back at last from my third and final day of evaluating third year design projects in various colleges around the city. because it is the third year there is supposed to be one ‘rural’ project and one ‘urban’ project. what either of those terms means is pretty pointless because none of the projects that were set even ventured to look beyond organizational efficiency and.. and pretty much nothing else. the icing on the cake were the models, made in paper, painted in fluorescent watercolor, green foam made lawns and brown mud. trees of twisted wire wore tufts of dust as foliage. rural hospitals seemed to be the rage. over programmed with labyrinths of unventilated corridors and ugly windows to boot. pitched roofs give it a rural ‘effect’ i was told. and then the random curtain walling that is unashamedly called elevation ‘treatment’ on all the ‘urban’ projects. elevation treatment used to be a bad word in my days of bad architectural education where ‘authenticity’, ‘honesty to materials’ and other such romantic notions from early modernism seemed to hold sway. but at least there was that much. i hate to sound like a regressive stick in the mud, but for gods sake what in the world is going on in architectural education today? and its not even as if the organizational ability or drawing quality or that other annoying word ‘resolution’ was any better than projects being accused of just ‘talk’. structure, circulation and services that holy triad of a university jury were all i was, much to my own chagrin, reduced to looking for, and found even them to be flawed. grrr..
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