It's been quite a while since I've written anything so let me catch you up to speed first. Since coming back to the US in 2008 I spent some time trying to figure out what I wanted to get my masters / higher education in. Ever since undergraduate I have really enjoyed playing around with architecture. Cutting pictures out of magazines and putting them together in rooms in my head mostly. Architecture magazines are probably my favorite kind of magazine ever. I love looking at all the pictures and the articles are very interesting. My aunt caught on to this fact about a year ago and got me a subscription to Dwell, which I already had a subscription to so I think the next 3 years are free now. In undergrad I decided to do my thesis on space between individuals, specifically male Indians in Banaras. This thesis included a lot of different aspects of space including how space between individuals is designated in residential architecture, my favorite kind of architecture.
Due to all of these reasons I decided I should finally take some classes in architecture starting in 2008. For the next two years I took a variety of courses including history of architecture and two architectural theory courses. Unfortunately I got stuck in a class called architectural drawing. To be fair it was the first time I had ever taken such a course and I was in the class with people who were architectural geniuses. Considering those circumstances I did very well in the course, my professor was surprised how well I caught onto the idea of seeing space despite the fact that I will never be good at free hand drawing. While I was enrolled in this class I was also taking my first ever class in anthropology, which I realized was what I had spent the last 5 years of my life doing. With this in mind I decided to apply for PhD programs in anthropology. Fortunately I did not get into any of these programs but did get in a masters program at the University of Chicago.
As soon as I got to Chicago I knew what I wanted to study, Chinese real estate and architecture, and its constant change during the time that I lived in Dalian. The locals used to say if a building was 5 years old it was too old and there was no reason to buy an apartment there. This was the case throughout the city to such an extent that buildings were tore down after 10 years in order to put up new ones. I was fascinated by this idea. After all I come from a country (the US) where the first thing I would look at buying in terms of residential architecture are old buildings, not new ones that tend to be prefab and fairly poorly built.
Unfortunately my preceptor (a PhD advisor for myself and about 20 other masters students) advised me against this project. He explained to me that I only had one year to do the thesis and needed something that had some well grounded methodological approach. Therefore I should look into something closer to home, specifically in Chicago. This was my first quarter at the University of Chicago and I was enrolled in a course called Urban Landscapes in which we needed to write a paper with good visuals to back up the thesis, floor plans, maps or photos. I decided I would try to replant my idea of Dalian in Chicago and focus on Chinatown. I spent several days in the library looking at maps of Chinatown and different aspects from the census before I came on something that seemed rather stark to me. The lines drawn between Chinatown and neighboring Bronzeville were very distinct and have not changed for several censuses. I decided to pursue this more, why were these lines there? Did this say anything about the relationship between blacks and Chinese? Unfortunately the results brought me to a standstill in my work. The lines between these two neighborhoods were drawn by highways and low income housing. There was no way for me to visually continue on with this train of thought. I decided to go south and study the distinction between the Irish community in Bridgeport and Chinatown as Chinatown was steadily growing into Bridgeport and there was a lot of tension in the news regarding this subject.
At the same time that I had finally come to this conclusion, a couple weeks into the quarter, I was sitting at work minding my own business when I overheard two of the managers discussing the architectural plan for the new bookstore. A light went off in my head. I already spent about 20 hours a week working in the bookstore which was literally across the street from my classes and I was interested in architecture, why not study the Co-op? I immediately shot off an e-mail to my professor of the Urban Landscape class telling him my idea of studying the store and asked my boss if he was okay with the idea. Both were elated that I would be interested in this particular topic and agreed to it on the condition that I start working on it intensely very soon (as there were only a few more weeks in the quarter and I had to write a 15-20 page paper on it). In the next couple of weeks I interviewed a large number of people, from the architects themselves to the store manager to the University architects as well as attended all of the meetings held between the University, bookstore employees, architects and the Co-op board.
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