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!
