Site, Structure, Skin

Il Pelicano | 2003-09 – 2005-05

For those of you who joined us for the Floor, Walls, Roof saga, here’s the Master’s programme sequel.

M1 Semester

Week One

So. Who made it, and who didn’t? There were a few surprises. It somehow seems like the loss of innocence.

Week Two

Thresholds? Venice? B7 is boring.

Week Three

And that would be about all the effort (read: half-assed) these first few projects deserve.

Week Four

Like an idiot, you show up on time for your 11:00 Monday class. Hey knucklehead: a freakin’ hurricane tore up the city last night. See you next week.

Week Five

Given the extra free work week, you should be further ahead than you are. Shame, shame.

Week Six

Nice work on that group model of the city of Prague. Three monkeys with 30 minutes and a band saw could have come up with something that at least fit together properly. This is graduate work?

Week Seven: Professional Practice Week

Q: “Mr. BML, why is the facade of your new office a blank concrete block wall?”
A: “It’s about minimalism.”
Sometimes our profession is our worst enemy.

Week Eight

If the Toronto field trip gave you nothing else, it provided this glittering, second-hand description of tract housing by Buckminster Fuller: “They’re all fancy nozzles to the same sewer system.” (via Bob Yamashita of Peel Living.)

Week Nine

You finally get around to picking up your parchment from your last degree. To do so, you actually had to look up the location of the registrar’s office. (You’d never been.) Hey! It’s the building they keep photographing for the cover of the promotional literature. Who knew?

Week Ten

You take the week to catch up all those other (non-Design studio) courses you’ve been neglecting. There. Now doesn’t that feel better?

Week Eleven

Just in time for your penultimate pin-up you discover that those two boules pitches you planned on fitting into your programme are nowhere near small enough to even fit on the site.

Week Twelve

A whole semester of studying Prague in History & Theory of Cities and no one has mentioned hockey or beer. Well, you fixed that.

Week Thirteen

Your housing project could be deemed a qualified success. If only the elevation fairy had paid you a visit somewhere along the way.

M2-3 Semester (Work Term)

Week One

We’ll call the introducton to this work term Advanced Photoshop Colouring for Graduate Credit.

Week Two

Well, it’s not the first scatch on Sturgess Architecture’s new laquered blue table tops, but it’s positively the ugliest.

Week Three

One cut, one gash, and one puncture wound. That’s a wrap.

Week Four

Life is too short for design visualization in 3DS Max.

Week Five

Yes. the green in the presentation boards is too intense, the transparencies are funny, and the renderings alternate between cartoony and pixelated. But you didn’t make any of these decisions!

Week Six

2D drafting! Glorious, honest, straightforward drafting in one less dimension than so far has been expected. Amen.

Week Seven

Measuring and drafting parking lots for development permit renewals. It doesn’t get much more glamourous than this.

Week Eight

Three partnered firms, three provinces, one competition deadline. Crunch.

Week Nine

From the architectural technologist and senior partner: “There are no innocents here.” Totally excellent.

Week Ten

More drafting, with just a sniff of a design component. A guy could get used to this.

Week Eleven

The trick to erasing the dirt and smudges from an architectural model is to be able to blow off the rubbings without spitting all over it.

Week Twelve

All about the tread depth and riser height.

Week Thirteen

Nope. It’s all about the washrooms.

Week Fourteen

Calgary’s inner community design standards make you gnash your teeth. Articulate this!

Week Fifteen

You totally fail to see the difference between stucco option one, and stucco option two. So why should the city care?

Week Sixteen

After a week of drawing elevations of a curved building, you swear when you get back to school you won’t draw anything that isn’t orthagonal.

Week Seventeen

That curious effect from your undergraduate work—where everything you draw takes on some semblance to a spaceship from Star Wars—has manifest itself here. Slave One anyone?

Week Eighteen

Now that the push to get out that draft development permit set is over you’ve finally got some free moments to be... bored.

Week Nineteen

FormZ is Sketchup’s bitch.

Week Twenty

Would someone at Autodesk please contact Adobe to find out how they do their area fills? BHatch blows.

Week Twenty One

Architects are whacko.

Week Twenty Two

A brief return to your previous life of tech support: “No, that isn’t possible, and anyways not on a Mac.”

Week Twenty Three

Just keep working. Just keep working. Whatever you do, don’t think about the hockey game that night.

Week Twenty Four

AutoCAD hatches make baby Jesus cry.

Week Twenty Five

You don’t think you’re cut out for this post-modern thing.

Intermezzo

Rosetti Scholarship in Bologna, Italy

“[The aim of gelato] is to convey to the palate the greatest possible amount of pleasure and taste, whilst in no way be suggestive of nourishment and solidity.”

—Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,
quoting from Mrs. Marshall’s Ices Plain & Fancy.

M5 Semester

Week One

You played hooky from the first week of school. What did you miss? Nothing. Right, no, seriously, anything? No, nothing. Not even a class to speak of. Now don’t forget to pay your tuition on time.

Week Two

You enrolled in your final elective thinking it would be the architectural equivalent to Scopes for Dopes, or Rocks for Jocks. You thought correctly.

Week Three

You show some abstract collages to a mailing list of non-architects, and promptly receive a reminder of how distant these architecture games are from the perceptions of honest, normal folk.

Week Four

You bit the bullet and figure out how big all of the mechanical gear in your thesis actually is. Why didn’t you do that earlier?

Week Five

You produce three large sections drawings, none of which have any relation to actual conditions in a building. Easy!

Week Six

During a certain book launch for a certain compilation of irreverent clipart cartoons, a certain faculty member simultaneously kicks all of you out of the student lounge, raises the spectre of arrest if anyone from the Planning faculty sees any of the cans of a certain malt beverage, then buys a book. Strange. Strange and lame.

Week Seven

For the second week in a row, you can't hold the traditional end-of-week Liquid Lounge festivities in the student lounge, because it shares an acoustic space with the exhibition room—in use—below it. The irony? The architect who designed the defective space was the one using the exhibition room.

Week Eight

“I think your thesis needs a beer garden.”

“...okay.”

Week Nine

With apologies to Hungarian mathemetician Paul Erdos, architecture students are machines for turning caffeine into basswood louvres.

Week Ten

The schedule is out, and you defend first. Gold metal!

Week Eleven

One week before thesis defence. To yor supervisor: “I really need to not see you right now.”

Week Eleven Addendum

The fact that the discarded formwork from casting your model base is prettier and more architectural than anything else you’ve ever done in the school can either be seen as a small victory for happenstance, or total abject failure. Maybe you can work it into your presentation. Maybe you’ll have to.

Week Twelve

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuckity fuck. It’s not that you’re not ready. That’s just how you feel while waiting to defend. Fuck.

Later: You recall the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, where one of his critical characters climbs Olympus Mons and descends into a spiral of self-realization: “On Mars, on Mars, on Mars....” It’s the same for you, if you substitute Mars with the chequerplate stairs in front of the exhibition room.

Week Thirteen

Here’s a nasty surprise no one ever tells you: after the defence, you’re not nearly done. There’s still a horrible amount of work to be done on the book. Damn.

Week Fourteen

And done. As a parting gift to the school, you hoist one of your 150lb concrete models into an empty display box in the foyer. It fit perfectly. Coincidence?

Coda

There. That wasn’t so bad now, was it?

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