BULLSHIT.

Dear Professor,

Looking back on my previous project, I can finally say with certainty that my work makes absolutely no sense. I've always had a problem with defining the things that I make (a sort of self-opaqueness that can only, oddly, be matched by my sensitivity to the immediate environment--but correct me if I'm wrong because I seem to be making a lot of mistakes lately), and this previous project had only exacerbated my sensitivity to nonsense. What am I learning? Who am I really? And what actually matters in life? These stupid philosophical questions plague me to no end, creating the edge of a cliff over which there is nothing but uncertainty and a complete lack of control. I am forever questioning the ground upon which I work, when, for example, I am asked to design a "Meditation Space" for downtown Syracuse, when over half the population is under the poverty line and would rather be approached with jobs than some pretty artifact inside which they may be able to contemplate the joys and sorrows of life, as I seem to have the free time bought by government loans to be plenty acquainted with. 

Propelled by no less than a stressful work load, high (but unfulfilled expectations), and the sudden death of a close friend, I am by no means trying to gain pity, but am simply trying to convey my absolute sophomoric confusion at the blending of boundaries between school and life. A divided personality I am, trying to balance studio, manage Freedom by Design (where I came into office regrettably with angry predecessors and clients), working at the reading room in which I have developed no other skills than scanning barcodes, repeatedly telling students to use the one stapler that works, and notifying unfortunate freshmen that we indeed carry books on Le Corbusier. So far, my life has been an absolute joy coated in nothing but the sweetest memories of pulling all-nighters in studio (not yours, of course) to produce work that will never make it into my portfolio. (Oh yeah, and other classes? What other classes?) I feel as though I am constantly working out of my depth, because the logic that exists in my head is far too complicated to realize through the mediocre and unpracticed skillset that I have. And simplification just doesn't seem to work for me, as you may have been able to tell from the length of this email. (I'm trying really hard to remember that there are starving children in the world as I write this elongated complaint about my irreparable personality flaws.)  

But more about this specific project. For some reason, I started obsessing over the geometry of the hexagon (not because any cult-ish religious affiliations, don't you worry), but because of their sexy multi-surfaced and multi-faceted function and form (how often do you get regular geometries that actually fit on a surface without residual space?) But you were definitely right in that the project was more of a personal research in form-finding than anything that I could say, came from the particular site conditions. But how can you make the argument that something just has to work, that it's the best solution, when we don't even know how structural systems really work yet? We have a bunch of formulas that we can look up, none of them which we can apply to our design because it's always more complicated than a box. And the ones that are a box, never stay as a box because they're deemed "too boring" or "uninteresting" by different professors. And one professor likes nothing but box buildings. I find the critique culture largely unhelpful in developing anything but a thick skin in terms of weathering undeserved verbal abuse (not you, but many professors that you and I can both agree to place on this list.)

And then I have another critique, one that I brought up in an earlier class. Why is it that we are so irreparably wrong when we conduct site analysis, yet we have to pass our work off as the product of confidence and the absolute laws of the universe in order to rid ourselves of critiques on our uncertainty? Places that we deem as "ghetto" (remember that this was used by someone to describe Park Slope in Brooklyn) and "overpopulated" (used to describe the abandoned Gowanus canal area which has a highway, a dumpster, and a subway station) suddenly make decisions for us in our projects. Because we have started off with wildly inaccurate assumptions, we continue to act upon those assumptions because our work is not questioned. And when we are questioned, it feels more like a personal attack than an objective statement on the quality and accuracy of or proclaimed assessment. How can we remediate these in order to find the perfect balance between accepting criticism and not losing confidence in our work? The answer, it seems, is nonsense. When people don't understand what it is that you're doing, they would much rather nod and pretend to know what you're talking about, fill in the knowledge gaps with their own prized imaginations than question the bullshit that you put on the table. I'm wondering if this failure at communication is a common problem, or a defect specific to myself.

Maybe I should pull a Jimenez Lai and make a rectum for this next project. I think he'll quite appreciate the mimicry.

All the best,

Ruo.

P.S. Here is my favorite nude picture of Le Corbusier, just for kicks.