The Stress Begins

It's been a little hectic the past couple days. The internet not working well at the house or school, not having the programs I need on my laptop for studio, and the saga of getting my new debit card mailed here after my account was hacked has all added up to a good bit of stress.

Other than those things, life as a student in Istanbul has been great. Tuesday morning we had Urban Morphology; a grad student lecture class taught in English. We all packed into a tiny classroom for the first part of class. Apparently none of our names were on the list, so they expected to only have about 24 Turkish students; our group doubled that number. After the general course introduction we moved to a larger classroom to begin the day's lecture, which was given as a powerpoint presentation with one of our two professors reading the slides in good, but somewhat choppy, English. After the first couple of slides, the power went out. Lucky for me, I was in the front row and could therefore see the laptop that the powerpoint presentation was on and take adequate notes for the rest of the class period. The course seems like it could be interesting: the study of city form, mostly coastal European cities like Istanbul; however, it was hard to comprehend the whole of the lecture. I don't know if it was how the slides were written or not having my ear keyed in on our professors' accents yet. I looked up issues of the Urban Morphology journal online when I got home, literature our teacher mentioned in class. I found an article on Istanbul's urban morphology, written by an I.T.U. professor; I read the first part of it and took some notes. It helped me understand the idea of the course a lot better, and it was really interesting.

After class on Tuesday I bought some drafting supplies at the school supplies store, came back and ate lunch, then went back to school for studio work-day. We have three potential sites in Mardin for our project: a family house, an inn-type building, and a bazaar. Our task is to design the interior space, keeping the existing building's shell and interior walls, with whatever proposal we want. That is my assignment for tomorrow: come up with proposals of what could exist in these sites. Two of the sites could become really great museums, I think, but museums can be tricky because there is a certain amount of restraint needed on the part of the architect so that the artwork is given a perfect background. I also thought about a mixed-use hostel or hotel and visitor's center. Anyways, I'll quit brainstorming here, and get back to my account of the past few days.

In studio I spent most of my time figuring out a software I could download (for free) to view .dwg files, which is the format of all of the documents we've been given on the sites. Most people have autoCAD, but OSX (mac's operating system) isn't supported by autoCAD, so I turned to AutoDesk's free student downloads, but got lost in the many options. Eventually, I realized that Adobe Illustrator (which I have) opens .dwg files for viewing. Today I found out that I can download a free student version of VectorWorks, similar to autoCAD; this eliminated a good bit of that stress I mentioned in the first paragraph. I just need to scan my student ID (which today I found out I can do at school) and e-mail it in.

This morning we had architectural contexting, taught by one of the assistant professors who is helping Tarik's studio class. This seems like it will be a lot of fun. Each week we are given a place (assignment) in the city to go explore and document. At the end of the semester we will make a video of all of our findings. Today we explored our campus. Our professor took us to see the two libraries, computer lab, and supply store.

After class I waited by the door downstairs for two hours on the FedEx man. At 11:30 am I decided to call it quits and went upstairs to enjoy my two lira sandwich from the restaurant across the street.

^ complete with chicken, french fries, lettuce, green peppers, and tomatoes

Tonight I cooked lemon spaghetti for Jamie and Cameron. It turned out well for eyeballing all of the measurements. Here's the link to the simple and good recipe. :)

Someone outside is making a noise every 15 seconds that sounds like a loud cough, although I'm sure it's a word; it can be a noisy night-time (and day-time) street that we live on.

Time for me to continue work on these proposals due for studio tomorrow. Instead of having class at school we are traveling to Koleksiyon, a trendy, upscale interior design shop that may (if we make a good impression) fund our trip to Mardin. www.koleksiyon.com.tr