I think this was the day that the dining halls were both so busy that we tried the X-Burger stand near the strip mall designed by Aalto for the first time. It was surprisingly rather good (or I was starving). It was not cheap, but reasonable by Helsinki standards.
Tuesday was a very busy day of accomplishing nothing. I woke and did some more sketching for studio. at 12:30pm we all assembled at the American Embassy. My main sense after meeting with the ambassador was that security took far too long and a lack of being impressed. It was a really great opportunity and he seemed very nice and very intelligent. It simply seemed like he would have been much more comfortable hanging out with us instead of meeting formally around a table. With his earring and broad sholders, the ambassador did an excellent job of playing devils advocate with us on questions that he posed about the current crisis in Japan, our role as designers, and environmental issues. I was disappointed that I left the meeting not knowing his opinion on anything we discussed and not knowing if he really heard anything we said. This is probably less a reflection on him and more on my lack of interaction with politicians. Next we had history class and then Peter MacKeith (who flew into town for a few days after leaving a group of 21 students in Copenhagen) wanted to meet us all for a drink. We did not have time for dinner beforehand, so after 2 hours most of us excused ourselves in search of food. Sally, Matt, Todd, and I went to an Indian restaurant which was quite tasty!
Wednesday morning I glued and sanded my foam chair and came up with a few more thought for studio. Everyone assembled at 13:30 where Peter affirmed (changed by our perspective) some of the foundations of our assignment. It's very good that he was in town to clarify this early in the process or some of us would've been derailed further into our designs. He then went around and looked at our Finnish and American images and cubes. After Penti talked to everyone, I set to work on the one to one scale model of my chair for review on Friday. I was starving around 7:00pm so headed home. After eating dinner, Sally and I finished our assignment for building systems (we'd spent quite a while developing it on Monday evening).
Thursday was more chair in the morning, building systems from noon to 3pm, and then frantic chair building. We had an office visit at 6pm which was a surprisingly good time. The representative for ALA architects was very kind, very interesting, and impressively generous with his time. I liked a lot of their work and what wasn't my taste I at least respected and enjoyed hearing how their firm developed. The name apparently means something like "plan" in Finnish and the 3 guys that formed the firm chose it because they wanted a three letter word that started with A (top of the yellow pages) that had meaning. The concert hall/opera house they are finishing in Norway (which was the competition that got their firm started) is beautiful, in my opinion. That night a bunch of kids went out for St. Patty's, but I came home and made food in the wok for dinner and started building a model for studio.
Friday was mid review for our chair design. I really enjoyed the professor of our teacher who was a guest reviewer. He clearly had a lot of experience and was very kind. I was disappointed that the class I was most looking forward to this semester is still a trial and error experience with the most common answer to any question being "I don't know....look at lots of chairs". It was fun to see everyones work, though, and enjoyable to get covered in chunks of foam together.
Kenny in his library chair discussing intense physics, stack-ability, and strength
My family of chair models - the large seat is very poorly done because foamcore does not want to hold a curvilinear shape and we are not friends. Julie (our teacher) thinks my metal proportions are off although I based them on an existing chair. My next step will be finding chairs with wood runners and metal runners and drawing my chair to see which size of material is the look I like.
Sally is working on a rocking chair so there was a huge trust element to actually sitting in the seat.
Todd titled his chair the "leap of faith" because its both a little high and an little deep for him
Saori tried to explain her vision for her chair as everyone else kept getting excited about their own ideas for the design.
Matt's chair was clearly the most sanded and probably the most comfortable.
This is easily the happiest I've seen Michael. He loves his chair because he is designing it to fit him perfectly (even if it doesn't work well for others) and challenges them to say it isn't comfortable.
Nothing particularly monumental happened over the weekend. I battled with the laundry machine Friday afternoon because the power was switched off but I could easily fix that and started my clothes. After two hours the machine stopped running, but my clothes were not wet. No water had entered the machine so they had just been spinning dry. I figured out how to switch the water on and tried again with my fingers crossed that there wasn't a good reason for the shut down. Thankfully, things went well, but I missed dinner with the trio (apparently they had Cajun food in Kallio with Mo-town music!). I met up with them at a local bar there were there were some interesting and some very intoxicated Finns. Sally kept kneeing Matt and Todd because she felt trapped next to the smelly Finnish man who kept asking her out. He sang a couple blues song to us in Finnish and used a very insulting pick up line towards Sally so we finally left. Everyone was keen on dancing, but then we ran into other international students of architecture from Aalto University so decided to tag along with them and make some friends. They were really nice, but the only name I remember is Maria from Bacelona because the names from Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway were far less familiar.
Saturday was girl's shopping day. Sally and I went to a pastry shop and got coffee a few blocks from our apartment and then took at least an hour or two to get into the middle of town. We went in many a cute little store and found many design items that we would like if they were only a fifth of the price. Then we tried on some clothes at a store called Mango in Kampii before progressing to Forum (where things are a little more reasonable and sales were happening). Sally bought two pairs of inexpensive earrings and I got a couple shirts (one is a bring pink color which is a wonderful change from my very black-centered wardrobe here). Next we went to Stockmann and then we started to get hungry (around 3pm). We went to Cafe Esplanade to get salmon soup but the salad looked really good, but kind of expensive. Sally knew of a better option - we went to Cafe Ursula on the 5th floor of a department store and had the best salad I think I've ever eaten (and/or I was starving). Next, we found our way back to the apartment, happy but exhausted. Sally had oatmeal for dinner and then I made myself spaghetti and garlic bread before heading into Kampii to meet up with Todd and then Saori and Matt for a little bit.
Sunday has been very enjoyable and quite low key. We got ready and then picked up a pastry (don't worry, I will be just having normal cereal tomorrow) and walked to the train station. The Eilel cafe there had reasonably priced coffee (hot chocolate for me) and was a nice place to sit and eat. Then we found a bus to our next building for building systems and took a ton of pictures. It is a funerary chapel so was closed/locked. Hopefully we will find a contact person to be able to get inside sometime in the next couple weeks.
I made a poor shoe choice in the snowy conditions, so when we got back to the train station I booked it back to our apartment for dry warm socks and sweatpants. Then I ate some lunch and watched the last two sermons from my church in St. Louis (last weekend I did not 'go to church' on our excursion). The current series is really interesting both in the sermons and the recommended books that I am working through along with the study. I then got to talk to DW for awhile, knit, read, video chat, watch Bones, make plans for spring break, book dinner reservations, and eat dinner. A lovely, lazy, yet plenty productive end to the weekend.
Tomorrow Peter will be in studio to give us feedback along with Matti and Penti on our current designs. In between activities this weekend I have made 4 models so am well set for that. I do not love any of them yet, but think I have made quite a bit of progress and nearly have a complete idea for the next iteration. The truly interesting thing will be to see what he has to say about our chairs on Tuesday. The big push for the week is our midreview on Friday afternoon, but as the requirement is 3 models at the same scale as my current models...it's perfectly acceptable that I knit a lot today and am getting uncharacteristically distracted by spring break.
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