Dealing with Issues of Inertia

Well its clear that I spent the week swimming in a sea of uncertainty. I’ve been unhappy about it without really effecting any material changes. Part of the problem relates to schedule. I have to accept that from Sunday to Wednesday I will work on thesis related items very little or not at all. The pull of studio and the prep work for my other two classes is too demanding. So the impetus has to come in the Wednesday night to Saturday part of the week. Right now, actually. And this week I feel equal to the task.
I’ve been trying to get back to the basics of my interest – housing … almost full stop. Going back to ideas of housing that appeal to me. I read Gropius’ The New Architecture and the Bauhaus last night. It was interesting as a manifesto and as a portrait of what sounds like quite a cult culture in his school. Not too much about housing per se, but there was this. “… in the last resort mechanization can only have on object, to abolish the individual’s physical toil for providing himself with the necessities of existence in order that hand and brain may be set free for some higher order of activity� on page 25. That’s a pretty direct contradiction of Schumacher’s claim that the problem of production. Gropius’ main contention is a call for mass production and standardization. I don’t know if I can agree with that but it has to be somewhere to study. Ozayr recommended that I also check out Mies’ Weissenhof housing project. Along those lines I was reading about Usonia this morning. Now that can be tackled from the aspect of how cool Frank Lloyd Wright is … but that’s not my opinion. Its more interesting as a social collective – with architecture.
And this afternoon I picked up Paolo Soleri again. Now that is sheer madness but it has a wonderful overarching genius to it and I think will be a good inspiration to think outside the box. And to think on a grand scale. To be bold. So perhaps what I need to do next is to dramatically overshoot my proposed scale and see what delightful flights of fancy I can come up with to get started.