The End is Near

Hi, this posting will be in English to see if I can get people from the program to read the Blog. We had reviews they went well. Wednesday's guest critics seem to have been very useful, informative, balanced and pleasing to the vast majority of students. Greg Pasquarelly sat in on the Buell Hall reviews and his approach, I gather from accounts was geared towards the logic of a competition entry. His firm has won competitions and he was advising people on how to make compelling, competition winning proposals.

My own review went well enough. I used more than the time that was allotted me and consequently got very brief comments. Other people had similar problems, we get so into our projects in three weeks of research that it's hard to say it all in 20 minutes.

A lot of time had been eaten up in other presentations that ran long and I was next to last in the list. The critics did have nice things to say about my analysis, they suggested I should have gone further and been more precise in my proposal. This is very interesting because my critic guided me very emphatically towards a very generalized, open-ended proposal. I think it is great that they create these situations where your advisor is not present in your review to defend your project. That way we get used to the normal contingencies pf the profession which requires reconciling diverse points of view and explaining things to different people.

These type of lessons are inherent in all the programs activities, specially the studio’s they have also had us work for a week on something as group and on the day of presentation said… OK, you have five minutes to explain your work. The way they shoose guest lecturers and critics, that each bring very specific points of view, from the more pragmatical, to the more theoretical, Lanscape architects with their very physical approach and people form conflicting stances in public discourse of urban design.

By the way, sincere thanks to Jan et Altri (his girlfriend, Bert and Marcos) for the lovely picnic. Hopefully the first of many 'Frugal Bonvivant activities'. i will hopefully post pictures of the pic-nic later in the blog. it really cheered everyone up who was working on reviews to be able to take a quick break in the lawn and eat healthy.

The heading form today comes from an E-mail Peter Sun (a classmate form California) sent out saying basically congrat’s everyone for good work on review, now work hard on your RNYU maps, the end is near. I will post more later, en español un ppsting mas retrospectivo como promete la descripción del blog. For now,

Cheers,
R.