1. sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep
2. clean and rearrange our house, including a little kitchen update (to be seen in an upcoming post)
3. sleep?
4. cook meals. and granola. and marmalade.
5. spend time with family and friends
6. watch tv?
7. read books. including the hunger games series (definitely recommend), Dietrich Bonhoeffer's biography, Hipster Christianity, A visit from the Goon Squad, and half of Earthen Vessels, a book on why the body matters to our faith...written by Matt Anderson.
I am looking forward to getting back to a schedule starting tomorrow, although Corcoran classes meet once a week for 4 and a half hour long segments, so the schedule doesn't have much pattern to it. In honor of going back to school tomorrow, I thought I would do a quick post of five things i learned in the first semester of school:
1. To keep with current...themes in this post -- sleep while you can. For whatever reason (and I don't think this will have been the worst semester), it is much harder to estimate the amount of time that art projects will take verses english essays. I only pulled one all nighter in all of college...because really, I don't do my best work at night and I get sad when I can't go to bed. However, art work doesn't always require the same level of coherent thought as essay writing did, and other than the fact that impaired motor functions may cause you injure yourself when using an exacto blade at 4 in the morning, art projects and late nights get along quite well. This last semester, there were several weeks where I got an hour less sleep every wednesday night before my thursday morning studio classes. I have several friends who pulled numerous all nighters, and I remember hearing (to my dismay) one senior who noted (around november 1): "this is that part of the semester where you start pulling all nighters!" There were 6 weeks left.
It doesn't mean I like staying up until 3:30 any better, and I definitely will continue to schedule my work to achieve the opposite, but I have to reconcile myself to the fact that mid and late semester will probably always mean less and less sleep. sadly.
Also, what school has classes that go until 10:40 at night??? Apparently, this one. Don't the teachers know that my brain shuts off at 10:00?
2. On that note, it was a very smart move for starbucks to be located across the street from our campus in Georgetown. It was also very nice that I had monies in starbucks card from my birthday this summer, that somehow lasted the entire semester. It is also very nice that the starbucks employees are sympathetic, and sometimes charge us less, or give us pastries at the end of the night.
3. Learning new skills - painting, drawing in perspective, hand-rendering, cad mastery, revit, sketchup, and model-making (chiseling, sanding) - absorbed pretty much all of my energy first semester. Though I had opportunity to be creative, I didn't have much incentive as I was more preoccupied with how I would articulate an idea than with coming up with a good idea, worthy of articulation. This degree seems to be as much about developing industry-specific skills as it is about coming up with new ideas - and, somewhat (sometimes) frustratingly, mastery of the former precedes development of the latter.
4. Towards the end of my art history class, I discovered my enjoyment of some of the early modern architects - mies van der rohe, walter gropius, and corbusier. I am looking forward to continuing to learn about the masters, studying their work as I develop my own ideas.
Mies' Project for a Brick Villa, never built
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, built 20 miles outside of Paris in the 1930s, demonstrating his five points of architecture (ribbon windows, raised first floor, rooftop gardens, asymmetrical exterior, free interior plan)
5. Some of the most interesting (and inspiring) moments of the semester were during our visiting voices lectures, where members of the professional community would come in and tell stories and share pictures of projects from their design firms. Seeing quality and beautiful work reminds me that this degree has application other than the fictitious house I designed for the fictitious family I came up with for my studio class. Though this semester I decided to pull back from studio classes to ground myself in more of the basics, I am excited to move on to other classes - to study commercial, institutional and hospitality design, to brainstorm for my thesis, to hopefully intern and learn more of the ins and outs of the profession...
So far, so good!
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