THE ARCHIVE

My semester “abroad” in New York wrapped up on December 18th and I headed home to Lancaster, PA for a relaxing winter break with the family.  Now that I’ve had ample time to sleep and gather my thoughts on the experience, I will share a brief synopsis of each of the courses I took this Fall. For those of you who might be considering studying in New York during your Cornell tenure, I’ll try to highlight how each course benefited (or suffered) from our location at the center of the big city.

ARCH 3819: What Would Gordon Do?

Architectural History professor Mary Woods designed this course from the bottom up to introduce us to Gordon Matta-Clark and the five boroughs of New York where he lived and worked. Whatever the curriculum may have lacked in coherence, it made up for with interesting field trips and events. Each week, we explored some theme geographically or conceptually linked to Matta-Clark and reflected on how the artist’s work might be read or redeployed 30-years after his untimely death.

Our investigations led us throughout the city, from the Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx to the Freshkill Landfill site on Staten Island. Individually, we fanned out across the city and discovered several lesser-known sites and exhibitions in the outer boroughs. To this end, the class was a great success; it forced us to explore beyond our comfort zone and take advantage of some of the opportunities that the city has to offer.

Pictured above is a portion of my group’s final project, which proposed re-animating derelict sites in Brooklyn using digital projection and responsive-technologies. We were given enormous liberty to choose our own sites and were attracted to the eeriness and vulnerability of these abandoned houses along “admiral’s row.”

ARCH 5101: Big & Small Studio

Craig Dykers from the Norwegian firm Snohetta taught our studio with former employee and artist, Liz Burow. Throughout the course of the semester, we programmed and designed a firehouse for a poor community in eastern Brooklyn and invented different ways of engaging the community. I have already described our panic-inducing final review, but there were many other aspects of the course. For one thing, we spent a good portion of the semester doing “programming” sessions, in which we expanded, organized, and refined the designated program (translation: function and size of req’d spaces). The exercise was new for many of us and threw us for a loop at first — but it is hard to deny the value of such a process as I believe it is one of the things that has propelled Snohetta to international success.

I honed in on the particulars of the firehouse typology and proposed a scheme to streamline firefighting activities while stimulating interaction and camaraderie among the company, visitors, and the local community. The chart above shows an adjacency diagram calling attention to the importance of the apparatus room; the sketches below shows my proposed “extrusion” of the vehicle bay to engage other program elements more closely.

Taking studios in NYC is a completely different experience from studying in Ithaca. While I believe we benefitted from the professional experience of our professors and the proximity of our studio to a provocative site, there were a number of drawbacks. First, the city was a constant source of distractions and it was difficult to engage our projects with the intensity that we do in Ithaca. Second, we were unable to benefit from the many resources we enjoy on campus: an enormous library, a well-equipped shop, and a large pool of faculty with whom to chat. I hesitate to complain about New York, but my studio experience there made me appreciate the culture and resources of Cornell’s primary campus.

ARCH 5110: Thesis Proseminar

The Thesis Proseminar is a course designed to prepare architecture students for their final, independent semester at Cornell. Although we got off to a painfully slow start, the final result of the course was exactly what we had hoped: a legitimate thesis topic, a respectable body of research, and a lot of ideas with which to proceed.

My own project came together in the final weeks of the semester when I consolidated my work into a pre-thesis book or “thesis dossier”. Only drawback: no Cornell library to use in NYC and only browsing access to Columbia’s Avery collection.  The Big Advantage: we could “borrow direct” books from Cornell’s online catalog and they would appear on our desks in 48 hours.

ARCH 5201: Professional Practice

The same course is offered in Ithaca and New York, but there is no comparison to be made — the New York City version of Pro-Prac is undeniably more valuable. With Jill Lerner of KPF as our guide, we visited offices across the city and listened to Cornell alumni describe their post-AAP experiences in the workforce. The presentations may have given us the false impression that all Cornell Architecture graduates run lucrative corporate firms, but it was nice to see that that is, at least, a possibility.

The final group project required that we each present a response to a hypothetical RFP for a new science building on Cornell’s campus. In doing so, we needed to invent the name and composition of our “firm”, assign positions and hierarchy, and articulate how we would manage the job.

My group decided to test the humor of our professors by pretending to be a famous Pritzker-prize-winning European design firm led by one eloquent-beautiful-brilliant star-architect named Artemis Von Circle V. We demanded an enormous fee for our services and declared that the only appropriate design for Cornell’s new science facility was a black sphere — slightly reminiscent of the death star. Our imaginary firm focused exclusively on circular geometry and preferred using the color black because it represents the presence of all color, simultaneously.  To our surprise, this farce went over well, earning me my first ever A+ for a practical joke.

Some of you may have seen the latest issue of Cornell’s alumni publication “Ezra Magazine” and a number have already taken the opportunity to poke fun at me for my cheerful photo on page eight. I suppose I have been called many things over the past five years at college but never has the word “dapper” been used so frequently. Before passing judgment, let me explain myself.

(Architects on the cover of Ezra Magazine, photo by Robert Barker)

This photo, and several others, were the result of a somewhat unexpected visit by the editor and photographer of Ezra Magazine who were intent on capturing the everyday experience of architecture students in New York City.  The team realized quickly that the interior of our studio looked too generic and that capturing the essence of the city would require going outside.

With a bit of help, the photographer rallied a handful of students to “get a bite to eat” on the street below. He thought it would be cool if we bought food from one of the street vendors and encouraged us to talk, walk, and explore the neighborhood as we normally do. Unfortunately, there is nothing normal about a photographer snapping your picture while walking down the street and our gaggle of college students stood out like a sore thumb — not nearly as suave as the celebrities who take such an occasion in stride.

(credit: robert barker, cornell university photography)

We headed up to Madison Square Park and the photographer sat me down with my beat-up laptop on a bench near the infamous Shake Shack. He wanted a photo of me  (a “cornell blogger”) doing my thing in front of the Flatiron Building on the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

(Recognize, for a moment, that this is an absurd premise — I’ve never whipped out my computer on location and started blogging.  Rarely do I use my computer outside. Blogging is a much less heroic activity than he intended to make it out to be and I could hardly play along without laughing.)

As he directed me to sit in particular ways, we started to attract the attention of people nearby and the Cornell girls (who ended up on the magazine’s cover) started blatantly laughing at me.  A large black man, who by all indications was homeless, rose from a nearby bench and started talking intermittently to the photographer and me.  In response to a string of questions amounting to “watcha doin?”, I explained that we were college kids taking photos. Apparently the large camera was enough for him to believe we were famous and he launched into a new, slightly crazed tirade:

“I know you! I know you! You Clark Kent. Watcha doin?”

He approached me with his arm outstretched, unwilling to believe we were just some random students. “Your hair is too perfect. I know you!”

At this point, we were all cracking up and I did my best to keep him at bay. The photographer decided to ignore said homeless man and continued to direct me to shift my shoulders in one direction or the other.

Upon hearing my name, the large man started shouting “Tim, Tim, Tim! Look at me.” As I watched, he pulled out what looked to be a busted cell-phone, held it backwards in the air, and announced his intentions: “I’m gonna take your photo Tim! Look at me. I know you!”

(source: ezra magazine, cornell university communications)

Then, to add to the confusion, a recent Cornell alum who I had been attempting to track down in the city saw me from a distance and, before recognizing the oddity of the situation, called out “Hey Tim. Want to get lunch?” This caught me completely off guard, and probably confirmed the crazed man’s earlier impression. I answered that it was “kind of a bad time” and tried to play off the mounting verbal assault as a normal day in the park.

As not to offend the eager homeless man, I turned toward the mock-camera, laughing at my unusual predicament. The Cornell photographer snapped his own picture from the side and it has since made its way to press, ensuring that I will remember this contrived and absurd photo-shoot in Manhattan for years to come.

I made a bet with my dear friend Crystal

so that I could eat dinner for free,

but I’m now obliged to write this post

to announce her victory.

The build-up to my final studio review this semester was every bit as frantic as forecasted in the previous blog post. Upon request of the professor (and as a result of our own neurotic temperament as undergraduate architecture students), the class collectively freaked out, scrambling to develop half-baked projects to a point resembling completion.  In typical fashion, sleep and sanity were set aside in favor of production.  And so, for seven uninterrupted days,  we lived in a world defined by the repetitive drone of Pandora radio, the occasional and celebrated smell of street meat, and the growing paper trails of ambitious, discarded checklists.

Cornell’s studio in Chelsea normally closes at 2am, forcing students to return home at a reasonable hour, but during this end-of-semester push we enjoyed special 24 hour privileges.  Consequently, the second floor of 50 West 17th Street became our own collegiate fiefdom, with a barter economy of popcorn and coffee, and hierarchy determined by one’s position and longevity in the computer lab.

We discovered that two armchairs in studio were relatively conducive to sleep when pushed together, and took turns in the upholstered trough. Strict instructions were given to classmates before each nap to be woken up after a predetermined amount of time, never exceeding three hours.

In the course of a week, I didn’t sleep a single night in my own bed, but enjoyed several hours curled up in these studio chairs. Without intending to do so, I became strangely nocturnal–eating lunch at midnight and feeling wide awake throughout the darkest hours of the morning.

The evening before our final presentation, we worked through the eleventh hour and on into the twelfth. I finally reached a stopping point around 2:00am but couldn’t fathom going to bed so quickly after lunchtime.  My malfunctioning internal clock, combined with a surge of finish-line adrenalin, caused me to stay up much longer than necessary, fussing with the layout of my slideshow, cleaning my desk, and helping classmates with minor tasks.

Our professor had insisted that we sleep at least four hours that night and that we arrive to the 9:00am review wearing new clothes. So around 6:00am I returned to my dorm room at Cornell’s Medical School, set my alarm, and lay down on my bed to fulfill a portion of the required sleep quota.

At 9:16am, my cell phone emitted a hysteric ring and started to migrate across my desk in vibration. I sat up in bed, cursed the alarm clock for failing to perform its primary function, and answered the phone.

“Hello Tim, this is your professor. Your final review started fifteen minutes ago and you are late.”

This statement ranks among the worst things to hear on the morning of a final review, especially considering the 40 minute rush-hour commute that separated me from the rest of my class. I threw on clothes, ran outside, and jumped into the back seat of a taxi heading south on York Avenue.  My enthusiastic taxi driver and I only made it a couple blocks before hitting traffic, at which point I decided that the express subway and sprinting along the sidewalk would deliver me faster to Chelsea.

I arrived at the Cornell Studio at 9:45am without much breath or dignity left in my body. I convinced myself that the professors would publically humiliate me and rehearsed a series of lame apologies and excuses in my head. With luck, I stepped onto the elevator with another man heading to the same floor, who turned out to be one of the critics for our review. He earned a formal introduction to the assembled crowd, and I took the opportunity to slip into the ranks of students in the back of the small room without much disruption.

Throughout the eight-hour review, I remained standing to avoid the curtain of sleep that would inevitably transform me into an immobile, drool-emitting zombie; I knew that this would not go over well with my professors. Luckily, my presentation went well and I think I redeemed a bit of the respect that I had abused earlier that morning.

After the review, we went out for some post-mortem drinks at a nearby bar and chatted about the semester.  I returned home around 11:00pm and slept for a solid 14 hours. Not to be outdone, my friend slept until 7:00pm for a total of 20 continuous hours, which I believe is her new PR.

None of us are particularly proud of the strange behavior we exhibited during this period, as it is mostly indicative of our lack of discipline earlier in the semester. But if anything good can be said of the experience, it is that we tested our limits and faced off squarely against sleep — the greatest enemy of all. And I, for one, have learned the value of setting more than a single alarm before a final review.

I walked into Cornell’s architecture studio in Chelsea on Friday and discovered that the place had been broken into and robbed while students were away for break. The interior door to the office had been smashed with a bulky hole-punch, leaving shards of glass and paper strewn across the floor.

The building’s security guard checked out the situation earlier that morning and determined that the burglar wasn’t hiding in the space; but by the time I arrived, he was at his post downstairs acting as if nothing had happened. No one had been notified about the burglary, so I went ahead and called the program administrator to explain that her office had been broken into. Several hours later, cops were on the scene completing a crime report and trying to make sense of limited and contradictory pieces of evidence.

Aside from the broken door, little was out of place in the studio. A couple university-owned laptops and projectors were missing from the office and the freezer door was left ajar in the kitchen. The most expensive pieces of technology had been overlooked, probably as a result of urgency or ignorance on the part of the burglar. Curiously, the exterior doors and windows of the studio were all locked and there were no signs of forced entry. The overnight alarm never went off, indicating that the robbery took place in the morning when security was already on duty downstairs.

When confronted, the security guard said he wasn’t too worried about the incident because he assumed some drunk student had broken down the door. But aside from doubting that the Cornell students in New York would steal from their own facility, I know that — if one did — they would be savvy enough to take more valuable equipment. In my opinion, his observation is only accurate insofar as the robbery may have been an inside job; and frankly, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he or one of the other security guards were involved.

The cops took fingerprints from the door, but it remains to be seen if the burglary will be resolved.  In the meantime, we’ve become much more careful about our belongings — remembering that the security we enjoy in Ithaca is a luxury that doesn’t necessarily exist in a big city like New York.

The final saga in the five-year architecture program at Cornell is an independent design thesis. For the majority of our undergraduate lives, this looms far in the future and is conceived vaguely as a ritual act performed by the most mature members of the architecture cult. Then, the moment arrives when you too must prepare for this rite of passage and become one of the deranged and sleep-deprived creatures known collectively by the younger generation in Rand as “those thesis students.”

In the spirit of Cornell, we tend to place a lot of pressure on ourselves when considering the thesis – hoping that it will be a shinning culmination of our extended tenure in Ithaca, but worrying that it might fall short. At his birthday party a few weeks ago, I told Richard Meier that we’ve been staying up at night with thesis nightmares and he responded humorously “who doesn’t have those?” Apparently, he continues to suffer from the same anxiety fifty years after his own undergraduate thesis at Cornell.

Today, we put aside anxiety and took our first official step in the thesis process by submitting posters for public display in Sibley Hall. Using a combination of text and visual material, these announce our intentions to professors in Ithaca and help us solicit advisors for the upcoming spring semester. The deadline caused a furry of activity throughout the week and a number of late nights, but forced us to solidify our ideas into a single, compelling proposal.

I have chosen to pursue an interest in destruction and intend to claim this process within the realm of design. Although slightly morose, I think the theme raises a number of interesting questions regarding the life-cycle of buildings that production-driven architects tend to neglect.

My site is on the southeast periphery of Rome along the New Appian Way and I am proposing to redesign an auto-demolition facility that caught on fire there last summer. If you’re curious, here is the first paragraph of my thesis statement:

In the summer heat of 2009, hundreds of discarded cars along the new Appian Way caught on fire, sending plumes of smoke into the skies above Rome. The pyre of automotive waste frightened residents throughout the capital city and called attention to a striking discontinuity in the historic and increasingly populated landscape of Rome’s periphery. The flames marked the site of an existing auto-demolition facility, where the traces of consumer culture have been awkwardly lodged between the expansive park of the ancient Appian Way and a developing residential district. Within this context of permanence and growth, how can architecture accommodate volatility and destruction? How might the internal metabolism of waste positively contribute to the life and economy of the Eternal City? READ MORE >>

With poster and proposal complete, the real work is about to begin. Before next semester, I hope to assemble a thesis committee that draws expertise from a variety of different disciplines. So far, I have enlisted a Roman architectural historian who has provided me with some fascinating information about the funerary monuments that once lined the ancient Appian Way. Now I am looking for people with expertise in material properties,  the (de) manufacturing process, and the automobile. Let me know if you have any ideas!

I learned very early on that donations to homeless people do them little good. Throughout the United States, and especially in wealthy cities like New York, the handouts given by kind individuals to ease the suffering of the less fortunate do precisely the opposite. They offer an incentive for homeless to remain on the streets rather than seeking help at a shelter, and they perpetuate harmful addictions. It has been said many times that the money flowing into the cup often flows out as liquor.

I do not give money to the homeless. That has been my steadfast rule since arriving to the city two months ago. And so, as I pass through the streets and subways of New York each day, I look into the forlorn eyes of each washed-up soul with nothing to offer them. I consistently reject the warm feeling of charity that a handout would buy me and remain strictly rational – knowing that my spare change can do more good in other hands.

While riding the subway late the other night, a woman walked onto my car and delivered yet another plea for help. But this time it was different. She dropped to her knees and spoke in a manner that resonated deep within me; it was impossible to ignore her. “I am starving” she said in a deep voice that shook her frame and mine. She choked on the words as she repeated them: “I am starving. Please. Please help me.”

I didn’t want to give her money, but another idea crossed my mind. Earlier that evening, we had an event at the Cornell studio and – like any normal college student — I had harvested as many left-overs as possible to eat during the coming week. As the homeless women waited for donations on her knees, I rooted through my backpack and found a large bag of vegetables. I offered this to her and she accepted them appreciatively.

The train stopped and we both stepped off onto an empty platform. I walked ahead with the pleasant feeling that I had helped someone in need. But the woman fascinated me and I glanced back at her from the top of the stairs. She paced back and forth on the platform and the bag of food I had given her was nowhere to be seen. Then, upon further inspection, I saw it discarded at the side of the tracks.

Furious and confused, I marched back down the stairs and approached the woman on the platform where she stood alone. “Excuse me ma’am” I said in a quivering but relatively forceful tone, “you told me that you were starving and I offered you my food. Why did you throw it away?”

“I don’t eat that stuff” she replied.

“What do you mean you don’t eat that stuff? What do you eat?

“Burgers, and chips, and things” she said as if I should have known.

I stood in shock. I always believed “starving” to be a severe condition that inspired the desire to eat food – any type of food. This is certainly the case in other countries around the world, but not so in the United States where notions of starvation have been utterly distorted, and the poor struggle with other problems.

I couldn’t insist that she take my food or eat anything besides ground beef, but she had claimed to be starving and I wanted to know more about the situation. With hardly any pressure, she began to explain her life story in great detail to me. She had been “spoiled” by a mother and grandmother who never made her work. After their deaths, she couldn’t provide for herself and landed on the streets. She moved in and out of shelters but got into fights with other residents there. She tried handing out papers for the NY Post but couldn’t pull herself together every morning to do the job. Now she rides the subways back and forth, trying to earn enough cash to pay a friend for a place to sleep and wash up.

After this narrative, I looked at her and told her that she was the best-spoken homeless person I had ever met (better spoken than some Cornell students for that matter). Why remain on the streets in such a miserable cycle of desperation? I didn’t want to patronize her or project my own values onto someone I barely knew, so I asked the simplest question that came to mind. “Do you want to be here in two years?”

“No,” obviously. But she couldn’t imagine an alternative; she seemed bound by immediate needs and immediate desires. “I’m gonna ride the train tonight until I make $15” she told me, “then I’m gonna put my head down for a bit, wake up, eat an egg sandwich, and do it all over again.”

Eat an egg sandwich? I asked myself (this time exercising enough restraint to maintain an inner dialogue). Egg sandwiches are expensive. I don’t eat egg sandwiches. Who eats egg sandwiches?

The idea of food frustrated me as I looked at the bag of discarded vegetables in the distance. “Look” I finally said, “you’ve got a tough life and I respect your struggle, but you’ve got to take what you can get. That’s what people do to get by on this earth. If you get a few bucks – or even a bit of food – you’ve got to make the most of it.” She shook her head in agreement but her glazed eyes gave herself away. She didn’t know how to make the most of anything. She was good at making money on subway cars, so she did that. She liked the taste of fast food, so she did that too.

The #4 train arrived and she stepped aboard. I climbed out of the station with more emotions than I can describe, but one distinct realization: it’s hard to help people who don’t know how to help themselves; and it’s probably naive of us to think that we can.

Living in New York City gives you the impression of being at the center of the universe and, although Copernicus may have proven otherwise, many New Yorkers believe the world revolves around them. Culturally speaking, this conclusion is surprisingly difficult to refute. Here, the rich and famous walk unannounced through the streets among corporate headquarters, trend-setting boutiques, and elite institutions. It is a strange and wonderful place. The local baseball team just won its 27^th World Series title for God’s sake!

The city may be narcissistic, but I will discuss that in a different post.  Right now I want to address something that bothers me every morning as I take the subway to class.  New Yorkers – consciously or not – have constructed an identity for themselves that departs significantly from reality; they completely deny the existence of New Jersey.

I could provide several oral accounts of this phenomenon, but I think the MTA Subway maps show NYC’s state-of-denial in its most basic form. Through a subtle distortion of geography, the transportation authority is convincing people that (a) the Hudson is much wider than it actually is, and that (b) Staten Island floats somewhere quietly in the Atlantic Ocean. Don’t be fooled by these claims; look at the maps yourself.

It turns out that the Hudson is, at points, only slightly wider than the East River. So, if it weren’t for a lopsided distribution of transit routes, Jersey would be as much a part of New York City as Brooklyn. And while Staten Island can call itself one of the five boroughs, its only delineation from New Jersey’s land mass is a narrow body of brackish water.

Many New Yorkers dislike New Jersey and poke fun at it incessantly. They deride it as the “Garbage State” and call attention to its landfills, turnpikes, and communities that identify themselves according to exit number. The busy highways and industrial vistas that lead to and from Manhattan reinforce this negative stereotype — giving people an exaggerated impression of the messy sprawl that sometimes characterizes the Garden State

This, however, does not justify the calculated elimination of New Jersey from people’s cognitive map. The geographical trickery needs to stop and New Yorkers need to admit the existence — and proximity — of their closest neighbor. Next time you ride the subway in New York, take a look at the map and ask yourself…

Saturday morning, those of us studying history with Mary Woods wrestled ourselves out of bed and headed downtown to the Staten Island Ferry. On the other side — after a free ride past Governors Island and the Statue of Liberty — we climbed aboard a Park Service bus and headed toward Freshkills Park.

The weekend excursion followed in the footsteps of Gordon Matta-Clark, who gained fame in the 1970’s for artistic mischief in the outer boroughs. Like all of us, Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell, but he rejected the discipline and launched himself into the New York art scene with works that he dubbed “anarchitecture”. These exposed the volatility of the city (and its structures) through building cuts, social and culinary experiments, and other acts of creative recklessness.

With irony and respect, our history of architecture class now honors Gordon Matta-Clark with the unofficial course title, “What Would Gordon Do?” Besides obviously referencing Jesus Christ, this title captures the essence of our course. Throughout the semester, we look at a series of neighborhoods in New York through the historical and theoretical lens of Matta-Clark. His life and work pervade the city and provide a launching point for discussion and debate. What would Gordon do if he were presented with the largely gentrified city that exists today? Do the changes over the past thirty years represent progress? Where do opportunities for intervention still exist?

The weekend field trip to Staten Island provoked all of these questions.  The bus took us to Fresh Kills landfill to explore a site that gained fame as the world’s largest trash heap. In 1972, Gordon Matta-Clark visited this same site under much different circumstances and produced a video documenting the mountains of residential waste, the machinery that moved them, and the seagulls that feasted on the decay. (click the image to play film)

In 2001 the landfill officially closed and became New York City’s second largest park – three times the size of Central Park. The landscape firm Field Operations developed a site strategy and the land will be incrementally re-purposed over the next 30-years. Although the park remains closed to the public, there are many opportunities to visit with members of the park service, who lead weekly informational and bird-watching tours. More information is available on the park service’s website.

The site today is strikingly clean with four man-made hills covered in long grass.  One might not think twice about the rolling landscape if it weren’t for the occasional metal well-heads that vent gas from the decomposing rubble underneath. These, however, cause little disruption to the sprawling views and reflect the cool austerity of much larger infrastructural fragments below. Gordon Matta-Clark may not have envisioned a park here, but the idea now seems well within reach.

Images of a landfill: past, present, future.

Rarely do I rub elbows with world-famous architects, but this Friday night I found myself chatting alongside Richard Meier at Cornell’s studio in Chelsea. As strange as it may seem, the encounter didn’t involve a lecture or design review. It involved cake.

The evening festivities were organized to celebrate Richard Meier’s 75^th birthday. Dean Kleinman hatched the idea a few weeks ago as a friendly gesture to Meier (who serves on the Dean’s council) and as a fun occasion for students in the NYC program to meet one of Cornell’s more prolific architecture alums. In preparation, students designed an interactive birthday card (above) in Meier’s own style and decorated (ahem, cleaned) the studio space to avoid offending the well-known king of clean.

After a brutal week of mid-term reviews and presentations, we welcomed the opportunity to unwind with a bit of free food and drink. And although none of us had much experience throwing birthday parties for celebrities, everything went quite smoothly. Feelings of trepidation were overcome and Richard (with whom I now consider to be on a first name basis) proved to be friendly, gracious, and surprisingly easy-going.

Upon his arrival, he congratulated us on attending the #1 architecture school in the world and suggested with a smile that we might even be the best architecture students. We laughed – awkwardly — to avoid any misplaced vanity that his comment might have provoked. After the ice-breaker and a few words from the organizers, the evening proceeded informally with ample quantities of food, song, and conversation.

After conducting a proper survey of the buffet table, I landed myself in front of Richard Meier and tossed him my first piece of conversational bait. He eagerly spoke about the Ara Pacis museum in Rome and the adjacent (and neglected) Mausoleum of Augustus. This led to a conversation about Cornell’s Rome program and the comparative merits of that versus “AAP in NYC”.

Along with newly appointed chair of architecture Dagmar Richter, we engaged in an interesting discussion about the future of architecture courses and coops in New York City. Meier offered plenty of advice and we brainstormed various ways that the program might be improved or expanded in the coming years.

As the evening wore on, Richard Meier and the other mature folk parted ways, leaving us with left-overs to eat, a sound system to pump, and projectors on which to play an assortment of youtube videos. It goes without saying that an impromptu dance party commenced. My only regret? That Richard Meier never showed us his moves.