I honestly think that the first week of school is one of the best times to be an architecture major. Every thing’s so exciting, there are so many elective options, your courses are still fresh and interesting, the lecture series looks promising, you have a completely new site and motivating topics to research, new classmates that haven’t driven you crazy in the middle of the night and best of all – no real work. If I could just hit pause right now, I’d love grad school forever.

Studio started by meeting with our classes and partaking in the traditional ice-breakers. Leslie introduced her synopsis of how she wanted the studio to run this semester. A key idea was using technology to make things that are “beautiful and cost effective”. She sees the studio as having three components:

  • readings in the history of architecture manufacturing technology
  • research into Atlanta as a problematic housing market
  • hands-on material studies in the AWPL

She arranged for us to have a week long tutorial in the AWPL in order to increase our capacity to manufacture our designs (we’ll be expected at the end of the semester to produce a large scale wood or plastic model of some integral aspect of the project).

Our first assignment, during Friday’s site visit, is to create an introductory collage piece in along the lines of landscape architect Mary Miss. Before she begins a project, she photographs the proposed site then cuts up the pictures and re-assembles them into a collage. These “photo/drawings,” as she calls them, are meant to elaborate on her experience of the site, “describ[ing] something other than what is being represented,” and inform the finished project.

Then we broke into ‘reconnaissance’ groups for the next two weeks. My group is in charge of writing a project introduction describing the term ‘density’, explain the current controversies surrounding the word, and gather data on similarly dense mixed use projects across the nation. The only immediate problem is that “30-50 units per acre” isn’t exactly a Google keyword for project research.