THE ARCHIVE

Living here at Cornell’s medical campus offers an interesting perspective into the lives of med students. Our kitchen functions as the main social hub in the dorm and bears witness to a host of communal and culinary activities. Study sessions one night are followed by celebrations the next — the intensity of both activities being directly proportional to the difficulty of the intervening exam.

I glanced at notes on the table and remembered how much I dislike molecular science. Chemical structures never seemed quite as interesting to me as inhabitable ones. Studying architecture, however, doesn’t prevent me from flirting with the idea of becoming a doctor.  I live in a med-school dormitory and have a bona fide identification card — I just need to start attending classes and I will be on the fast track to success.

With this in mind, I have been keeping my eye out for information regarding my future, hypothetical career.  Medical flyers litter the bulletin boards on each floor. One poster encouraged students to attend a lecture concerning H1N1, another invited us to a special conference about healthcare. But one flyer, in particular, caught my attention:

“Interested in surgery? Love beer? You just hit the jackpot!” At the bottom of the page, after some further details, they offer a convincing — if not simplistic – reason to attend the event:  “Surgery is awesome (and there will be a keg. Seriously.)”

I’ve always been intrigued by surgery and I do like beer.  Joining the the Stimson Surgical Society suddenly seemed like a good idea.  Then I remembered my best friend talking about anatomy class and the gruesome dissection videos that he sent me. Cutting up bodies for a living is a gory business. Maybe that’s where the beer comes into play — it calms the nerves.

But consider the implications of this poster.  Do all beer-lovers become surgeons?  If so, it’s likely that other medical specialties have their own drink-of-choice.  Wine for cardiologists, jungle juice for pediatricians, gin and tonic for dermatologists, daiquiris for family practitioners — the list could go on and on.  An entire healthcare system consuming and consumed by alcohol.

I went exploring the other day and decided to relax a bit in Central Park.  Having studied Olmsted and Vaux’s original plans, I enjoyed seeing the park in a state of summertime activity. Neatly trimmed lawns, winding paths, and grand trees offer a welcome counterpoint to the ruthless grid and rigid materials of upper Manhattan.  Perched atop a little outcropping of rocks near 68^th street and 5^th avenue, I observed the surroundings and jotted a few thoughts into my notebook.

While sitting on the rock, I overheard a brief exchange between a father and his inquisitive son as they walked up toward me on the little mound.  The boy — who couldn’t be much older than five — called out to his father in an excited voice “Look Dad, a real mountain!!!

With a glance in my direction (and perhaps unsure of what to do when he reached the top), he called out again to his father — this time in a more contemplative tone. “Do people rest on mountains?”  Noticing me as well, the father turned toward his son and explained didactically “Yes, some people come up here to read books… or to write books.”  Linking two parts of the conversation in his mind, the boy asked eagerly “Do they write books about mountains?”

Five to ten years from now, I expect that that boy will be pleased to discover that many people have written many books about mountains. I can only begin to imagine his excitement when he discovers what “real mountains” really are!

Those familiar with Cornell have probably already been subjected to the repetitive naming scheme of campus buildings.  The first week of class brings with it many trials and tribulations – among them trying to find the location of your first lecture. Although it might seem obvious to veteran Cornellians, the collegiate nomenclature could hardly be more confusing. Your first impression upon arrival at Cornell is that every university building is called a “Hall” without regard to its size, structure, or function.  Then, as soon as you begin to ignore these accessory titles, you will be caught unaware in the wrong building on the wrong side of campus.

Wealthy alumni are partially to blame for this confusion, seeing as they are unable to fund merely a single building on campus.  To make matters worse, their surnames have migrated and multiplied as departments, laboratories and chimes have changed location. Thus the current situation: McGraw Hall is not attached to McGraw Tower, Uris and Olin Libraries have no relation to the similarly named Halls, and you will be hard pressed to find the Sibley Labs in Sibley.  Adjacency be damned! Sage Hall has no chapel by that name and don’t expect to find the Johnson museum in the Johnson school.

I sometimes wonder if the university planners were playing the same sort of joke as those who decided to put Kansas City in Missouri.  It just isn’t logical.

But, after time, this particular brand of Cornell nomenclature makes sense to the people who need to know. Each name becomes inextricably linked to a particular space, to experiences, and to our collective memory. When taken in sum, the names constitute a sort of code that reflects the culture of Cornell the way that strands of DNA reflect the nature of an organism. Until this semester, however, it never occurred to me that this “code” might extend beyond Cornell’s campus in Ithaca.

After walking the streets of Manhattan with bags in tow, I felt a wave of amusement and satisfaction upon the sudden discovery that I had reached my destination at Cornell’s Medical school. Every building in sight was named for Sandy Weill, a banker and philanthropist who has donated a good portion of his enormous fortune to Cornell. Then, on the corner of York and 69^th, I found the dormitory where I am living this semester. “Olin Hall” it is called, not to be confused with the chemistry building of the same name in Ithaca.

Olin and Weill Halls on the Upper East Side?  The Medical campus is like an intellectual microorganism created from the same “Cornell DNA” that generated the campus in Ithaca.  And I’ve got to assume that the same could be said for the campus in Qatar and other, smaller, and more remote educational outposts.  Where does this University end? The extent and multiplicity of the thing I know as Cornell continues to amaze me.

I guess it might be worth explaining a bit about my accommodations this semester in New York.  I am staying in Olin Hall at the Cornell Medical College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (where all the architecture students without family arrangements have been placed).  If, by chance, discussion of the Upper East Side brings to mind thoughts of Park Avenue flats and Trump Palace, I’d have to ask you to think again. Although the location is pretty stellar, the dormitory — used primarily to house first-year med students – leaves a bit to be desired.

Each floor has two long corridors with an assortment of single and double rooms. We share a kitchen and a small lounge area usually occupied by studious Medies. I live in a single room with an excellent westerly view of a very active construction site. The workers begin jack hammering bed rock at the stroke of eight each morning, eliminating the need for a back-up alarm.

The single rooms are reasonably spacious and have access to what might appear at first to be a private bath. The awkward thing about these bathrooms, however,  is that they serve two rooms and are accessed by two different doors with exterior locks. That means that Joe Neighbor can stroll in while yours truly is sitting on the john.

I could manage perfectly well with this situation except that, in my case, Joe Neighbor appears to be quite mysterious. I can’t actually tell if anyone is living next to me. There aren’t any signs of life in the bathroom but I sometimes hear noises at night. I’ve mentioned this to my friends and the girls suggest I write a friendly note and post it on the mirror. Three different guys (on separate occasions) told me that I ought to leave some beer as a peace offering.  The conclusion: leave a beer with a note.

Hopefully as the weeks progress I will settle into the room and re-accustom myself to the joys of dorm life. I’ll make sure to post the results of my bathroom reconnaissance mission if everything works out.

The Fall semester in New York City kicked off yesterday with orientation events, class presentations, and free food.  After an informational meeting at 10:30, we headed southwest from our studio to the newly opened High Line park designed jointly by architects at Diller Scofidio + Renfro and landscape architects at Field Operations.

Led by a representative from each firm, we learned about the entire project from the initial design concept to the final realization on site. Standing on the elevated platform that weaves through the meat packing district, we were able to see a number of nearby developments.  In the picture below, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel loom in the background as we discuss the effect of carefully designed lighting features.

After climbing down from the playful boardwalk, our group took a tour of the quarky “Standard” hotel. The hotel lobby (pictured below) as well as the restaurant and bar are best described as eclectic – with more materials than I could even attempt to name.  The rooms, on the other hand, were bright and open with prime views of the neighbourhood from bed, toilette, and shower.  It seems to have been designed explicitly for exhibitionists.

In the afternoon we met our new professors and listened to brief descriptions of each class.  Today classes begin and I am already dangerously close to being late to my first one!

Rome is famous for her monuments, but unlike Florence and Venice which surrender to hordes of tourists each year, the eternal city marches forward under a double banner as both tourist capital and national capital. These designations leave Rome in a difficult, albeit an interesting, situation. The city exists in a paradoxical state, divided between an undeniable present condition and an unforgettable past.

Living with a family in San Giovanni this summer, I finally had the opportunity to experience Rome as a living city — not merely as a curated one. My perspective changed from tour bus to local bus (number 673 to be precise) and I started to gain a new familiarity with the city’s wonderfully unique and disfunctional characteristics. Using public transit each day on my way to work was not always a comfortable endeavor. On one occasion, I stepped onto a bus with so many occupants that the doors jammed shut behind us and failed to re-open after repeated (and frantic) attempts to make them budge. You can imagine the dilemma.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Coliseum looks much less impressive when viewed through the sweaty glass of an overcrowded bus. The same could be said for other important monuments throughout Rome, which in many cases have become nodes of transportion.  Porta Portese, Largo Argentina, the Coliseum, and Piramide (pictured below) are just a few examples of ancient ruins lodged awkwardly into a modern, fuel-injected context.

Cornell introduced me to Rome last Fall and allowed me to make the connections and friends needed to return this summer on my own. I worked each day at an Italian design firm called Labics with two architects who I studied under during their tenure as visiting professors at the “Cornell in Rome” program. At their studio, I met a number of young professionals who had arrived in Rome from every corner of the Italian peninsula between Veneto and Puglia.

In the end it was the people, not necessarily the place, that made the summer so enjoyable. My host family and friends were incredibly welcoming and engaged me on topics as wildly diverse as health care, Mormonism, and Deconstructivism. Getting to know these people while performing the linguistic gymnastics of speaking Italian kept life in Rome interesting.  And if there were ever a moment to spare, a five minute walk would undoubtedly lead to another monument or museum to explore.

You either love it or hate it. Garbage pizza — so packed with flavor that it demands the most vague and threatening term in culinary vocabulary. Garbage — an amorphous field of calories, loosely identifiable as meats, cheeses, and veggies. It makes life worth living, even while threatening to cut it short.

Similar words might be used to describe the city of Naples, where the ingredients for civilization (the good, bad, beautiful, and smelly) have been heaped together in what can only be described as a charming mess.

Some visitors find the grunge and disorder of Naples repulsive. Italians from other regions mock it as a lawless state where most rules are considered mere “suggestions”. It is a peculiar place and an intimidating one, but I’d like to think it’s taste can be acquired.  The people of Naples are a proud and spirited bunch.  They might grumble about the mafia-imposed trash strikes or the struggling economy but they genuinely want you to enjoy their city as much as they do.

There are many cool things about Naples that I cannot necessarily name or place;  the constant barrage of fireworks, late night pizzetta, and grass-sprouting facades are a few things that come to mind.  There are others that no visitor can afford to miss; the San Severo chapel and the archaeological museum are my top recommendations. Personally, I am still in awe of the little “porcellino” pig that has survived more than two millennia of ware. One has got to marvel at a society that can posess such treasures while still struggling to take out the trash.

Looking for a classical design to spruce up the bathroom?  Nautical themes are a popular choice among homeowners and will undoubtedly impress your guests.  Nothing says “fertile” like a Pompeian mosaic.

Promptly after exams ended at Cornell last Spring, I set out on a 24 hour journey by tram, train, and plane from my home in Pennsylvania to the ancient ruins of Pompeii. With two backpacks balanced across my shoulders in front and back, I schlepped through stations on both sides of the Atlantic looking like an over-loaded, under-experienced backpacker on an urban expedition. As I neared my destination along the Circumvesuviana train line, I glanced cautiously at several potential pick-pockets and prayed that they wouldn’t take advantage of my vulnerable state. They deemed me a less lucrative target than the handbag wielding tourists nearby and I emerged unscathed.

For three weeks I lived at Pompeii’s “Motel of the Mysteries” with a small and talented research team from the University of Texas.  Although hardly the set of an Agatha Christie novel, our accommodations were sufficiently mysterious to fuel daily postulation about illicit mafiosa activity and clandestine afternoon encounters.  We would often sit around our poolside table in contemplation of a few recurring questions: Why is the swimming pool shaped like a Roman Amphora? Do businessmen often bring young women to World Heritage sites? Are rooms here offered at an hourly rate?

Each morning, our team travelled by car from the safety of Pompeii into the modern squalor of Torre Annunziata, where crime and poverty continue to draw attention and tourism away from the town’s archaeological gem. There – in the midst of social and economic wreckage left in the wake of crummy politicians and crime lords – sits a 2,000 year old country residence called the “Villa Oplontis.”

Although less extensive than either Herculaneum or Pompeii, the archaeological site in Torre Annunziata boasts brightly colored wall paintings and cleverly sequenced spaces that invite visitors into the minds and lives of the Roman elite and the people who served them. Construction and renovation transformed the Villa repeatedly in the decades leading up to explosion of 79AD.  Now it is possible to track this architectural evolution through three distinct styles of Roman wall painting and a number of clearly identifiable masonry techniques.

As an architecture student among trained archaeologists and art historians, I tackled two projects that utilized some of the drawing and software skills I learned back in Ithaca, NY.  My first task focused on the Villa’s masonry and resulted in a series of digital elevation drawings cataloguing construction type and materials throughout the complex.  My second task focused on the Villa’s frescoes– many of which remain fragmented and disorganized in a storage room.  Using scaled photos of each fragment as a starting point, I created an interactive digital “puzzle” in Adobe Illustrator to identify matches or alignments between parts. After some work, I came up with the following reconstruction which appears to align vertically with an existing scene:

I must say that my experience working among researchers at the Villa Oplontis impressed upon me a deep respect for and interest in the ancient world.  It is not too difficult to imagine dropping architecture to pursue an Indiana Jones inspired career in archaeology.  I could spend the next fifty years of my life travelling around the world in search of mankind’s greatest achievements. But, then again, it would be pretty cool to build a few buildings myself and leave them for someone else to discover.