Back to School!

Today, Dear Reader, was my first day back in school.

I have a desk near the window (hooray!), and a couple of the girls in my studio asked me to join them when they went to get food at the University Center Satellite.

The campus is so enormously sprawling that they have a mini-University Center. How's that for "urban planning"?

I made the mistake of wearing shorts, though. Seeing as the university overcompensates for the heat outside by cooling its buildings to Arctic proportions, I will be wearing long pants, in future. At least, until winter comes, when they will hopefully keep the buildings a bit warmer.

I already have oodles and oodles of work to do, Dear Reader, on three "tiny projects," as our German curriculum director termed them, and they're very conceptual in nature. My undergraduate work was more along the lines of "arrange a series of pristine white boxes and clear glass until they look nice."

Here, I'm supposed to define Originality, Innovation, and The New as the first part of our tripartite assignment.

I have my definitions down, for the most part (it's good to be a wordsmith), but the rest of the assignment has me a bit puzzled. I'll be sitting down with some of my books on architecture and design to try to figure out what my Originality, Innovation, and The New examples will be.

Then, there's The Knot assignment (as opposed to The New assignment). We are supposed to think about knots in multiple ways, then create some, and then use our analyses of the knots to design a building. Mine is going to be a String Theory research center.

Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all night!

And yes, if asked, I will say it's a String Theory research center. I hope they don't ask, though.

The third mini-assignment involves boxes of given dimensions that then collide. Collisions tend to be violent and create mish-mashes of things. I have some brilliant ideas for collisions, and the materials out of which the boxes could be made, but alas! the brilliant ideas are all too time-consuming to pursue, right now.

(sigh)

I'll just have to think of something else that's brilliant!