brain fart

I was teaching the kids about architecture the other day and I was just admiring the geometry equations on the wall. All of the sudden, I totally forgot the quadratic equation. I know. You are thinking, what is wrong with this girl, but I specifically remembered where I was and who was in the room when we were learning it in 8th grade. Who my teacher was and etc. So for all those who have forgotten about it: here she is!
I feel like maybe I should start a math night or at least a geometry night vrs just craft night.

School daze.

Currently, I have been teaching 6th graders about architectures at George Washington Carver Middle School in South Central LA. I have been posting everything on my other blog
THE FUTURE STARTS WITH YOU. The kids are amazing. In the midst of making a powerpoint, I found this diagram on parabolas. Pretty amazing. I miss math, don't you?

my next move

After meeting with Sonny Coates earlier this week, I've realized that I have made a lot of awesome artifacts but since they weren't perceived as the final object (aka the architecture) they have been passed aside and put back in to the hard drive.

I count this lack of "being enamored with the immediate object" with my architecture education. More specific that that, my first week in freshman design studio my professors Tim Hadfield and Marsha Berger took us out of the studio and we followed them to the student center at cmu. There a group of Tebetian monks were making a mandala. I was 18 and had never seen anything like it before. It was beautiful. They were finishing it up and then the ceremony began. And what happens is that after hours and hours of laboring on this beautiful sand sculpture, the monks push the sand into piles, mixing the vibrant colors back to a mush. And as trippy as this might sound, Marsha said one of the most important things that I have kept with me to this day. And to paraphrase, it is to remember that you have to walk away from your work and its in some one else's hands. Someone will destroy your building, aka some one will kill your building. And its not for you, its for those who you make it for. (Wink wink.. how does this relate to my Inhabitable Organism??!!!!)

This video is very similar to the mandala experience I had. I used to have some of the sand and now I am kicking myself because I have no idea where it has gone to through all my moving about. But the sand is just an object as well.

So back to my little story. I am putting a book together with Kendo of our work. I am putting images I have made and am making now. The long story short here is that my architecture training has taught me over the years to not just make. For art, that's how I do alot of it. You can just make due to its rapid turnaround and monumentality. Architecture needs to be stripped of 1. the pretension that soo many folks have in its community and 2. its permanence. It's time we loosened up and got more like Picasso. (and to quote.. art can only be erotic...)