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There are these online "Master Classes" that have been making the rounds on social media for a while, even before our COVID 19 situation. They are a peculiar thing indeed, but even more peculiar was the one that popped up on my screen this week, one taught by a hostage negotiator. And I thought, that's... Continue Reading →
We looked at six-foot boards on our desktop screens, zooming in on a drawing like we were walking up to the print on the wall, sticking our noses in it. We don't have to take turns, all eleven of us "crowding" around the palm-sized detail, on account that we don't have bodies anymore, just ten... Continue Reading →
I could see everybody's ceiling above their faces, that peculiar relation we have in our webcam conversations--we are looking down at our screens and our conversationalists see us hovering above them. It made me think of the video installation "Just Above My Head" by Steve McQueen, which I saw in the late 1990s when I... Continue Reading →
The assignment had been to 3D print 1/16th scale massing models, but we were all distracted by the one printed at 1/32nd scale which in comparison appeared diminutive and made us laugh because it was so, well, cute. Scales only appear to be quantitative; there is, in fact, a sort of feel to each one.... Continue Reading →
Our architecture studio class is designing a middle school and at the beginning of the semester we brainstormed about ways in which to finish this sentence: "A school is/has..." Each student read thirty responses on camera and those nine voices now live together in a virtual drive, even as we have dispersed to Canada, New... Continue Reading →
I started cleaning my hard drive the way I tidy up when guests are coming for dinner. I'm planning to share my computer screen during video conferencing meetings and I'm pretty certain than in a three or three and a half hour class I will at some point feel compelled to go digging through my... Continue Reading →
I'm taking a page from Pietro Franceschini who started a visual diary of his Italian COVID-19 shutdown and starting my own teaching online diary. This is day one of making the impossible happen. A studio and a seminar, 9 + 1 and 10 + 2 people respectively that were reliant on my physical presence to... Continue Reading →
When as an architecture student in the 1990s I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Western Pennsylvania, the docent took notice of the number of women architecture students on the tour and asked, “why do you suppose there haven’t been any great women architects?” Virginia Wolfe’s argument about the impossibility of a female Shakespeare came... Continue Reading →
It is rare for a seasoned professor to get that jolt of excitement one gets from teaching a class for the very first time, but that’s exactly what happened this semester when I was asked to to teach a history of architecture class in a new program. The material covered by the class was in... Continue Reading →
