Student Reviews Summer '10

I find myself sitting on student review panels often. I really do overly enjoy them. It is a good excuse to get out of the office, converse openly and off the cuff with students and other (typically) learned individuals whose names I forget on the tedious ride home. Once in a while I will come up with a summation line that I will hope to hold close to the chest and keep in the pocket, sort of a remembrance fortune cookie for when I myself get stuck on an idea.

I find, overall, that students have a very hard time explaining their goals and decisions. It isn't hard to imagine, any person working on a project, forced to put on blinders and concentrate for 8 to 12 weeks begins to create a set of personal rules, a metric of their own device, from which to cull options. The problem typically stems that the metric becomes wholly intuitive, not that intuition is a bad idea, but utilizing intuition only (forgoing logical problem solving) means that when the overall idea is shared, components operate in a vacuum of assumption. I strongly dislike having to guess upon why someone decided option A was better then option B, especially when I don't agree (given my severely limited exposure to the prompt). I feel betrayed and at times overly rude for having to ask seemingly obvious questions as to what the vernacular the student is using actually means. Words have a power when used succinctly and correctly and can make one look quite foolish when not (see our last empire).

I also have to admit (here and now as I do during reviews) that I find when students present an overly pragmatic solution I become intensely perturbed. I realize that the students are not yet aware that when they become boy and girl architects that they will enter a world ruled by devious code enforcement and seemingly random zoning logic where pragmatism (actually it is the powers that be interpretation) can suck the very joy from, yet simultaneous allow existence. However they are not quite yet in the "real world" so they have the chance to "Dream big you f*ing dreamers" (to quote a comedian I don't find funny).

In all regards the latest review of one of the graduate studios at Kent State left me with two statements that have become the profound iteration of my fortune cookie litany (someday to actually be produce in fortune cookie form). I share them with you because I don't want to post photos or type out a diatribe about bike lanes and poor urban planning or how ODOT is directly responsible for our state's economic collapse.

There are three questions you should be constantly asking yourself as you design through a solution; Why not? What if? and Who cares?; Why is said solution to a problem most correct? What does this alter (in implementation/execution or experience? Who does said solution affect (I decipher this as Who the f*** Cares?)?

I admit I find this line of thought not very original, it lends itself to an adaptive reuse of basic journalistic teachings (journalwhawha?), however there is something poetic about how if one considers architecture to be profoundly about the ability to problem solve then getting to the truth becomes requisite to being authentic and successful.