I have absolutely nothing to do, and it’s fantastic. I’m sitting here on a fine Saturday afternoon watching UCLA get their dentures ground into dust by the fighting Mormons of BYU, and I just can’t help but smile. THIS is the reason for living, right here. There’s no homework to do, no pressure mounting, no nagging weight, just pure unadulterated carelessness. Almost a week ago, I finished 26 years of schooling in a single whirlwind afternoon that left me completely unable to put the feat of completion into context. It’s not until about now that it is all beginning to sink in. Guiltless nothingness!
Man, Thesis was a monster. It’s a system that has been abandoned by almost every architecture program in the United States for reasons ranging from early job-market entry to lack of resources to feelings of irrelevance. I, however, see it as not only important but essential to a quality education, if you take as a given that a quality education tries to send each student out into the world with a set of marketable and worthwhile skills. Thesis is the final culmination of each student’s method, which at a place like SCI-Arc can be as individual as tea strainers on your shoes. I mean snowflakes. Without that final push to develop a single well-thought-out, fully-developed and carefully-executed last project, everything taught over the previous three years becomes moot. ( bit of an overstatement)
If SCI-Arc’s reputation is one of innovation and individualism, it is currently failing to live up to that standard. So much emphasis is placed on high-gloss shiny renderings, overly-elaborate white on black line drawings, and untouched, unmodified 3D prints, that most of the projects hanging on the hallowed concrete walls of our ¼-mile-long former railroad depot during Thesis week are indistinguishable. I wish I could go back in time and see what SCI-Arc Thesis projects were like 25 years ago. The mystery I want to solve is whether computers have ushered in an age of “Thesis” projects concerned monotonously with taking an arbitrary inspiration for design and executing it, or if those types of projects have been around through the ages. To me a Thesis project needs to find a question within the discourse of architecture and attempt to at least find out if the question is answerable. In this way, the project gives something back to our field, advances it in some small way. If you get 125 students each year trying to millimeter forward the line of what architecture is and can achieve, great strides can be made. But if 70% of those can’t manage to figure out even what asking a question entails, well then there’s not a lot of progress happening.
That being said, my project last week had a lot of people scratching their heads. Not least of which were the heads (pun) of the Graduate program and Thesis program at SCI-Arc. These are two of the most powerful and, in my own personal opinion, un SCI-Arc-y people in the school. I’ve never met two people more out of touch with what they purport to propagate. They are, in many ways, my archenemies. The fact that they barely know I exist only played into my hands last week. As fellow These-ers rushed around in white gloves with their $1000 boards making sure their $2000 3D prints were being manufactured in a timely manner, I was inexplicably laying down industrial linoleum and putting up shelves stocked with food. It was inexplicable to them, not to me. I actually knew exactly what I was doing, believe it or not. I say this not as twisted show of superiority, but to illustrate just how cavernous was the divide between our respective ballparks. Theirs was a glittering, spotlit, fleet of robotically-controlled HD cameras, 90,000 plus Monday Night Football event watched by millions in their living rooms and local bars in primetime. Mine was an afternoon High School Field pickup cricket game with a couple of wives and a crew of scoffing local ruffians in attendance. Those were our respective ballparks. That about sums it up, and brings a merciful close to the sports references.
To say the supermarket that had popped up in the Northwest corner of the Main Space overnight was garnering buzz is an understatement. Most of it was just plain curiosity, some of it was overwhelming joy (really, some people laughed so hard they cried...ok, it might not have been joy), and the rest was open derision. In fact, I found out on Sunday before my presentation that on Friday night aforementioned heads of programs held a meeting in front of my shelves determining whether it was feasible to require me to dismantle my project and not present. I kid you not. They eventually cowed to the sheer mass of my food and gave up on their quest to rid the school of everything not 3D printed. Perfect. I’d at least achieved the most basic tenet of my personal Thesis mantra: Do something different. Beyond that, however, I knew that I would really have to execute an eloquent and direct explanation in my upcoming Sunday presentation, because the premise of my project (which actually has very little to do with supermarkets, exactly) would not be immediately tangible.
This, then, is a good time to talk about my Thesis and its presentation. There are interesting milestones that can be achieved when working on a project in the way we do. One of the things you hope might happen is that you stumble upon an element of your idea so worthwhile that you might even be able to continue working on aspects of it beyond graduation. When I was in China studying this summer, I had such an event occur. I developed a technique of spatializing everyday surfaces with film and projection, specifically using projection as material, material as space. It’s a bit complicated, but it involves filming and re-projecting carefully from a single vantage point. Great. Now what? The rest of my time was spent developing a worthwhile substrate for this tool, and I eventually settled on and developed a supermarket. It’s an unusual choice for a thesis program, because it doesn’t generally lend itself to innovation. And that’s exactly what I intended to prove was possible.
I did a killer video in China that illustrated my concept beautifully. I shot it and projected it back (while filming a second time the reaction to the projection) in a busy tiny square in the village of Cao Chang Di outside of Beijing. It was a rousing success, to the point that my thesis advisors set up a pseudo-art opening for me in our studio space and many of the artists from the nearby Beijing art scene showed up to see it. I may very well have influenced the media art scene in China for decades. HA. That was a joke, people. But it was at least an indication that I had stumbled upon something worthwhile. And you can’t ask for anything more than that.
Knowing that my Times Square video (the little square where I filmed we called Times Square) would be the killer moment of my presentation, I put together a series of multimedia vignettes and tied it all together to show the jurors. As I sat waiting for my friend Eileen, the person presenting just before me, to finish describing her project, I began to have a nagging dreadful stomach twist. I’d practiced the routine, set up all the projectors and dvd players, stocked the shelves, designed, printed, and mounted my boards, and frosted the mirrors. Something else was bothering me...something..missing. What was it? I got up quietly and ran through the video presentation I had queued up and ready to begin in 20 minutes time...Wait...what’s going on...? I...I seem to have... Oh. Crap. I FORGOT TO INCLUDE MY TIMES SQUARE VIDEO! I was so concerned with polishing off all the other stuff I was working on, which included almost a dozen other videos, that the main event, already compiled and ready to go was so easy that I kept putting it off. I kept saying I’d be able to throw it in at the last minute until I forgot to do so entirely. Until 20 minutes before I was to present. My bowels emptied. Discouraged, devastated, and disgusted, I had no choice but to go on with my presentation. I had already set up a physical example of the technique used in that film, and it was running dutifully in my pseudomarket setup there, so I just had to use that as an illustration of my concept, without getting the ‘wow’ factor that the other film would bring.
When I stood up in front of everyone, I was quite nervous, but my vast experience performing in front of people and my seasoned skill at being publicly eviscerated by those more knowledgeable in the field of architecture prepared me well for this terrifying afternoon. After a brief early stutter, I fell easily into my spiel, and was off to the races. The jurors gave fair and balanced criticism, with some defending my approach and some saying I had not gone far enough. I was expecting some sort of ‘is this even architecture’ debate, but they delved less into the controversy of my project and more into the meat of what it was attempting to propose, which made me happy.
After it was over Michael Rotondi, one of my juroros, pulled me aside and told me that I had developed something remarkable, and that if I spent the next 20 years pursuing the implications of it, my career would be an exciting one. WIN.
So though I screwed up tremendously, no one noticed, and in the end something remarkable came out of it. I walked up to the podium to grab my (misprinted) diploma from the steel gray hands of miss automaton Graduate Director to the raucous applause of my friends in attendance. I returned her scowl with a nice toothy grin, gave her talons a firm grip, and said, “Thank you very much!” before I turned on my heel and walked out of SCI-Arc with my head held high. This school may have won many battles, but I won the war.
-c
