The students that stayed in town were moving out of the studio today and posting goodbye photos of packed boxes and empty studios with sad emojis. I filmed my own studio as I found it last Thursday, the first day classes were canceled, in all its silence and stillness. There’s nothing tidy about an architecture studio. There’s some control of debris around finished models and drawings, but for the most part, it just gets messier and messier as the semester wears on. I suspect that an online studio has a lower tolerance for actual messiness.
The messiness then will just have to be figurative rather than literal. That would be one way to measure if the second half of the semester online can be as rich as it would have been in person, if the progressive accumulation of models and drawings and random objects and sources of comfort like pillows and plants will takes us through synchronous and asynchronous meetings.
