winter road trip

Today I traveled to Richmond with a class to visit a concrete paving fabricator, and I picked up some plywood for my table on the way back. We drove home on the scenic route, and got to see some quintessential Virginia winter scenes.

holland, revisited

This past weekend our group from last summer's Holland/Germany trip put up our exhibit about the four projects we visited in Holland. We all made drawings and diagrams about the projects, assembled long panoramas (the flat Dutch landscape) and wrote briefly.

Hanging the exhibit was a labor of love-- it took 5 of us all day (here I am waiting for glue to dry!) We are very proud of how it turned out (and we are already planning to put this on our resumes!).

The projects my smaller group visited were part of Room for the Rivers, a national program that is coordinating diverse efforts to prevent flooding by making more space available for the rivers (rather than by building larger dikes). Other groups visited floating houses (attached to vertical poles, they elevate in place with rising water levels), a design studio that is planning plazas in Rotterdam to detain storm water, and a dune replenishment project on the coast.

This week we have a visiting lecturer, Dirk Sjimonds, who was formerly the national Landscape Architect in Holland. That alone says something about the Dutch understanding of the importance of landscape design and planning.

Roof Landscape

This is one of the models I worked on during January term in the Fallow City project. Last week, a few of us filmed an animation of the house that makes it look like the pine needles are growing (by clipping them bit by bit, and running the images in reverse).

The exhibit is being installed this weekend, and will open the week after.

Modelling Venice

Here are a few photos from the first week of the semester, when 3 of my studio-mates and I made a model of the Venice Lagoon. This took a lot of careful digital tracing and planning how to laser cut each level of topography, and then more careful work pouring melted glycerin on for the water. Here my classmate Maria is scraping the glycerin to get a smooth surface (this part was so satisfying, we all wanted a turn).

rush!

Living near campus, I've had a continual view (from afar) of the fraternity/sorority culture, previously unknown to me. I often exclaim to myself, "they really do that? I thought it was just a cliche!"

The past few weeks was rush, so there were big groups of men and women walking to and from the frats/sororities, to do whatever it is they do to apply for entry. I saw a few women changing from their snow boots to dress shoes in the street. Apparently it would be gauche to show up dressed for the weather!

The other night, Rosana and I heard what sounded like a huge crowd of men chanting at the top of their lungs-- it turned into a swelling shout, and then a few short yelps. What were they doing? How many were there?

From our bedrooms, we could actually see the whole show-- and were shocked that it was only a dozen to 20 men making the racket. They called each new guy ("Thomas! Thomas! Thomas!"), then Thomas would out the door, then they would throw Thomas in the air 3 times. We had fun watching a few rounds, and then they dispersed.

a snowy world

It is a snowy, snowy, snowy, snowy world!

After a few weeks of snow, the accumulation makes it look like we are in some far northern climate. Here is my street:


Several of the beautiful magnolias in front of our building have lost large limbs. Tonight, the winds blew over another tall tree at the end of our street. On days like this, I am particularly grateful that school is just a few minutes' walk away-- I don't plan to dig my car out for awhile yet!