Lawn

Matinal lawnmower man. A characteristic noise of suburbia, campuses and apartment buildings. Oh! The noise they make. Constant, takes longer than expected, maintains a space that nobody except us care about. No one walks on it, no one uses the passage. Only squirrels and the black pot that got a little attention by one of the lawnmowers, but not enough to save her from the green standing, just to move her away from the way of the machine. She did not even deserved the dignity of being thrashed in the nearby (just 10 meters away) disposal storage. Picture by Adriana.

Building Mexico

The seminar is over. 16 undergraduate architecture students (1 Chilean, 1 Korean and 14 Americans), 2 lectures by Miquel Adriá and 26 by me. 2 meetings a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12.30 to 1.45 p.m. 3 papers and one PPT presentation. I enjoyed it.

Sean Godsell II

This Australian architect is more than 6 feet tall and looks somehow like a mid-forties rock and roll or pop star in retirement. Wears dark, informal, comfortable clothes. During his speech he constantly reminds us about the poisonous animals and insects that inhabit his very low-density populated country/continent (he shows a slide of Australian tarantulas, snakes, medusas, spiders), something that keeps being contradicted slide after slide going through the openess of his high income skin permeable houses with no air conditioning. Bars filtering the Australian landscape, employing cross ventilation, oriented to the north “were we get our sun down under”. Simple mechanisms metamorph the rather unitary volumes opening hatches from invisible frames embedded in the paralleled wooden wrapping. The social side of his work is shown in a “Park-Bench-House (refuge)” and in a bus stop working for passengers during the day and as a shelter for homeless (often aboriginal Australians he later added) during the night. He draws by hand, dislikes computers and renderings, and has a 5 person office. His clients are more like patrons and approach him already understanding and desiring the product that he has explored a dozen times. He actually lives in one of the first bars. Initially the skins were industrial metallic grids, then recycled wood, now sometimes new and expensive wood. Great work.

Sean Godsell

Will lecture tomorrow, Friday April 20th 2007, here in Auburn. 4 p.m. B-6 Auditorium. You are all invited.

Studio

Yiding is a classmate from China that sits in an isolated and cornered space in our thesis studio. Here, he is sheltered from professor’s views allowing for him to constantly concentrate playing Sim City or something that looks just like that. But not for my view, since I constantly invade the corner to pick up prints or scan in the artifacts placed there by the technological unit of the school. I am still wondering why they chose an almost invisible spot for these public appliances. Anyway, I drew Yiding while being on his back and while he was gaming.