Lectures

Lecture friday celebrating the 100th aniversary of the College of Architecture Design and Construction of Auburn University with a whole day series of presentations of AU graduates. The day started at 9 a.m. with a nostalgic presentation by an elderly equally nostalgic industrial designer, then moved on to a recent landscape graduate from AU who has been touring the state of Nebraska. He staged his entrance into the auditorium with a horn band, timbals, and drums, dressed in the cowboy outfit of what he explained is a cattle rancher region. At the middle of his lecture he changed clothes into a farmer outfit of the easterners. It was a cool lecture, that I found completely inspired in the teachings of his formers professors that today are mine. Robert Kuper walked Nebraska from west to east. And now he’s going to bike it, drive it, and fly it. Looking for community life, these main streets of the postcards filled with people, turned into empty towns in which, apparently, the only communal life thrives in the Mexican and Hispanic population.
I skipped the Building Science lecture to come back to hear and see Marlon Blackwell’s. Great architectural work, and he also seems a nice guy. There nothing much to say about his work, everything he showed is published in many journals and books. Arquine magazine has published him widely in México and he has a new monograph from the Princetown Architectural Press. I specially liked his obvious formal references between toads and dragonflies with some of his “prototypical” housing efforts. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get a chance to speak with him. I couldn’t today, he was constantly surrounded.
After that, the day became an endurance competition. Too much for one day, I barely made it awake into the planning presentation and the interior design. Planning was good but interior design was just about the faceless, tasteless, banal work that you get to see in most contemporary “design” magazines of today.
Tomorrow there’s a round table. More later.