Architectural Foundations, Reflections on the M.Arch I Summer Course

Stone: What were you doing before this?

Nina: I had a background in Studio Art and History and was working in Brooklyn at a firm that imported materials and provided consulting services for passive house projects.

I seriously considered deferring: I felt satisfied with the life I was building for myself there. I ultimately chose to start now because I had this shared dream with my best friend that we would start an architecture firm together one day. She had just graduated from GSAPP
(I moved to NYC to live with her), and now it was my turn.

Stone: I had a long meandering journey towards architecture. I graduated from music school, then moved to Japan on some cultural reclamation type beat. Worked at a design agency in Tokyo for a couple years, pandemic hit, then moved to Kyoto, became a studio assistant for the artist, Kohei Nawa. Then I went to London, studied at the RCA for a year, met some of my Caribbean family for the first time, then finally came back to the US to sort out some family things at home while I worked at a museum and saved up some cash. That’s my past 7 years in 100 words.

How would you characterize your first impression of Foundations?

Nina: Pulling up to foundations was like entering an NBA training facility as a walk-on and seeing Lebron James (Jermone Tryon) just sinking 20 threes in a row (Freehand Orthographic drawing).
It’s an intimidating sight.

They ask us to start with a simple layup drill: Hand-draft plans and sections of a 4’x4’ space in Rudolph Hall.

Stone: And that was a 1am or 2am endeavor for a lot of us

Nina: Coming in as a non-background student does really feel like you’re walking onto a professional team. It takes a lot of faith to decide that YOU have what it takes to play in the big leagues, all you need is coaching. Meanwhile, the rest of the league already has students who are unbelievably talented and have been honing their skills for at least their undergraduate studies, and sometimes for entire careers.

Since we all had completely different academic and professional lives prior to coming here, it really did feel like a gamble because we had no tangible proof that this is an environment we could thrive in. All of us left wherever we were living, whatever we were doing and everyone who was around us to take a chance doing something that we greatly admired without hard evidence that it was the right thing to do.

Stone: We really were kinda betting on vibes…I think we all had an inkling that this architecture thing could be for us, but like you said, we had no proof.

That said, because of our lack of surety, I think there was a uniquely special nervous energy, and hunger that I could feel radiating off each other that was addicting to witness. There were occasionally these times in a late night working where people would naturally drift off into idle talk to take a break from work, but after a few minutes of that a moment would come where the whole studio would lock in and you could hear a pin drop… and then Willie would yell out a big “fuck!” to snap us all out of it.

Nina: That’s a great point. The fact that being here isn’t something that was promised to us was really motivating for everyone. No one quite understands how admissions works, but everyone was eager to really prove to themselves that they had something special to offer and really deserved to be in the room.

Nina: The first week I felt so many growing pains. My hands felt so awkward hashing out lineweights with heavy pencils. It seemed like my brain could run a mile a minute, and my hands struggled to keep up with the pace.

Towards the end I still felt my hands lagging behind: It took me until 2am on Saturday night to finish an angled staircase for a Bristol paper model for my final model. I felt really proud in the end during my final review when we talked about Expressionist theater sets instead of my craft abilities.

Stone: I was talking to Ahenne at the end of this all and we were both feeling like we actually just graduated lol. We had def been storing a lot of fatigue…but i kinda dug that feeling.

I spent the last two years helllla depressed in my hometown sorting out family stuff. And the super scary thing about depression is it just feels like it erases these blocks of time from your life where you try to reflect back and think, “what the hell happened all that time?”. That lost time leaves nothing to show for. It’s almost like, were you even really alive then? But these past five weeks have been a direct foil to that. There were these discreet points at midterm and final review where we could see, physically, a collection of all the work each one of us had made. All the hours, energy, and physical labor that manifested in models, drawings, and photographs. To me, they were really a proof of our existence. The night before final review, Oliver and Melos came up to the 7th floor and showed a few of us the completed site compilation of all of our interventions. When they unrolled this long-ass scroll of a paper to reveal all of our collective work, tbh it was pretty emotional for me. It may sound kinda trite, but when I see all of our work, the words that keep coming to mind are just “we are so alive right now”.

Nina: It’s a great feeling.