping, but that was one of the renderings of the project.

i actually like this one better, although it was just an initial study to see how the materials would look on the surfaces. obviously the scale is really out of whack...but i like anyways.

it was actually a really refreshing review and format: instead of us each presenting one at a time, we put up our boards science fair-style and had reviewers circulating around to critique us. we got 3 official critiques from various engineers and a couple non-official ones from our TAs and studio professors. all in all, it was efficiently timed and we were done in an hour and a half, which is completely unheard of in a typical design studio review.

anyways, back to the last project, which is an animation sequence for our design skills class. more later.

listening to what pandora has to offer with my noise cancelling headphones on
figure out what's going on for the summer, read about historic preservation in beijing and christian hedonism

my so-called disfunctional family

now that it's nearing the end of the term, it's sort of hard to believe our first year of architecture school is coming to a close. we pulled through, and as a class of 24, it's pretty remarkable and crazy how well we've gotten to know each other. sure, there are still people who i don't know as well as others, but we've come to a point when, after spending almost 24/7 together, we've come to know everyone's little (and big) idiosyncrasies, habits, and moods.

i can recognize people's sneezes.

everyone plays a different role in our mini level 1 world and has their signature line or even accent (thanks to nadya + ann, people now speak in a pseudo-eastern european/russian accent that no one can really identify). we've got inside jokes like:

"i just keeee-ding!"
"this kind of thing" (said w/ a korean accent - no, we don't do racial profiling, just an international class)
"bless you!"
"never working, always sleeping" and other variations (german accent)
and more

and we know when people are sick, when people have or haven't been in studio, which visitors come, etc. i guess it's a mix of people caring and being nosy busy-bodies, but hey, how could you not notice some things? and in general, it's a nice thing to have friends who value each other's presence.

anyways, i didn't mean for this to be too sentimental, but it made me smile to think about the new family :)

FINITO!

(well, almost!)

at least, i'm done with studio!!! the final review was this past wednesday, and the week leading up to that was practically one
very
long
day.

i never really noticed until now how important sleep is, not simply for the well being of your body, but simply in terms of separating days and giving you a sense of time. because of our crazy sleeping patterns (and i won't go into what exactly they were, for fear of too many comments), it was more like napping several times rather than truly sleeping and experiencing a more definitive passage of time.

this is the true time warp that rocky horror spoke of, although it was bizarre in a very different way.

the critique itself went pretty well. i think the reviewers (a smattering of professors/practitioners from various universities) were fair with their criticism and also gave some promising encouragement, which was really good. sometimes their comments can be unproductive, but this time i think they were pretty perceptive with their questions and suggestions. they even said that, given another week or so, the project could've been really pushed to a higher level, and to be honest, i agree with them. i know i could've done more and am not sure exactly how i would've done so, but hey - it's done for now, and hopefully the ideas generated will spur me on to further good works. i'll upload some photos of the final work once i actually document.

as for the process in general, this last week wasn't just pure torturous work, but had bright moments, too. some of the things that kept me going were:

1) supportive friends and late night visitors who gave encouragement and that extra push to keep going
2) wake up calls
3) prayers
4) praise music practically on pandora and ipod (some favorites: "hosanna" - hillsong, "surrender" - downhere, "
5) the other part of the 24/7, jason mraz and other laid back tunes
6) a supportive critic who urged us to "wind down" the night before w/ some wine (although...sadly we did not wind down but wound back up)
7) the wood shop laser cutter - sad, but true. it got my files cut and made model assembly easier!

and you know what's bizarre? i hardly relied on caffeine to stay awake through all of this. weird, right? i guess my body relies on other strength to keep going.

so much going on... i'm still figuring out what's going on for the summer. there's a chance i will be having quite a masonry one, but that's yet to be confirmed. who would've thought that masonry camp all those summers back would've resulted in this constant reoccurance of brick and stone in my life??

anyways... off to finish my laundry, a la jason mraz's "geek in the pink."

listening to vampire weekend and the viva la vida album (coldplay), reading a cook's tour - a.bourdain, feeling RESTED but still not quite completely awake, very excited for research prospects to come!
relieved, anticipatory (word?), curious...