The Clovis meeting turned out to be different than I had expected. I was under the impression that he was going to hire one student to do all of the design and presentation work, but rather, he decided to have another student design three different addition proposals, and have me do all of the presentation work for each proposal. So she has to do all the floor plans and layouts, and I will design a graphic site plan and a crude sketchup model for each one after she is done. Essentially, this is what I did all summer – design presentation drawings and graphics of other architect’s work. I actually don’t mind doing this, because it is a good graphic exercise and I didn’t feel motivated to work on the design of the apartment addition. Plus, I will be getting paid to do it, and extra money is always good!
We received our Montréal itinerary today. We are leaving very early Thursday morning, as I mentioned, and we return very late Monday night. Our return flight arrives in Des Moines around 11:15 pm. With our luck, I imagine this will be more like 3 am or even Tuesday morning, but I hope the return flight is on time. Our schedule is very busy while we are in Montréal. After we arrive on Thursday we have a walking tour of Vieux Montréal (Old Montréal) and Basilique Notre Dame. On Friday we will visit the Médiathèque site and go to the Pointe-à-Callière museum. On Saturday we will be touring the Université de Montréal, with special visits to the Faculté de l’Aménagement (Faculty of Planning and Design) and l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales (this translates to “School of the High Commercial Studies” so I am assuming it means business or management). It will be interesting to see how a Canadian university differs from ISU, although I don’t know how good of an idea we will get unless the students take classes on Saturdays as well. After touring the school we are doing a walking tour of Université du Quebec a Montréal (UQAM)/Latin Quarter, including the Cinémathèque Québécoise, Bibliotheque Nationale, and Pavillion de Design. On Sunday we will be visiting the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and then it seems we have a bit of free time Sunday evening (yay!). On Monday we are allotted time to finish up site research, and then we are out of there.
I don’t know much about the buildings we are visiting or what their names really mean in english, so I hope this turns out to be a fun and educational trip. I really hope we visit Habitat ’67 by Moshe Safdie. I also hope we have a little bit more free time that what is mentioned on the itinerary. I hate being controlled by schedules like this, because it feels like you are either at a place for too long or not long enough. I have been on trips like this before with the architecture program, where we have had full days planned for us and were informed to bring sack lunches and everything – that did not turn out to be fun. I hope now that we are a little older they will quit treating us like children. The New York City trip was quite pleasant because we got to choose everything we did while we were there, so I hope this trip is more similar to than than the one where we had to bring sack lunches.
I am a bit worried about not knowing any French. On my Montréal map it said that all of the signs are in French, so I guess I will just have to stay close to the people that know a bit of the language. All that I know is “Voulez vous coucher avec moi” and I will not be saying that to anyone!
Other news – a girl from my university was mentioned in the October issue of Glamour magazine for being one of the top ten college women in America. It’s nice to see some positive promotion out there for ISU.
