Tag: english

In the Eyes of an Architecture Student: The Power of Writing and its Relationship to our Discipline

themichiganarchitect Leave a comment

Hi Everyone! I know it’s a bit late, but bear with me! (Ahaha, this is the typical life of an architecture student)

I’m back again this week to discuss the topic: the power of writing and its relationship to our discipline!

I’m sure, no matter what age you are or what major in college you’re pursuing right you, you must’ve thought of English papers and all that unpleasant stuff seemed completely unreasonable and unnecessary to your discipline and life goals. I confess I’ve also had these thoughts at some point before when I took introductory architecture courses that required a ton of writing and I’d remember thinking to myself, “Ughhh I’m in architecture school, shouldn’t I be designing instead of writing all these boring papers‽‽
I do occasionally have these thoughts recurring as I continue to write papers, even as a fourth year in architecture. But I’ve finally grown to understand that writing and architecture are truly interrelated. As ridiculous as it sounds, let me explain.
In architecture, we use different drawing mechanisms as a language to convey our ideas visually. Although drawing seems to be the primary language present in architectural education, it is important to realize that it is still our thoughts and understanding of these thoughts that in turn inspire the abilities behind these drawings.

Let me rephrase more simply, I mean to say that if you cannot describe the idea in verbal language, then you cannot hope to understand the design well enough to effectively convey that idea visually through drawing. All this time, papers have been the root practice at structuring the way we think and understand ideas verbally as designers, but also serves as the universal method to communicate ideas with each other. To be a better writer directly correlates with being a better designer in that you are able to clearly understand what it is you want to highlight about your ideas in the representational drawings. To reinforce my point, these drawings and all your models are to be displayed at critiques reviews where you are expected to help your critics understand your project so that they can then give you feedback on what to improve in your representation, or even perhaps what to add to your design to further it’s successes. I canopy stress how important it is to understand our own work before we try to get others to understand it too. As expected, I’ve observed that my classmates who seem quite fluent in explaining their thoughts and ideas about projects are also quite fluent in representation as well, and they also make for quite amazing critics of our work as well.

So, bottom line: do the papers!! As boring as it seems, it’ll help you SO much in the long run, even just as a general human being in general. After all, humans were meant to communicate 🙂

Welp, that’s all I’ve got for tonight, but I’m so grateful for any one of you who’s still up this late and still reading my blog!

Ciao 🙂

A Travesty Against Intellect

Fareah Fysudeen Leave a comment

“Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”

–Thomas Nagel


 Perhaps this quote does not lend itself to the interpretation that I will now transpose upon it, but it is the invocation upon which these musings are built, so I will include it nonetheless. Being in college as and English and Philosophy major is such a strange thing. It is freeing and exhilarating to be immersed in subjects which I was told, or at least systematically conditioned to believe, were useless. But somehow studying them more has not made them more “useful” to me. I do not think they would even be “useful” if I were to go on and become the world’s greatest contemporary philosopher or the next bestselling author or the most sought-out keynote speaker. The thing with these subjects is that they are by their very nature inconclusive and therefore hold no real “usefulness”. Useful things have an end goal, they have a purpose which can be perfectly traced like the mechanical parts in an IKEA instruction manual. But english and philosophy will only allow you to bask in the glorious and magnificent enquiry of human existence. That is practically useless.

They both seem to be two wildly selfish disciplines. They aim to satisfy insatiable and snowballing curiosity. To want to understand the world for yourself holds no innate goodness unless you intend to act upon that knowledge. There is no moral worth in knowledge unless it is applied. And so philosophy and english, for me, as Nagel said, are both the “childhood of my intellect”. They are my selfish vices to inconclusive understandings and problems I will always flirt with but never love.

But Mr. Nagel, you are wrong about one thing– if we want to “grow up”, we cannot altogether rid ourselves of the childhoods of our philosophy. We must live both as adults and as children, as vice and virtue, in order to be complete. To be either only adult or only child is a travesty against intellect.

Winter 2014: the semester I read so much my eyes fell out.

Taylor Leave a comment

After entering recluse-mode for many an hour, I have finished my first book of the semester! The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf.

the voyage out 1

*takes breath*

Assigned for my Virginia Woolf class (whodathunkit?), the novel was a quick head on collision to what would be in store for me this semester: a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of feelings. The combination of reading and feelings often leaves me home alone, on my couch without pants, ignoring ambient/electronic beats wafting into the air like my incense, and staring into the massive void that is the winter in Ann Arbor because it never stops snowing.

While it was by no means Woolf’s best work, The Voyage Out is “a beginning” of sorts. Although not her earliest diary nor letters, this first novel stands as a type of fluid production from one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century. I can see question and figure out what it means to write a novel as she pieces together allusions–from Conrad to Milton to Bronte to Austen to Plato. She tropes Victorian themes (the dying heroine) and twists them into a new modern sensibility as she meditates on deathly illness rather than the sentimental last breath of life. Unlike her other “more modernist” novels, however, there is a clear plot. WOAH. Step back.

Rachel goes to South America, falls in love, and dies. OR A bougie woman travels to a middle class wet dream of what the exotic other-as-land would be and becomes a body with out organs and disintegrates from life. OR Woolf’s creative idea of her dead sister, Stella, comes of age (whatever this means) in a post-Victorian world, and dies. The dying part is pretty consistent, but the other elements of the novel, well, including the death, too, are wildly complex. Meditating on the inability for anyone to really know anyone else, the downfalls of language, the ways humans feel, the ways human name their feelings as emotions, the ways men and women interact, the ways classes interact, what colonialism does to a collective consciousness, how patriarchy fucks over all women (and men), what death and life and love seem to be, etc., etc., . . . *this is a fragment I’m trying to save* . . . the Voyage Out covers a lot of territory that will reappear in the later fiction of Woolf.

the voyage out 2

Not only has Woolf impressed me but she has made me rethink what it means to be a reader in the 21st century.

As an English/Philosophy lover/snob/being, I enjoy a good book. To me, “good” refers to something along the lines of: published out of one’s century (unless your name is Toni Morrison) that either invests too much in the world, consciousness, and humankind or is entirely skeptic of everything including the very page it is written on. Whether Naguib Mahfouz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce, or Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Bishop, or Sylvia Plath, or Michel Foucault, Frank B. Wilderson III, Gilles Deleuze–I have a lot of opinions on what is “good.”

However, as a bibliophile that is moving closer and closer from the hallowed halls of libraries (let’s be real, libraries here means hipster/queer coffee houses) into the real world where the library is anything I can fit on a shelf in my hypothetical apartment in an imaginary Washington D.C. (my future plans), I realize that “good” means more than just “good.”

In reading Virginia Woolf’s first novel I have a newfound respect and curiosity for new authors. This–the ability to read for pleasure and explore new authors–is a epiphany that is oh-too-recent. I have always despised new books because nothing can replace what has already been written. But this despair, I’ve learned, is stupid. Just as I think I have merit and worth in the realm of scholarly writing (HAHAHAHA MY THESIS WHAT), others, too, have merit writing in the scope of fiction. I should honor their creativity.

the voyage out 3

Although new writers can be sloppy, can have an fluctuating style, can be apprehensive, they can also be full of new insights to my queer world–filled with new relations to humans, technologies, and myself, new relations to others, new relations to the environment, and so on. The world is not static, and, I guess what I’m trying to say is, neither should my bookshelf.

Thanks, V.