semester's end

It' the time of the semester when I once again rethink my future as an architect. While criticism and comments are a given in crit, it was especially harsh for me this time. It was quite possibly the worst one I've ever had. It wasn't "worst" in terms of having a bad project, I felt I had a competent scheme. It's just that half way through my crit, I was cut off and was embroiled in some sort of fight between different philosophies towards conservation and I wasn't able to clearly explain my scheme after that, nor was one of the critics interested in the scheme after the conservation debacle. It was an absolute disaster but I stand by what I did, although I wished my brain would work faster and come out with more convincing rebuttals during the crit and not after.

This is my scheme for this semester. The model is one of the better ones I've made in years although it didn't really come into use much during the crit.

The crit for the others in the studio went pretty well, nowhere as heated as mine.

Hann rejoicing over his sucessful scheme.

Reflecting the last semester, I personally felt that it was one of the best studios I've been in. The people were fun and most of us were quite involved in the studio's work and activites. Simply put, we had more than a hi-bye relation. And the site study and masterplan we did for the first half of the semester was far better than anyone of us could imagine.

The day did not end with the crit. After that, we went for a lecture by this Korean architect called, Cho Min-Suk. His works were quite interesting exhibiting strong Dutch influence and exploring intriguing spatial and formal relationships. A good example would be this aprtment block in Seoul that has 160 units but has 49 different unit types, some containing bridges linking 2 seperate parts of the same unit.His practice is called mass studies, I'll try to write a seperate entry when I'm in the mood.

The day simply refuses to end. After the talk by Cho Min-Suk, we had to rush down to Capital Tower for yet another talk by superstar architect Toyo Ito. He is in town today and we were, on short notice, invited to a talk given by him.Organized by the developers of Vivocity (Ito's first project in Singapore) , it was as much a meet-the-fans session as a publictiy stunt for Vivocity, although Ito wryly decided that he will not talk about Vivocity but instead about his other recent works.

After the talk, we went to Lau Pa Sat on the pretext of having a drink to celebrate Wang Ying's birthday (well, not really on a pretext, we really wanted to have a drink.)