out of control

My desk, as my life, has pretty been a bit out of control lately. This whole grad school thing is flying by faster than I could have imagined. Final deadlines start up right after Thanksgiving and I am a bit nervous about how those will all play out, but I am sure they will be okay. And I am very much looking forward to a hectic(but hopefully relaxing) winter break visiting friends and family!

Last weekend I managed to go out and get away from school a fair amount, but I'm slightly behind and feeling sick this weekend, so I guess that's a one time deal. Though I did go out for Thai food last night, which was excellent! (As for the gym, I won't even go there...) On my agenda for the weekend - make 5 more studio models (as if my desk can handle it), build a functional prototype for my furniture design, model some epithelial cell behaviours in GC and work on some dynamical system componentry for an "inhabitable surface." We'll see how it goes...

around somewhere

Life is getting very hectic and as a result I have become a very awful blogger. I'm just recovering from midterms and a last minute studio trip to NYC, and I don't think things will calm down much between now and the end of the semester! It's hard to believe that I am almost halfway done already!

The photo is of my class at the new Cooper Union building by Morphosis. I'm in there somewhere, see if you can find me...

paint it black

So, my studio professor, Roland Snooks, literally wears the same black outfit every day. I don't know how many of the same shirt and pants he owns, but they are legitimately all the same. So, I decided that we should all dress like him for our first pinup yesterday, and emailed my studio section about it. Despite some initial confusion among the foreign students (I think a few of them thought it was some sort of formal tradition to wear all black to pinups), the outcome was successful.

love/hate

I tend to have a love/hate relationship with many things. Grad school seems to be one of them. There are just those times where I feel that there's too much going on, and not in a good way. And, as a result, I feel this need to produce things, without necessarily taking the time to think about their coherence and validity at all, let alone attempting to create something meaningful and non-regurgitative.

Luckily, with the help of west Philadelphian Ethiopian food, a very international dinner party, my decision to buy a gym membership, and a few nights of adequate sleep, I've been able to snap out of this production workhorse mode, which is actually fairly counterproductive, and return to thinking about things once more. Unfortunately, my actual workload hasn't changed, so getting it all done should be interesting...

wine + dine

So, a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to try to start up a weekly dinner group in an effort people to get to know one another, do fun things without spending a ton of money and to force people out of studio for a little while. I am happy to say that it's going well! Last night we had about 25 people there! There's a food theme each week, and this week was "mini foods" so I made a variety of tea sandwiches. There was a traditional cucumber sandwich, a "japanese" one with cucumber, avocado, nori and wasabi cream cheese, and one with apple, cheddar, walnuts and cinnamon honey cream cheese. They came out surprisingly well considering I made up the recipes and put them together hastily since I had to head to school to meet with a professor.

A friend just sent me this article about ideas for what to do with all the halted construction sites around Boston. I wonder if there's some sort of future in temporary architecture?

pretty pictures

Here's some of the stuff I've been doing in studio. They are sectional studies of surface topologies, and actually, all of the images come from the same form.

some links

There's plenty to write about, but I'm behind on work and feeling under the weather, so here's some people, places and things that have been swarming through my brain as of late:

http://www.kokkugia.com/

http://www.sabin-jones.com/

The Evolution of Useful Things

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Emergence

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

Yogorino

GC scripting