Pictures of the Surface of the Earth

2008-01-20T17:13:00.000-05:00

kdollaghan.tumblr.com for photo updates!!

2007-12-25T16:56:00.000-05:00

ah, yes. christmas! it was so exciting, we got mom and iphone, and were so excited to see her face when she opened it. yet last night, as we were trying to give her this gift, dad brought out two other gifts and was trying to make us open them at the same time. annicka and i were sort of annoyed since we were trying to take pictures and watch the magic.. it turned out, they'd gotten us iphones too! so now we're just one big happy iphone family except that dad has a treo, which i think has been difficult to look at for the last couple of hours. but he has been consoled by the fact that there are rumours of a business model of iphone coming out. woo! his bday is january 12, and though i don't think it will be out by then, the mac convention does happen in january, i think! so maybe then it'll be unveiled.

in other apple news, i think annicka might be going to work at the apple store on michigan ave. in chicago, as a creative! coool!!! her friend works there and they are hiring, so i'm sure they'll snap her up. she's the best teacher of all things electric. patient, see!

well we are leaving for colorado on the 27th, to go to grandma's 80th bday. of course mom is organizing some crazy shit, for example, the other day a box of like 5,000 m&ms with the words "Happy Birthday Nancy!" inscribed on them arrived. AWESOME. also, it's a casino themed party. oooooh snap. i cannot wait.

i'm a little nervous about the drive, since we drove last yr to go skiing for a few days and let me say.. it was a trek. but i figure, i'll have my iphone to keep my occupied, right? i'll need to download some game apps i guess..

the night before christmas eve was fun too, dad wanted to go to nobu so that was very fun and delicious. the nobu here is in this absolutely insane complex in the center of the city, which looks like what can only be described as a victorian skyscraper. or maybe, not a skyscraped, but a mega-structure. it's this cream colored brick, trimmed with bizarre white molded iron decorations, and lit up at night with old school string lights, just naked bulbs. awesome. it's so horrible and wonderful. actually many find it horrible, but i really like it in this weird way. it looks great in texas, let's say. actually, here's a picture of it i took back in august.

and that's just the back end of the sucker. anyways, so that's where nobu is, and we went and had a really good dinner, though the service really sucked. i had lobster ceviche, crab with spicy sauce, and a shrimp role. we drank prosecco, since it was a very celebratory evening, annicka having just gotten home.

we also took some hilarious "jumping" pictures:

anyways it was a very fun night. now i am just sitting here, messing with my iphone. i love it! excited to return to school in january, especially now that they announced who the critics will be. it lends an air of.. newness or something. the term ended up fine, i feel pretty good about everything. i'm nervous about next term, when we'll now have two different structures classes - structures II and environments and enclosures. ohhh, boy. i'm also considering moving, because i feel really far away from the action for some reason. just isolated i guess? the thing is, i either need to move all the way downtown so i'm close to my slc friends, or back uptown to be closer to school. hmmm

2007-12-24T18:44:00.000-05:00

im going through a civil war phase... make that.. life

classic studio moments 2

2007-12-22T11:42:00.000-05:00

alright, these videos are pretty old now, but i got the urge to post them. these two are classic, you gotta watch this one first. mid-studio final allnighters, after having total freakout/panic attacks and getting a whey protein bar at hamilton deli. which features in the second video as RAT BAIT as you can see, the 'rat gag' escalated over the night.

rocking high tops and saying no to stilettos

2007-12-17T04:09:00.001-05:00

this has been a weird few days! my schedule is all fucked up still from studio finals. i thought i had pretty much recovered after a week of sleeping more, but apparently there are more long-term effects than i realized. i haven't been able to go to sleep until about 5am every morning and i am weirdly hyperactive and then really lazy. like i fall asleep at 6pm until 12am, and then can't sleep until 6am. uuugh it's horrible cuz i have shit to DO!!!

friday was FUN, my friend leah whom i met in berlin came over with some delicious wine from her restaurant and we drank that... then we went to jarett's bday party in brooklyn at the jefferson loft and that was pretty fun. ojay and his entourage were there which is always crazy and hilarious. also there was sophie, who went to slc but is doing a yr abroad at the columbia/paris program, and i loooove her. hopefully we'll hang out more soon. i was also really excited to see jiddy and justin, though amy had left earlier which was disappointing. but going home from that place blows. it takes like 1-2 hours on the train. and its never a one, so youve got to walk from 96th.

not being at studio all the time is weird and alienating.. like i don't know where my center is or something? my sleep schedule is all fucked up so i'm always walking home at 4am and stuff. i never see any daylight..

im excited to buy some stuff for my family.. annicka if you are reading this, tell me what you want, cuz for some reason i'm an idiot at buying stuff for you. i always see somehting i think you'll think is funny and you end up like wtf is this??!?!? so let me know. PLS!!!

i finally belong somewhere

2007-12-15T20:35:00.000-05:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
The West
The Midland
Boston
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

final review triply surface with hiking boot run through

2007-12-13T06:54:00.000-05:00

2007-12-11T02:48:00.001-05:00

woOOOOOOOO! rhino is in FREE BETA TESTING for OSX!

the irony of this is that there are only 3 days left in the term.

wait til i get my money right

2007-12-10T00:37:00.000-05:00

last night was pretty fun. i met up with starsha, jarett and justin, whom i hadn't seen in like a monthhhh because of school. we ate at the old town or old town or whtever the fuck, and it was delicious. bar food. wings and cider. mmmm anyways, then we went down to tribeca to stop by andrea's house, where she was having her birthday. wow was it ever fun! their place is amazing, her parents are both architects so it the whole place was done by them - really beautiful. the party was great. there were lots of planners, who turned out to be great. they're like the architecture kids, but a little less into themselves in some way? which i can appreciate. there was also a pinata. YES. i also tried many types of booze, or "liqueur" as they say, which i had never had. for example, absolut pepper with pomegranate. and so on. it was fuuun. then we had to leave to go to the mckibbin lofts.

it was going to take 45 hours to go back uptown and then get on the damn L, so we took a cab and went across the williamsburg bridge. it was great. so we got there at like 2, when a bunch of people had already left, but it was nice to see everyone. the place was decorated all christmasy and we walked in during a walk off ala tyra mail. hilarious.

i stupidly only got out my camera for about 5 minutes of the evening, so i have a weirdly concentrated, small number of photos.
here are some highlights.

and this, for my money, is the stupidest and funniest picture of the night. wtf is wrong with us in this picture. it looks like 1991

kanye in chicago

2007-12-09T22:23:00.000-05:00

im watching this over and over...

2007-12-07T13:07:00.000-05:00

Yeah, i know envelopes is spelled wrong.

2007-12-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

2007-12-03T23:06:00.001-05:00

i don't want to sound overdramatic about this, because the second and third years act like it's nothing.. but this is definitely an experience i have never had before.

all the days run together, which sounds like a cliche, but i mean it literally: you can't remember which is which because there's no change in activity to mark the day's passing, like sleep. mom reminded me today that the last time i had been home/slept was sunday morning from 7-9. it's like: you stay at studio for 6 days straight, with 2-3 hour breaks each 24 hours to nap and change your clothes. there are more people in studio at 5am then there normally are at 2pm on a weekday. sunday morning, before i went for the nap, was great: smokers coming in from outside said it was snowing! ashley and i went out, there was snow! it wasn't dawn yet, but there was enough to see the snow in a real way. as ashley said, it was 'snow light.!'

here's a picture i took later that morning when the snow had melted mostly:

malika told me i might have repetitive stress injuries in my last two fingers on each hand and my shoulders, from resting my elbows on my desk when computering, cuz i guess that means i use the tendons in my sholders (which connect to my last two fingers) to move shit around and that means a lot of constant movement and pressure. it feels WEIRD. like your shoulders aren't TIRED, but they feel all crunchy and wobbly and my two fingers tingle and go numb. from sitting! white collar injury!

i'm getting worried to leave our little bay in studio. i love it. people are so funny. i take videos, but afterwards you can never tell whats happening in them or why the hell it was funny at all. but it WAS SO FUNNY!

Youtubing

2007-11-30T04:11:00.000-05:00

Pimp My Model with X-ACTO

HAHAH

FOA's Yokohama Ferry Terminal Sermon

Awesome

efterklang

2007-11-29T14:55:00.001-05:00

2007-11-28T19:59:00.000-05:00

Cell Phone Tower May be Built Inside Cross

elevator at ICA

2007-11-19T00:46:00.000-05:00

4th model light tabel pics

2007-11-19T00:33:00.000-05:00

there were lots of irish people

2007-11-18T01:49:00.000-05:00

good start to weekend!

i decided at the last minute (11.00am friday during drawing) to go to boston for the night to see my parents, who were at ASHA (american speech and hearing assoc). i took the bus up for port authority, and they met me at south station - where i immediately ran into a girl i studied abroad with in copenhagen. weird! we ate dinner at "elephant walk," a cambodian-french (and also gluten free) restauraunt. delicious.

unfortunately, i jumped on the bus in my disgusting still unwashed since the review clothes and only a pair of thermal underwear (why!?!?!), not realizing i was getting to boston just in time for all the celebratory honors cocktail parties. oooh, boy! hello thousands of people to make a good impression to! haha, and i was so out of it. you know it's bad when you find yourself in a ten minute conversation with the guy they hired to dress up as paul revere for people who want pictures with a legend at the "texas" party. it was surreal! as evidenced below.

my mom and dad were staying at this really nice new westin, so they had this great room high up with a wall of windows and a great view. the best part was the beds. oh man, those beds are great. so many pillows. so high off the ground. great sheets. ahhh that bed. i couldn't stop getting up to look out that wall of glass though. somehow glass like that makes the scene outside so much better. it frames it, i guess. but equally across the whole plane.

then this morning i got to go down to the convention and see my mom's new book's publisher's stand! cooool! here's my dad looking happy about it. i guess it's been reaaally well recieved and sold out, but my mom would never admit to it wholly - so everyone else says so! oh man i am so happy for her. i guess the publishers are really happy cuz theyve had tons of orders from universities.

so then we had some seafood, i had looobbssttteeeer WOOO! and went to the new diller+scofidio+renfro building right next door, the institute for contemporary art. wowwww. i was really pretty impressed with in, especially with the structural clarity of it, in terms of tectonics - the large horizontal ribbon cutting through (i.e. the shape on the side of the block) the whole volume and these little snippets cut off and in. i'm not sure about how the decided to site the whole thing, it seems like it was just kind of plopped down there but really i only saw about 15 seconds of its surroundings so who am i to comment. i really just like diller+scofidio.

periodic surface shoe

2007-11-16T10:45:00.000-05:00

can you even see this is a shoe? it's two sections of a hiking boot, modeled in rhino, and then run through a minimal periodic surface. WTF?

countdown to 3/4 term review

2007-11-14T03:22:00.000-05:00

1.15am

3.30 am

2007-11-12T13:20:00.000-05:00

this week is gearing up to be a COMPLETE SHITSHOW. okay. hear me out here.
i had to spend the entire day yesterday writing a goddamn history paper. i was up until 6am (i had to be at school at 9am). i've got a review with jeffrey in 20 minutes, our LAST before wednesday, which is 3/4th term reviews. and BTW, what the fuck is a three quarters review? how is that even helpful? why not just call every day the 5/17th semester review and be done with it. anyways, i have to have a lasercut model, scale sections, plans, and perspectives in rhino and maya to pin up for wednesday, which means i have to plot by tuesday afternoon. TOMORROW AFTERNOON! i haven't even nailed down then final rhino model. also, our crazy ass triply surface drawing is due on friday, which is supposed to be our most "involved" and "sophisticated."
okay, so all that sucks, blah blah blah.. but then today at work, i found out we have a structures EXAM on thursday that he just SPRUNG on us. THE DAY AFTER (or in some studio's cases, of) our 3/4th term reviews. REALLY??? REALLY???? a fucking structures exam on ALL of the physics and calculus that weve had since the second week in september? OH NO PROBLEM! it's like, remember when you assigned us a simple HOMEWORK assignment the day before midterms? EVERYONE in the class got a check minus!even the engineers! iefv;oaherv;aeworg[0rqOAWEHIGOWRHG'[R9GALIWHEGAWER
plus: the review session is WEDNESDAY NIGHT AT 8PM! our 6 hour review is going to go at least until 7pm. and that night will be all night. WTFFFFFF

10 MIN LATER:
good review with jeffrey, but IVE GOT SOOO MUUUCH WOOORRKWAEOIJFAWIEJGFAWE

up to the sky

2007-11-10T01:44:00.000-05:00

so jiddy and some of her friends and i saw mum tonight! wowwwww! it was so cool! i've been so into mum since freshman yr and it was wonderful to see them in concert. god they are an adorable bunch. they all look so nice. and icelandic. and funny. the show was in a church on 60th and columbus, amaaazing venue for the music. if you want to get an idea of what they played, listen to "moon pulls" from the newest album. IT'S SO GOOD! imagine that in a huge dark church. it was kinda spooky, beautiful and great. apparently the icelandic ambassador was in the crowd. it was painfully cute everytime the band spoke: "eh...we playd a song about a boat, and then we play song about water, and now we'll play a song.. well it's about something so silly i don't know what to say."

and then at the end, their guitarist, who had been kind of lurking in the back of the stage, came forward towards the very front and just kind of stood there. and then one of his bandmates was like "i think robert thinks we are being far too serious and wants to tell a joke" and then he just stood there, and after about 10 seconds lifted up his ankle with one hand and proceeded to "jump" through it.. you know, like jumprope with your arm and leg? TWICE. and then just silently walked back. HAHAHA.

the vocalists for mum have the prettiest voices i've ever heard, and the most powerful. the super blonde boy cut girl was like stunningly amazing. i could listen to her sing all day. enough to give you shivers. also the guy.

our site for studio

2007-11-09T00:52:00.000-05:00

2007-11-07T18:04:00.000-05:00

in a crowd of homesick full grown children

2007-11-06T21:33:00.000-05:00

well, i guess i finally understand the meaning of the phrase "fate came knocking." i woke up this afternoon, got dressed, ate some cereal and stuff, and went to studio. it's just ashley and i in our row today for whatever reason, so it works out well for us. and everything is just good in that sense . so we sat around and didn't do work and took smoking breaks (well i didn't smoke). then we went to ollie's for dinner which was nice. got some candy and went back to studio. tried to do some structures, failed, and gave up. so i was sitting at my desk, and i looked up as someone walked by - it was this kid that i studied with in copenhagen, all weighed down by bags. i guess it was one of those double take moments, where the context (arch school) is right, but the chronology is off. so he's on a grad school tour, UVA, MIT, columbia, etc.etc. and just stopped by studio before the open house. etc.etc.

this is all not that Big of a Deal, this isn't someone i was close to in CPH, but something about it really shocked me. like the juxtaposition of two time periods that are closely connected to each other in terms of motivation, cause, want - but not in literal terms. psychologically - copenhagen feels a million miles away. yet: i still think about it daily. more than daily - when i listen to illinois, actually all sufjan.. even just sitting in studio this afternoon, as we got into that studio workflow that i loved in copenhagen. like kind of bullshitting and doing no work but that being the point - late afternoon...

i guess this is all written in kind of nebulous language..but i guess it was the first time i connected the two eras in a literal way. one is a model for the other - recreating copenhagen, while aspiring to columbia. suddenly they were both real. what i mean is: we spend a lot of time missing past incarnations of ourselves, without appreciating the present (which we'll later miss as well). it was cool to be slapped into reality by a relic's appearance.

btw, new beirut: awesome. "nantes," "guyama sonora," and "forkes and knives (la fete)."

ring them bells

2007-11-03T00:45:00.000-05:00

HOLY CRAP, best night ever.
okay.
so i got to go see sufjan stevens tonight at BAM. in the third row. like, i could walk up and shake hands with mr. stevens. it was coooool! i got this ticket cuz i was looking to buy some on craigslist, and one of the posts i replied to was a free ticket for the 'best story.' anyways, i got it, because i emailed first, and the guy selling it is originally from elfinwild road, which is like.....2 mi down my old street in pittsburgh. whoa! so him and his friends and i met up outside of BAM tonight, they gave me this insanely awesome ticket for free, and we went in to see sufjan premiere his BQE piece, which is about the brooklyn queens expressway... and is AMAZING. another pivotal part of it was that it had a lot to do with hula hoops...like 6 kids dressed in day glo doing insane hula hoop tricks in front of a full orchestra and movie screen projecting super 8 footage of the BQE sufjan took. WOAWEFIOVAERVOIQEWJ! so that piece lasted for a half hour, then there was intermission, then he played a full set:
(in sorta mis-order)

seven swans (amazing arrangement)
concerning the UFO sighting...
the black hawk war... (i couldn't believe they played these two in succession or even at all... so amazing i wanted to cry)
detriot, lift up your weary head!
john wayne gacy
casimir pulaski day
MAJESTY SNOWBIRD (slightly different arrangement, incredible.. put on the wings for this one)
predatory wasp of the palisades (another amazing made up story to go with it)
a new song no one had heard, beautiful and piano just ss. singing about kissing and barns and stuff
CHICAGO!

oh god it was great. and the people i went with were SO nice. we're going to hang out this week. cooool!

okay, so that was mind numbingly beautiful and nice and fun and exciting and new.
then i met another cool person and afterwards met up with a bunch of slcers (amy, nick, katie, analee, emma etc) and had a strongbow. me and amy decided to go home early, and on the platform:
i saw a girl carrying a hula hoop.. i ran up to her like "did you buy that at BAM tonight!!" (cuz they were selling 50 limited edition ss hula hoops) and the guy she was with was like, nah, its hers, and i realized: she was one of the six crazy hula hoopers on stage during BQE! WHOA! she had the red lipstick and dayglo orange nailpolish and everything. they were so nice, i felt bad for interrupting cuz they were kissing a little. i was all drunk like Heyy!!!

most of the time, nyc sucks so hard. but every so often this serendipity happens where you realize how closely the world can be connected under certain circumstances.

thanks nyc! i'm sure tomorrow i'll see more homeless guys fighting each other or someone will spit on me, but for now... nice!

oh, it's rush hour now, on the wheel and the plow

2007-11-02T12:57:00.000-05:00

2007-11-01T23:08:00.000-05:00

OMG I AM SEEING SUFJAN STEVENS TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AND, i thought it was just for the premier of BQE, but it's ALSO an hour of old/new songs! OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
im sad i wont get to party with new kids (i.e. ashley) but hopefully the people im going with (i got the ticket for free off craigslist from someone who grew up in the development next to mine - AWESOME!) will be nice. and if not, a bunch of slcers live mere blocks from BAM. also seeing amy will be great. EWF;OEFV;OQEHNRBV;'O i'm so excited.
the person who's giving me the ticket saw s.s. a few weeks ago (i guess that kinda stuff happens in brooklyn??) and he said bqe was going to be "a fun disaster" which means it's going to be great, i'm sure. i wonder what other songs he'll play. maybe sister winter! EPOQERIH'PREIHBB

school's good, busy, everyone's sick and on the verge, or midst, of nervous breaks. im excited for the two days we have off next week, its the first break we've had, and weve all be waiting for it since... well september. there's so much to say, i feel like i can't even begin here. basically i can't wait for thanksgiving, my new bff ashley is soooo great and i like school, though it is slowly killing me.

fofofofofofofofofofofofofo!!!!!!!!!

2007-10-18T04:26:00.001-05:00

new times

2007-10-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

this is probably the most important picture, because this is my location for most of every day! generally at least 12 hrs a day. you'd be amazed how much time i spend in correlation to how crappy my work is. seriously - i'm not being humble. i am barely scraping by...

here was the quad when ahmedinejad visted. it was nuts

the view from justin and jarett's new apt. roof. you can see the lights in times square flickering.. so big it looks like some natural sky phenomenon..

here's my first try at using the lasercutter at school. it's a machine that basically prints autocad files onto materials using a laser. like, if you need some plexi, or chipboard, or even fabric cut in a specfific way, you can make a cad file that shows what you need and then it cuts or scores it (depending on what you say) and then you can glue the pieces together to make your model. basically it's my best friend, because i have bad motor skills and can't make models.

it's either overworking or overpartying i guess. the weird thing is, now if you go to most bars it's just people taking pictures or videos of the people there, for party websites i guess. like that's pretty much the whole point. after this night, i saw some people from it on blue states loose. thank god i wasn't in any of those pictures...yeesh

here's a picture of the shoe i have to model using a program called rhino. basically they were like "get a shoe, open the program and do it you idiots" which did not bode well for me, ive become pretty dependent ont he the liberal seminar emotional individually-sized hand-holding method ...

people on the roof in bushwick...you know the drill!

old young mc, if there was a girl i wanted to talk to but i was too shy, what would your advice to me be?

2007-10-11T06:20:00.000-05:00

bust a move!

unfinished plots 2/3:

2007-10-09T20:51:00.000-05:00

i have had more toxic material on my hands in the last 10 minutes... so i sent up a piece of plexiglass to be cut by the lasercutter, and got an email saying that my plexi was the wrong kind and would be toxic to laser.. so i go up there later with my brand new super expensive plexi and theyve already cut the toxic one anyways. so i pick up the cut and its all... dusty. like plastic dust. now that hand hurts! and then just now i got MORE zap a gap on my fingers, which is like super crazy plastic bonder.."warning: bonds eyes and skin in seconds!" lovely. my last bottle exploded and this kid across the way tried to use it and the next morning, one of his hands was all shiny and crap.. HAHAH! i guess it's not that funny.. or it could be really un-funny..

2007-10-02T20:48:00.000-05:00

so, i’ve definitely come down with some kind of brain fever tonight after going to the BIG opening at storefront. imagine: a 32 year old from copenhagen who has more projects going on in the world than practically anyone right now, a huge exhibit dedicated to their radical urbanism models, and you’re cool enough to show up on your birthday which means free carlsberg for everyone involved. i am feeling really sick about studio right now and seeing bjarke ingels tonight really gave me some perspective. on the one hand, it made me really depressed about what was going on at columbia. on the other hand, it put things in check, in terms of the fun-factor. as in, we’re taking this shit way too seriously and it’s getting oppressive. and for good reason, i mean, you stay up all night every night no exaggeration and freak the fuck out about your work constantly - the situation invites seriousness. but why? it makes me hate studio and do crappy work. maybe i need to back off of the self-sacrificial shit and start caring a little less about whether or not my work seems relevant right now. for god’s sake, it’s our second brief. i think there’ll be time later to be self-important.

tonight was really cool in that i got to stand right next to my role model. it was so awesome! i wish i would have said happy birthday, or you know, i’m a big fan, but i thought... maybe i need to take the hero-worship thing down a notch. let’s just admire from a distance. but everyone seemed so accessible. it was great. jiddy surpised me with a cupcake from babycakes because she is an angel. we didn’t even really get to look at the 250,000 piece lego model of the new project because it was so crowded, but we’ll go back later. then she ashley (from studio) and i went to get dosas which were delicious.

now i need to take my climateology concept to the next level - namely, the less formal and more fun level. i.e. do what i do best, which is drawing and research. i got criticized at our pin up yesterday for being too diagrammatic - duh, because i dont understand the diagram/structure stuff so i became obsessed with succeeding at it. while ignoring the stuff i actually have a shot in hell at doing well.

there’s so much happening here - i don’t even know how to update it. i feel like it’s important to catalogue my activities because it all happens so fast, i forget it two days later - yet when i come home all i can do is sleep! or eat or shower. some combination of the two. people in studio are divided right down the middle - either completely awesome or total douchebag. which works for me. as long as it’s not ALL douchebags.

i think annicka just gave me my concept pitch:

a sharpened sense pierced the heart. why is it easier to sleep with white noise in the backround, for example? why is tv calming? us monsters are independent from everything and everyone who came before us.

thanks bro!!!

walk on water

2007-07-20T13:05:00.000-05:00

I’ve become enamored with the daily mail. I don’t know how, but its SO much more entertaining than US newspapers. For example, they have a section called “fancy that…” which is basically just stories like this one from today: “Caught on camera: The shop-raiding seagull with a taste for chilli Doritos! This cheeky seagull loves Doritos - and often pops down to the local shop to pick some up!” haaaaaaaaaaaaahaha! Basically I just want to read every story on the website. Also, check out this story which shows photo compositions of what famous people would look like if they weren’t famous:

www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=469050&in_page_id=1773

its so much better than both us gossip and news sites together. Ah...
so its been quite a month – ive taken a break from writing here because one, there wasn’t much to report, and two, i didn’t want to remind myself of the boredom id be documenting. My job is so boring. One of my coworkers thinks its actually a front for hamas.

The clock is ticking on my big move, im living on 103rd and west end ave in this insanely nice apt., one little section of which im renting from this mother and her son. I figured it would be better than getting a shitty studio for the same amount in harlem. Plus theyre super nice and I have three windows, and my own bathroom. Woo!! So of course this information has ushered in the inevitable month of pre-school obsession over how Ill decorate the room. I remember last year I actually had nightmares about it – like I showed up at my friend’s room and it was 10x nicer. But anyways my dilemma is over this hanging light from Normann Copenhagen that I really want to have in the room:

I bought one as a Christmas gift for my parents – I brought it home from denmark. The thing is, they haven’t actually hung it – it’s perched atop a shelf on the landing. I guess it makes sense because it didn’t come with a socket or wire, and were still getting situated in our new house… but it makes me think: do they not actually like it? Because I would take it in about 3 seconds. I mean honestly I bought it because I liked it, it’s doesn’t fit with the rest of the house. So I don’t know. But im certainly not about to take it after giving it – I couldn’t. im not gonna be that guy. No way.

I guess im a little nervous now to move – but actually not really. I just have no idea what it will be like at the GSAPP. I just pray to god it’s like my Copenhagen studio – where everyone liked each other, and that made it easy to hang out in the studio for ten days straight. And wed play music and dvds – that was great. My big fear is that everyone will keep to themselves and never speak to each other about anything except at crits. That would be horrifying.

I went down to ny last week to find an apt (we were in rhode island that week) – I stayed with Justin and jarett at their apt on 131st and lennox. Their neighborhood is nice – historic harlem – though it seems like some people really despise them living there. college students = soulless gentrification. It makes sense. although they live like 4 blocks from a huge bruce rattner mall, so i have a feeling its not actually about gentrification. Justin got mugged on Wednesday – which is horrible. I just cant imagine him getting mugged. I hope hes okay.

showdown in chicago

2007-06-29T23:16:00.000-05:00

I’m not eating any wheat, gluten, or bread right now which is crazy. I
actually really like it – I thought I’d shrivel up and die without bread
but it turns out there are delicious alternatives to wheat, like sorghum
beer and rice and almond bread. I can’t wait to go out to dinner with
jiddy when I get back to ny. In other news, I am bored as hell here at
work. Oh my god. It’s beyond descriptions of boredom. The guy whos
supposed to be my boss just made a joke about someone else playing the
skin flute. This presents a dilemma: does this comment open the door for
me user these kinds of idioms, or am I disqualified by being an intern and
the youngest/newest/least paid person in the office? I’m not totally sure
I want to find out – after all these people pray before they eat
applebee’s for lunch.
In other news I am so excited for the fourth of july because we are going
to the horse races in grand prairie! HORSE RACES! Hahahha also they have
fireworks. Holy crap. I have to look into getting a ridiculous pastel hat.
Or is that just at the Kentucky derby? Who cares.
Actually I have a feeling that a more fitting outfit for a horse race on
independence day in ft.worth, texas would probably be a bikini made from a revolutionary-war era American flag and cowboy hat. by the way i am becoming more and more obsessed with abe lincoln, i am at the part of my book where he just gained the republican party nomination.

also, i got some info from columbia, like about ids and email.

iphone approaches

2007-06-23T23:23:00.000-05:00

oh boy, either a lot or very little has been happening in my life lately. i have a full time job as a graphic designer for this ridiculously inept "volunteer abroad" company which has seen a 300% increase in sales in the last year, and i'm producing their literature. oy!!! it's run by these two nepalese guys who seem to be.... prismatically transforming business geniuses. they're constantly changing - like friday i made a brochure for one of the other companies they run, this one called global future inst., and the brochure listed them as forestry, agriculture and poverty researchers. wha??? five days a week all i see is them convicing naive college students that the guy meeting them at the airport in nairobi isn't someone they found loitering outside a bus station on their last visit (he is). but they are really nice. it's just been the weirdest experience ever. i overheard a conversation the other day where this 22-yr old canadian volunteer was calling saying they wanted to go home because they got chased by people with machetes. the people at the office were like "we're not giving you a refund, this is all hearsay." booyah!

i have also been living in the loft which i have made into a very cute little place. for two more months i will be here before leaving for manhattan. i can't wait to go back, mainly because all my friends are having parties every night and i want to hit that before studio starts!!! jarett got a part in a production of macbeth, reinforcing the constant stream of people insisting he's going to be famous. justin and he are living together, about 10 blocks from my future abode! or, not having gotten a place yet, neighborhood. this is lucky because it will be easier to join parties, so that we can find justin his future relationship, with someone from the GSAPP. it's his goal for this year and it would suit both of our interests, a marriage!

today my mom is away in madison, having a little reunion party with her best friends from grad school. dad, annicka, and i went to burger bar last night in the west village (imagine prenzlauer berg in berlin, but only 4 years old, planned by a new urbanist, and populated by wealthy texans - albeit fun). it was amazing. i had a turkey burger with cranberries, avacado, pepperjack, and sweet potatoe fries. and the best mojito i've ever had! ever! delicious. like drinking minty heaven. burger bar is this sort of up-scale after-bar hangout, sort of done up in copenhagen-chic --- big huge ambient chandaliers, lots of wood and metal. it stays open til 3am every night so all the dallesiens who can't stand to set foot in a diner love it!

many other things have been happening to me - it turns out i am "on" the celiac's disease scale, though my tests are "overall" negative - so i'm getting on a gluten-free diet! oh shit!!!!! so i have been eating special almond rice bread and cookies, which i actually like better than the gluten-y old kind. plus, i dont feel like puking after i eat it. though, strangely, i've actually been getting more rashes since i started (rashes are a big indicator of celiac's)

i skipped work to meet with an architect here in our neighborhood the other day, who regaled me with stories of working under michael graves at princeton in the seventies and going up to columbia for the football game, and has a son doing conceptual art at harvard. i think i may have impressed him by trotting out my almost encyclopedic knowledge of alvar aalto. he was telling me about how he visited alvar's own house in finland which he'd "never met anyone else who'd been there," and i identified the house. oh yeah! he sent me on my way by saying we should have a beer. awesome.

well on the apartment front i am having a hard time of committing. i am excited for rhode island because i'm gonna take the train into manhattan, sign a sublet or lease, and then take some of my friends back up to the beach houses for a few days. i can only imagine what the meeting of those two little universes will be like. irish swedes and russian jews. remarkably alike, theyre actually almost exactly the same, when you really get to know them.

im sunburned today

i can wait, i can wait

2007-06-18T14:29:00.000-05:00

Ooh boy, office jobs are so boring. I mean, some kinds of offices I enjoy very much –ones that are in a field I’m interested in, ones which are doing something important, or even just ones that are doing something totally boring but have a good culture – i.e. the employees like each other. Unfortunately my summer job doesn’t really fit into any of those three categories. my computer hasn’t arrived yet (after four days of full-time work) so basically I am doing ridiculous and useless work, like checking the entire website for spelling and grammar errors. Needless to say they picked the wrong guy. But then again, I now am dreading the arrival of the computer, because it means I’ll be held accountable for semi-independent work (creating all their .pdf graphic files in indesign). It’s just counting down the hours that really gets to you. Like right now, I have five and a half more hours here, since I’ve been here for two and a half. God this place is weird. It’s in this weird old seventies office building off of the freeway that goes to the airport. It’s one of those office bldgs with the orangy-glass cladding. From the window I’ve been sitting at, I can see the city’s skyline and the freeway leading towards it. The white dome of the Cowboy’s stadium is to the left, while endless car dealerships and fast food places are to both sides. One fun thing is to watch the weather roll in and out – it’s so flat here that you can see for hundreds of miles, so storms that are in Oklahoma are visible to the eye.
This building is really a dump - tons of mirrors, a rickety elevator, cockroaches, and an ornery maintenance man who claims he’s retired! Today they told me that the men’s bathroom is being used by “vagrants” at night, because the door lock is gone. I asked what vagrants, and they were all “don’t worry!” and I was like, I’m not worried, I meant seriously, what homeless person would come all the way out here on the airport highway to use these shitty bathrooms? And go to all that trouble? So my opinion is it’s an inside job. Oh boy am I excited to get out of work. Maybe it will be sunny and I can go to the pool.
This weekend was kind of sad simply because it rained the whole time, and I was so excited to go to the pool. But father’s day was yesterday and that was great because I made dad some blueberry and raspberry pancakes.

pavan

2007-06-06T00:53:00.000-05:00

i discovered i really like all bands on 'flogsta danshall.' i wish i had known when i was in dk.. just didnt pay attention i guess. but now im really getting into it. its good for summer. i am obsessed by looking for an apartment in new york. i found the best place ever but it's 20 blocks south of avery, and people say that no one in the arch program should live beyond walking distance since you have to go home at like 5am every night. i dunno, my mom says i'd just have to alot some money each week to taking cabs home. still, it would suck to have to take the subway so much. i mean its walkable but itd take longer. i dunno. plus this place doesn't move in until nov.1 so id have to find some other place for two months??? which would blow. but it's so beautiful, three windows on the 10th flr of a building on broadway and 101st. niiice!!!

i had a job interview today, it went well though it seems like the job might be a little bit boring. basically producing indesign files for a study abroad organization. i mean its full time and pays awesome, but honestly i'd rather not work in an office and have to carry through every day with the awful 9-5 office talk. for some reason that really got to me at my last office/graphics job. it just gets to you after a while. i never expected to feel that way... but right now i just want a job at starbucks and call it a summer.

were going to wisconsin this weekend to annicka's graduation, im really excited. mom and dad are going early to go to a conference in madison, and then on saturday im flying in and then we'll all drive up to appleton. YES! i love appleton! then i am going to drive home in the scion with annicka and all her stuff, which is going to be awesome because on monday we're gonna go to chicago and stay with caitlin, whos gonna be there. her grandma has an apartment really high up on lakeshore drive, i cant WAIT to see caitlin. she's annicka's friend who lives in dallas and is so awesome. but i wanna go see IIT again and then maybe around..then we'll drink that night and so on. oh chicago i love it. then we'll drive straight down through the country, probably stop in omaha to see our grandma jean. then get home. im really excited cuz we'll be able to stop and take lots of pictures and see all the weird stuff along the way. i am personally looking forward to the weird alien nebraska plains myself. last time i was there i didn't have my polaroid out and missed getting a picture of them i think.

so anyways. dallas. weird. ive been riding my bike around everywhere. mom was in dc a few days ago so dad and i were hanging out, we went to little katana where i had the best sushi ive ever tasted, in particular a sunny roll which is shrimp tempura, crabmeat, avacado creamcheese wrapped in some kind of rice noodle with orange and eel sauce and one other i forget.. heres a picture of it

i cant wait to go back and have another it was so great.

holland?

2007-05-31T15:41:00.000-05:00

i am cultivating an almost god-like knowledge of summer tv. have you seen the commercials for this new show, "pirate master?" the voice over goes something like this: "it's DANGEROUS!" and this guy says, "to be a pirate, you have to be COOL." wow, that does sound dangerous!!! it's basically a group of idiots running around the bahamas following a "pirate map" that was obviously made by an intern.

i am so bored, so so bored. yet whenever my phone rings, i am terrified that it will be someone wanting me to work for them. my mom is away at a committee meeting in washington so dad and i are just hanging out. yesterday we went to go get these flats that ive been trying to get for like 3 months now but couldn't find in the right color/size, but i found them over by SMU at a store called "cotton island." here they are:

this place is the epitome of the whole dallas/smu culture.. check out this picture of their store:

basically the people who work there are ridiculously done up, tanned, blond girls who are like...so nice. so sweet, so southern. i mean i'm sure it's a front but i love it so much. when we left my dad was like "you know, every girl working there came from the same model didn't they?" SMU is so weird... i'm fascinaed by it, and yet i know i should be repulsed by it because everyone else is. but it's so interesting and weird. forte describes it best, his wife went to SMU and he can do a hilarious impression of dallas women.. "oh youahh're funnn!"
anyways then we went to mockingbird station which is one of these new shopping/entertainment centers that are everywhere here, which i actually kind of like because in dallas' case there's a few that are actually pretty cool looking and have good restaraunts. actually i think the reason i have a soft spot for this kind of expansive and excessive development because it reminds me of oresund in copenhagen. anyways this one at mockingbird station has the angelika film center, which i always thought was unique to new york, but it turns out there's three in texas and one in new york. boyah! my dad wanted to see the new paul verhoeven movie, "black book," which as you might guess, is about holland during world war two. i'm a sucker for war movies so i enjoyed it. before that we went to the adjacent trinity hall for some dinner, and i was excited because they serve strongbow there. we sat outside and for once it was sunny.

ive watched marie antoinette twice today...weird

magasin

2007-05-28T19:09:00.000-05:00

oh boy this is really starting to get old. i really hate to complain because i know i'm the luckiest kid... im just running out of stuff to be excited about or something. i guess yesterday was good, we went out to brunch at la duni with burt, the dean of my parent's school, and his wife.. burt is really awesome and loves to talk architecture so that was fun, turns out hes friends with antoine predock so that's really neat. predock is 'kind of a big deal' around here... i drove over and saw one of his houses in highland park last summer, and kinda liked it:

and then later it cleared up for like 5 minutes (it's been raining literally for 8 days straight now) so i took the refurbished bike out for a spin around oak lawn, which was unexpectedly awesome. when i had that bike at school, you know, it's from the 70s, i was always freaked out by it because the front wheel wobbled and the breaks didn't work...now both the iron pig and dad's bike are running like a charm. i took it down to walgreen's to get some pictures developed, and then after dinner, mom and i rode down to the katy trail (one of those rails to trails things that leads from our neighborhood to downtown dallas) and rode all the way down to victory plaza, where the w is and the new mandarin oriental next to it, and not far away from the koolhaas/foster construction sites. its only like a 2 mile ride, you can get there in like 10 minutes. we also found out that the parking lot of the theatre in turtle creek is a popular cruising spot! take notes. anyways i was gonna go back today with my camera to capture the progress on construction, but it fucking poured all day of course.
we went to the mall and i returned these bright blue jeans i bought, cuz it turns out they were just a little too crazy for dallas. that's typical. the color palette here is more subdued than up north, and i forgot that. dad, however, bought all these shirts and one of them is insane - like purple and green with these ferns which mom and i told him look like feathers. we told him to return it but he refuses. we'll see, i know mom won't let him wear it.
but anyways i have been sick for the last week, and ive been taking robotussin nighttime before bed, and its making me CRAZY. like i can't wake up at all during the day, and if i have to do anything within an hour of taking it i can't wake up from this really weird, crazy sleep. i mean people in highschool used to 'robotrip' or whatever, but i thought you had to drink like an entire bottle of the crap to feel any hallucinigenic effect? i'm taking a pretty normal amount, and last night i had a crazy waking dream about "the girls next door." wtf?????!!??!?!? im gonna go get some other kind of medicine if it stops raining ever.
in other news i finished "undaunted courage" and have started on "team of rivals" which is about abe lincoln and his cabinet. i mean honestly, its more of a sleep aide than anything, i read 2 pages and without fail i doze off... but it's really interesting, just really slow. obviously.
i want to go see the new 28 weeks later so bad but no one here will go with me and since my computer is broken my dad is refusing to let me download it on his since he could get in big trouble i guess.
my mom keeps saying if i want to go back to ny right now i can, but i dunno...i need to get a job and save some money before the fall and living in ny i can't see how that would help.

i've got a tigress back at home, and i need someone with soul power

2007-05-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

oh god i think i have enough time now to write a post. it's been a WEIRD few days. or i guess, weeks now. i graduated, it was so weird... so fast. the senior donee dinner was amazing: forte brought all his own wine, year 2003 for the year we entered slc, and french in honor of michelle meyers leaving this year. we drank so much, and then it was the faculty show, and then the dance - so funny. then we went to a party in mccracken, and discovered a way to get up on the roof. it was really wonderful, i love roofs. so anyways then graduation happened, i could write a lot about it but you know, it was a graduation!

the real highlight was that night, when we went to AQUAVIT. it was quite literally, the coolest and best resteraunt i've ever been to in my life. just imagine: jacobsen swan chairs, a utzon-esque undulating wooden slat ceiling ala bagsvaerd's outer rooms, poul henningsen lights, verner panton chandaliers...oh god.

we ate in the dining room, sitting in these very 70s textiled booths. each table had a alvar aalto vase with nettles in them. we ordered aquavit to begin with - i chose raspberry lime and tried vanilla, pear and black pepper. if you don't know, aquavit is a scandinavian liquor which is basically ike schnapps or vodka, which is surrounded by a lot of tradition and so on - i remember my swedish relatives challenging my dad and grandpa to an aquavit drinkin contest or something when we visited them. so we began with that, and they bring it in these beautiful chilled crystal glasses which look like shot glasses with stems. also, aquavit is by far the most expensive place i've ever eaten - damn. so of course this is one of those places where they give you 3-4 little tasting plates of stuff the chef is trying out, the first one was mushroom soup with sort of pickled shrimp, and then there was salmon foam, smoked tuna, and caviar. i started my actual dinner with this really famous thing the chef magnus makes, the lobster roll, which is a really thinly rolled thing of lobster, pickled apples, and trout roe...and it comes with this little shot of frozen lemon lime juice! i also had to get an elephant beer because that's a classic thing to drink with fish. and then for our second course i ordered shellfish stew, which wasn't really a stew, it was a plate of one of each: lobster, scallop on mushrooms, something else i forget, and some kind of flower stuffed with crabmeat. and then the water poured this saffron/saslify soup all over it...delicious. and then we had this rose hip soup with lime foam over it, and then we had dessert, for which i had a chocolate truffle with lemon sorbet thing. my mom was so excited, because on the dessert menu they had fruit suppe with pepparkroker, and she said grandma ina and grandpa helge used to make it for dessert, and she hadn't seen it since then.. i am writing all this down because it was literally the best meal i've ever had. whoever this chef is, i guess he's a young swede who was raised somewhere in africa, but he's brilliant. we got little packs of pepparkroker to go, haha!
oh god it was so magical...i just had to write about it so i won't forget.

so here i am back in dallas, bored as hell and both trying to get a job while trying to hold out as long as i can without doing it. it's been rainy since we got back - kind of depressing. i don't know anyone here now that caitlin's in chicago, and annicka doesn't come home for another few weeks. my mom took me to see "the lives of others" which was fantastic. not much to report otherwise...the long cold months of boredom at a crappy job await... i'm okay with it though!

and all those lonely night down by the river, brought me bread and water, by the kith and the kin

2007-05-11T13:31:00.000-05:00

i'm finally done. so hungover, spilled beer all over my computer and so on.i think it's because i still haven't made up my sleep debt - when the work induced sleep deprivation ended, the booze induced sleep deprivation began.

i was so sleepy in my last pre-calc class that i went to the bathroom in sheffield, sat down on the toilet with my pants still up and fell asleep with my head propped up against the toilet paper dispenser. some guy woke me up knocking - i was sure it was my prof coming to yell at me two hours later.

we had forte's last class, which was anticlimactic becuase instead of the traditional "end of year slide show extravaganza" we just has class as usual, but with mimosas. and you know, i'll never learn, because every end of semester in joe's class we have all this champagne and every time i drink it and fall asleep because i'm so tired, and have an awful day because i'm drunk/sleepy. and i say, never again will i drink in the morning during conference week! but next thing i know im telling the person to make mine a DOUBLE MIMOSA! ugh

i finished my thesis and turned it in yesterday... i'll admit i didn't even proof read the goddamn thing. it turned out to be about 80 pages with pictures. it's seriously so bad i'm avoiding joe.
trying to figure out what to get for graduation and the don/donnee dinner.

yesterday night was so great. we went to the malthouse, the last bar night FOREVER. yesterday was all "lasts." our last bates dinner - i had a sandwhich, some toast with jam and butter, and some coffee and ice cream. delicious. i made a toast - to the future! skoal. we drank so much last night but it wasn't in a bad way. everything was good at the malthouse, not weird like it sometimes is. i drank long island iced teas and white russians. boring! i really wanted a mojito but poor joe, the bartender. i can't believe they don't have two bartenders on nights like those. all this funny stuff happened, like justin had a complete freakout when they played "i would do anything for love" on the speakers. i mean really, a complete freak out. hahahhahhaha! i remember when annicka and i were little, we'd go up to the bedroom in the attic of our old house, and put pillows under our shirts to look fat, and sing that song dancing on the bed. BUT I WON'T DOOOOOO THAT! oh god it was so funny. so then we went back to campus and ordered wraps from eileen's. something else funny happened but i can't remember. then i went to bed finally at three or four, and woke up to what i think must have been the sound of someone puking in our bathroom, again. it sounded pretty bad..i felt bad for whoever it was, i felt like i should go see if they were okay but i've found sometimes i need to just let people be, i'm too inquisitive.

oh god i can't wait for this shift to be over so i can go back to bed. unfortunately every time i try to there's some "last ____" that i have to be at, so i don't sleep. i'm excited for tonight, i don't know why, i just am.

btw check out annicka's latest post:

and the rockets' red glare, and the bombs in the air

2007-05-08T05:02:00.000-05:00

so here i am at 6am in the library, crying because i'm listening to the star spangled banner. i mean sufjan steven's cover, but it's for the same reasons. yikes.

ever since i was little i've been obsessed with scandinavia and going back where i seemed to belong, but after i went abroad i was able to realize just how american i am and just how much i love it, and how much i love the midwest. i dunno. this is just so corny and i must be insane to write it, but it's true. i guess i inherited my dad's love of american history - he used to tell us stories about the constitution and founding fathers when we were younger and all that, and he's got pretty much every major volume of american history and biography, and i started borrowing them lately - right now i'm on "undaunted courage: thomas jefferson, meriwether lewis and the opening of the american west." and i'm just in awe of it all, i guess is all i wanted to say! i need to calm down or something

there is a hospital inside me it's full of medicine and babies

2007-05-05T19:32:00.000-05:00

what a week. work was due friday but forte said tuesday was okay so now conference week has extended itself like a bad cold. actually maybe more like...ebola. my computer has decided to crap out on me two weeks short of making it through our entire college experience together. i have submerged it completely in water, cracked the case, replaced the hard drive twice, replaced the exterior shell, and have dropped it countless times...its been so good and forgiving to me. annicka got a new powerbook pro this summer but i refused to my parent's chagrin. i love this goddamn computer and its tearing me apart to think i have to give it up. today my mom told me to just take a cab to the westchester mall and buy a new one, and i was freaking out, but then i shook the computer in frustration and it suddenly turned on. it's like a real person...

last night was weird. katie's cousin terry is visiting from umich, so that was really hilariously great - hes in a frat. everyone was pretty taken with him - he and jiddy are the funniest dancing partners EVER. i couldve watched that for hours..actually i did. we danced in jiddys room and it was fun. i also spilled beer ALL OVER jiddy's desk and computer, and of course freaked out. she's ALLERGIC to beer, on top of the wetness and beeriness. oh god. i hope to god i didnt ruin anything.

im very excited to be done with work so we can get on to the business of shopping for graduation clothes. unfortunately sarah lawrence makes graduating seniors wear CAPS AND GOWNS for graduation -- wtf?? fucking tacky. not like the academy, where we all had to wear the same shade of white and were led up towards the quad by four bagpipers. oh no, not like that. i guess for sarah lawrence we'd all have to be wearing fishnet and be led up to the lawn by that hookah kid. typing that sentance actually has actually got me feeling physically ill.

one really exciting thing that i found out today is that my dad got reservations for the night of graduation at AQUAVIT! oh yes! its the coolest restaraunt ever, check out the website: aquavit
its by scandinavia house, and its all arne jacobsen chairs and pH lamps and they specialize in herring! oh my god how did my parents think of it, its the most perfect idea ever. they launched their own cranberry aquavit this yr. i hope we actually get to drink some real danish aquavit at dinner but my grandma is coming so it's unlikely. i dunno though she's a white anglo saxon protestant, and we all like hard liqour right?? that rule goes double for us since were both wasps and a swedes (annicka and kelsey, get it???). im just so excited, i dont know if i should wear my black puffy skirt dress or get something new. i havent actually had a fancy enough occasion to wear that one yet but it seems more christmas-y. everyone wants to do a dress shopping day next week so i guess i'll find something then. i need to get my ideas down on paper cuz i'll be taking insane amounts of pictures and i want them to be only marginally embarassing.

whhen is bachannalia?

typical plan

2007-04-29T23:15:00.000-05:00

so i'm sitting here writing my paper on marshall field additions, and i'm reading an SMLXL. and it's about the "typical plan:"

The typical plan is an American invention. It is zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity. It belongs to the New World.

Typical plan is Western. There is no equivalent in any other culture. It is the stamp of modernity itself.

Typical plan is neutral, not anonymous. It is a place of worship. More austere than a Cistercian monestary, it accommodates infinately greater numbers, a 20th century church without doctrince.

Although the domoinant emphasis of the Typical Plan is on abstraction, there is plumbing. It doesn't deny those residual features that make humans animals still.

The cumulative effect of all this vacancy - the systematic lack of commitment - is, paradoxically, density.

Concentrations of the Typical Plan have produced the skyscraper: unstable monolith; accumulations of skyscrapers, the only "new" urban condition: downtown, defined by sheer quantity rather than as a specific formal configuration. The center is no longer unique but universal, no longer a place but a condition.

and i'm sitting here trying to write about my plan for the new marshall field, and thinking: this is such a rare expression of hierarchy for OMA. it's like sort of this defining statement of how they approach programs. and i realize, it's like fractal chaos theory - the deeper and closer you go, the pattern keeps multiplying. near or far, the chaos of the narrative is equaled. I know this sounds crazy but it's actually very simple. in simpler words, i don't know if i'm gonna do this for a living but now at least i can see that it's not linear: it won't get boring in the way some things do. if anything it's in danger of black holing, rather than brick walling like art will. which is so cool.

"holy hell are my boxers made of wool? because my weasel's getting heatstroke!"

2007-04-28T16:13:00.000-05:00

check out these pictures of my sister and her friend adam ghostriding our whip, the two door scion!

so awesome. so, so, so awesome. they also hung out with diverse last night which is cool.
my night last night was a lot less exciting. we drank in pauline's room (it was her bday) and then went to 'its goin down' which was actually so great. it's so good to go to a party with a real dj - they played the greatest songs. like stuff people actually want to dance to. this year it's been a lot of self indulgant crap that people have to dance to cuz it's the only thing on campus happening. but last night there was a little soul to it. plus there was free beer. the thing that sucked was that i lost my white antler/coral necklace! i guess i was dancing to hard cuz it just snapped right off and then i couldn't find it on the floor. and then the whole thing got shut down because of a noise complaint from the neighbors. duh.

tonight is going to be funny because it's jason's fashion show and then jiddy's opening, which is going to be great. she's getting like 110 gallons of wine. and then i forget what else is happening..some kind of party.

travel

2007-04-27T09:29:00.000-05:00

check out our video of the mixed use tower crawl we did last week:

jiddy is a brilliant editor...it's so awesome. we showed it at the beginning of our presentation yesterday and it was great. unfortch i only had like 5 minutes to give my part of the presentation because the group before us went like 20 minutes over. they were great - brought beer and peanuts for us because their presentation was on stadiums. i presented on albertslund syd and oma.

it's so busy here. every day passes and then i can't remember what happened because it went so fast. yesterday was the opening of the musical ross wrote, brick by brick, (based on the stories of edgar allen poe), which was surprisingly amazing. i mean i knew ross was talented, but generally i hate musicals, and this one i actually really enjoyed. i also think it was because my friends were in it - erica played the sassy hungarian nymphomaniac and jarett played dr. de kock, an insane doctor at an insane asylum. that was pretty much the funniest thing ever. jarett's stage presence could stand on its own beyond any show or anything like that...i just laugh and laugh at that stuff. afterwards he told us after the first number he faced in our direction because from our hysterical laughter he could tell where we were sitting. i wish i could describe the mannerisms to you. imagine a rooster dressed in 1890s clothing, wearing eyeliner, who uses his entire head as a beak, and keeps going squuauaaaarrrk. anyways erica has a really, really amazing voice so it was great. i was happy for all of them.

then an hour later there was a lampoon show, well really they opened for "treble in paradise" which is a female acapella group. HA! anyways hilarious. they ended with a joke about a wheat allergy, which really got us all going. anyways it really took me back to highschool in a way - everyone's doing the SEEEEENooooiiiirs thing, and watching "the last show" of this school group. i felt like i was in mem hall. except a much queerer, less waspy version of mem hall. the black squirrel is in a room that is really pretty incredible. big bauhausian windows on one side, 20ft ceilings... too bad they slathered party carpet all over the walls. yeugh! actually i'm starting to like it just because it's so bizarre. it feels like a cross between an abandoned warehouse in brooklyn and a chuckey cheese in illinois.

then i think we were going to go to the bar, but it was just too much to do. i went home and went to bed. woke up this morning to a lot of rain, hopefully it'll end before tonight, because take a look at the poster for this party max martin and some other dudes are throwing tonight:

HAH! we need this.

my family's role in the world revolution

2007-04-25T22:15:00.000-05:00

woo! i've stopped counting the hours i've been in the lab. we're all here in the lab working on our forte presentation on mixed use towers. jiddy is making an awesome video right now of our trip to three towers in the city and i am so so so excited about it. i'll post it here when she's done.

yesterday was our opening for our designs of the museum. it was supposed to be 'potluck' but everyone brought wine, and forte gave us like 5 extra bottles he had in his car. don't ever drink after you've stayed up for more than two days. you'll be hanging from the rafters! here's a couple samples from my project:

(i dunno why, but this first one's colors are coming out all crazy...it's supposed to be burnt sienna words on dark orange with yellow figures???)

afterwards katie drove us to cross county and made some bad drunk-buys. for example a white 'u.s. polo association' shirt. wtf????????? why did i buy this? i'm predicting it'll be my most-worn item of clothing for the rest of the summer.

i feel like i'm floating right now... everything is good and bad too. for example, volume emailed me to ask for writing samples but then i wrote the guy back as a "ms." OOPS!

p.s. i am so into beirut right now. it reminds me of our eastern european escapades last spring (one year ago to the months!). that was so awesome. but something tells me i shouldn't like beirut...much like my instinct to not like sufjan stevens. but you know what, i don't care. i like what i like!

and hold on

2007-04-22T01:41:00.000-05:00

tonight was the 'glamour ball,' i.e., the re-named and slightly less raunchy sleaze ball. of course, traditionally, the sleaze ball was second to the fall's much more sexy "coming out dance," at which i was officially initiated into the sarah lawrence college community by seeing a classmate jerk off another classmate onto some girl. yes. i'm not exaggerating at all. these are commonplace acts at sleaze/coming out dances. for this reason among others, last year both dances were cancelled. mainly because 11-15 people each night had to get their stomachs pumped. so this year they're trying to re-invent the whole queer week thing by calling it "glamour week." it's a 'new leaf' that slc is apparently turning over, since the coming out dance had become way more about boobies than its original anti-homophobic angle. it was the frat party without the holier than thou validation factor, which i enjoyed nonetheless.

(amy and nick before the coming out dance sophmore year.)

i wish i knew how describe my experience of coming out dance for the first two years here. justin once said, "you only have fun at the coming out dance if you go to the hospital." they would literally just line up ambulances outside of bates, and if they saw some guy kind of falling all over the place they'd just take him away, clean as a whistle. it's held in the cafeteria, and the booths are specifically for having sex in. people come naked. it's really exactly what you'd expect from a school like this.

so tonight was the new and improved glamour ball. which was pretty much the exact same thing, except with one light turned on, 200 fewer people, no sex, and less dance music. more clothing too. i remember feeling shamed that i hadn't come in underwear when i was a freshman. tonight the craziest person was just wearing one of those silver lame leotards from american apparel.

i've only been here for four years, and i've seen the college atmosphere go from one extreme to something completely different. where's the gay royalty? where's the glitter? high heels? even the much-hated neon thong peeking out over stone washed mc hammer pants...at this point i'd take it! i'm glad in a way that it's over, because it makes me realize that certain social phenomena really truly are specific to certain time periods. by this i mean: what makes people wear this crazy shit isn't sarah lawrence, it's the general cultural climate of the years they attend. which is kind of cool when you think about it.

classics

2007-04-20T09:29:00.000-05:00

it's starting to finally act like spring around here. today is gonna be funny because my freshman yr best friend who graduated early, tasha, and her parter mel (they're the agytators) are taking my picture. you might ask, why? you take the dumbest, though funniest, pictures ever? and honestly i couldn't tell you the answer to that one my friends. theyre also shooting jason and adam nichols. i just remembered this whole thing this morning and so now i dont have time to practice my blue steel in front of my mirror. CRAP

anyways so here i am waiting for them to show up and doing the usual "i'm being paid to be here" dance around helping anyone do anything in this lab. yesterday night we went to the aspace unveiling of the first art review, which was pretty cool. i am always so impressed by my friends' art. then we went to ac12 but i lost momentum and decided to just go home instead of going to the bar. i've just had like no sleep in a week and blah blah blah...anyways i talked to my parents and they were doing well. my dad told me that he had lunch today with the ex-vice-dean of UT austin's arch school. DAMNIT. he said he told her i got rejected and she said it's been so selective the past 15 yrs that they go almost completely on test scores alone. crap. at least this validates my theory about my GRE math disaster.

in other news, i am so completely screwed with my museum design! haha!

FOA sermon

2007-04-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

i am a maniac. i can tell you that right now. here's the hours i logged in the lab for the last two days:
10am - 3am
10am - 10pm
WTF? it's because i started my museum model OVER and it's supposed to be done for our class' opening next tuesday. OH MY GOD. and i went crazy with this new design and i mean...it really is crazy. i don't know if i'm even making the right decision with this thing. but i can tell you right now i like this one a lot better. that other one was evil. but it sucks: yesterday in class everyone was finishing their final presentations with their final model renderings and going around looking at each other's and saying "oooh! awwww!" and they came to mine, and all i had was this little grey thing and they all kind of just stood there silently..justin actually said "good! keep working..!" HAHAH! but it'll be sexy in the end!!!

okay how hilarious is this. this was sent my my friend jessica, she was a donee of forte a few yrs ago and started at harvard this yr. i've been facebooking with her cuz i wanted to get her advice about schools, and she just send me this message with all these pieces of advice...one of them was to watch this video, which some people at penn made about FOA's yokohama ferry terminal. it's called "FOA sermon." so click here.

2007-04-16T11:02:00.000-05:00

VOLUME is looking for summer interns! AIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!!! volume is so interesting - founded by ole bouman, mark wigley and rem koolhaas! so i just applied. but i dunno why, i cant live in the city this summer! oh well.

i'll write the album of the year

2007-04-15T20:00:00.000-05:00

ugh what a weekend. my god. its like hell here. i cannot wait to go back to dallas. it's like everything was going great for a while and now suddenly i live in the house from aquateen except without frylock,shake,or meatwad. just the same enviornment. okay, that metaphor didnt work just forget it.

anyways, yesterday night started out great, perfect - we hung out in jarett's room and then we went to anna/caitlyn's party, which was really great - they opened up both their rooms and filled the bathtub with ice and drinks. they even had snacks - you're lucky if you even see some cut up limes at most parties at slc. luxurious! anyways it was really fun. unfortch later i slapped justin for saying something really meanspirited, so then of course we spent the rest of the night fighting. this same fight keeps happening over and over. but last night it was truly inimical. how embarassing. but really. i'm tired of him being able to push, hit, insult, and generally harass people when he drinks, and then when he provokes me i get in huge trouble. anyways i feel so embrassed about what happened, but listen to the advice annicka just gave me, which is brilliant:

but people get butt ass wasted and make asses out of themselves ALL THE TIME. youre just another one of them. people actually dont even give a shit or remember, theyre just worrying aobut whether theyll get laid that night

anyways after anna's we went over to the slonim 4 party and that was okay. i will go out on a limb here and say that i drank too much last night. but hey, when else am i going to act like a fool?

i found out that my friend leah from berlin is moving to ny! YES! she is the most wonderful person. she is that classic type of european (shes a dane) that's all business on the outside and hilariously neurotic on the inside. she is so smart...she goes to oberlin for art history but she's considering med school. badass! anyways if i don't get university housing we're going to live together. i'm really hoping that she'll paint our apartment white. tired cliche anyone? but it's true.

another really exciting thing that i found out today is that the entire dollaghan clan is renting two houses in rhode island for a week this summer. YES!!! every summer since i was a baby we used to all go to rhode island - in 1991 we even had to evacuate for hurricane bob!!! i think we go to rhode island because that's where grandma's parents settled when they came over from sweden. i think her uncles built a bunch of houses on narraganset. anyways we haven't gone since i was in elementary school and now ITS HAPPENING! BOOYAH! every time the dollaghan family gets together it is a nonstop laugh riot. they are all the funniest coolest people and i've always been pissed that i'm not more like them. for starters annicka and i are the only ones out of 12 cousins and seven aunts and uncles with dark hair. WTF? ive always been resentful of this fact. i don't know why, i mean i like my hair. it guess i made into a symbol of how i wish we were closer to colorado and all of them. i mean we're very close, it's just that they all live in the same city and so they get to see each other more than twice a year.

in other news my work has come to a standstill because of my ocd about loosing my skills. like my whole life, with every thing i've been moderately good at, after a little while i loose interest or i just can't do it anymore. it happened with swimming, painting, writing...and now i'm terrified it's gonna happen with this stuff. so i'm convinced that if i do my best on my conference projects i won't be able to do well next year in grad school. so yeah. just a little glimpse into the insane logic of my constantly terror-stricken mind.

will it ever stop raining?

opus 36

2007-04-14T15:15:00.000-05:00

well i just sent in my five hundred buckeroos to columbia. or, should i say, my parent's 500 buckeroos. the point is, i'm either going to columbia in the fall or i'm giving them a free half grand. either way, whew.

yesterday was weird... after work i came home and took a nap, where i had a crazy night terror/nightmare. i'm really worried my night terrors are coming back (i've had bad reoccuring nightmares about volanoes and fires and stuff since i was little, but then senior yr in high school i had crazy apocolypse nightmares constantly and my mom made me go to therapy for it). it would make sense since i think those nightmares were symptoms of repressed anxiety, and the pattern of senior yr right before graduation also fits. anyways this one was particularly terrifying - it started out innocently enough: i was on a ferris wheel waiting for my friends (it looked a lot like the columbian exposition of 1893's midway area, though i knew i was in bronxville), doing work on my laptop. it started to go really fast and my bag fell off - so i jumped off the ferris wheel to go pick it up. as i was doing so, i heard a huge vibrating BOOM and looked in the direction of manhattan - there was a crazy mushroom cloud. so i dropped to the ground and tried to push my head down in the sand of the midway. the next thing i knew, katie and i were in some room at slc with the windows drawn, trying to figure out what our next move would be - leave, head north, or try to wait it out in the room until someone came to get us. but would anyone? there were some other people there too i think. two security guards came in and said they had a van that was working - they could take us. so we got in. for some reason we headed down into manhattan, and we stopped outside of the main gate of columbia's campus. the buildings were all torn up and it looked like a disaster zone. for some reason we went in, and went to the administration building. we walked into a room where there were three clearly higher-ups from the board of directors maybe? the funny thing was, they were all dressed in turn of the century tuxedos - tail flaps, crisp white collars, and so on. a few of them even had white andrew carnegie-style beards. anyways we talked to one, and i forget but we had to ask them a question. so he turned to the other two, who were both looking away. when they turned towards us, i finally saw that they were zombies from the nuclear fallout. they both had two different colored eyes. there mouthes were hanging open and they just sat at their mohogany desks and looked in our eyes. then i woke up. BOOYAH!

dang was that scary. the two different colored eyes thing is from the promo poster for the new 28 weeks later movie. which i am SO EXCITED FOR! then i spent some time researching how to survive a nuclear attack (answer: there really is no way to survive a nuclear attack!). it's bad, because the Apocolypse and related apocolypses are the most fascinating ideas to me - i love books about them and movies and stories and so on...but that stuff is also the scariest stuff EVER to me. so it's like a vicious cycle of alternating fascination and terror. but geez i hope these dreams don't continue. i'm gonna have a hard time living in manhattan if they do.

anyways we postponed our tower crawl because justin had some kind of nervous break the night before and only slept an hour, so he was too tired to go. so i woke up all disgustingly sweaty and freaked out, then katie drove us all to new rochelle, so we could go to one of their favorite midwestern chain restaurants, buffalo wild wings. we ordered ONE HUNDRED wings and got them in medium, mango habenero, and asian zing sauces. oh my god. i've never really been to a place for wings so this was new to me. everyone chided me throughout the meal because apparently, i am a very wasteful wing eater. as justin yelled, "THE CARTILAGE IS THE BEST PART! CRACK OPEN THE BONES!" ugh. but it was delicious.

i'm excited for tonight, there's a party in DL on justin's hall and those are always the best ones.

big!!!

2007-04-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

alright. i need to get how much i love BIG (bjarke ingels group) off my chest. he and julien de smedt used to make up half of PLOT before they parted ways. this might not make much sense if you haven't been keeping up on your future-city contemporary danish architecture lately (shame on you) - PLOT is a firm that designed a bunch of really cool bldgs in copenhagen. anyways, they separated and now it's BIG on one side and JDS (juilen de smedt). and it's AMAZING. like the craziest awesomest coolest stuff ever.

click here to see the website. he lectured at columbia this week i think, too.
anyways, i was just reading this article in metropolis and i can't get over the last paragraph:

“Do you know the Notorious B.I.G.?” Ingels asked me as we returned from the VM Houses in his Volvo wagon. “I read in Wikipedia that B.I.G. stands for ‘Business Instead of Game.’” If gangsta rap and progressive Danish urbanism seem worlds apart, Ingels views Biggie Smalls’s nickname as a simple metaphor for his own “big,” moving toward ever more ambitious, and realizable, urban schemes.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-04-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

the rivington

okay, you need to click on this link and watch this intro flash animation. it's for the rivington hotel, which is cool if a little snotty...but that intro is fucking awesome. and at the same time reminds me of rotterdam?? you have to listen to the walkmen's 'wake up' while looking at this intro, then the circle of massive douchery will be complete.

graffiti research lab

2007-04-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

how awesome is this:
interactive architecture
and this:
drip sessions

celebrate the new, celebrate the few

2007-04-13T10:43:00.000-05:00

i'm so excited, tonight is our HIGH RISE MULTI-USE TOWER CRAWL! wooo! in forte's class we're giving group presentations on contemporary arch. typologies, and me/justin/jiddy/sarah chose the multi-use tower. so tonight we are going to do a 'tower bar crawl' and make a movie out of it. i'm so damn excited!!!

last night was great - we went to the malthouse as is our wont on thursdays. jiddy showed up so that was funny. at the end of the night we were doing shots of sambuca and that crap is so sugary and greasy, when someone handed me mine, it slipped right out of my hand! oh god it was awful. now everything i own smells like licorice. i guess it could be worse. but seriously, the section of my pants where it got spilled was literally hard by the end of the night - like it had been sprayed with some kind of disgusting clear sealant. hah! so anyways the end of the night was just really great. and then after that katie, amy chris and i went to eileen's - YES. eileen's is so great. then starsha charis and richard came too. these obnoxious yonkers kids started making fun of the irish waitress' accent cuz she kicked one out for smoking inside, and as they left, richard jumped up and said "i am just so mad right now." and ran out, and picked up two trashcans and threw them at the cars of these kids as they drove away. he then got in his car and tried to follow them. he was back in 10 minutes though for a burger - it was pretty hilarious/badass.

so i'm almost 100% on columbia. gotta get a money order (for some reason i have no checks) and send that off. i applied for housing yesterday!? i had been feeling for a few days after ithaca that columbia was the right place for me, but i kept trying to convince myself of cornell because when we were there, my mom was really quiet about judging it. so i assumed that she wanted me to go there. so i kept thinking "mom must see something i don't" so i spent a while trying to see how i should go there. but slowly i realized it wasn't gonna happen, so i was dreading telling my parents, since i thought they'd be dissapointed. so last night i called them and i was kind of slowly trying to say that i was going with columbia, and my mom goes "THANK GOD! now i can finally say something! we were on pins and needles that you might choose cornell, but we didn't want to influence your decision!" it was like the biggest miscommunication ever - i thought my mom wanted me to go and she thought i wanted to go, but we both knew i should go to columbia. hah. anyways that's done. i'm so relieved to put that decision behind me. cornell's open house was pretty weird - no one asked questions and in general the admitted students just seemed kind of...blase? i mean on the other hand the kids at columbia's open house acted like they were all on meth or something. i would prefer something more in the middle, but i don't really have another choice! so, here's to decades of debt and three miserable, oppresively anxious, sleep-deprived years!

2007-04-11T21:17:00.001-05:00

hurry boy it's waiting there for you

2007-04-11T20:21:00.000-05:00

is toto the greatest? 'africa -' yes.
so we drank some wine at the advanced painting show, and then i come home to get my drawing stuff to take to katie's room where everyone is, but then i sat down cuz i wanted to listen to toto. so then i started up maya, and then after 20 minutes i started to feel sleepy. uh oh. so of course the only choice was go to bed or keep drinking. luckily i have a few beers in the fridge from last weekend. so now i really am kind of drunk, maybe too much so, but anyways it's making for hilarious work in maya. especially in light of this article about stoner architects.
because the model i am building in maya right now is MADE ONLY OF STAIRS!
haHHAHAHahahha!

heimdalsgate

2007-04-08T23:14:00.000-05:00

ahh, there's nothing like a cold beer after a stressful day. haa.
i'm so into the new of montreal album. "i spent the winter on the verge of a nervous breakdown while living in norway/i felt the darkness of the black metal bands/but being such a fawn of a man i didn't burn down any old churches/just slept way too much"
hah! these lyrics could describe my last yr - except replace norway with denmark. or germany. i was so happy and so sad at the same time. especially in denmark. in berlin i was just sort of bitter. although i had the best time ever.

anyways, things are weird/good here. subverting all my exiety into hypochondria. or is it? ah, that's why it's so hard. anyways today was good. amy txted at 11.30, waking me up from a bizarre 'quest' dream. in it, i was travelling to get to my family, in a car, through the midwest. i was stopped somewhere, some new urbanist town, trying to find my hotel room. i put all my things in a random room and went in search of the main building to get a key. everywhere there were people, families, enjoying refreshments at these little new-urbanist kiosks. like pretzels and beer and stuff. the hotel was broken up into several small buildings, each was this strangely small fachwerkhause. when i came out of the lobby it was pouring, and i had to run as fast as i could to my room. but i was also being chased by something. i think it had a lot to do with the hotel i had to stay at in ft. lauderdale when my flight to phila got cancelled over spring break. did i ever write about it?
i was rerouted from atlanta to ft. lauderdale, and had to take a 45 dollar cab ride to this tiny hotel, where i had to pay in cash...then, five hours later, i got back in a shuttle and drove back to the airport. and they had lost my baggage so i had nothing but the clothes on my back, and three books. anyways we drove back to the airport in the dark morning, and past all the big 80-story art deco hotels on the shore. they all had these palm-tree-edged grass lawns in their front yards - and in front of one, someone had just flipped their car upside down. the police weren't there yet, and the body was laying right next to the upside down car door, covered by a blanket. it was something out of a david lynch film. well that was my first dead body ever. then we passed the ambulance going in the opposite direction. anyways i think that's what my dream had to do with. it went on forever, it seemed like. so then we went to brunch, and amy's friend from home lily was there, she was so cool.

sarah s. called me during brunch and said she was having a photoshop 911, so i went over there for a while to help, then came home and cleaned cuz my mom is coming tomorrow and i assume i'll show her my room? then sarah borrowed kate wood's car and i went with her to CVS. it was nice.

since then i've been researching grad schools. my mom is flying in from dallas tomorrow and we're driving up to ithaca. i'm more nervous about this open house than columbia's. this one i know much less what to expect.

the phantom of undone work is haunting me right now...a month left and i haven't written any more of my thesis since january. should i even admit that? yikes.

"i spent the winter on the verge of a nervous breakdown while living in norway"

2007-04-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

i'll begin with this delightful post (entitled "bonkers in yonkers") from curbed.com about the ridiculous new will alsop project in yonkers:

and here's a little excerpt:

The hulking 80,000-square-foot power plant will lose its two smokestacks and gain a large residential tower. A third of the 400 units will be luxury condos and the rest rentals, with some reserved for low-income residents... The $250 million project also calls for adding a contemporary art museum, located in a former switch-house, and a new apartment structure, nicknamed the “magic tower,” with a boxy upper portion balanced on tentacle-like stilts.

Seriously, Will Alsop, where have you been all our lives? Your Google Image Search results alone have won you our eternal devotion.

haaaaaaaa! i love when curbed gets all... funny.

so what an intense few days.

re: columbia open house
i feel like i'm a pregnant woman, having bizarre mood swings every 10 minutes about this shit. and then of course today forte drops the bomb: "you know, you could defer and apply to the other top schools next yr!" its like OHHHH NOOOOOOO!!! in a way i know he's right, i didn't apply to yale/harvard/princeton because my portfolio wasn't ready back in december, and those schools might be better matches for me, but i have spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME, sweat, tears, and money on this to just let it all come to nothing. i am beginning my m.arch in four months. that's the story.
the columbia open house was pretty enlightening, but also very confusing. the dean, mark wigley, is awesome, and after talking to him a bit i can see how he's changing columbia from the stuffy robert a.m. stern environment into something more engaging. the big kicker is: columbia's facilities SUCK!!! actually worse than suck. you're paying 35,000 dollars a year to share a computer and desk with someone else? geez. walking through the studios, they're just so awfully cramped and depressing - not the good kind of messy, the miserable kind of messy. all the kids just had these looks on their faces like "dear god please let this moment pass!" one guy i talked to told me how to build his model he had to put a piece of plywood on a garbage can in the hall and build it out there. on the other hand:
did i look like that in studio last yr? i'm sure - sleeping under a desk and only drinking 7-11 espresso and gummi bears for 3 days, it doesn't matter if you're working in a suite at the four seasons - right? and what really matters in those situations is who's sitting around you.
speaking of the people - i was incredibly surprised by how cool they all were. i met so many nice people - what?? i thought everyone at this school was supposed to be a jerk! no. the first guy i met was so cool, he's coming to cu to do AAD, graduated from cornell two years ago and has been working for kohn pedersen fox since then, and has been in dallas working on their new 50-story tower next to the W hotel, right by our house! and he wants to go back to school so he has time to 'think.'! awesome!
i also met this girl who's been working at GM designing cars in detroit - they recruited her one night in her studio at u of i or somewhere. mysterious.

anyways the whole thing is that columbia clearly is better connections/better jobs while cornell is better facitities/education. now for a humanities situation, obviously the right choice is the school with a better education. however, in an m.arch program the focus is on preparing for your career afterwards, and your professors are more critics of what you do in studio than anything. so i really have to be careful here - this isn't choosing between small liberal arts colleges where the emphasis is on building a humanities foundation, this is about choosing a school that's gonna guide me towards the best place afterwards.

i'm terrified that the day before the deadline next week i'm gonna have a panic attack and defer for a year. but the truth is i will regret that so bad it's not even imaginable.

in other news (believe me there is not much happening with me right now except this stuff), jarett/starsh/emma's play is this weekend and i am looking forward to seeing it. we went to the bar last night and everyone there gave it very very good reviews. the bar was so weird - it was so crowded and all with freshman - how did they get served? hey, if you can get it, mazel tov!

and now for something very superficial

2007-04-03T21:06:00.000-05:00

waaawaoooo as borat would say (dead joke, anyone?) i am so nervous. tomorrow is columbia's admitted students open house and boy i feel like it's my first day of 6th gradee! i am posting 5,000 posts a day to the archinect thread about the open house. everyone wants to meet for drinks after it ends - oh my god! am i cool enough? what should i wear? should i play the cool card and not be myself, or be myself and run the risk of being mocked???

when in reality, judging from the prospective open house in the fall, i know that 65% of the people in that room tomorrow are going to be wearing literally the same exact outfit i am, no matter what i put on. and 100% of the people in that room will be wearing some variation on this ensemble:

as a sidenote, i almost chose the following picture for this joke:

but upon closer inspection it made me feel... funny. isnt it really weirdly, subtly sexual??

anyways, i'm excited to see what this open house is like tomorrow. not excited about going to the city, but hey, i get to miss pre calc! (read: braces, social studies)

montanita

2007-04-02T15:18:00.000-05:00

my god i am getting nowhere with this museum design. woolfson emailed this morning to say he was out sick, so ive been in the lab since 930 trying to get somewhere, and amazingly i have nothing - though i did get an easter package from my mom and a huge, crazy-looking abstract from columbia.
anyways it's 4thirty and nothing has changed in my design. i have tried johnny clegg, sufjan, even ratatat's "classics," which always makes me work. ive finished another model of marshall field. yet i cannot get anything done on this damn thing that's due tomorrow. i just don't know what the fuck this thing is even supposed to be. i can't stand the collection, i can barely stand the building we're supposed to put it in...ugh. i was actually closer to a good design the second day in. this guy we're building it for, v. margolin, looked at all the pictures of fancy new yuppie-ish museums and loved them, but in our first review he criticized us for not taking a more theoretical, critical approach to his museum. it's like guy, you told us you like modern! you told us you liked raw stone and track lighting! this is our compromise. geez i just feel really frustrated right now.
i had too much fun with the concept graphic design and now i cant do any more, its like im stuck in this.

well i published this post but i already feel a little calmer after having written it. so ill talk it out some more.
what i'm confused about is that i really really like the twin ramp cyclones that right now are anchoring the entire concept. like i cant get over them - or more specifically i can't put anything else together around them. like they're this black hole which i know is going to stay but which is debilitating the rest of the design. it's almost like these two towers are oppressing the rest of the design because they command so much attention. they create a vacuum. so then my instinct is to say, well let's play that up and make the rest of the building as dark and minimal as possible. but then you're left with a design which draws way too many comparisons to the twin towers light memorial.

interjection: oh man this lady who teaches the photoshop workshop at night just came in and is being sooooo mean to eli, who runs the maclab. like being a jerk about stuff that clearly isn't his fault. then she started screaching about "where's the controller for the projector? the controller???" and i was like "it's right in front of you, here" and gave it to her and she didn't even crack a smile or say anything. and then she was like "i think the administration would be VERY interested to know that i cant even send my files to my students, i dont WANT to put them on my website, name the solutions for me if there are any" its like whooooa this is your problem. UGH i hate listening to this. poor eli.

anyways, as i was writing, this design is stuck. i mean on the one hand, maybe no one will even notice the 9/11 light tower thing, and plus i mean this design in many ways is related to the event. on the other hand, the most important aspect of this design's success, ironically, is not the actual design but how the renderings look. so maybe i should go with this initial idea, and just concentrate on making the rendering as badass-looking as possible, because honestly i feel like when people in a non-educational setting judge renderings it's not the pragmatic but the romantic appearance of the image that matters. okay. so here i go.

and the ghost of carl, he approached my window

2007-04-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

well girl's night out went great. the boys were trying to rub their boys night out in our faces and we prevailed and actually might have surpassed them. they were not happy campers on the train home. and they all dressed in matching sports jackets. i have been feeling very wacky lately i think because i have been watching so much scrubs. it's as if i am finally letting my true personality out. actually i think i might embarrass my friends with these antics but they're stuck with me now.
anyways we went to dinner at risotteria in the east village where you can get gluten-free italian (jiddy has celiac's disease and i may have it too), so i had a gluten free beer, panini, and cupcake! it was so delicious. i spent most of the night trying to 'judge' ny which i could tell pissed jiddy off. then we went over to decibel which is this good sake bar but there was a 30 minute wait, so instead we went to KGB bar. which supposedly is in an old KGB hangout. but in my experience every large western city has one of these red-painted daily-worker-plastered places that claims to be an ex-KGB hangout. then again, never underestimate the reaches of a secret police force. my most memorable fake-commie-hangout-bar was in krakow, propaganda (duh) where this guy tried to drug our cider. what a weird place - depressing.
so we had some drinks and did some shots of sambuca, which was nice and reminded me of copenhagen. good stories were told - i told my trelleborg arch program initiation story which always puts me in a good mood.
wearing my longhorns shirt is now a bittersweet experience. the one place i actually wanted to go rejected me! probably because my math scores are so low i couldn't even tell them to my family, and there are three college level courses (college calculus, physics I and II) that i'd have to take between now and the fall to even be able to enroll. but still . everyone says i wouldn't be happy there as a theorist because it's more engineering than anything, but i don't care. anyways now it really is between cornell and columbia. i wanted to get out of ny but it looks like i've got another 3-4 years here.
here i am in the library trying to write an introduction to my marshall field project. this whole thing has turned more into a case study of how to get people to speak candidly about their surroundings - i've interviewed people, and even put up one of those 'free online surveys' which was sort of a shot in the dark, but actually turned out great. i asked a few basic questions like "have you had problems with MF?" and "are you a music student?" because i am envisioning the presentation as a much more statistics-oriented affair with many koolhassian charts and 3D maps. which is another way of saying, i want my design to be rooted in statistical analysis of basic programmatic data about the school and the site. i'm not sure what i'd think if i was asked to answer these questions, but whatever. more and more i want to find out how to bring institutional arch back to the people - i.e. the end of starchitecture. it's a collaborative process so it shouldn't be viewed as anything else. i want people to reengage with their environments. that's how i arrived at the question-asking approach - wanting this design to be founded somewhere other than my own ridiculous imagination.
i found this thread with FIFTY NINE pages on archinect called "m.arch 2007 applicants commiserate here!" which would have been an incredible resource five months ago. they've all been having panic attacks and stuff just like me, but they all had each other! well now i am posting and hopefully will find some others trying to decide between these schools - painfully, some of the people on the site who didn't get into columbia were accepted to UT austin! WHYYYY

"oh great fire, oh great disaster!"

2007-03-29T12:44:00.000-05:00

oh my god class was great today. i am still really sick, constantly almost puking, but i overcame that obstacle today to attend what will now be known as the return of what i love most about forte's classes.
it was a special day today because one of the oxford kids, and the head tutor and wadham (our sister school at oxford or whatever) are sitting in, as well as alex forte, joe's son! so we were all very surprised by this and very interested to see what he was like. anyways, today we talked about CHICAGO from 1871 to about 1880, i.e., adler/sullivan, the great fire of 1871, and why chicago is so important. this was especially exciting for me, because i just finished "the devil in the white city," so my mind has been constantly occupied by burnham/the white city/etc. unfortunately we mostly focused on the pre-Fair chicago school, and by that i mean sullivan, though i got the impression that he was always a little bit behind burnham/root, and was sort of a jerk. i mean he was eventually evicted from his own building, which is so unhappy. i asked justin, and he said that sullivan was artistically much more advanced than burnham. but in a city of commerce doesn't a love of the business count for more than anything!?
so we talked a lot about adler and Sullivan's schiller building.

it's important mainly because it's a clear visualization of the cultural temperature of chicago vs. the eastern seaboard: which is to say, whether commercial culture is a totalizing force, or not. and the idea is that the bottom part of the building housed a popular theatre, and on top of that, the arches that progress up the facade anchor modular office blocks, and the loggia at the very top houses a men's club. i.e., there is a vertical progression from communal to individual cultural practices. which leads into a comment on the psychological presence of 'the vertical' in chicago, whereas in NY it was much more about the block, the horizontal. of course an easy comparison to draw is the upward mobility of the immigrant classes in chicago - especially the germans. apparently, olmstead believed that the german immigrants displayed the most viable system for democratizing traditionally bourgeois cultural practices!!! he wrote a series of articles about this in the herald and i guess this is what ultimately lead to the beginning of the integration of parks into the urban fabric of american cities. i mean it was natural for the german immigrants to become a model of this assimilation of upper-class activities because the immigrants olmstead was talking about were politically and culturally literate since they immigrated because of the 1848 revolutions, as opposed to immigrants who came because of financial reasons.

so this is the stuff forte was talking about. and it was GREAT. i felt very proud of forte, and our class, and all the subject matter, for some reason. i got the feeling that maybe the brits didn't like the emotion and enthusiasm of the lecture. later at lunch justin said, that was why i hated oxford and why oxford hated me - if you're not lecturing in an old boy academic monotony they see it as illegitimate. and tasteless. and it was so fitting that today our subject was the breaking away of america from the tired, british colonial styles, and creating the first native american style!!! and that it helped america far surpass england in terms of architecture, and culture for that matter.

damn, i have to go to a pre-calc conference at four. my god that class gets worse and worse every day. i dont even answer his simplest questions anymore, because when i do, there's a good possibility that it will snowball into a waterfall of painful references to your confusion that have less and less to do with the original topic as they progress. in fact i think i may be in danger of loosing credit - i missed my third class before break because i overslept for once, and he emailed me like "JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE MISSING CONFERENCE TOMORROW DOES NOT GIVE YOU A REASON TO MISS CLASS TODAY." oh. it's my fourth class anyways. i began this course thinking it might be a chance to redeem myself, mathematically speaking, of all my failures - but now it's clear it's just a redux of every other math class i've ever taken. my professors are so sickened by my complete incompetence that they slowly become more and more uncomfortable with even addressing them, and therefore subvert their anger into chiding me about attendance.

my mom is coming out here on the ninth, and then on the 10th we're renting a car to go to ithaca! hah! there's a sentance i never thought i'd utter! i've been researching cornell a lot, and it seems i might choose it over columbia - it's less fashionable but has wayyy more of a soul. though i'm going to reserve judgement until after the open houses.

graduation is quickly approaching - today at lunch the subject was "what goes under your cap and gown?" as well as "what is the appropriate price range/fanciness range for senior/don dinner attire?" and of course, "does tao have private rooms?" for the much-anticipated full-family all-friend dinner that we are supposedly having. which of course is going to end up being 70 people. this discussion brought me back to thinking about when justin and i are going to go up and have drinks at the lever house - something forte said we must do when we graduate. i have the perfect dress for it now. justin also commented that his parents are giving him a blank check for a suit for his graduation present. luckily hunter had the newest issue of GQ which had a huge section on new suits. i personally think thom browne is the 'duh' choice, but then justin said something classic and simple - like brookes brothers. but thom browne is doing a new line for brookes brothers. which might be better anyways because t.b. is haaard to pull off. but at the same time, the era which he contacts is the same era, and epoch, which justin draws from in his academic life. it fits. so to speak! hah!

just as an endnote i would like to note just how attached i am to chicago right now, architecturally and musically. the last two minutes of "the tallest man, the broadest shoulders" informed much of forte's class for me today. i feel so connected to the whole thing - it's weird. justin says i'm not a midwesterner cuz i went to a waspy high school, but he's misinformed about shady side's beginnings - poor scottish and german immigrants, who almost instantly became steel tycoons (andrew carnegie) - began a tiny private school in the wilds of the Appalachians to educate their sons on how to become tycoons of industry - that's classically midwestern. anyways, this whole story is so gripping right now. maybe i see some kind of paradigm at work which i reticently believe is at work in my life too. forte talked a lot about the psychology of the prairie today. i think that might have a lot to do with it. "from the plains?"

the cops rush in. everyone's screaming

2007-03-25T19:38:00.000-05:00

so, i got into columbia...uh oh! this makes the situation next yr infinitely more complex. more on this later.
for now, i want to post my pictures from my time in dallas last week, more specifically, my pictures of the site of norman foster and rem koolhaas' new buildings for the dallas center for performing arts. i posted on these buildings a few weeks ago, and my dad randomly got some tickets to the symphony from their provost the night before i left, so we went. the dallas symphony sits directly adjacent to the construction site, so i was able to run over there before the music started to take some pictures on the rapidly progressing projects!!! well actually, the foster was rapid, the koolhaas was hard to tell. i know they're laying the foundation for the parking garage, though.
this first picture is walking towards the symphony from the nasher sculpture center, where we went for this reception and dinner before the music. it's actually a very nice little promenade, though part of it is next to a parking lot. you can see a few of the 4-5 cranes on the site in the background.

moving towards the symphony, you can see that the construction site is wedged right up next to the building.

here's a picture, standing on the edge of the symphony's site, of the norman foster building coming up. you can tell by the distinctive (and when i say distinctive, i mean that in a slightly ironic way) spherical shape of what will become the theatre (which i included a picture of after this one, and which i think is a blatent rip off of henning larsen's copenhagen opera house).

here's a shot of how the foster project is placed right up against the symphony's side - it seems a little unruly to me, but then again, having them so close together might foster (so to speak) a sense of connectivity and shared experience between the two institutions.

during intermission, i snapped this picture of the foster site viewed from the interior of the symphony. at first, to me, they seemed weirdly placed in relationship to each other - but when i walked around to these windows, the relationship began to make more sense. it will be interesting to see if the foster dwarfs the symphony, especially when you think about the color and materials of the surrounding blocks - right now, it's a lot of sandstone, desert tones, and sea glass. the foster building purports to be so LOUD and laquerbox red.

honestly the foster building could end up being the most beautiful thing ever and i would still have it in for it. there's something snide about it. we'll see. in other news, my parents and annicka, and anne and jim, all went up to the ghost bar in the W (right in this same area) and said it was hilariously awesome.

i'm not sure i could turn columbia down, simply on the basis of how many guest lecturers they have - there's at least one lecture by a practicing architect every evening. i don't know what i'll do. maybe i'll make a decision simply on a financial basis. though they're pretty much neck and neck there, too. my mom is thinking about flying up to NY to drive me to ithaca for the open house on april 10 - that would be so good. i really hope she does. i miss my parents and annicka so much right now. ny just seems so dirty and mean. why hasn't ut austin written me back?

but what would frank lloyd wright say? oh, columbia!

2007-03-24T22:23:00.000-05:00

while in the bahamas i cultivated a newfound awe for 'illinois.' leaving the dallas airport, i bought "the devil in the white city: murder, magic, and madness at the fair that changed america," by erik larson. it's about the world's columbian exposition of 1893 in chicago, which daniel burnham spearheaded the building of, along with people like mckim, hunt, olmstead, and for a short while root. even sullivan and adler did a building. anyways, it's about the fair, and how chicago won the competition to get it over new york, and how it built 'the white city,' within chicago, 'the black city,' and became this point of civic and national pride. as the book follows burnham, it also follows h.h.holmes, a serial killer so charming and handsome that he was able to build a city-block long 'castle' under the guise of a hotel called 'the world's fair hotel,' though the building was actually a killing machine full of sound-proof vaults, a furnace, and so on. so there's this dichotomy between arguably the greatest and most beautiful creation of american planning/architecture/commerce/invention and this evil for which no one could ever find a motive. and chicago becomes this central point for this kind of cyclone of beauty, progress, and evil. and of course the fair is also the focal point for the 'illinois' album -

"Oh great white city
I've got the adequate committee
Where have your walls gone?
I think about it now

Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion
Oh Columbia!
From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented,
The Ferris Wheel!"

it's all in reference to the fair - chicago surpassing new york, the new inventions of the fair (shredded wheat, aunt jemima), how ferris (a pittsburgher) got this amazing wonder of engineering built, and dedicated it to "all engineers of america," and the warfare between the committees of businessmen created to build the fair, and the intense anxiety of the directors and for that matter, the whole nation, of underselling the paris exposition attendance record (a record which they in fact broke by several hundred thousand people, on "chicago day!")

i could clearly go on and on about all this stuff, but at the heart of it is this amazement that this all happened, and the hugely influential impact it had on us and our country. and what's more, how no one remembers it now - no one knows about the architects, or engineers, or entrepreneurs at all! though for a hundred years after they were household names. one 19 year old advertiser who worked at the fair, sol bloome, even went on to help found the UN. everyone in america still has this reticent but profound connection to these events! and we don't even know it. walt disney's dad was a construction worker at the fair - and after hearing stories about 'the magic of the white city,' his son would try to recreate the enthusiasm. and that's just one example of the supreme influence of the fair on american culture. for burnham, millet, olmstead, ferris, and even mckim and all the eastern architects - it defined their lives. it was the single largest construction project in american history.

and so this book made me go back and re-interpret "illinois," in the context of the history of the fair. and so now of course it's 15 times better, though before it was still my favorite album ever.

anyways, we got back from the bahamas yesterday... it was sort of insane, but fun. i got some kind of food poisoning on the way home and so have been in bed all day since yesterday. the next month and a half looks a little bleak, since i have my thesis, the appeal to my housing probation, and the decision about grad school to make. also, there is a bug infestation in this slonim. it's disgusting beyong belief. i am so ready to get the fuck out of ny.

also, our presentations for victor are due tuesday...OOPS! we have to have our entire models done as well as a flythrough quicktime movie. i am really excited to make mine, i'm looking to OMA's recent louisville kentucky skyscraper video for inspiration. however, i have not even begun the final model so i really am a little worried. especially since i can't really get out of bed right now. i'm excited nonetheless!

are you ready?

2007-03-15T01:33:00.000-05:00

bleeeeeech i feel like im about to puke. tomorrow (well, today now) they announce the watson fellowship recipiants. i'm completely freaked out, cant sleep, because if by some shot in hell it's me, then i have to put off grad school for a yr and go be alone for a yr. exactly what i dont want, which of course means it'll happen, right?
i applied for this thing just cuz i wanted to keep my option open, and it seemed like a good idea - but now that i've gotten into grad school what i really WANT to do is get started asap - on that road. i know it sounds insane, ungrateful, and probably shortsighted. but i can't deny that i really, really just want to start arch school next yr.
the final watson interview went HORRIBLY - the lady called my proposal "schizophrenic mumbojumbo" and "careerist," and said a bunch of other mean/crazy shit about me/it, so i'm hoping that means i've got no chance in hell. but on the other hand, maybe she was testing me? i thought the first interview went horribly too, and it turned out that they nominated me.

i've been so dang happy about cornell for the last week, and going to see the arch school at UT austin - i started making all these plans in my head for the fall. and now to think those plans might not happen - even because an opportunity that so many people would love to have - it makes me feel scared.
i must sound insane - and i know 10 yrs down the road when im working a 70 hr week for the fifth yr in a row i'll be kicking myself...but i dunno. i can't lie about how i feel right now. it's like, i've floated around, experimenting, absorbing, doing crazy stuff...now i'm ready to get to it, and learn. if by some stroke of bizarre fate i get this thing, would i be able to turn it down? legally, and emotionally?

UGH. and i ate tons of bread tonight so i feel so sick. i guess i have to get tested for celiac's after all. im dreading leaving on friday, and dreading finding out the circumstances under which i'll be leaving.
UGH i hate sounding so ungrateful. but hey, if i can't say it here, where can i say it??

if seeing is right, then look where you're at! andrew jackson, all i'm asking

2007-03-12T00:28:00.000-05:00

This has been one of the best weeks. I just couldn’t think of anything better. I haven’t posted because SO much has happened, I keep thinking “I should write this down, I should post” but I can’t even get it down on paper. I wrote on Thursday:

On Wednesday, I was writing a post about henning Larsen and Schmidt hammer and lassen (which I’ll still post), and I was interrupted, because I got an email from cornell university, with the subject line only of “Graduate Architecture Application.” I was like, OH SHIT. This is bad. So I open it up, and it turns out they accepted me and gave me a scholarship. So I dunno. Maybe I’ll end up there.
It was just such a relief to hear from somewhere, and most importantly, get in. I never expected that. I stoop up and went “oh my god?” to no one in the lab, and ran upstairs to tell forte. Then I ran outside to call my mom, who was excited, but I felt bad cuz she’s having a really hard time getting this book she wrote ready for publishing, cuz apparently her editor is kind of not totally with it. But then forte came outside and showed me the rankings, which was nice of him.
This profound weight was lifted so quickly, I’ve felt nauseous for the last 10 hours or so. It’s like going into shock, really – to panic and completely freak out about something for literally almost a year...and then suddenly it’s okay. It’s the weirdest feeling. I went to dinner with Katie and hunter, amy julian, emma and chris too, and they were so cool about it – so nice. Everyone was so nice. I felt like I had just had a child or something.
So anyways here I am at LGA, ready to go home. Damn I can’t wait to see my parents and dallas. I just saw ivanka trump – at first I forgot who she was, and was trying to figure out how I knew her. Then I realized no, she’s just a celebrity.

So anyways, that day I flew home to dallas and I had a window seat, and manhattan was on my side – right at twilight. It was literally hard to believe I was looking at a city and not looking at a model of the city. Everything was gold, red and orange and yellow, and I could see where I worked in dumbo, I could see the atlantic ocean as well as the west side highway and jersey city and everything.
I got home, dad was waiting for me at dallas ft.worth airport. We walked outside and it was 75 degrees – what a relief. What a beautiful place to live. We drove home and talked about everything – dad and I have very good talks about the future and about ‘business’ stuff. Then mom and dad had waited to eat, and we drove to hunky’s but it was closed, and so was uncle julio’s, mia’s, and toy’s. so we came home and at some vegetables and stuff and talked. Mom and dad put one of my old paintings from highschool in a big frame and hung it in our living room, cuz they need more art for the house. theyre getting ready to put up more of our stuff i guess.

Then on Friday they went to work and I slept in and just watched tv and ate stuff, and then we went to toy’s for dinner, which is two blocks away from our house. I hadn’t been there yet, but it reminded me a lot of the thai place on my street in berlin that annicka and I loved so much. We had steamed mussels in coconut milk curry and then I had spicy flat noodles with chicken, and tsingtao beer. Then we drove to la duni, where we had dessert – la duni had the best desserts in the city, in my opinion. I had a limonata which in my personal opinion is the best drink EVER created (like 5 limes, 10 mint leaves, and crushed ice with fizzy water), and my parents had coffee, and we ordered a piece of venezuelan cake and the nutella cake (I forget their fancy names), which of course was my low-brow choice. But wow. Delish.
Then yesterday dad and I took a road trip to AUSTIN!!! (by SOM) I’d never been, and dad said that in the case that I get accepted, I won’t have chance to visit before I make a decision – so better safe than sorry. He really wanted to visit the LBJ library too, one of the main reasons we went is because mom needed to go sit in the callier center and just work on her book for the WHOLE DAY and do nothing else. So we got up at 8, hit the starbucks, dropped mom off, and hit the road. It’s a three hour drive to Austin, a straight shot south on 35E. dad drove, and I djed the music, and took pictures of the weird churches and houses on the side of the road:

We got there, parked, and man was it hot! Like 90 on march 11. we walked underneath the art museum’s awning, which I thought had great detailing:

And then down a beautiful street with huge old trees, and something called “water chilling station #2” whose windows were open – I could see water pouring down inside!

We found the student union, and then found out the school of architecture was next door, on gaudalupe street, which is sort of like state street in Madison (food, urbanoutfitters, etc). The architecture building was locked (spring break) but SO beautiful!!!

then we ate a pita at 'pita pit,' across the street, and dad and i bought matching longhorns shirts (hahaha). dad was gonna buy one of the ones where it's all the orange then just a white longhorn symbol, but he said it was "too much for him" as a nebraskan, to take. so he bought one with the opposite color scheme, like i did. dad wanted to see the state capitol, which is claimed to be the most beautiful state capitol in the country, which i actually could definitely understand. i saw this guy asleep in the back of a truck, it was like huck finn or something.

so we saw the house of reps. and senate meeting rooms, and everything was decorated in the texas star - star chandeliers, star door hingers, everything. did you know that the texas senate and house of reps. only meets every other year? it's the only state government that does that.

then dad wanted to go to the LBJ library and museum, so we went. it was in a building by SOM which from the outside looks so boring but the inside is awesome. lbj's papers are all archived in these red binders with gold seals on the spines, and the 7-story atrium has one wall of windows where you can see them.

there was also a replica of his oval office which was really cool. he had a special marble-topped coffe table built which had a built-in phone. so then it was almost five, time to drive home and get mom, but i asked dad to drive me back to guadalupe street so i could run in and buy these boots i saw. then a few hours later we were home, in dallas.

we went to the bread factory and i had a chicken and raspberry sandwhich, it was great. we sat outside. that night i finished "extremely loud and incredibly close," jonathan safran foer's newest book, which is about this 9 year-old kid, oskar, whose dad dies in 9/11. i expected to be kind of rolling my eyes at the whole thing, but i finished the entire book in 24 hours and cried an embarassing number of times. people say that he's given too much credit, but i think he deserves it. i thought a lot of the psychological symptoms i attribute to being just nuts generally started after 9/11, but i didn't think they were related. all that stuff - the night terrors, the intense fear of flying, the constant thinking about protecting people from harm, the obsession with death, with the media - they're shared by this character. and i never thought they would be verbalized in connection with people my age having this major psychologically transformative experience that year. i don't mean the whole "i knew someone near there, i'm a nyer" thing. i mean, everywhere people changed because of that event, no matter if they were in kansas or the financial district. obviously, it was unfathomably more tragic for the people directly involved - but what i'm saying is i think a culture of 'disclusion' has developed. where people who are from ny scorn those who claim to have been changed by it. i understand this impulse, but i also think they're forgetting to acknowledge that there is a shared national conciousness - across the whole country - that has nothing to do with immediate experience. it has more to do with the media than anything, it has to do with thinking about the country as a history, a story, and a kind of 'whole.' and with realizing that that narrative could be changed very quickly, and in a horrible way - people my age hadn't realized that yet. anyways, i have always been embarassed to say that i think it kind of really had a strong effect on me, for that reason, but this story made me feel a little more.. well i guess i simply comprehended my feelings to a greater extent. and this kid is brilliant - so smart, sweet, sort of insane - the book is very incredible. i haven't liked a book this much in a while.

so i woke up this morning and mom was taking a break from her book to take me shopping and get a pedicure, but then dad said, let's go to brunch. so we tried to go to the dream cafe, and mamitos, and parigis, but they were all suuuuch long waits. so we went to la madeline and sat outside. i had a chicken friand and a ceasar salad, and a raspberry lemonade. we talked about private school, new york, and my mom's cousins.
then mom and i headedy out to northpark mall, which. is. great. fashion week for dallas (wtf??) had just ended yesterday, so the tents were still up.

anyways, we had a very good time. i sensed mom was worrying about her book, though.

so we came home and ate dinner on the balcony:

where it was interesting to hear about pragmatic speech disorders and this center for brain health that just got built at utd. i also got their input on my marshall field project.
then i really started into "undaunted courage," about meriwether lewis, jefferson, and the lewis and clarke expedition. its very good, but i fall asleep every 5 pages, which is nice in a way. relaxing.
so now i'm sitting here and annicka is sending me great songs. but i am worried because she is worried about her finals and stuff..but she'll be home in a few days and will have forgotten all about it!!!
AND on the way down to austin dad played some johnny clegg - OH MY GOD! i knew all the words incredibly, from when i was a little kid! i hadn't heard it since i was probably seven. OH GOD i'm so into it now.

even as i left florida, far enough far enough wasn't far enough

2007-03-06T16:16:00.000-05:00

as much as i constantly complain about maya class, i realized today how completely hilarious it is. i realized this as our entire class was crowded around one of the lab computers watching this cartoon of bill gates and steve jobs fighting (here). There's a scene where the Finder (as in the app in osx) is on stage rocking out. anyways we spent like half an hour going over the latest youtube crazes.
i'm going home to dallas on thursday. planning on spending the week at the pool at the verandah. i need to work on my base tan for the bahamas, which we leave for on the 17th. i'm flying from dallas to philly on the 16th, to hang out with amy and stay at her house, and then her mom and dad can drive us to newark the next morning. everyone else is driving or training down from ny. but i guess newark is closer to philly than to ny. amy and i are going to do a little rocky-inspired tour of philly...the art museum steps and everything.
anyways, it's supposed to be 75 the whole week in dallas. i also am gonna go see all the dallas performing arts center construction projects, so i'll post some pictures. and shop. it is disgusting that i am capable of missing a mall. but northpark isn't a mall. for gods sakes, they're opening up a public library there. it's like i'm being sucked into things i know are soulless...as if i'm part of a new mutant breed of consumer that attaches no moral significance to traditionally 'superficial' experiences. i just go on my immediate reaction, which is...wonder? security? the fact that this kind of stuff exists somewhere? that america is a reality and for the first time, tangible?
and i'm finally tired of feigning disgust at this stuff. it's part of my life, and it's part of everyone else's, whether they admit to it or not.
also, listen to the new modest mouse album. the song 'florida' is amazing. the guitarist from the smiths is now officially part of their band - HA! the lyrics are actually pretty much how i feel about florida too.
i feel this sadness when i think about driving through the country during summers, through pennsylvania, wisconsin, nebraska, colorado, nevada, texas. i miss oberlin ohio, eerie, osh kosh, amarillo - their transparency, their invisibility. everything good that happened there. it feels good.
this is what modest mouse does to me. it makes me think about this stuff. even more than every day life already does.

i think i want to drive out through the plains this summer...yeah

vashti and esther

2007-03-04T21:41:00.000-05:00

Last night I had this dream that I was walking through the plains with someone else (I’m not sure who – Katie? Annicka? Justin?), and it was a blizzard – everything we saw was blue and grey. We walked for days and days trying to find something, but I’m not sure what. I got the feeling that we were looking for a home – a place to stay. As if something had happened where we had been and we were running from it now – but not something really bad, just something we couldn’t stay for. So we walked and walked over snow and then we came upon a suburban development – you could see the little blue windows from far above on a ridge. We came to one of these houses, and somehow we snuck into it. We realized someone was home – and panicked. Obviously we’d be arrested. But then when this person found us, they were happy to see us – they treated us like children. Then we knew that this was sufjan steven’s mom. I didn’t know if we had been looking for her out in the blizzard or if it was a coincidence, but she made us food and had us stay. She talked a lot about sufjan, like she had been there the whole time while he was growing up (though a lot of those songs are about how his mother abandoned him and his brother). But she talked about it like she had been there the whole time, and loved him more than anything.

Anyways it was the strangest, most vivid dream. In the dream I somehow knew that I was playing the part of one of the three kings of orient are – the snowy plain was like a desert, and we were traveling in the dark following small lights on the horizon. But then when we got there, we found this mother, who was talking about sufjan like he was gone away, or not born yet – I’m not sure. It was very weird.

It’s probably a symptom of three straight days of parties. Its been a long weekend. But a good one – Katie said today at brunch, “is this the beginning of the end of school? Drinking every night?” and yes, I guess it is. Which in turn sent me into a panic about my thesis, which I am currently in the library not writing. Anyways, Friday was so funny – we turned the top floor of DL into a party. Justin finally drank too and was a gem. We drifted from evan’s to justin’s to jarett’s to matt’s to jiddy’s back to justin’s, then to just the hallway between them all. There were so many people chanting SENIORS! SENIORS! Someone had a camcorder, I cant wait to see this indicting footage. There was this red lipstick floating around, and by the end of it all we were covered in it – gross. I had to go home, I was grossed out. But I had a great night.

Then Saturday was purim, this jewish holiday which is kind of like halloween. So analee and the slc hillel organized a “purim schpiel” in marshall field, and Justin amy and jarett all had parts, which was funny to watch. Also lots of holmentaschen, which justin’s mom sent from their family’s jewish bakery in Chicago. Then as analee said, it was time for “the real point of purim,” which apparently is simply alchohol. i saw some things that night i hope to see again soon. (i.e. mike levine wearing amy's bra, justin peeing sitting down).

This has been a great weekend, just kind of intense. I feel like I need to do some kind of detox – or at least sleep for a day or so. I guess it’s just that every night of the past three has been like…100%. And I’m sick, so it’s just been, exhausting. Luckily, my math homework is done.

antarctica

2007-03-02T13:27:00.000-05:00

oh to be only either hungover or sick. not both. or is one a symptom of the other? the weirdest parts of my body hurt - ears, knees, hair. like piercing joint pain in my legs. and my boss is playing blonde redhead really loud. come on.
last night we went to the bar. it got awesome at the end. usually the bar seems kind of...i dont know. its an oppressive atmosphere sometimes. but last night it was very relaxed, very open. joe (the bartender) gave us tons of free drinks, and had jarett analee and i do these tequila shots. i think he just wanted to see us act like idiots. that's what i'd do if i were a bartender - which i probably will have to be soon enough. charis (i.e. a brit) was with us, and shes very good friends with joe so maybe that was part of it. but there were also a bunch of freshman at the bar - are they not carding anymore? whatevs, some of them were really kind of cool.
then around 3 or so it was time to go to eileen's, this little old irish diner in the irish part of yonkers. we were the only ones there, but there were like 45 of us. i ordered three scrambled eggs and two silver dollars but then when my plate arrived, there were like FIVE eggs and literally 12 pancakes. and i wont question the will of whoever was in the kitchen. last night they taught me a lesson.
im having a lot of fun with my new 'micromemo' ipod recorder. i am making joes class into a little podcast so everyone in our class can listen to it. i feel so dumb, saying 'podcast,' maybe i should revise that and say 'file.' but ive also found that taping conversations is way funner than i thought.
yesterday afternoon before dinner justin jiddy and i were smoking and talking about the future as we are wont to do, and i tried it out. the conversation turned into just justin and i talking about history and whether we can talk about it as the kind of narrative that modernism and arch history generally apply to it. in other words: the rome/usa debate. i couldnt believe it - it was something out of first yr. so interesting. justin and i get in these conversations where we kind of go deeper and deeper into these weird vocabularies whose meanings are oblique to the actual subjects being discussed. its like were talking in a secret language - sometimes you get lost too, but you try and get back on the same path as the other. ive never been able to do this with our other friends. i think it has to do with sharing a certain awe-struck-ness in 'the future.' or history, in this case the same thing. and its always about america, in some way or another. america and the future.
there were a few real gems.

: facebook is crazy..the things that are happening to our generation..i dont think we're prepared.
: the modernists, they were all making utopian dreams at our age. im just, we dont have anything. theres too many ideas, information. in 10 yrs everyone will be a business major.
: we lost 500 points so we can spend the next five yrs building it all back up, and then do it again (re: stock market)
: the fact that dubai exists means that our system is corrupt.
: im an optimist. ive taken poly science stuff, ive seen breakthroughs.
: nobody cares about the packaging at grocery stores - why our cereal cant be in bags. target doesnt have to be a daily activity. but it is for me, when im home in the suburbs. but as you come to this realization, that you dont need it, you find yourself consuming more and more.
: the moneys gonna dry up, there's going to be a global recession. why do we have to call it a panic?
: the katrina cottage was a shotgun house but didnt have the back door which is what validates the whole form. the cottages use a/c. its not a dignified way to live - it should have been a temporary, government solution.
: im suddenly into thinking again

the reason i have apocolypse dreams is the same reason i love this kind of shit. its like destructoporn. its all so cryptic. its related to an intense fear of death.

ive had this project in mind today. in that way you do sometimes, when you keep a place or image in the background of your mind as you go about conversations and so on - just sort of a reticent image that sticks around and that you associate with whatever conversation you had while it was there.
but today its the utrecht university library, which we saw last yr. "the anti-seattle public library," also by a dutch firm, wiel arets. i loved it. its very imposing but at the same time, sort of...empyreal? is that the word? it adheres to this kind of somber color coded classicism thats the direct opposite of oma's witticisms. sort of refreshingly stoic.

(images via googleimage)
a propos utrecht - this was a place i felt i could stay for a while. the netherlands to me is the most alien european country, but had the smartest and happiest design and public spaces.

2007-02-27T22:20:00.000-05:00

so i got this letter from my old high school in the mail, with the letterhead and everything - very nice, to see that stuffy old logo again. it was for a "reception" cocktail hr ("ssa: celebrating the past, framing the future") in the city hosted by the founders of this award annicka and i got our senior yr, and the president/headmaster. why will they all be in ny? how did they get my address? i won't be able to go - it's a few days after i go home for spring break. but it made me happy, to know that somewhere out there someone at the switchboard is searching a database and printing out my name on that nice ivory stationary. i also wish i could have gone, just because i'd like to see the looks on their faces - that look that silently screams"we know you go here but jesus who let you in, that hair is barely passing for a 'natural shade'" after coming to slc i really haven't played that roll for years. i'm more on the other side of the mirror here - i have to say it's less anxious place to be, if less exciting.

i've really been on a koolhaas kick for the past day or so, if you haven't noticed. but now i may be passing into the far more tempting 'joshua prince ramus' realm which most of the world also seems to be enraptured with right now. koolhaas' protege, broken off from OMA to form REX architects. "prince josh," "so dreamy!" "so young!" "you try qualifying for the olympics in the middle of grad school!" geez. but then again, if you watch his TED talk from last month (here), he does sort of come off as awesome, especially in the second half of the presentation.
the two:

interestingly, ive heard rumors that he was able to rise so quickly through the OMA ranks because he provided some kind of monetary investment in it. sad and also logical? but just as likely, the envious mutterings of those moving more slowly upwards.

ive gotten into this habit of sitting in bed and watching 4-6 episodes of aqua teen hunger force before i go to bed. weirdly, i havent had any bad dreams since beginning this practice. which doesnt make any sense, considering that the last image i remember seeing last night before i fell asleep with the computer was of gigantic crabs that carl let loose when he tried to 'enlarge' himself using frylock's shrink machine. but i wont question it - it works.

louisville

2007-02-27T15:24:00.000-05:00

we're in claudia's maya class right now, and she brought in the big daily news article on the rem koolhaas jersey city development. so then i wanted to show her the wyly theatre i just posted about, and then justin showed us all this video, a proposal video of the new louisville, kentucky. its kind of awesome, and it kind of looks like an mtv commercial. par for the course.

2007-02-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

just woke up to gawker's linking to this nyt article on the notion of LEAVING NY here . very timely after all of these discussions we've been having about, "who stays and who goes." i'm counting myself out. i was looking at apartments in austin ysterday and they have beautiful floor to ceilinged window studios for about 400, three steps from the UTA shuttle and in a nice neighborhood. why, why? it's mark of true, unyeilding love that i'd actually consider living in some basement in queens for 1,200 a month just to be near my friends. true love. remember that my friends.

rem in dallas, foster ripping off larsen

2007-02-26T20:47:00.000-05:00

since i'm going home in less than two weeks now, i'm getting excited to see the progress on the victory plaza/dallas center for the performing arts development about a mile from our house in dallas. basically, we're getting a rem koolhaas! call me a corny, chinzy plebian, but, i love rem. i'm an addict. it's everything that i want in architecture as well as everything i know is cheesy about it. his design for the wyly theatre basically adheres to his "cake-pan architecture" (or whatever its name was) concept published in content a few years ago: you take a cake pan, and you take many different articles (rooms, functions, etc.etc) and you just throw them in there and let the pan form them in its image.
the theatre is going to be eleven stories, and here's a facade rendering from the website.

paradoxically, this design is very dallas. something about the granite and the wide, open walkway. it definitely has a relationship to renzo piano's nearby Nasher Center , but it's also sort of following in the blandly colored new W building, also nearby. i feel that 'starchitects' who come to dallas to build end up bein boxed in by the 'beige,' or 'desert stone' aesthetic of many of the buildings, but conversely, i like a lot of these places and feel proud that there is some semblance of a 'local' architecture, even if it is controlled and created solely by oil billionaires. after coming to dallas i feel new respect for these oil magnates, since they all have given the most insane, extravagant gifts to the arts. it's strange - the place, and people, that most of liberal america villainizes, is actually one of the friendliest and most artistically-well-endowed places i've ever been.
the entranceway:
YEAH!!! this is why i love rem. this is exactly what he's good at. metallic textures, low-ceiling entranceways, de stijl lighting that make you feel like you're in the netherlands even if you're in texas.
moving on to the less render-genic shots, here's the 'lounge,' i.e. cafe:
yeuugh. this is exactly like his cafe for his rottedram kunsthal, minus the good parts. a big grey box, and what's with the weird viewing-room on the right? is that where the oil magnates get to look out over the crowd, reigning over their domain? it's like a scientist's one-way mirror wall. actually, this also reminds me of DIE ZOLLVEREIN, in germany, which is an old abandonded industrial site that koolhaas re-planned and is now a design center. it has all these big, empty concrete mixing chambers (right) you can walk around in, and this looks exactly like them. except that this one probably cost a thousand times what the german ones cost.
here's a rendering of a theatre:

yikes! this looks like russel crowe should be onstage wearing a blade runner costume. no one wants to see this. looks like a robot's lower intestine.

this is where i predict dallasites are going to begin to get pissed. they all expect a pretty luxurious show for their money, i feel, and by luxurious i mean good lighting, light wood if it's modern, lots of white laminate -- this seriously actually looks like a gladiator's ring from the future. brutal.

rem is a good fit for dallas in the sense that his showy-ness always produces great looking, glossy facades that you can really feel impressed by, even if you are a little weary of the starriness of it all. but these interiors, unless he really spices them up with some weird plastic laminates that are back lit with some crazy colors, or with some bruce mau graphics running along the ceiling or something...i fear he might start to loose the dallas crowd. then again, maybe i'm playing the eastern seabord stuffy closed minded asshole, and dallasites appreciate much more than i give them credit for.

another building in the complex, the norman foster opera house, is a BLATENT rip off of henning larsen's new copenhagen opera house. so much so that it actually kind of pisses me off. he took everything that was good about the opera house and made it plasticy and cheap looking.
take a look:

henning larsen, 2004.

sir norman foster, under construction 2007.
a cantilevered roof over a glass curtain wall and an spherical interior theatre shaped like an egg? with floating stairs and walkways into the egg? really? really norman foster? gee, i think ive seen this somewhere before!
(all images via google image)
"larsen inspired?"
oh, right. copenhagen. plus a bunch of tacky red plastic and minus the beautiful organic massing.

the people vs. frank gehry

2007-02-23T16:10:00.000-05:00

i went through a bunch of the curbed posts on gehry's new chelsea building today (right, image via curber). as i read through the comments sections i realized just how ornery new yorkers and people in general are with mr. gehry - these posts have inspired some of the funniest commentary! i was sitting here in the lab just laughing out loud (or screaming OH SNAP!!!). people are so up in arms - most of the comment threads turn into big, flaming verbal wars between people ala livejournal. it's so weird. here are some of my favorites:

15. Someone told me over lunch at Swifty's that Frank G. hires sophomores from C level architectural schools to come up with concepts for new, exciting and unsustainable buildings. But at the same time he hires detailers from the mobile home and trailer industry in Elkart, Indiana to follow the concepts through the construction phase. Is this true?

7. Paging Mr. Gehry, your buildings are giant metallic turds.

6. goddamn, that building is ugly...not homely, but certainly chinsey.

02. It looks like two ugly, gigantic robots somehow managed to get drunk and have sex, then the female ugly gigantic robot got pregnant and had a ugly, gigantic robotic abortion in the middle of Brooklyn, and this is the ugly, gigantic unwanted discarded robot fetus.

6. There's something about those windows that look like ghetto tint jobs or Walgreens Christmas Window spray.

13. what the hell is this crap? it looks like something i saw under construction in Mumbai three years ago. (re: atlantic yards)

23. This is just the architectural equivalent of a logo handbag.

46. So after this is built, what project will you idiots bitch about next? Maybe you can stop the Calatrava transit center from being developed. Or perhaps you can endlessly complain about the Silvercup Studios project. It must be exciting to have so much progress to fight against!

61. shit someone put that thing too close to the radiator and it got all melted.

and one kicker:

14. Obviously, your demented mother dropped you on the floor (head first) when you were born. She was probably scared to death to see what an ugly troll you are and does not remember who's your actual daddy (what a whore).

HAHAHaaaaaa

2007-02-23T14:27:00.000-05:00

i spent a lot of my shift today in the lab working on a digital painting for my mom for her birthday. it's of berthoud pass, in colorado, which we drove over this christmas to get to winter park. i thought it was a good memory to make reference to...

i wanted to keep it nice and simple. i need to think of a real thing to get her though, within the next two or three days.

research

2007-02-21T14:52:00.000-05:00

oh god, i just had the funniest hour. i was researching the kaisersaal ruins that are part of the sony center in berlin now, because i want to use a similar process in my marshall field design. so i was kind of wikipedia surfing around, and i went to the article about sarah lawrence's campus. now, our campus is this sort of cliche of a cliche, quaint tudor wood adorableness. EXCEPT for the new dorms . the new dorms are a horror to most people on this campus, a concrete and glass box that houses tiny triple rooms for freshman. they stick out like a sore, grey, half-machine thumb, and so of course there are tons of legends about them (see: freshman painting a bullseye on the basement level and jumping from the top of the atrium). many people wonder: how did this shit get built? on every other side of the quad there's a neo-tudor house, except for this box of concrete. so of course there is also a legend to satisfy this bizarre incongruity. so the story goes, the college hired an architect to build a new building for administrative offices. but, they didn't tell him that they'd be used as dorms, so he designed a simple office block. when the buildings were built, and the architect realized what they were using his design for, he refused to be credited with the project because he objected to housing students in such tiny and poorly ventilated rooms. this story conveniently explains the insanity of the design, as well as the lack of any information about HOW this thing was put up. but today, on wikipedia, i saw the words:

Designed by world-renowned architect Phillip Johnson in the sparse modernist style of the time, the "New Dorms" were actually completed in 1960. The architectural style of the buildings is meant to be a modernist reflection of the three older dorms (Gilbert, Titsworth, and Dudley Lawrence) that stand on the opposite side of the North Lawn. The three buildings that comprise the New Dorms are connected by two glass atria in which the buildings' primary stairwells are found. With the exception of the large apartments in Rothschild, these dorms typically house first-year students.

wait, wtf?? philip johnson??? a quick call to justin confirmed my suspicion that this must be a wikipedia mistake. however, philip johnson's washington post obituary writes: "johnson designed buildings on the campuses of harvard, yale, brown, and sarah lawrence." holy shit. could this be true?
i ran upstairs to joe's office and interrupting a conference with one of his donnees, asked "philip johnson designed THE NEW DORMS??" he told me that he had designed them, of course, on a cocktail napkin, and sarah lawrence had accepted the design after it had been rejected by VASSAR. ahhaha, oh, sarah lawrence. joe also told me that when he first came to teach at sarah lawrence someone had SHOWN him the napkin, and that it might still be in the archives. so, of course justin and i are going over there tomorrow to take a look for ourselves. CAN'T WAIT!

this land is our land

2007-02-20T17:32:00.000-05:00

five thirty. half an hour more until we can go to dinner. i had a great sleep last night. woke up this morning at 530 and watched the blue light come through the sides of the blinds in my room. it felt like berlin, or europe..an airport or something. my room with its colored string lights and then the blue snow light. very nice.
getting excited about my marshall field conference project, though the head of the music dept. hasn't emailed me back yet. i'll probably just have to go over there and find the guy. no doubt he's under a lot of stress right now. today was a conference with claudia in which we spoke of the concept. lots of good ideas were thrown around. basically right now im going with fragmenting several of the walls of the current building and somehow conciously parlaying them into a transitional element to connect a big, new concert hall with the current building. maybe theyll be encased in class, all messed up and ripped apart? also, the sound studios will be where the current basement is and will continue out eastwards on the site and then sort of 'grow' up like vegetables or something, a few yards away from the existing building. we talked a lot about postdamer platz/the einstein cafe and the 6th ave projects which i dont know much about. i will write more later since now class is over - got distracted. but heres a paint tool translation of one of the concepts that came out of the conference:

2007-02-20T15:19:00.000-05:00

a commenter on gawker explains the phenomenon of...wanting to be an architect:
"I'm really smart, and I'd really like a job where I can express myself, but I don't really have any passion or direction in my life, so my innate defense against disappointment and disaster is to try to control as much as possible in my little corner of the world, so I've decided to become an architect."

the sweet summer of 1992

2007-02-18T19:19:00.000-05:00

i bought my ticket home to dallas on march 8 - have i ever been so excited?? why do i like it in dallas so much? how can i change so quickly and drastically over a matter of years, and is it me changing or the circumstances around me? two years ago i would have been disgusted to even think of moving to texas. now, it feels like home. i was saying to amy the other night - there's something special about being in the middle of the country, in its...chest? she said, "nestled in?" and YES that was exactly what i meant. you feel home. like you'd imagine people on the frontier would feel when they were out hunting for days and then come over the last hill and saw their log cabin or whateverthefuck down on the plain below. the same sort of phenomenological feeling that we used to get at falk school, sitting up on the monkey bars that almost jutted out over falk hill. you could look over the whole medical complex and universities and parks, with the appalachian hills spreading out around it like a flower, but a green flower. all these circumstances share a basic set of visual and tactile similarities... its like they all boil down to the same feelings about what you're looking down into. in dallas it's the future, on the frontier it's your house, and at falk it was your whole life - mom's over there in the cathedral, dad's over at the hospital...
it's damn hard to explain... it has to do with the plains. i hate to throw the word 'mythology' around because it sounds so corny but it is a kind of phenomenological mythology that you develop as you grow, and as you move around the country. each major spatial experience is woven into this unconcious 'story' behind your mind about what land looks like and what kind of land feels right. maybe it's american? we're so obsessed with our land.

this weekend was kind of a let down, but its okay. theres been too much going on around here to keep the momentum going for any longer. we needed a few relaxing days. tonight lampoon is doing some kind of fundraiser thing so i guess id better head over to that... amy and justin and i went shopping at the cross county today and i got a dress and some awesome wrapping paper for my walls and some other stuff. it was cold today. the snow is half melted and frozen over.

2007-02-16T15:09:00.000-05:00

curbed.com posted the following floorplan submission from a reader, who found it at work.

Curbed people.
Yes, it's very early in Chicago and I've already been at work for more than an hour. And I did drink a bit last night. But I don't think I'm seeing things when I tell you that the toilet in this listing's floorplan appears to be sporting an evil grin. I've looked at a lot of floorplans in my day and I'm not sure I've ever seen this particular brand of toilet before...

Am I making this up?

ahahaaaaaaaa

ha

2007-02-16T14:21:00.000-05:00

gawker's take on the new banana republic 'architect' ads

never insult a redneck with a chainsaw

2007-02-16T11:39:00.000-05:00

so it's been three days since the last time i posted. geez. what a weird few days. i guess i'll start at the beginning.
skiing was awesome - on the ride up to belleayre mountain it slowly began to dawn on me it was kind of a wash in terms of the people on the trip. like, not in terms of being mean, but just in terms of acting like losers. i skied with them for a while thinking, hey, maybe theyre not so bad! no. they were that bad. so after a while i broke off from the group and skied with some other people, and then for a while by myself. the big drama for me was falling on a double black diamond i was kind of forced into going down with the assistant AD of the sports center. i was okay for the first half, and then i stopped and froze up - it was so icy, the hill below me was CLEAR! i'm not kidding. so i went for it and fell for like 55 feet it was such an incline. it was pretty shameful. but i pulled it together and was on what they call 'my a-game' for the rest of the trip. the next day on the lift up, these two kids asked me why i left to ski alone - they were like "because they're so lame?" i thought i was the lone wolf on this trip. i clearly should have hung out with them, the last night they partied with the 45-year old firemen having a big birthday party downstairs.
we stayed in this old civil-war-era colonial inn, that had tons of bears and stags on the walls. the first night there, cool runnings was on the big screen tv in the lounge, so that got me all psyched up to ski the next day. that movie is a true classic.
it was cool to be on the road in the east again - after moving to dallas i havent seem much dreary eastern seaboard highway. before dallas, we were always driving back and forth from ny or to seven springs or somewhere. those drives were always very cozy, hangin out with mom and dad and annicka.
so we got back, and i got straight to work on the maya model for our big pondfield road show that was opening tuesday night. i woke up at 5am with my computer on my stomach and my hand on the mouse. was it ever hot. but we got it done - as rob and big might say we DO WORK. joe came by the lab and gave us all a hug when he saw the renderings. he said "four years ago! i can't believe it!" by the time we hung the show people were so excited - it turned out to be a Very Big Deal. i think joe was probably using it to rouse up excitement and interest for the new Design Studies concentration - we got the atrium gallery and a bunch of profs and people from the administration showed up to the opening. joe brought tons of food and about 10 bottles of wine, but still had to go make a liquor run at about 7pm. the opening turned out to incredible - lots of people, lots of nice things said, which of course was okay with us. here's our section of the wall, with amy looking on

it turned out very well, but the posters could have been spaced better. we just ran out of time.

and we got the chance to take another group picture with joe, to compliment the one we took of our first year studies.

something about the whole night was fantastically exciting for me. it was like our school was transformed into a different place - somewhere where i wanted to be? everyone was being normal, there was great work - work done together! everyone was equally happy and so excited. it really felt sincere, which for me is a rare feeling here. generally there's some element of bitterness or embarassment or the like when it comes to social/academic/art events here - people have too much self-loathing maybe. that night was some kind of alchemical concoction of people who were relaxed but also excited, sharing their credit with everyone else in their groups, all very understated - because you didn't NEED to overstate it, as corny as that sounds. usually openings are all about people making a big show of themselves to some how knit a mythology of 'brilliance' around their art/etc., but in this case people just showed up and had a good time. it was great. as naive as this sounds that's what i hope arch school will feel like. that's definitely what copenhagen studio felt like.
anyways later that night justin, jarett, amy, and i watched casino royale in jarett's room. so great and dissapointing at the same time. one of the first scenes is this badass fight that takes place on a construction site built with what we can assume is "dirty money." there's a shot in there of daniel craig busting through a sheet of DRYWALL haahhahaha running after this guy. at one point they're fighting each other on two huge crains above the site. hilarious. i think they were trying too hard to deviate from the classic bond plot, though - there was enough deviation from the gadget-ish stuff to make it a winner already. they didn't need to fuck with the model any more. but i liked it. the credits looked awesome.
we got some snow on wednesday - well six inches of sleet is more like it. it's still on the ground - but it's completely iced over now, so it's fun to walk on if you're wearing boots. last night we saw evan's new play, "lions," open - written by a grad student. evan played this good ol' boy peacekeeper in an unspecified african civil war situation who dies waving the UN flag over the raging battle below. he grew this molester moustache for the part - he was brilliant! i was so impressed. by far the best actor in the show. the play was actually really amazing - stayed away from a lot of the corny shit i hate about theatre, and made some good and important points about history and how we live and so on.
mr. lif of def jux records came to campus last night, which was AMAZING. an embarassingly small number of people showed up - so few that even WE were in the front row. but he was amazing. so great. we talked to him afterwards and he was the coolest guy. then we went to richard's party in ac9, which was okay at first but then ended up being kind of a bust because it was all freshman. so we drank a few of the beers and went and hung out in ac11. then i went to bed and woke up in a nightmare where this redneck guy had just cut through the skin that connected your thumb and your index finger with a chainsaw - because i had laughed at him when he was telling his girlfriend that they should put up a billboard outside their house that advertised her new job at bare elegance, a strip club in pittsburgh. wtf?? and annicka and caitlin were like michael scofield and link, and had been wrongfully imprisoned. i stumbled out with my hand all bloody and cut down towards the base of my thumb, and i found all of their electronics in the grass where i knew they had been arrested - which in my dream was now right outside of my house here at slc. i scooped all the ipods, slvr phones, and backup phones into my shirt i think. it was so weird. i began to panic because i couldn't feel my hand, and then pins and needles - i woke up and realized that i was laying on that hand and it was in fact asleep. it was still scary though. the goriness of it.
now here i am, fridays in the lab from 10-4. dang.

2007-02-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

the predatory wasp of the palisades

2007-02-09T11:10:00.000-05:00

geez i haven't been able to post for three days i've been so busy! what an intense week. it was bad and good.
the big news on wednesday was that we bought out tickets to the BAHAMAS!!! hahahah! i feel so bad for spending so much of my parents' money but i'm picking up more hours at the lab and have a pay-back schedule. the big drama was that justin booked my plane ticket to nassau in MY MOM'S NAME! i pretty much blew my stack. i had to cancel that ticket and buy a NEW one. goddamnit. i won't dwell on this event now, since it all got worked out, but i'll tell you what, i was PISSED. my pissiness has subsided, mostly because poor justin cant leave his room he's so sick, he'll puke everywhere.
so we're going to nassau for seven days. now it's all anyone can talk about - it's really only a month away. we're staying in some shitty hotel but it's on the beach, and has two pools, so wtf?
then thursday (yesterday) was weird, we had forte's class where we talked about the NY 1851 crystal palace and the 'handiwork' movement in america, as well as how emerson/thoreau/pugin/aj downing all relate to each other in their notions of individualism and consumerism as essentially similar and natural affects of the american ideology. i feel like we've been talking about 1850s NY for five weeks now, but this particular class was actually very interesting. we saw some slides of 1860s NY 'county houses' and a henry cole painting where he painted one of these weekend houses as a 'frontier home,' made of logs and inhabited by a lumberjack and his wife/kids.
i went to cross county, though the walk was so cold, because i had to change my PIN number for my bank of america account. luckily that was easy and the guy was very nice. i bought a pair of new leggings for the ski trip and a pair of flipflops for the spring break trip. geez i sound like a real jet setter here.
then last night was great - jarett's play 'the big funk,' opened, and let me tell you, it was FANTASTIC. if i wasnt going away this afternoon i'd see it again. i'd also encourage all people to read the play. i HATE theatre - and this thing really resonated with me. i think it's because it's similar in many ways to don delillo's white noise, in the sense that the focus of much of the dialogue is indirectly the state of our society in america and the deep fear of dying that many americans have. that sounds heavy, but it was also HILARIOUS. there were only four characters, jarett, starsha, owen, and a girl i didn't know. i guess the play is referred to as 'surrealist,' in the sense that some crazy shit happens - this girl gets slathered in vaseline and then gets bathed on stage, owen had to be completely naked for his last scene, etc.etc., but really it's sort of poetic realism. but the last scene was intense. they're all eating dinner and owen leaves, and then he comes back NAKED. i mean i was prepared for this - ive heard him talking a lot about whether he should try to uh, 'enhance' his performance before walking out onstage, but man, nothing can compare to seeing the real thing just inches away from the front row's face. mind you, the play was in downstage, so there aren't set seats, it's just a little black box with folding chairs. so i felt okay about seeing this guy naked, no big deal, but it was when he put his robes ON that i felt super embarassed - something about seeing him right AFTERwards was the most nervewracking part. mostly because he takes a china teacup and is supposed to be drinking from it, and his hands were shaking so hard it sounded like an alarm bell. oh god i couldnt even watch when this was happening. but it was really a fantastic play, and for someone like me to say that, i mean it really has to be amazing. plus, jarett is seriously a comedic/thearical genius. i have no doubt hes going to go very far with this. he had everyone in the audience hanging on his every facial expression. i felt very proud of him..
so then we headed out to the malthouse, it being thursday night, and tipped back a few long island iced teas. and a beer. played some darts - im actually pretty damn good at darts! the great thing about the bar last night was apparently they recently got busted for serving underage kids - so last night there were NO asshole freshman filling up the place. we could even sit down. it was great. i talked to this norweigan girl again, and we did a SKOAL. it was like being back in DK. so funny.
this morning i woke up so painfully - i had only gotten to bed at about four. now here i am in the lab - waiting until two when someone is going to come and take my last two hours so i can go get ready for the ski trip, for which we leave at four. im pretty excited about it - were staying at this civil war-era bed and breakfast and skiing saturday and sunday from 9-4. granted, i was nervous cuz both jiddy AND katie cancelled on me, but at the orientation meeting i met a few really cool people and me and this girl estelle agreed to room together - she seems so awesome. im excited. also, mom told me that upstate NY just got like 100 inches of snow, so maybe its heading for the catskills? im pretty foggy on NY geography to be honest. but i can hope. right now theres a 23' base - hah, imagine just a month ago i was skiing in four feet of powder! ah, like i care. i grew up skiing the anthills of the east and for that i am grateful. as i told the group at the meeting, if you grew up skiing on ice (in the east), you've got one thing going for you: you're not afraid of anything. you just go with it. of course there are a bunch of westerners on the trip who were getting their panties in a twist over the lack of base. dorks.
im panicking, because im nowhere near done with our pondfield model. but fuck it. im a second term senior. everyones just gonna have to deal with possibly not having a fly through. IM GOING SKIING

nassau

2007-02-06T16:02:00.000-05:00

well, it's official - our pondield road exhibition opens on tuesday:

im actually pretty nervous, because the ski trip is this weekend so that's three days of work-time lost. i have to finish our poster and a fly-through animation of our 3D model. yikes. yikes especially because i'm only just learning how to animate in maya. oh shit.
plus, i have to re-do most of the model since i built it in october when i didn't really know how to model in maya. plus, the scale of the buildings is totally off. plus i need to go into bronxville and take pictures of all the storefronts so we can texture them to be realistic. plus i have to find a way to get 'poser,' a software that makes prefabricated scale model people to put into 3d models. no idea where ill find it.
i'm so unmotivated right now. it's like the scarier this deadline becomes, the less i want to work on it. not good.
in other news, i can't wait to go skiing!!!

strange days

2007-02-04T18:10:00.000-05:00

what an eventful two days!
it all began on friday, when we decided to party in my room for a change. it was GREAT! we had so much fun. katie had bought a gigantic bottle of svedka and in true soph yr fashion, we mixed with either sprite, cranberry or orange juice. we listened to:
young love - find a new way
the knife - we share our mother's health
test-icicles - circle square triangle
annie - heartbeat
basement jaxx - good luck
and i put up new lights in my room so it looked great. after a while, we had to go over to the SLC lampoon party, in slonim 8, unfortch - but it was funny too. they said they needed my ipod, and to play some 80s, hahaha, so i did. this other person came over with a nano and put on babyface or something...everyone stopped dancing and was like, hey put the music back on. so i put my music back on and i think they got mad. not sure though. it was kinda fun, i felt bad for the weirdness. but it was okay. the embarassment peak level was reached when i poured a 22oz miller light all over myself by accident. i actually had to walk away from the conversation i was having with these two guys from nyu or somehwere. there was just nothing to say that could make it better. the lampoon crowd is pretty much hipsters. though amy and jarett are in charge and they're not, so who am i to judge? but it was a kind of funny party:

justin got sick and had to leave. when this kid julian was sitting in my lap and i couldn't see anyone i knew around me, i knew it was time to round up the group and get out. we went back to my room and danced. this guy ross was there, who's in lampoon, and we have this running joke - we don't know each other, but when we were introduced, he said "oh yah, we made out at the coming out dance freshman yr," which is a hilarious thing to say because for most people at slc, there's a real and tangible possibility that anyone to whom they're introduced to will say these words ( and be serious). so most of the time in my room was spent listening ross make up grosser, weirder things we 'did' at the coming out dance, while amy and jarett rolled around on the disgusting floor laughing. come on, i don't even know that guy. i was laughing so hard though, i felt sick. peoplg were rioting for taco bell, but clearly no one could drive. so we went to the pub. i don't know how. amy bought me a piece of pizza, because i couldn't find my card.
we said goodnight.
then saturday got weirder.

justin and i had to go into the city to see claudia's opening at PS 122, and so that was great. she's a genius. i hope she doesn't leave next yr, joe will be heartbroken i think..she's important. laura needed her nipple rings changed, and since looking at nipples makes justin sick, i was the only one left to sit in the room with her while the guy did it. he kept talking about when his nipple ring got ripped out while he was getting a tattoo. they made us wait because we were so vanilla, i think. but then we went over to broadway to go to UNIQLO, which BLOWS!!! it's this huge store, and everything is weird beige colors and really poorly made. very boring. they call it 'the japanese gap,' but it seemed more like the american gap, but taken DOWN three notches.
it was a great looking store though:

it was full of 20something urbanites looking lost. really dissapointing!
so laura and i went next door to h&m while we waited for justin and hunter at uniqlo. i got some loot. then we went over to justin's friend's new apartment, which was ON st. mark's place, wtf??? her dad bought this place for her, it was beautiful - awesome kitchen with rusted metal plate floors and then beautiful light wood for the rest of the floors, and a huge window looking out, not even on another wall. damn. right over the chipotle on that street. i can't imagine living on st. mark's. 'the times square of commodified boho culture' or whatever. the place reminds me of highschool.
it was such a weird few hours. we watched RIZE (the david lachapelle doc about krumping) and ordered in from moustache, this awesome middle eastern place. i had falafel and a spinache/cheese/filo dough role. oh god it was great. so then i started to freak out, so we left to get some green tea frozen yoghurt from the automat next door, but it was tooo full of people. so we went to the grocery store underneath her apt. it was so weird, god. we got back on the train. i had to immediately go to sleep when i got home and when i woke up this morning i was STILL freaking out.
its so cold here!

click

2007-02-02T15:45:00.000-05:00

an exhibit opened in copenhagen - of helsinki street fashion.
these photos are great!!!
www.hel-looks.com

antelope

2007-02-02T11:30:00.000-05:00

ugh what a morning. i slept in until i had to hurry to get to my lab monitor shift, where i am right now. plus, i have to go to this dumb mandatory training meeting at 1.30 and i can't find anyone to cover that hour of my shift. goddamnit. now what am i supposed to do?
on the other hand, fashionista.com continues to wow me. they posted on how to make the new louis vuitton spring necklace for like 10 dollars here,
so awesome. plus the proenza schouler line for target came out yesterday and i need to get some of that. i'm sure it will be like viktor and rolf for h&m though, gone to hoards of legginged maniacs within two hours.
katie and i played squash again last night, we played great. we're already making quick headway towards winning the championship end-all tournament on the 20th. actually the last time i checked it was just a tournament, but END ALL CHAMPIONSHIP sounds better. we're going to play again tonight before our soph-fest.
i walked over to academic computing to get the WACOM tablet to use, but when i got back i realized they hadn't given me the pen. WTF!!!!!!!!! also, during the first two hours of this shift forte's "archi/texts" first year studies class is going on... it's so nice to walk by outside and hear that class going on. i miss it so much. i still think i learned more in that first year studies than in all my other classes combined. it's the basis on which i do everything else now. i want to just stand outside and listen to it, but i'm worried joe or one of the freshman will walk outside and see me crouched down outside with an ipod recorder. it'd be embarassing for me.
today i'm wearing some tights, which i haven't worn in a while, but honestly my pants need to be washed. i felt kind of lame, but then i looked around and saw a rainbow spectrum of tight colors prancing all around me across campus. sarah lawrence, always a bastion of diversity and self expression. in fact now my gray tights feel a little matronly. maybe someone could lend me some tye-dye.
i talked to my parents last night - they were up at the bar at the top floor of the hilton anatole in dallas, where they were having a drink with anne because it was her birthday, and jim was out of town....when we went there for mom and dad's anniversary this summer, it was really good. i had roasted antelope with carmelized bananas and peanut sauce, and the best amuse bouche (hahahah that ones for you annicka) - it was like, some type of brie with crystalized apricot and carmelized onions. delish. also where i accidentally said "the texas book suppository" rather than "depository." the anatole (i forget the name of the actual restaurant - nana?) is one of those places where every time you get up to go to the bathroom, etc.etc., the guy comes back and re-places your napkin on your lap. kind of irrelvantly snooty, but the greatest views of dallas EVER. you get to watch all the planes coming down to love field airport (only a few miles from our house). i really began to love dallas this summer when my parents left me alone in the townhouse for a few days - i'd sit out on their 3rd floor balcony and watch the southwest airplanes come in - one every 3-4 minutes in the early evening. southwest planes are red and blue, they'd look so cool in that kind of texas light - red and orange and blue, with the tops of the trees turning that kind of amber green color and blowing around in the wind. and it was 105 degrees but beautiful. that's when i started thinking, hey, maybe this is a better place than i thought. maybe there's something to be said for living somewhere beautiful?

silent shout

2007-02-01T15:36:00.000-05:00

just got back from health services. today was a weird day. it's not over yet. i had forte's class. we talked about new york, about the crystal palace, and about the relationship that emerson and carlyle had (and how it relates to consumerism in america). very interesting things, but i wish we had looked at more slides. more and more, our course is less about architecture and more about cultural philosophy. which i enjoy, but am less motivated to work for.
i went to lunch with justin and jiddy - jiddy was about to get a ride with forte into the city, she was going to the last day of this thai cowboy movie at film forum.
we have so much work coming up in the next two weeks - our pondfield road exhibition hangs on the 12th, claudia wants me to hang up my presentation from tuesday next week, i have to begin my marshall field conference project, group for design is apparently kicking into high gear, and i'm trying to organize a mult-disciplinary panel in the VAC theatre on the future of marshall field. i thought of that in the shower last night - it'd be great to have forte, an administrator, and chet biscardi (the music dept. head) up there having it out about the future of that whole site. i'm interested now. i'm gonna go buy an iTalk ipod recorder so i can start doing interviews with the faculty and music kids. also the archs. the biggest dilemma for me is the fantastic interior spaces in the existing building, and the problematic that would arise from either tearing them down or adding on, or recreating them. it's hard to know what the right thing to do is in this case.
last night was great, katie and i went to the gym and played squash for an hour, and then worked out. squash was awesome. there's a tournament on the 20th that we're joking about entering. today my wrist hurts from the POWER i was bringing from the game last night.
today is an important date in two ways for me: my ut austin application was officially due today, and one year ago today i arrived in berlin. how can that be?

reading for forte's class

2007-01-31T14:50:00.000-05:00

"But everywhere, and in all parts of the country, in planning a country house, let the habits, and wants, and mode of life (assuming them to be good and truthful ones) stamp themselves on the main features of the house. It is thus that our domestic architecture will always be growing better, more truthful, more individual, and therefore more rational and sincere, rather than more foreign and affected."
downing

pass this on

2007-01-31T11:30:00.000-05:00

oh man class was awful today. we are still reviewing algebra stuff, and no one says SHIT when he asks anything, for good reason - he asks these questions where you know it, but it's such an easy question you don't answer because the embarassment of getting it wrong would be unbearable. elliot kept falling asleep and SNORING next to me. me and the girl next to him kept trying to hit him awake, and he wouldnt budge. it was awful. then i picked up two packages - one was my skipants/goggles/gloves from my mom.

i have a conference with claudia at 12. okay.

yesterday night was great - right as i published that part about the girl next door doing it so loud, katie and amy called me to say they were taking a walk in the snow. they came to my room and we went back in the trees in slonim - it was so dark, but glowing because it was snow-covered. it reminded me of the woods behind shady side. i pulled a dad/rich thing - i hid behind a big tree and jumped out at them and they FREAKED out - it was so great, and easy - i was barely two feet ahead of them when i hid and they were all "kelsey? kelsey where are you?" classic. then we walked back by the ECC, and then back behind the new polshek VAC and then to marshall field, the old music building. it's a beautiful building. it feels so much like shady side, i couldn't stop thinking about it once we left. dark red carpet, chandaliers, wood panelling, eggshell paint, the whole nine yards. and a big swooping staircase. we walked up to one of the bigger rooms and stayed there for an hour or two, we just talked. it was very awesome. they are so great. it made me feel a lot better about the situation with our friends. it felt like talking to them in old times. we talked about high school, and suburbs, and swimsuits. they want to start going to the gym and going bathing suit shopping. anyways it was a very nice few hours. clarifying.

we also decided that we don't party enough like we did freshman and sophmore yr (i.e. a handle of vodka, "a flat sprite" and a bottle of cranberry juice from the pub, and some ladytron or similar fare). so we're doing that in my room friday night. we have to be careful though, no more than 16 people can be caught in my room now because i'm on housing probation from the last party we had at my house - the infamous WWF party.

then saturday we have a plan to drive into the city and go to a few bars and sleep until we can drive home.

trees there will be

2007-01-30T23:34:00.000-05:00

it started snowing tonight, only like a quarter of an inch. we had the group for design in jiddy's room, justin made me so mad: we were talking about planning a trip to russel wright's house upstate, and justin says "someone really just needs to take responsibility and plan this, and book the van and ask for money." i said, "well, go ahead!" and he said "why should i have to, i don't even know who this guy is and i sure as hell don't care about going to his house." ugh i was so angry. he'll suggest things to do and then ask US to follow up on them - he'll never do it. it's because he's afraid of being embarassed or ashamed by this group. he'd rather do nothing than feel like an idiot. then he got bored and left. he was stoned and said he had to go to a "hillel meeting," which of course he later referred to as "my friends from my israel trip smoking up and talking about israel." it's like cool, make us feel like lazy assholes who refuse to do your bidding and then run off to get even more stoned. it was so lame. he refuses to contribute to the group, but criticizes us for not doing things he wants to do. i feel bad, i think rachael and sarah expected more from us...we just wanted to talk about stephen holl and droog design. then jiddy and sarah and i left to go to the pub/library. i like sarah, she's from houston and is just very cool - she has these fancy cowboy boots and monogrammed cardigans and stuff...she suggested we eat dinner sometime, which made me happy. she knew a ton about droog design, too.. i felt embarassed for saying "drOOg" instead of "draghh" like the dutch would. she saw one of their designers speak a while ago. also jiddy revealed she and whitney are thinking about applying to eindhoven in holland, for the "IM" program, which is the "interior, industrial and identity design program." WTF? it sounds awesome. of course a program like that would be in the netherlands. never have i seen such bizarre synthesis of interior/product/commercial design...row houses painted sky blue and galleries consisting of hilarious couches and projections of fireplaces and stuff. that place was nuts. i also got drunker in rotterdam than i've ever been in a dinner-setting, at a restaraunt called "new york" right by the erasmus bridge. embarassing, but also funny.

i went to drudgereport.com this morning as is my wont after i wake up, and i saw this headline, "FORECAST: CHAOS" and they had a picture of a skyline, i think manhattan..it was like all my crazy apocolypse-dreams were coming true, i couldn't imagine, was it a huge blizzard, a hurricane, an airborne toxic event ala white noise? but no, it was something both dissapointing and scarier than those things - the results from the big climate change report or whatever it's called. very frightening.

i'm not really looking forward to math tomorrow. it's getting more boring/weirder/harder by the day.

GOD DAMN IT the new girl next door is having really loud, freaky sex. great. i guess i can expect this for the next four months. i think i'm done with this.

dark mac lab

2007-01-30T17:44:00.000-05:00

oh man i'm bored right now. i'm in hour 2 minute 44 of maya class. heres the gist of what i presented today:

pretty much some bullshit i pulled together in the two hours before class, but i like the pukey-colored one. i think that one is good.
tonight is our first meeting of slc group for design this term, which would have stayed defunct but other people in joe's class kept complaining. so we're having it in jiddy's room at eight. great. i dont have much to say now, im just exhausted.
i went over to the gym today to pay my 100 dollars in cash for the ski trip. i'm just worried about who i'll room/ski/eat with now that jiddy's not going.
i'm trying to type really quietly so claudia won't think i'm not paying attention, but whatever. i have a headache.

meditating and/or procrastinating

2007-01-29T18:05:00.000-05:00

here i am in the computer lab, trying to figure out something to present for tomorrow. im too lazy to draw and too lazy to go to the other room where the computers have maya, so instead i'm writing on this. a bunch of graphite exploded in my bag so now everything i own is shiny metallic.
i can't really come up for much for this concept right now. all i have is really, a plan for what the facade will look like and where the museum is going to be situated within the arcade. the original (existing) arcade facade -

basic guidelines for renovation -

concept for what each side of the facade will appear as -

so as you can see i haven't done much work. instead i am sitting here writing into space about it. the idea is that this is a museum for this design critic who collects kitsch objects, Victor Margolin , and the museum is meant to be built inside the Providence Arcade, which was the first indoor shopping mall in the US (we had to model it earlier in the yr in maya). My idea is about a kind of gibsonian "viral" presentation of the objects..i want the facade to look like a decaying formation of small glass boxes, each housing a kitsch object. it's sort of about the vast number of products manufactured each day in the world, and the awareness that the machines are always running, somewhere in the world, even when you sleep. it's kind of about ghosts, and decay, and sheer force of numbers... we'll see. i think the interior of each side is going to be a ramp, circling upwards a tornado-like amalgamation of the objects inside of the same glass boxes...and a bridge 'made' from these boxes will connect the two sides of the museum.

aha! now ive spent enough time talking about what ive already done, its time for dinner with amy and justin.

auch helden haben schlechte tage

2007-01-29T00:33:00.000-05:00

just woke up from bad dreams. i'd taken a tylenol pm around eight. laura ( my next door neighbor) moved out this afternoon, now some other girl moved in, while i was asleep. there's the sound of people and stuff, it makes me feel lonely. i miss when my room was the center for us, it was both freshman and sophmore yr.

i wish i could do something but complain. the thing is, i really just want us to be okay. this room, it's a wooden box that feels a million miles away from anything. i just hope it's not a preview of next yr. but actually being thousands of miles away from this would be better than being here and feeling as though you're a thousand miles away. at least you have tangible distance to blame. but why am i complaining? it's such a silly problem.

i have pre-calc tomorrow morning, which is okay. i kinda like being up at 9, and the people in my class are nice. it's mostly first and sophmore yr girls, plus elliot from joe' 'consuming architecture' and julian, the 24-yr old freshman from botswana, and this other guy who i think is an older first yr too. also, a bunch of continuing education/early childhood education people. jiddy and i were signed up for this ski trip to vermont on the 9th, and now jiddy can't go since her sister's thesis show is that weekend, so now i'm kind of confused. who am i gonna room with? who am i gonna hang out with at night? ride on the bus with? feels very middle school, all of these thoughts. in fact i've had this thought several times the last few days. just not sure how fun skiing alone for 2 days sounds.

im afraid of going back to sleep now, since the dream. i'm letting all this stuff be written down, i'm sure most of it sounds pretty dumb. but i'm not afraid, they're just thoughts. maybe i should eat an apple, it might help with the tylenol. one yr ago today i was about to get on a plane to berlin. i remember the plane was so old - it was dark and quiet, and no tvs in the seats or anything - like being on a movie set for a film set on a plane in the 1970s. colored with sort of muted navy, red, mustard yellow... it was hard to tell we were going anywhere. and in the same sense, it was hard to accept that in truth we were in a little metal cylander over the ocean. in the big tech-y planes i've always flown, it's easy to feel like you're going on some alien journey, not 35000 ft over the atlantic. this was like being in a bond movie, or a gibson book.