Of the benefits of a three (and a half) year masters program is the opportunity to see your classmates and yourself develop as architects and people over time. We finished our a mid-review/pinup last week, which for a lot of us was the first time we are seeing each other with developed individual ideas since last May. Everyone has come a long way over the summer, it’s becoming more apparent everyone’s individual interests and strengths as well as what is becoming our years collective vocabulary (more on that another time).
Personally I used to be (note past tense usage) fixated on theory and diagramming but after working this summer at a small firm my interests shifted slightly. Not that this was my first work experience it is actually my third – my prior office was a two year stint, so the fact that my interests evolved were more to do with the focus of the latest office instead of the profession as a whole.
Now that we’re in the heart of the semester I’m finding myself critical of the overdrawn conceptualizing and process-making of the Cornell studio, it seems that you cannot make architecture without adobe illustrator any longer. I believe in transparency in process and the (re)insertion of agency into architecture however the dichotic nature of studio is; if the ‘concept’ is too clear it is interpreted as simplistic. This however is a superficial summary of a more complex argument which will have to be an ongoing conversation – for now here are some well shot photos of studio work by Angela Afandi.
