BLOG.STUDIO-OFFICE

Good news. The abstract was accepted and Studio Office is going to speak at this year's Harvard Graduate School of Design Critical Digital Conference. Very exciting for us, but leaves little time to figure out kites and personal lives over the next month or so. The announcement came about a week late via email, which had an odd collage of different fonts and colors (merge mail?), and also came with some cryptic criticism, about which we are completely clueless:

122. Accept Relevance: 7 Quality of Content:7 Quality of Writing: 8 Originality:7 Overall Grading:7 The paper is not critical enough to me. I like the author mention about external VS. internal effect on surface or digital model, but the examples that he is going to present is not very interesting. The proposed abstract is well organize and offers a thorough description of the actions to be taken in the accomplishment of the research target. However, it needs to offer a substantial level of criticality. The description of a series of actions is, of course, valuable in addressing the “how” questions, but that does not necessarily reflect also on the “why” question, that may be of similar importance.

From this, we . . . we have nothing. But we take it to mean that we're in pretty good shape. Meanwhile, the images above (original collage by Stanley Tigerman, 1978, JD remix below, 2009) are a graphic sampling of one of the paper's main focuses, namely the fluctuation taking place at present between discovery and responsibility, with explicit regards to digital technique in architecture.

Next up, we'll see what we can do with a collage of the Pruit-Igoe demolition images. Until today, I never noticed that you could see Saarinen's arch in the distance. You can barely make it out top left, just over the roof of the falling building. You can see it in a better image here.