howdy, lj!
I'm not sure if anyone other than thumbergia2001 and cbackson is still around these here parts - shout-out if you are! - but I am still, for now, an LJ user, and I do still read my flist every few days or so!
I am also still alive. Though last week, featuring nights spent in New York City, Boston, and Washington DC, stretched that a bit. This coming week I head to St Louis for my "shrinking cities" urban design studio (which seems a good time to relink to one of the best conversations I've had on the subject).
Can I just tell you all how much happier I already am this semester from last? I know it's a bit that it took the whole of last semester to adjust. I was woefully underproductive and inefficient. But a lot of it has to do with expanded freedom to take classes I actually want to be taking. I'm in classes on community engagement, the politics of large scale urban design, and shrinking cities. I'm a woodshop monitor again and am restarting my internship to build a mobile farm stand. I am debating doing an independent study with a woman working on natural building systems in post-earthquake Haiti. It's all so delightfully... exactly what I want to be thinking about.
Thank God. I had to screw up my courage to come back after last semester. I'm glad it's already paying off.
Other things! I spent the month of January in Brooklyn! Building a series of these delightful ridiculous things for one of the cutest nonprofits I've known. It turns out, New York City is huge, y'all. And delightful but tiring to explore on foot, window shopping and snacking along the way. And extreeeemely expensive. Meaning, this semester, it's beans and rice as far as the eye can see-!
A few great buildings I've been to lately:
Dulles Airport Terminal, by Saarinen, midcentury space-age glorious riot of controlled concrete expressionism. It's so hard to photograph the looming presence of this great majestic assymmetric concrete belly bearing down on you and then swooping up into space. Main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, a splendidly Art-Deco-meets-Egyptian-meets-Mussolini example of how to be strong and distinctive yet still engage with the bigger city (the concave entry steps are soooo good).
So those two made me happy. It's nice to remember that I am, in fact, an architect.
Honorable mention for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, one of the best museum experiences I've had, ever. Everyone EVERYONE should go here and take a tour. It's so relevant and open-ended and empathetic to ordinary people. And yet it subtly asks bigger questions about immigration and labor and social movements.
I have downloaded important things like the new Sherlock, Downton Abbey, and Game of Thrones, but have yet to make time to watch any of them. I just decided to spend my spring break visiting beloved folk in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit on a bit of a whirlwind. I've made a few friends here in Boston that I actually hang out with once in a while, even though I'm back to my generally-monastic existence and am really okay with that.
And maybe now that I've blown the top layer of dust off this thing, more entries will come along, and with less rambling and unstructured contents. You'll be the first to know.
I am also still alive. Though last week, featuring nights spent in New York City, Boston, and Washington DC, stretched that a bit. This coming week I head to St Louis for my "shrinking cities" urban design studio (which seems a good time to relink to one of the best conversations I've had on the subject).
Can I just tell you all how much happier I already am this semester from last? I know it's a bit that it took the whole of last semester to adjust. I was woefully underproductive and inefficient. But a lot of it has to do with expanded freedom to take classes I actually want to be taking. I'm in classes on community engagement, the politics of large scale urban design, and shrinking cities. I'm a woodshop monitor again and am restarting my internship to build a mobile farm stand. I am debating doing an independent study with a woman working on natural building systems in post-earthquake Haiti. It's all so delightfully... exactly what I want to be thinking about.
Thank God. I had to screw up my courage to come back after last semester. I'm glad it's already paying off.
Other things! I spent the month of January in Brooklyn! Building a series of these delightful ridiculous things for one of the cutest nonprofits I've known. It turns out, New York City is huge, y'all. And delightful but tiring to explore on foot, window shopping and snacking along the way. And extreeeemely expensive. Meaning, this semester, it's beans and rice as far as the eye can see-!
A few great buildings I've been to lately:
So those two made me happy. It's nice to remember that I am, in fact, an architect.
Honorable mention for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, one of the best museum experiences I've had, ever. Everyone EVERYONE should go here and take a tour. It's so relevant and open-ended and empathetic to ordinary people. And yet it subtly asks bigger questions about immigration and labor and social movements.
I have downloaded important things like the new Sherlock, Downton Abbey, and Game of Thrones, but have yet to make time to watch any of them. I just decided to spend my spring break visiting beloved folk in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit on a bit of a whirlwind. I've made a few friends here in Boston that I actually hang out with once in a while, even though I'm back to my generally-monastic existence and am really okay with that.
And maybe now that I've blown the top layer of dust off this thing, more entries will come along, and with less rambling and unstructured contents. You'll be the first to know.