Mostly done with classes

I managed to survive my first Architectural critique relatively unscathed. On Wednesday the first professor to review my design had some good praise on how different mine was from other people's in both it's simplicity and my explanation why it wasn't curvilinear. Everyone else seem to be mating with squids as far as wiggliness went... mine was very straight edged and simple. As explained it there was no design advantage to add curves. I was going for a specific effect and curves wouldn't add to that. They wouldn't have detracted either, but I am not adding anything that does not serve a specific purpose. He gave some great advice on specific lighting and ways I could improve the over all experience for the user interacting with my instillation.

Today I got my professor for the design class. He started the conversation with the following phrase... "You are older then the other students, and seem to take constructive criticism well... so I'm not going to pull any punches."

And he didn't.

He proceeded to grill my in depth about all my design aspects, why I designed things the way I did, what was the meaning being this shape, this angle, this distance, the decision.

He told us several weeks ago he was going to try and stump us and ask us questions we hadn't thought about everything on our design.

He didn't stump me, and I had answer for all his questions.

I think I saw of hint of smile when he was done grilling me.

Mind you he then proceeded to tell me why I was wrong on most everything I said but it was a really instructive deconstruction.

Apparently he and I different definitions on what abstracting a concept means, as mine is relatively shallow interpretation. I considered my installation an abstraction of the mountains surrounding Bozeman, and didn't really consider that essence of the mountains can be shown without triangular shapes.

I have been given a homework assignment of Christmas break to pick any one object and describe a pure abstraction of it. (He is not even my professor next semester but he probably will end being one of mine again someday sooo...)

Poor cinnamon. She's going to get abstracted.

I have single class on Monday, and a final test on Friday and I'm done for a month.