"What were you doing five years ago today? As the holiday season began? Where were you? Who were you with? What did you want? What did you have?"
Early December for the last 6 years (excluding 2009) was always spent cranking out final production material for my studio finals. I can remember every year based on what studio I was in, but everything else is just a blur of sleepless nights, 3-day-old sweatpants, and trying to catch a nap in any of the larger lecture classes.
December of 2005 was probably the worst for me…I had a hard-ass critic who no one in my studio group could crack. His philosophy on architecture school was that we shouldn’t have holidays/family/vacation because they get in the way of studio and the design process. What a Grinch! My classmates and I bonded over his craziness. My fall 2005 was the semester from Hell and I thought that if I could just make it out of this studio, I could get through any subsequent studio relatively unscathed. Studio finals were always in the first week of December before other finals so that architecture students wouldn’t fail their other classes. In architecture school, Studio is King, and most other classes come second.
As a second year architecture student, I remember this was the first semester that we were allowed to use computers (aka: Cad and 3d modeling programs) for our finals. So along with trying to have a kick-ass design concept, we had to teach ourselves these programs and hope that upperclassmen would take pity on us and help us figure out plotting, scanning, etc. To this day, plotting is still a nightmare!
I remember one guy in my class was told 5 days before the final that he should just start over. I remember signing up for my last red-line review before our final, only to be blown off by my critic for a “faculty meeting” that I later found out was a “tennis date.” I remember slicing my left index finger with my x-acto while trying to build my final model. I ran to the bathroom as my finger gushed blood. Standing alone in the bathroom, I thought I was going to pass out and have no one find me, but thankfully my roommate, who was also an architecture major, saw what was going on and followed me. I had sliced it so badly that it looked like I had a hoof. Public Safety demanded that I go to the emergency room but I refused; I had to finish my model, or risk failing studio. They made me sign a release form, saying that I wouldn’t sue the school for negligence. Hum-z bought me a huge pizza to cheer me up, which meant I had hoards of people at my desk trying to snag a slice. I plugged away, trying to one-handedly finish my model. To my amazement, there wasn’t a drop of blood on the tiny diving board I was trying to cut before the incident. To this day, I still remember my studio critic telling me I had horrible craftsmanship on my final model. But I didn’t care. I was just happy to be done with him, and that studio, and that evil diving board!
I remember 2005 was the year that my parents decided that they would FINALLY put real floors in our house. Until college, I had thought that plywood floors were suitable residential flooring. Because of this project, my mom had “cancelled” Christmas and said that we could not get a Christmas tree because there were boxes of flooring everywhere and furniture strewn about. This was unacceptable to me, so my best friend Beth helped me stuff a tree into my tiny Celica and sneak it into my house. All was well, until my parents and I came home from a Christmas Eve dinner to find that the tree stand had leaked and ruined part of the newly laid parquet flooring in our living room. There was a whole lot of yelling that lead to me having to un-trim the tree and drag it outside. I called Hum-z, who was with his family in Maryland, crying hysterically that Christmas was ruined! He offered to buy me a train ticket to Maryland that night, but I refused.
My parents eventually got over it and let me bring the tree back inside, but only if I put it in a non-parqued section of the house. This was the last Christmas that I spent at home during college.
Things I've learned because of December 2005:
- I don’t want to be one of those people who takes myself or my design SO seriously that I can’t have a life. My life was made miserable because I thought I had to spend 28 hours a day designing to make someone else happy.
- Never trust an old Christmas tree stand.
- Basswood diving boards are still evil!
Nice blog!! I like it!
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