The first day of freshman studio is something like being thrown into a bull ring naked. It is unbelievably difficult, frustrating, time-consuming, and sometimes downright painful. But you always secretly love every second of it. Our freshman year studios were intro courses that dealt with the fundamentals of drawing and design.
We began our first studio, Manual Representation with Mo Zell, by studying Dürer and his alphabet in particular, with an emphasis on pure, grounded representational skills. We moved on to studying Lissitzky, diving into color, form, material, and the abstract. As hard as I tried to push Mo during this project, she would not let me experiment in pure abstraction, and insisted that I had a reason for every move I made. Spoken like a true architect; it was a task to follow, but one that was ultimately valuable. The third project was a blind study of the Barcelona pavilion, with a “kit-of-parts” design project where we dealt with composition and space. And finally, we designed a “room for repose,” a mini-hotel room for poor souls at an airport on an extended layover, which combined everything we had studied previously.
Digital Representation was the second freshman studio, which involved an in-depth study of a Corbusier project (the Pavillon de l’Espirit Nouveau) through the computer. It was nice change from man rep which was all hand drafting.
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