Recently I have spent a large amount of time writing, reading and touring architecture. Last Monday I finally finished writing my term papers for this past quarter. My first was entitled Space as a Character in the Life Story of the Seminary Coop Bookstore. This was kinda fun to write. The whole quarter my professor had been talking about life stories, how to interview people regarding their life stories. Even when I went to meet with him a week before my presentation on the topic he mentioned life stories again. Well we all know how much I like the relationship between people and architecture. So I decided to make the paper for this professor told from 3rd person perspective about Space itself as if it were a character with a life story involving the relationships that it had with all the people I interviewed. Some of my main points involved how Space was just like any other person, if you never connected with it it was as if you didn't even know someone's name. But if you worked with Space every day then it was as if you knew it like you know your sibling. Due to the fact that I also had to incorporate some theory into the paper I decided that Space would refer to the space of the Seminary Coop bookstore whereas space would refer to the general.
On March 9th, the day after my sister's birthday, I presented this paper to my class. They really enjoyed my presentation, as did I learning more about theirs. One of my classmates and I are both drawn to the relationship between architecture and people and both writing about the subject so we decided to swap papers and read each others'. Hers was regarding the NY High Line and some interviews she did with friends of hers regarding the project and their reactions to it. I've never actually gotten a chance to go to the High Line but it sounds like an amazing project and I really enjoyed hearing about it. We realized that we took two fairly similar classes our first quarter here, I took Urban Landscapes and she took one entitled Social Theory of the City. I asked her to send me a copy of the syllabus so I could possibly read some of the books that were required for it.
In addition I wrote a second term paper entitled The Voices in the New Space of the Seminary Coop Bookstore. In this one I finally discovered a diplomatic way of writing about the issues that the Seminary Coop has faced in the creation of the new bookstore. Namely I decided to write about the topic from a leadership standpoint in some common pitfalls of leadership. All of this was to expose elements of the current bookstore that are being incorporated in the new bookstore or elements that are not being incorporated and some of the reasoning behind this.
I decided a couple weeks ago that since I'm here during spring break I would do my best to take advantage of the situation and do as many CAF (Chicago Architecture Foundation) tours as I can while I have the time. Yesterday I went on my first tour in a while, the modern skyscraper tour. It was a walking tour and unfortunately it decided to start raining half way through the tour, which didn't make it especially fun. However I fortunately was fairly well prepared for the cold and had my umbrella for the rain. It was really an eye opener, I learned about modern, postmodern and what the docent decided to refer to as neo-modern, despite the fact that it hasn't been officially named yet. One of the cool things that I learned about was the reason for the height and expanse of the Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park. There is a web-like grid hanging above this pavillion which has speakers dangling from it at several places, the reason for this is that at this pavillion, unlike many auditoriums and other concert areas, when the speaker speaks (or sings or does whatever they're doing auditorily) the sound that you hear at any place from this pavillion is heard at the exact same time. The speakers help this acoustic effect so you don't get people at the back of the pavillion hearing the sound the latest and people at the front hearing it on time. I was pretty amazed by this concept.
Today I have scheduled myself to go for a CAF lecture at noon and a tour at 3pm. Looking forward to both of them! And will be going on one CAF bus tour with a friend on Friday (amongst several other things).
In the meantime I have also been reading about architecture. In addition to the space theory that I read for my term papers that includes books like Tim Cresswell's Place: A short introduction and Anne Buttimer's The Human Experience of Space and Place I have been working my way through (when I get time) Sykes' The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present which I am very much enjoying (and only wish I had more time to read as I am still having to do a lot of work for my masters thesis).
