Hi St Paul's close-designers..
Firstly, congratulations on Thursday! Many of you have finally started to kick into gear, producing a great amount of work for discussion, and then, all of you have interesting project ideas to work with for the rest of semester. We are over half-way now, and one week before you will have to work independently in the non-instruction period. It would be good to start thinking now about getting some colleagues to work with, and a regular place a time. Non-instruction can be a time to really develop your projects, if you can keep up motivation and good critique from peers. Second, looking at the schedule, this week you all need to complete a shift from ideas and concepts into a solid 1/100 and 1/50 detailed project. This is an important step, to allow us to start to talk about details, materials, facade composition, surfaces, and further refine the play with meaning. It's probably a good time you all have a look at the schedule and imagine what you might be producing for the final panels. I would even do a loose mock-up which includes all the relevant drawings. Every one of you have interesting projects that have great potential, so this step to 1/100 and 1/50 this week is completely doable. (no-one should be going back now) Third, Richard Falkinger spoke to me about how impressed he was at your development over the last week. Next Thursday he would like to have some time to critique your work again, and resurface some of the earlier discussions back into your project. (Again to do this you'll need to finally make your projects solid). His general comments were again about thinking through issues of entrance, access, movement, and structure! I would add 'light' as something that came up frequently on Thursday. Please take advantage of precedents! Fourth, Can everyone please take quick photos of all their work and post on the blog. You can send multiple photos as one email with attachments to post@closeoverplay.posterous.comIf you can please do this straight away (now/today!) I'll ask some others people, and the guests from Thursday to have a look and perhaps add comments to your work. (Tim is away next week, and it will give him a chance to keep connected too.) I also think this would be a good opportunity to start to share each others' work, and as we said, drawing/presentation methods. Facing the non-instruction period, it's important that you feel like your peers in the studio are supporting you and the conversation has really shifted to peer feedback and encouragement. Scarey times, but oh so exciting. This is a great site, both challenging and fascinatingly important. You are all on a good footing, Keep going! Ammon + Tim