Studio Culture

Although I don't have much time anymore, I'm pretty proud of my major...

Journal Assignment #1: “Studio Culture.”

I thought college life would be different. Actually I thought it would be different for me. Everyone around me is living the college life but I’m confined in the architecture studio almost every waking moment. It’s easy to get burnt out when you leave the studio at 6:45 am and have three hours of sleep and then a three hour class.

In studio there are two extremes. You have your peers who go to class and go home and on final day bring in something they spent no time at all on. Then you have your peers who are really dedicated to improving themselves and spend endless hours on projects and models. By endless I mean possibly forty hours on long projects (ones that last throughout the weekend) to twenty four hours on smaller ones.

We see the “college life” through windows high up on the second floor (which seems unreachable with models, laptop, and materials in hand while attempting to take the stairs,) or on our way to and from classes.

Classes, outside of studio and Architectural Design 1 (D1 for short) are seen as buffer. They are GPA raisers. The easy courses used to fulfill our general education requirement. We cannot care about other subjects. We don’t have time or the brain capacity. We don’t pick classes where reading is a requirement. Oh and writing is not even heard of. I made this mistake and well, I’m not too sure I want to experience Africa any longer.

You might see us around, us architecture kids. We’re really more than that… some of us are architects, but others of us are in allied fields such as Interior Design and landscape architecture. Some want to take over the world one building at a time, others want to restore the broken down, and others want to implement sustainability in everything they do.

You might see us grabbing a Starbucks double espresso, or in my case a frapp, with no time to sit and talk to our friends who at that time we just casually run into. Our meals are also to go. We have minor injuries and Band-Aids are a usual fashion accessory due to late nights with an Ulfa knife or Plexiglas cutter. We might be carrying our latest model. Please don’t touch it. It took us thirty three hours just to get that one piece of basswood to hold that Plexiglas at that exact height and if you touch it we risk our “craft” going down.

We’re either always tired or incredibly immune to exhaustion by now. We can go days without sleep and function quite nicely. Actually when you’re about to hit the sack from a long day of studying and reading all of those chapters, we’re brushing our teeth and getting ready for the midnight shipment of supplies and our pizza to arrive in the studio. We head off as if starting our work at midnight is all the norm and leave you in bewilderment.