Spring?

January 22, 2010

Installment Fifteen

Still wandering.

You may recall several months ago just after I got here I blogged about the PrattStore, and how excited I was to have a real life New York City-style art supply store, and in the neighborhood. Having been here a while, and having been introduced to several other art supply stores throughout the city I’ve come to realize that I was wrong in my first impressions. I was impressed. And now I’m not. And to make things even more interesting personally our Design Studio II for Spring is charged with the re-design of the PrattStore. Ten of us in our section (there are about 55 students in my year) are all working on some research aspect of the store itself (that just the first week’s project). I’ve taken about 40 pictures of the environment in and around the store, on campus, and in the neighborhood and I’m determining whether there are any connections, any comparisons worth noting. It’s not looking promising.

Pratt tends to be rather exclusive (which doesn’t really surprise me given the nature of most art schools). And it doesn’t surprise me that the main entrance to the PrattStore faces a major street through the neighborhood, Myrtle Avenue, and that the entrance is not very inviting. It does surprise me that the store doesn’t do as much business as I was expecting, especially from the neighbors. And the store is at the very limits of campus on the northeast edge, which means it’s far from the art department, the interior design department, the industrial design department, and pretty much everything on campus. Actually, when you walk through campus parking lots to get to the PrattStore you must use our student ID’s to get through the large iron gate that separates campus from the neighborhood.

Campus is completely surrounded by an 8 foot wrought iron fence and the gates are not too near each other, making navigation through tricky at best. Rumor has it that one of the reasons the fence was put up was the inordinate number of mothers with baby carriages using campus for their personal neighborhood park. Other rumors suggest that the neighborhood is less than safe. We do border the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, which isn’t too safe. One doesn’t need to flash ID at each gate to be admitted, but you must present ID at each building before entering. It’s very exclusive here but I’ve digressed.

This afternoon my work consists of creating a graphic inventory of PrattStore products in an effort to determine what stays and what must go, with respect to making the store more inviting, more competitive both in price and selection, and better looking in general. Although the building is only about 5 years old it looks like a trailer park remnant. I’ve heard that the prior PrattStore was much worse, and considering other components of my personal Pratt experience I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it for a minute.

Then I’ll be off to the computer lab to work on several other projects on SketchUp, AutoCAD, and Photoshop. And then I’ll print out results, email to fellow students, and come home to watch a movie from my roommates’ large pirated collection with spaghetti for dinner. I also had Studio this morning, from 9:30 till 1:00. Lovely new group of classmates working on new projects with a new professor.

I thought I’d bring you into school a bit, show you around, and then tell you about recent trips to museums and whatnot. And tomorrow is laundry, never ending laundry. If I thought I could make it work financially I’d drop it off and pick it up later but that would be twice as much as me doing it myself. I can’t quite justify it yet. And the time sitting in the Laundromat is good for reading, sort of.

I’ve been to see the Bauhaus exhibit at MoMA twice now, and I’m thrilled to have seen it, and fabulous it is. My friend Bob from Taos and his friend Jerry from Denver, are here now and we met at MoMA yesterday for a wonderful walkthrough of the exhibit. And they graciously treated me to lunch at the café on the fifth floor there. Lovely. Thank you Bob and Jerry. It was lovely to walk and talk with Bob and Jerry because they had met several of the artists and faculty from the Bauhaus who’d left Germany and immigrated to the US. Bob is an architect and Jerry is an artist. They attended school together and are old friends. The show itself is stunning. The work from the Bauhaus influences many of the design decisions we make today, from functionality, form, program, process, and concept. It is a living history lesson for me. And most of the Pratt curriculum is derived from Bauhaus theory. Perhaps not directly, or verbatim, but really close.

A classmate and I went to see the Eero Saarinen exhibit last weekend. I had seen it earlier in January with my friend Marianne, and now I saw it again with Sarah. It just gets better everyday here. Saarinen created many iconic American buildings and images, like the St. Louis Arch, and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport here in NY. I wrote about this earlier so I won’t repeat myself.

I guess my intent is to express my gratitude once again for all the incredible experiences I’m having here, and to share that gratitude with you through stories of the experiences. I’ll keep you posted.

January 29, 2010

Here it is a week later. My friend Brice has pneumonia again and is in treatment. Thanks for your thoughts. He’s been instrumental in my recovery and I wish I could be there with him. I’m not. I’m here in Brooklyn, taking a few minutes before Studio this morning to share a bit of news.

My friend Julie facebooked that she wanted to see “Cosi fan Tutti” next week, and that tickets were $20 each. I wrote and said I’d love to go but that we’d be in the nosebleed seats. The opera is being produced by the students at NYU, not the Metropolitan Opera. I‘m excited. Culture at student prices!

And classes are wonderful. We are doing research on the Grand Central Terminal for Directed Research, and I’m loving it. I was there on Wednesday at 12:30 for the guided walking tour offered by the Municipal Art Society. They’ve been doing tours there almost since the building was built, just after the turn of the twentieth century. I love learning the history of the place, as it’s fraught with intrigue and politics and graft and collusion. Almost like watching a soap opera on TV except that the characters are the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Philip Johnson, and Stanford White. The design of the terminal itself was a precursor to the way we use airports today. The terminal originally separated departing and incoming train traffic for several reasons. It takes lots more time to load a train than it does to unload one, and because there is an underground loop of multiple train tracks the arriving train can then be shuttled around to the departing tracks within minutes of passengers disembarking, making the transition to the more time-consuming process of loading really quick.

Although the building looks like a massive stone structure it’s actually a steel frame with stone (and fake stone!) veneer. Amazing. And that sculpture on the front weighs 1,500 tons, which translates to 3 million pounds, give or take. The clock face is designed and manufactured by Tiffany and is 13 feet in diameter. There’s tons of trivia available for the asking. The terminal was designed to accommodate 500,000 passengers per day. Impressive for a city that was populated with about 3.5 million back in 1903-1913 when it was built. Today about 200,000 commuters and subway riders use the terminal daily, so we’re nowhere near capacity.

Okay, my Monday afternoon class is History of Interior Design: 1700 to the present. Very exciting to me because I love history, and I love reading, and the teacher is fabulous, from Austria, a gorgeous tall blond woman whose doctorate is in Japanese aesthetics. I think I’m in love.

Monday morning is Presentation Techniques, which hasn’t happened yet due to some scheduling issues. Used to be two classes, combined into one, location change, confusion, and the teacher didn’t show last week, so I can’t report on that one yet. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as I’ve heard that the teacher is really good and we get to combine hand drawing techniques with computer techniques. Great!

Gotta get back to work. Time to draw a plan and several sections for the concept I’ve created for the PrattStore. And work on the presentation for Monday’s research on Grand Central. Photoshop and AutoCAD here I come. Get ready.

February 3, 2010

Days slip by while I’m not looking, leaving me just slightly behind. Then I put my head down, hunker down and work, really work. Study, research, draw, think, re-think and draw some more, in the computer, on paper, on the proverbial dinner napkin.

I suspect I’m getting more and more like a New Yorker. I’ve lately noticed my displeasure (disgust) at the number of cellbows walking down sidewalks not watching where I’m going with my large parcels and computer, my backpack stuffed, my heavy winter coat. There seems to be an inordinate number of people using cell phones everywhere – on the bus, on the streets, on the elevated parts of the subway (thank god they don’t work underground – yet). What can all these people have to talk about? I really miss the phone booth where I don’t have to hear about your love life and why he didn’t want that massage, and what you did about it, and why didn’t anybody call me and tell me that Alicia had passed, okay? Enough! It’s also much more difficult knowing who’s talking on their Blue Tooth and who’s just a lunatic talking to the voices in their head. Sometimes I wonder if there is any difference.

And then this morning I took the B54, my usual bus to downtown Brooklyn, to H&R Block. Yes friends it’s tax time once again, and in order to qualify and receive financial aid one must file tax returns, regardless of how much one didn’t make last year. Unfortunate for me, my Taos accountant screwed up royally and forgot to do my 2008 return, so I’m having that done as well. It’s a long and painful story that I won’t bore you with here. (Okay, he never returned my calls, his secretary became snarky and never left him messages or returned my calls, and when all else failed I had a friend physically retrieve my paperwork from his office and mail it to me here. He had the paperwork since early May 2009 but didn’t touch it other than to file the extension.) Have I mentioned the number of hoops one jumps through living in New York. Did I mention that all my filing is in a cabinet in storage in Taos. It’s tricky.

Because the H&R office is close to the Trader Joe’s I carried my shopping bags (one from the Strand, black mesh, and one from Bloomingdales, black poplin, gray trim, nice embroidery, thanks to Carolyn for shopping there!) and shopped for staples, butter, milk, eggs, bread, because it’s so much cheaper than the local grocery. So, I’ve got two shopping bags full of $46 worth of groceries (a lot!) and my computer because I needed it for the taxes, and I’m back on the bus, and I recognize someone on the bus. She’s not from class or the neighborhood, but someone I’ve seen on the bus. Is this making any sense or should I just get back to the homework and blow off the blogging.

I did get a really nice email yesterday from Peter in Taos, about how my writing about Pratt and life is bringing up all kinds of personal history for him. It was such a positive, affirming, and encouraging email that I have to keep writing, even if it’s only a way to record my daily blatherings.

And last night after one of those meeting I attend for my serenity and sanity I took the bus (B54 again) and train (the 4) to Grand Central Terminal. It’s actually not a station. It’s a terminal. Officially, Grand Central Station is the Post Office around the corner.
Anyway, after pin-up and crit during Directed Research yesterday we learned about continuation of the research project, folding our individual research into what the other students did, and digging deeper, finding connections, a story line, a thread on which to cast a thought. Our brief is as follows: imagine that a developer has called and said “I have an option to rent 4,000 square feet of space in Grand Central Terminal. Where should the space be and what kind of business should I put there?” Interesting, huh? We do the research: demographics, use, traffic patterns, materials, lighting, furniture, etc. and determine what might work best where, and more importantly (from our due diligence) why. Fascinating stuff.

Okay. Really gotta work now. Love you all.

This one’s shorter because you asked for it to be shorter. Fine. Bueno Bye.

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