THE ARCHIVE

The past week  saw a flurry of activity as the summer architecture program came to an end.  Final reviews were held on Thursday, and we raced throughout the day on Friday to clean the studios and prepare for the closing reception. Parents swept through campus yesterday morning to see the final show and listen to the professors’ closing remarks.

By all accounts, the summer program was intense. Students worked around the clock in the studios: testing ideas, building models, and refining drawings to present in the final review.  Their hard work resulted in some outstanding project, and — judging from the wide smiles at the end of the day — it all may have been worth it.

Many students enroll in the summer architecture program with the idea of eventually pursuing a degree in the field. Some will go on to undergraduate ‘B.Arch’ programs like the one at Cornell, while others will elect to study at the graduate level. In both cases, the summer program serves as a good preview of what will come.

The curriculum this year included a number of two- and three-dimensional exercises that introduced students to architectural concepts such as space and instrumentality. Without divulging the entire course, I’ll go ahead and share a few examples of work produced by students in my section:

After finishing the cube project (pictured in the previous post), everyone in the course received a simple hand-held tool.  They documented these thoroughly and used drawing to investigate and expose each tool’s intrinsic properties. Later, the tools were considered in three-dimensions, and vessels were built to house them and choreograph their movement.

Finally, in the last week of the program, students were asked to design a small single-occupant dwelling based on concepts they had developed earlier in the term.

(from top: tool documentation by katie kelly, tool collage by willow hong, ice-cream scoop vessel by chris yee, dwelling model by katie kelly, dwelling section by noreen wu)

Graduation may have marked the official end of college life, but I’ve landed back on campus for one last dose of Cornell education.

This time, rather than taking classes, I am teaching them as a TA for the Department of Architecture’s six-week summer program. The studio course kicked off last week and we have already raced through our first exercise – the famed ‘Cornell Cube’ project.

Over a hundred students enrolled in the program this year, and they arrived to Ithaca from across the globe; Singapore, Turkey, Ecuador, Dubai, and Beijing are among the many places represented.

The program – which has been led for years by the same two professors – is conceived as a crash course in architecture. It introduces high school and college students to the intensity of a design studio and challenges them to think differently about the discipline.

I suspect that only a handful of students knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed up for this. The majority of exercises in an introductory architecture course are hardly recognizable as architecture, and students sometimes have trouble letting go of their preconceptions. Upon reviewing the first assignment, one girl turned to her TA and asked, “so, when do I get to design my dream house?”

It will be some time before any of these students design a dream house, but – whether they realize it or not – they are beginning to acquire the fundamental skills necessary to do so.

Although conducted slightly differently, the curriculum of the summer studio is similar to what I experienced as a freshman at Cornell. Students learn to think conceptually about space and form, and they learn to generate and convey their ideas through visual means.

As a recent graduate, I’m enjoying the opportunity to teach these fundamentals to a new generation of students. It’s a chance for me to reconsider my own architectural beliefs, and see how much wisdom I have accumulated over the past five years.

So far, we’re off to a goods start.  I’m working with a talented group of students, and they swing at everything we pitch at them. Five more weeks at this rate and we will have covered all our bases.

——————

When the teaching cap comes off, there’s plenty more to enjoy about summer in Ithaca. The locals are out in full force, the Farmer’s Market is booming, and the cool waters of Cayuga lake beckon from afar. I keep kicking myself for not having spent a summer here before.

Most Cornell students ventured off campus when classes end in May, leaving the rest of us to live like kings. My friend and I are the only two people living in an eight person house with a wrap-around porch. Our friends visit from their own neighboring mansions to cook food, drink beer, and plan out summertime adventures.

Life doesn’t get much better than this.

I woke up at 4:00pm after my final thesis review and texted my friend in embarrassment. “Sixteen hours of sleep? How long does it take to recover from thesis?” She responded from bed three hours later: “I’ve heard it takes about six months.”

Some time has passed since that final, blistering lap of my architectural education and I can look back on it now with some pride and amusement. Why did we take ourselves so seriously? None of us failed our thesis, and the primary measure of success was the amount of fun a student had with his or her project. In hindsight, the unrestricted nature of the thesis semester is truly a luxury; it ought to be exploited and enjoyed.

Admittedly, the hysteria that plagued our class took its toll on me, and I made more bad decisions in the last three days before the final review than I thought possible. But, for the most part, my project emerged unscathed. It took on a life of its own, and the ideas that had been floating around my head for months somehow coalesced around a single architectural project.

As I introduced in an earlier post, my thesis dealt with issues of variability and permanence — of material and cultural life-cycles. I chose to address an auto-demolition facility situated alongside the sprawling Park of the Appian Way in the outskirts of Rome; the uncomfortable proximity of industrial waste and Roman funerary monuments in this location fascinated me. I wanted to orchestrate the convergence of these two disparate worlds: the changing and the unchanged. I suspected that the funerary traditions practiced on the site for thousands of years might lend themselves to the proper display, disposal, and re-cycling of waste in the consumer culture of today.

The car became the subject of my exploration and I discovered parallels between it — as the object of worship in a consumer culture — and the human body — as the object of worship in the religious culture of early Rome. In this vein, I identified a strong correlation between the original Appian Way and the modern highway that has replaced it.  While the former plays host to dozens of celebrated tombs, the later is characterized predominantly by gas stations. Both tombs and gas stations serve (or served) as waypoints for travelers along a busy road, with prescribed services and signage to attract new guests.  Yet a tomb (as conceived by the Romans) holds a much more significant position within society than a gas station — it maintains ritual, structures the system of belief, and challenges the living to think beyond the scope of a single life-cycle.

Like the human body, cars have a finite life-cycle and must ultimately be disposed of. I resolved to build a funerary monument for automobiles — one that could sponsor rituals to celebrate the car and, in doing so, determine its material afterlife.

My thesis, entitled “MONUMENTAL DISPOSABILITY,” sought to undermine the apparent conflict between change and permanence by showing that one cannot exist without the other. I proposed a facility that would service cars, transform them, and — in certain cases — dispose of them. It employed a prosthetic logic wherein parts could be removed and replaced. The constant exchange of parts within a car actually sustains the whole. And so I imagined the structure of the facility itself to transform and evolve over time.

The underbelly of the project services the car and contains repair shops, storage, and networks to allowed materials to flow throughout. The upper portion functions as an arena, primarily intended for demolition derbies.

The inclusion of a demolition derby started as a joke but quickly became integral to the project. I would argue that the tradition of crashing cars into each other for sport — a common practice in the rural America — is well suited for Italian drivers. Like gladiatorial fights that were once arranged to bring crowds to important tombs, the occasional derby would bring people to the industrial site to see and experience automobiles in every state of action and decay.

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I presented my work in Hartell Gallery at the end of a long day of thesis reviews. After I spoke, members of the jury asked questions, voiced their opinions and debated the merits of my project. Reviews in other rooms ended, and the small crowd surrounding me swelled into a large one.

The showdown lasted an hour and, for the most part, it went well. I was pleased to be finished, and pleased that my project provoked some spirited remarks. One of my friends told me that he had fun in the audience, and thanked me for  ”putting on a show.” I’m not sure that was ever my intention, but I’ll take debate over boredom any day.

The department hosted a dinner for all of us afterward and we awkwardly unwound with our professors and critics at the Miller-Heller House in Collegetown. It didn’t take long for most of the group (faculty included) to migrate up the street to the Chapter House — an old favorite among Cornell architects. In the din of the bar, with drink in hand, one of the most outspoken critics on my review pulled me aside.

“I liked your project” he said “It was ballsy.”

Ballsy?

I’ll take that as a compliment.

Earlier this semester, my fellow thesis students and I were corralled into the college’s main lecture hall to listen to the wise words of three professors and our new department Chair. The explicit goal of the session was to discuss the significance of an undergraduate thesis. And, while most of us had already launched headlong into our projects, questions still loomed. What’s the purpose of a design thesis? Is it an exercise in liberation or masochism? What’s the value for ourselves, and for our school?

(an image from my thesis… before I actually knew what I was doing)

The faculty couldn’t make up their mind about thesis, and they passed this uncertainty onto all of us. When the opportunity arose to establish some common ground — to agree on the purpose of thesis at Cornell — we were cautiously optimistic. A loose consensus on the subject could offer us that thread of structure that had been missing from our lives. I had hoped that this discussion would happen before the semester began, but good ideological sparring is better late than never, and we were eager for any guidance we could get.

The discussion, however, couldn’t have been more vague. Thesis at Cornell, it appears, is anarchy; strong opinions abound, but no one has the authority to do anything about them.

The most revealing presentation came from one of my own thesis advisors, who had taken it upon himself some months earlier to gain perspective on the word ‘thesis’ by gathering opinions from throughout the architectural community. He sent an email to colleagues and friends asking them to complete the sentence: ‘thesis is…[blank]‘

The responses were wildly diverse, amusing, opinionated, and contradictory. Some were extreme: “Thesis is…the most important project of your life; the start of your career.” Others were blunt: “Thesis is… don’t remind me“  A few were remotely inspirational: “Thesis is… what you make it.”

The meeting was decidedly inconclusive, and we continued on our divergent trajectories. The purpose of thesis would remain a mystery at Cornell, but we could strive to make the most of it. The weeks wore on and as we approached our final review emotions ran high. Excitement, depression, and uncontrolled hysteria spread like wildfire. Thesis was a lot of things; for a good portion of the spring semester it was our life.

Expressions of distress and encouragement started shooting between thesis students in a group email chain. In the heat of the moment, we took it upon ourselves to complete the sentence “Thesis is…”

The sentences completed by our class in the days leading up to the final review couldn’t be more revealing of our strange mental state. Here is a sampling:

(5 days to go)

• Thesis is… lonely, sweaty
• Thesis is… almost over.
• Thesis is… Like the movie Tron…you get sucked into the computer and can’t get out

(4 days to go)

• Thesis is… like being pregnant: nausea/morning sickness, random food cravings, weight gain, crazy irrational mood swings, and a thesis/baby at the end.
• Thesis is… A premature baby
• Thesis is… [frog fail]

(3 days to go)

• Thesis is… [in braille] bump, bump, no bump, bump, three vertical bumps, four bumps in a square
• Thesis is… [walking on water]
• Thesis is…

(2 days to go)

• Thesis is… Intellectual Bulimia
• Thesis is… [all by myself]
• Thesis is… Sleeping Disorder, Eating Disorder, Sex Disorder

(1 day to go)

• Thesis is… [ooo child]

(This morning)

• Thesis is… OVER!

As if things couldn’t get worse, the Daily Sun published an article on Monday discussing the average starting salaries of Cornell graduates. As you can see, the future is rather bleak for those of us in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (#4) who can expect to make significantly less than our collegiate peers. Although the numbers are difficult to refute, the graph itself is misleading and I decided to write a letter to the editor expressing my concerns.

Here’s my letter as it appeared in today’s issue of the Daily Sun:

To the Editor:

Re: “Cornell Class of 2009 Grads Find Fewer Jobs, Earn Less Than In Previous Years,” News, April 19

I glanced at the cover of Monday’s Daily Sun and was dismayed to see a bar graph entitled “Starting Salary for Cornell Grads by School.” Not only does this chart point out that my fellow architects and I will be getting paid far less than other Cornell graduates next year, but it does so in a graphically irresponsible manner. The problem is that the bottom of the graph has been chopped off without indicating a new baseline value. Believing that the x-axis of the graph is zero, we get the impression that students in AAP earn a mere quarter of what one might earn after graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences, and only 8 percent of the starting salary of engineers!

The fifth-year architecture students are stressing out about thesis right now, and this visual affront on our livelihood is unfair. My best friend nearly cried when she looked at the graph and I had to explain to her that the situation is not as bad as it may seem. We can expect to earn about $37,000 next year, which is more than half the starting salary of our rivals in Duffield Hall. And although we are doomed to a low-paying career, it is clear that there will always be a need for our graphic skills.

TL ’10

The new barriers flanking the bridges at Cornell present a serious dilemma. While they are intended to prevent impulsive suicides,  they invariably provoke a sense of dread among those who pass them every day. As many have already stated in their own way, the natural beauty of Ithaca has been hastily exchanged for chain-link reminders of death.

In the past few days, opinions concerning the significance of the new barriers have plastered on the pages of the Daily Sun and on the fences themselves. Some students have sought to turn the chain-link partitions into memorials by covering them in flowers, while others have sought to undermine the solemnity of the whole affair by attaching bras. The fences along the footbridge in Collegetown received a fresh coat of colorful paint last night and the fasteners on the suspension bridge fence have been repeatedly clipped.

Among the student body, ideas for changing the fences have run wild. In the short term, there is a strong desire to deface them, to cut them down, and to make them into something which they are not. In the long run, students are beginning to imagine viable (in some cases ironic) architectural solutions to the so-called ‘bridge problem’ at Cornell.

Dean of Students Kent Hubbell revealed his own feelings about the suicide fences in a recent email, stating frankly: “As an architect, I look forward to the day when we have much more pleasing, permanent approaches for enhancing safety while preserving the natural and man-made beauty of our campus.”

If the fences are to be re-designed, as the University suggests, what should they look like? How should they feel? What message should the convey?

Considering these questions, a few architecture friends and I decided to initiate a University-wide ideas competition to “Re-Think the Fence.” The goal of this project is to visualize the many ideas people have for the future of Cornell’s bridges and review them as an entire community. Perhaps, in doing so, we might develop a better understanding of what we want (and don’t want) our campus bridges to look like in the coming years.

To participate in the competition, submit at least one 8.5”X11” landscape image of your vision to rethinkthefence@gmail.com before April 16th. Additional details can be found on our Facebook page Re-Think the Fence.

Students returned to campus after Spring Break to find 10-foot high chain-link fences installed on each of our campus bridges. Despite the administration’s repeated attempts to justify these barriers, students are unhappy.  The fences not only destroy the natural beauty for which Ithaca is famous; they are an affront on the wellbeing of the entire student body at Cornell.

Suicidal or not, it is now impossible to walk across the gorge without thinking about death. The fences serve as a continual reminder of those who died and seem to imply that the rest of us need to be fenced in so as not to kill ourselves.  If the university intends to move on from the tragedies this year and improve student morale, it ought to remove the fences so that our campus looks more like a college and less like a concentration camp.

The administration has, unfortunately, backed itself into a corner.  As students continue to criticize the fences, the university continues to defend them by citing various studies and claiming bridge barriers as the “most effective means of suicide prevention.”  We are expected to believe that suicide is a geographical problem, rather than a mental one—and that fences are the only solution.

The problem is that the experts advising Cornell don’t account for the enormous negative impact that  fences can have on a community. To understand that phenomenon we’d have to ask other experts—perhaps historians—who would attest to the long association between fences and oppressive regimes. In the past week, I’ve heard the word “Auschwitz” in reference to the fences many more times than I’ve heard the word “safety.” This can’t be good for anyone’s mental health.

Despite my criticism, I recognize that our administrators are well intentioned. They know that the temporary chain-link fences are ugly and are moving quickly to develop a permanent solution to the “bridge problem”. In the next couple weeks, architecture firms around the country will be invited to participate in a competition to redesign the Cornell bridges with barriers that enhance safety “while preserving the natural beauty of our campus.”

I can imagine what architecture firms might propose for our bridges and it won’t be pretty.  Tall, impenetrable barriers do not dissolve into thin air. And fences of any shape or size aren’t exactly the hallmark of a caring community.

We used to say “Ithaca is Gorges” but the university has moved aggressively to block the gorges and their associated beauty from our lives.  Now, Ithaca is Fences. Is that what we want?

Five years at Cornell and five Dragon Days.

My friends and I dressed as a green psychedelic marching band and did our best to make noise and lead chants during the parade. The fire on the Arts Quad this year was smaller than ever before, but the freshmen’s dragon and upper-classmen’s costumes were as impressive as ever.

Check out additional footage online of Dragon Day 2010!

After pretending to be engineers during the Nerd Walk on Monday night, the freshman class returned to Rand Hall and focused on being architects – slightly deranged, questionably sober, and extremely spirited architects.  That’s how it’s done at Cornell.

As the dragon began to take shape downstairs in the shop, a couple first-year students started offering “studio” haircuts to their classmates. When all was said and done, the majority of the freshman class sported impressive hairdos, such as the Mohawks pictured below. A wall in the first-year studio exhibits some of the most prized specimens of clipped hair.

On Wednesday, the freshmen stripped down for the traditional Green Streak to announce the imminent arrival of their dragon at the end of the week. As you can see, the dress code for this particular event was casual—comprised mostly of underwear and green paint. Despite the questionable garb (or because of it?), the entire group felt no qualms about entering hallways and lectures across campus. Here are a few pictures provided by the freshmen:

Spring Break is just around the corner and spirit is beginning to surge in Rand Hall where first-year architects are preparing for Dragon Day. Aside from the formidable task of building a dragon for the parade on Friday, the freshmen perform a series of traditions (and pranks) throughout the entire week. On Monday night, they kicked things off with the “Nerd Walk.”

On this particular evening, architects dress like nerds in mockery of our department’s rivals in the College of Engineering.  Granted, it’s no easy task to dress up like an engineer (it takes years of hard work to perfect that look).  But the freshmen were not deterred, and they gathered outside Rand Hall sporting short sleeve button-down shirts, thick-rimmed glasses, and awkardly parted hair.

With graphing calculators in hand, they ventured across campus to visit several busy libraries where engineers (and many other students) have been studying intensely for prelims.  I think it proved to be an amusing experience for everyone involved… except perhaps the librarians who called security. No major problems, however. The nerds returned safely to Rand Hall to prepare more pranks for the coming days.