I’ve had this little page sitting on my harddrive forever. I think its time it saw the light of day.
The text and the comic are from a handout I received in a Women’s Studies class I took years ago. I used it as sort of an experiment in setting simple, unobtrusive, and hopefully readable text with CSS. The column width is large to match the image, but I increased the line height to compensate and used a hanging indent to give it some rhythm.
This was long before I really figured out how to take full advantage of stylesheets so the page source is pretty ugly. I even used tables, a serious web design no no these days. And Times New Roman *gasp*!
Still, I just love the texture and form of the page. Like many of my early design projects, its simple, I didn’t think too much, and it doesn’t try to do too much.
As for the content, one of the things that interests me about the womens movement is the way it began. The article mentions “consciousness raising groups.” Women simply met with each other and talked candidly. It was that simple, but it sowed the seeds of a revolution.
That’s all it takes :)
The garden is looking lovely this summer. I wanted to take pictures while the lillies were still blooming but as usually I didn’t get to it.
Click for enlargements…
A typical day in Casco Viejo (specifically, yesterday)…
For lunch we walk down the street to get barbequed chicken and rice from the guys at the corner of Plaza Bolivar. An old woman leaning out of a window recognizes us as Bret’s students and greets us in English.
As we wait in line behind the grill the President of Panama rounds the corner surrounded by a gaggle of black suited men with ear pieces. The old woman calls out “Hola, como esta usted?” and he stops and replies genially (the only part I caught was “almuerzando”). They talk for a moment and then the gaggle flaps on down the street.
The woman identifies him for us as the president of Panama. “I love eem,” she says.
Apparently selling food on the street is not normally permitted, but her sons were out of work so they started the stand with the President’s express permission.
I wonder if there’s a corner near the White House where someone is selling tacos or tamales with the personal blessing of President Bush. Somehow I don’t think so.
Thesis may have ended, but the all-nighters continue. My desk has a perfect view of the sunrise over the mountains each morning. It pops up and and stabs me in the eye surprisingly quickly. In this particular instance its actually raining even as the sun beams in.
Here’s hoping this will be the last one I see at this desk!
KZ sent me some pictures of a house she wants to move into with some friends. She lives and works down in Biloxi so I did what any internet obsessed young person in my generation would do and checked it out on Google Maps. Take a look for yourself, its an almost surreal sight. Hundreds of rooftops apparently covered with tarps.
On a lighter note, I’ve posted some of the images from my thesis presentation to my Flickr account. One final and some mop up work and this whole dramatic episode called college will be over. On to even more dramatic things!
The end is in sight. About six days left and I’ll be standing in front of my design and trying to project confidence while quaking like a reed on the inside. By then I’ll have generated plenty of images to show off. Right now its just a digital model.
I’ve been using Google Sketchup for the entire process, which I think might have been a bad idea. It doesn’t seem to handle large, complex models very gracefully. It remains accurate and relatively stable but very slow. Thankfully whenever it does crash it never loses data, even if you haven’t saved.
In any case, I’ve been making use of the online 3D Wharehouse to populate the building with people and furniture and I’ve found some great submissions…
…from the Designer Lifestyle Items collection which appears to have been created for a high school class assignment ( <-- includes awesome photo gallery of famous chairs).
…a great sink. I know it doesn’t look like much here but if you zoom in the details are nice.
…a lathe from an excellent collection of furniture and woodworking tools by Highland Woodworking.
…and a scene from this artist Max Gruter’s Working Class Hero series. He also does Astronauts and Cosmonauts from various periods as well as…
…Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey!
Yay Google nerdery!
Yeah, so someone forgot to pay the bill for our hosting services, not me, just someone.
Anyways, as you may remember from our last exciting episode, I’m designing a school. At the end of the last post I did not yet know what said school looked like. Now I’ve got a somewhat better idea.
You can click for a larger view, but to be honest it looks better tiny. Maybe I’ve just been looking at it too long.
Thesis is slow. I don’t know why I imagined it being one big creative orgasm, but its not. Its grueling. Its thankless. Its slow. Yesterday I came in to studio around one o’clock. I started doing work I felt I could call “progress” just after midnight. I burned out around two. The time in between was spent trying to expend the knot of nervous energy that prevents me from sitting down and focusing on the desk. Today followed a similar trajectory (its 1:40 am).
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And to top this whole thing off, like the cherry slowly sliding down the side of a sundae already drenched in double fudge depression sauce (indulge me), I’ve lost Saint Jane once again. She was stolen friday night. As I reveled with my peers above, someone skulking along below nabbed her from the stairwell. Bicycles just don’t stand a chance in my care. I’ve now gone through three in the past year, two of which I was very attached to.
I continue to hope it will show up somewhere. I don’t even have a picture of it assembled, just the pic from the last post of the top tube after I stenciled it. It was a great bike while it lasted. The first bike I ever owned that was big enough for me!
I’m now about a week away from my final review for the semester and the anxiety has set in with a vengeance. I still seem to find time to spend on completely useless diversions, like the above rasterbation.
My thesis has progressed somewhat from the foundation I layed out in the last post. I’m now using the Career Academy as the framework for the school’s concept. I will attempt to describe what this means and how this relates to my architecture.
In my last post I talked about the large, comprehensive High School and the need for more focused programs to meet the needs of contemporary society. Many High Schools have indeed streamlined their offerings to create a more focused liberal arts education, albeit usually with some vestige of tracking still built in (I talked to someone today whose High School offered all the core courses in five different levels of difficulty!), but this is not nearly enough. Schools still need to get smaller, and we need to embrace a more holistic, student centered approach to teaching (facilitating learning). That means expecting the same quality of work from everyone (rigor) while recognizing that learning happens only in the proper context (relevance) in a supportive atmosphere (relationships).
Career Academies combine a rigorous academic core with hands on, career focused work. Academies are small schools, often realized as sub-units of a larger school, that have focuses ranging from finance, to health care, to graphic arts.
Curiously, while academies were originally developed to prepare inner city students who were not college-bound for work, according to the NAF website 4 of 5 academy graduates attend college. Many of these schools are in inner city communities alongside traditional High Schools that have %50 graduation rates. This is clearly a model that mainstream schools should be looking closely at, borrowing from their playbook, if not adopting it outright.
The academy I’m proposing is a school of art and design. Warwick prides itself on its artist community. Each year during the Open Studio members of that community open their homes and studios to the curious to show off their paintings, ceramics, photography, furniture, blown glass, and sculpture. Consistent with the academy model, students would recieve instruction in the arts, learning to use their hands and their minds creatively, while also completing core academics through the lense of the schools focus. The physics of color, the chemistry of photography, the history of art and its relationship to society, and literature as an art and an expressive tool.
So I’ve got the basics down, now comes the interesting part. What does it look like? I’ll have to get back to you on that one…
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On a personal note, I’m sorry to say that Saint Jane is now dead, in her first incarnation at least. Two crashes resulted in a fair amount of road rash and a bent frame. I put the poor old girl out to pasture. Thirty-two years isn’t a bad run.
Not to fear though, she’s back in new clothes… a ‘77 Raleigh Super Course. I’ll try to keep this one in working order a little longer. I’m running proper brakes this time, which should help ;)
Recovering Young People: Education and American Towns
Thats the working title anyways. This is the first in what should become a series that will follow the development of my thesis. What follows will compose my thesis book, beginning with my thesis statement. It is as follows…
This thesis is about the Three R’s of education, Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships, and the struggling institution of American secondary education.
Since the early 50’s the prevailing model for middle and high schools has been the large, comprehensive school. At the time when this model was conceived it was considered the only way to achieve the economies of scale necessary to give every child a proper education. It was thought that schools had to pool resources to offer a broad range of courses so that students could be tracked into groups corresponding to their perceived cognitive strengths. Some were guided towards professional life, business, management, law or medicine, while others were tracked towards careers as laborers, clerks, or in retail.
The realities of American life and the world economy have changed the context in which we raise our children. We now live in a knowledge economy where creativity and critical thinking are the most valuable commodities. If we acknowledge this change we are obligated to fundamentally re-evaluate the strategies we use to educate.
My thesis program is a small school located in the heart of Warwick, New York. The framework for my solution comes from the philosophy set down by the Coalition for Essential Schools and its founder Theodore Sizer, as well as the expertise of many other educators who advocate smaller, more community and student focused schools. Sensitive treatment of the planning and architecture of schools can reinforce these instructional objectives and knit students into their communities in a mutually beneficial way.
I’m interested in creating smaller learning communities, positioned closer to the working fabric of civic life to promote civic identity, and enrich the education of young people while instilling a sense of social responsibility. Bringing students and the community together means young people engaging in service learning outside the four walls of the school building, and more community members seeing the school as a resource worth investing time and money in.
From this equation comes the simple methodology designing for relationships.
I’ve been remiss in not updating earlier. Lots of people who only post every three months say that, but I feel like I started something with the bike nonsense and then didn’t finish it.
In fact to say I started something is an understatement. I now ride St. Jane every day given even the slightest opportunity to go somewhere (update: I’ve now begun making up reasons to go places. Sudden inexplicable craving for gummy worms? But you just had a shake and a sandwhich! Whatever, guess I’ve got to go for a ride). I get sidetracked on my way home at least once a week and end up practicing skids in the Architecture parking lot at one in the morning. I ride to Canyon Pizza to get dollar slices even when I’m not that hungry. I ride to the Cheese Shop to get coffee during breaks in studio reviews, and get back in time to see the next crit. I even deliver food for work every once in a while (I like to say I’m State College’s first bike courier).
Anyways, as you may have guessed, I’ve christened her Saint Jane after Jane Jacobs. Jane is famous for the motto “eyes on the street” (although I’m not sure she ever said it) which I think makes her a fitting namesake for the old Raleigh. Everyone who breathes should read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Reading it while living in Brooklyn was like peeking behind the curtain and seeing the network of relationships and simple trust that are the foundation for the success or failure of every city.
I’ve also been indulging in a fair amount of bike porn. Consider, for example, these fine specimens.