My life has been so crazy lately what with finishing up school and everything. You prolly won't hear from me for the next two weeks. cause i gotta be all school all the time. and for that reason Ive chosen to blog, instead of deal with school work! yay!
I gotta back up a bit. Tuesday was a pretty great day. As was yesterday.
Tuesday- I worked in the morning then went down to the University of Chicago for my poetry class. We had a field trip there to hang out in their special collections library where we got to handle original drafts of poems and personal letters from poets like Erza Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and my two favs H.D. and Marianne Moore. SUPER RAD!
From there I went to the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) they have an exhibit up right now about Buckminster Fuller. BUCKMINSTER FULLER is the love of my life and has been for quite some time now (sometimes I wonder if my love for epcot's spaceship earth at a early age just goes to show that my love for Bucky knows no age. Even before I knew about him, I was drawn to the things he did/inspired) The MCA show is great. Not only was the show amazing there was a lecture given by the director of ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANITY and the editor of the book DESIGN LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN. I found this book while browsing Strand Bookstore in NYC a few summers ago. It prompted me to chance my major and transfer to another school. So you can image how excited I was to be surrounded by Bucky things and then be headed to a lecture with KATE STOHR. I mean I just wanted to pee my pants (thats how excited I was, I'm sorry but I don't even have an appropriate description to give you besides "wanting to pee my pants") Design is the ultimate renewable resource! this is also great, an article on Kate Stohr from TREEHUGGER which is alsoooo great. was the redundant? no this is REDUNDANT .
wednesday- first architecture studio since last week's butt kicking midterm critique. It was surprisingly relaxed and productive?
Our department holds "mid-day musing lectures" at least once a week. Yesterday's noon time lecture was given by Andrea Mina. He was fabulous. Let me tell you a little about him:
Andrea Mina is a Professor at RMIT in Australia. He makes teeny tiny models. He uses a jeweler's eyepiece to glue cat and dog hair and shells and other organic objects into miniature architectural forms. He says the purpose of making these tiny models is to learn something about architectural propositions. He believes the model can be an investigative tool. It can become something that asks questions, rather than telling people things. He sees them as "machines for learning about space, investigating thresholds between inside and outside, tools to leverage understanding."
He hopes that viewers of his objects are transported to another plane of reality, if only for a moment. In that way he has created an architecture for the mind, a space for the imagination to reside. This is what he focuses on, making tiny models without architectural plans or conventional conversation. Some might say hes not a "practicing architect."
But, mother, can you really say that Mina's not making architecture just because he is not working towards making actual buildings?
Well Mina's agrument is that architecture does not reside solely in buildings.
He sees the model as the purest expression of the architecture: "the final intended building can easily be dissolved through the design process by the demands of commerce and weather."
Lets get real, architecture is rarely built by an architect. Buildings are built by agents and those different agents actually make the work. He even went so far as to say that people who actually make architecture are graphic designers. They are the ones that propose a building when in fact it could, through their translation, be nothing at all like the original design.
So this is Mina's biggest question, "Where does architecture reside? In the words, dreams, ambitions of architects and clients. In what we choose to see in the bricks and mortar, how we analyze and interpret and understand it."
I LOVE MIDDAY MUSING LECTURES!
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