Whitespace

Between the meetings that were required with clients outside of studio, the preparation and administrative tasks that went into a teaching position, and interviews with faculty for my work as a journalist for the outreach and communications office, it felt like this term was more scheduled than normal. By the end of the day Monday I generally had my whole week on my iCalendar, which led me to make up a new word. Use it!

why A List of Books?

For a long time I wanted to be a celebrity. Vanity aside for the moment, I had good intentions. I wanted to tell people to do good things. I wanted to inspire and persuade an audience, as large as possible, to make this world better. In the same conversation that inspired my interest in sustainable design, my brother asked me "why don't you just do the good things that you want to tell other people to do?"

"A Summer's Reading" by Bearnard Malamud is a short story that first appeared in the New Yorker in September of 1956 (available to New Yorker Subscribers here and also available on the iTunes New Yorker fiction podcast). The protagonist, George Stoyonovich, is a young high school dropout with time on his hands and no summer job. He runs into Mr. Cattanzara, a man from town who foreshadows George’s fear of his own life down the road. One day Mr. Cattanzara holds a conversation with George, at which point, ashamed of his current situation, he tells Mr. Cattanzara of fictional plans to read from a list of 100 books he found at the library to enhance his education. It was a plan told out of earnest, something George wanted to do but just never got around to.

Word spread of George’s self-generated educational pursuits. People in town looked at him differently, George felt better about himself for a while. After a month or so George started to feel anxious about his situation. He kept meaning to read books, but when he did he quickly lost interest in them. Soon his anxiety affected his relationships with everyone around him. In one conversation with Mr. Cattanzara who knew something was amiss, he was offered the following advice, “George, don't do what I did."

As the summer’s heat mimicked George’s frustration it caused him to erupt and overflow into the streets where he realized no one else in town knew he hadn’t read the books. They still treated him with admiration and respect as if he had. He could easily have gone on telling people he read those books, but it was Mr. Cattanzara’s words, and George’s own conscience that drove him to the library where he sat down at a table and started reading.

A List of Books is the symbolic relationship I have to all the things I have ever wanted to do in my life. Unless I am doing those things right now, I do not want to do them enough. 

Winter term wrap up

The winter term is officially over. Kate and I celebrated by spending the day up at Willamette Pass skiing with a pair of bald eagles in 50-degree weather. It was a relaxing reminder of why we moved out here. The term itself was another whirlwind, but one that taught me a lot about what I have learned here, what I want to be learning over the next year and a half and what I think I can contribute to the world as an architect. Yes - after seven terms I can finally see myself becoming an architect, maybe. 

A big part of this term was a studio project for designBridge, the community design/build organization I have been working with since the Fall of 2008. The winter term design studio is the middle installment of the "designBridge year", an academic year of three classes dedicated to pre-design, design and construction of a real project. Our task since September has been to work with Camas Ridge Community School to design a bike shelter for the students and faculty. I wish I could explain all of the benefits I have experienced by working on this project, but it is too much for me to wrap my head around let alone communicate to anyone via blog. Instead I will show some pictures of the final review, and hope they can serve as cues to expressing the value of this term.

From dan gilman's photos

The photo above was taken at the end of the review. We are a team of four grad students and five undergraduates (not pictured is a grad student in the landscape architecture department).  An immediate component of any project is the number of people working on it.  Each individual brings different strengths, weaknesses, design styles, schedules and personal interests to the conversation. More people does not always mean more productivity. It was a learning experience in itself to try and understand how to get the most out of such a diverse group of students. I never would have been given the opportunity to manage so many people had it not been for this project. Even if I went straight into practice after graduation it would be years before I became a project manager. I have learned a lot about myself in this process and it has helped me understand what I need to work on before being in this position again.  From dan gilman's photos  This is a photo during our review. Pictured are several members of the team, a couple of professors from the University, an architect from Eugene and the head coordinator of Safe Routes to School Eugene. Another valuable lesson of this studio was the effort required to coordinate between all the different parties involved. The vast majority of my time was dedicated to communicating between the client (Camas Ridge), the city of Eugene, the school district architect, our professional mentors and the local architect volunteering his time for a separate project in development at the school, an outdoor classroom. The dynamic between our bike shelter and the outdoor classroom deserves an entire post of its own, but I will shorten it for everyone's sake. It was an interesting relationship because both projects have at one time or another been dependent on unconfirmed grant funding and both are being done by separate design parties. Early in the term we decided to move our site closer to the outdoor classroom and think of these projects as having the potential to create one large benefit to the school rather than two separate, smaller projects.   This resulted in some rather challenging design questions along the way:  1) The outdoor classroom is waiting for a grant so its future is uncertain. How do we design our bike shelter, in such close proximity to the proposed outdoor classroom, to function at its best with AND without the addition of the outdoor classroom? 2) The parents of the outdoor classroom have a rather specific idea in mind for the architectural language of their structure (shown below, a rendering generated by the architect volunteering his time to the outdoor classroom). It does not exactly mesh with our design interests, to say the least. How can we design our project to speak to this architecture without compromising the integrity of our own work?  A rendering of a separate project in close proximity to ours, the outdoor classroom by Pivot Architecture Images from final review  These two photos illustrate the final theme that jumps out about this term; the lessons learned working on a real project. The photo on the left shows a few people looking at our permit set, nine pages of architectural drawings to be handed over to the city for approval. A few members of our team worked extremely hard on this (not me). The night before our review I went over to FedEx to pick it up and it was quite a unique feeling to see all our hard work over the term summed up in a nine-page, 22" x 34" document.  I don't know what felt more strange, picking up the permit set or seeing our full scale mock-up come to life (right photo). The full scale mock-up was a requirement for our studio final. We chose to build one end of one of the shelters and the planter/bench beneath it.  Never before had I designed something of this scale to then see it erected. I literally finished designing the planter on Thursday and the build team put it together over the weekend for our final review on Wednesday. I designed something and someone else built it. I actually felt like an architect. It was a bizarre feeling, one that is not often felt by students. It was a reminder of what I observed during the 2007 Solar Decathlon (website and inhabitat article). Those team leaders had such an obvious and admirable sense of pride for the house they had worked on over the previous two years. They put everything they had into the design and construction of their house, and this was the first time I felt that same connection to any of my work here.  Sketch models and our poster presentation from dan gilman's photos  Our presentation included the permit set, the mock-up, a poster and a really beautiful site model. It was all well received by the community in Lawrence Hall. We dropped the finished permit set off at the city on Friday and now we are gearing up for construction if all goes well at the permit office.

final essay for the Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship

Below is the final draft of one of the essays required for the Margaret McBride Lehrman Fellowship. I would be surprised if I were selected for the award as I don't think the essay came out that well and they won't be looking at the supplemental documents i included, but i found the process of applying extremely valuable. Writing, whether for this blog, for graduate or research fellowships or for university scholarships, helps me to process and analyze the often overwhelming amounts of information being thrown at us. It forces me to have an opinion about it, to articulate it and to figure out why it is or is not important to me.  Writing as a tool of process helps me communicate to myself.  For this essay in particular I had a number of conversations with professors and peers who helped me figure out what I want to get out of my education over the next year. There were also several moments along the way that I observed in reference to the subject of architectural communication, moments that helped me figure out what i want to do after graduation (see post john Peterson). Anyway, thanks to everyone who gave me feedback! It was so helpful and great to feel engaged with you through this venue.


[The Architecture of Communication – Today and Tomorrow]

In the architectural education we are formally taught how to express ideas to potential clients using a small handful of tools and graphic styles. Informally we are taught how to approach, evaluate and solve problems of the built environment. Over the last two decades the tools with which we communicate have changed dramatically, and with them so has our ability to reach out to broader audiences. Technological advances and the availability of three-dimensional computer software have bridged a large gap between architects and the general public. Supplementing this change in technology are the implications and awareness of the effects of construction on the environment, as well as a general undercurrent noticeable in the profession and unavoidable in our particular student body; design should not be available only to those who can afford it. These factors combined with a staggering unemployment rate have resulted in a competitive advantage for architects to be responsive and adaptive in redefining their roles. Architects have an increased responsibility and incentive to change the public's perception of their role in the pursuit of a better built (or non-built) environment. Those who are willing to take an active approach in response to these changes are the ones who will shape our profession in the years to come. They will utilize their skills as problem solvers and extend their reach to problem identifiers. To do this they need to be experts of communication to a vastly diverse and ever changing audience. They need to help their clients make more informed, better-educated decisions about the implications of their actions. 

Thus far in my studies I have dedicated myself fully to the act of communication as defined by the architectural education at the University of Oregon. As of the most recent fall term, those studies narrowed on writing and how we use words and text to convey architectural ideas of spatial configuration. While satisfying the requirements of the department that primarily focus on the traditional methods of architectural communication and continuing my employment as a journalist for the office of media and outreach in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, I have structured my remaining education around the following two projects of communication:

[Publication Writing for the Student Organization, designBridge]

As I step down from my position as Organizational Manager of Public Relations, I have assumed a new role to help designBridge grow and continue its assimilation in our curriculum. I believe strongly in the educational impact of community design/build programs and I want to use the written word to inform others of the widespread benefits of such organizations. I am working with the faculty advisor of designBridge, Juli Brode, to help convey the benefits of the organization to national architecture and design publications, as well as to our own department curriculum committee. During the spring and summer terms I will be researching the media outlets available to us and writing articles intended for publication. To support my work I will be enrolled in a summer journalism course.

[Product Design Collaboration with Professor Erin Moore]

Erin approached me to partner with her on a series of informative flash cards depicting the ecological properties of building materials. A combination of appropriate graphics and concise wording will serve as a clever way to take vast amounts of information and communicate it to students and professionals. Erin is one of the nation’s foremost experts on materials and ecological design. Right now her goals are mass production and distribution. My work will be part of an independent study in the spring, followed by an intense schedule over the summer to reach production by winter of 2010. 

2nd draft of application essay

I just finished a revised draft. Thanks to everyone who emailed me or commented on the blog, it was infinitely helpful. For this draft I added a little background and revised some wording, and it should be pretty close to final. The next part of the essay will map out my academic plans and how i hope to formulate the rest of my curriculum based on my desire to communicate more effectively. I may or may not post that stuff tonight, but i will be posting the whole thing after i submit it - in a more blog friendly format (links and pictures!).

The architectural education emphasizes a limited, albeit effective approach to communication. We are formally taught how to express 'architectural' ideas to our potential clients using a handful of architectural tools and graphic expressions. This is adequate if the discipline retains its current, narrowly defined role. But that is not what architecture is, it is not what we learn in our education, and architects do not always act upon this capacity. Between the widespread momentum of the environmental movement, the technological advances and availability in three-dimensional computer software and the staggering unemployment rate, there is a competitive advantage to be more responsive and adaptive to the role an architect plays in a project. Supplementing these factors is a general undercurrent, noticeable in the profession and unavoidable in our particular student body, that design should not be available only for those who can afford it. Architects have an increased incentive and responsibility to change the general public's perception of their roles in the pursuit of a better built (or non-built) environment. Those who are willing to take a more active role in response to these changes are the ones who will shape the way our profession is defined in the years to come. They are using their skills as problem solvers and extending their reach to become problem identifiers. To do this, they need to be experts of communication - not just of traditional 'architectural' communication, but of communication to a vastly diverse and ever changing audience - in order to help make more informed, better educated decisions about the implications of their clients’ actions. 

Again, grammar and style edits are still welcome!

Part 1 - How does the architectural education emphasize communication?

Taken from the application:

"This fellowship derives from an endowment created to provide support for graduate students with financial need who are pursuing studies that emphasize communication, especially writing skills."

So the first question I have to answer is, how does the architectural education emphasize communication (to someone who has never been a part of it), and how can I explain it quickly enough to allow room for my academic plans in the same 1-page essay? Here goes nothing...

The architectural education emphasizes a limited, albeit effective approach to communication. We are formally taught how to express 'architectural' ideas to our potential clients using a handful of architectural tools and graphic expressions. This is fine if the discipline retains the narrowly defined role it has built a reputation around. But architects do not always play this role. Increasingly they have more responsibility and incentive to reevaluate their roles, and more importantly to change the general public's perception of those roles in the pursuit of a better built (or non-built) environment. Architects are taking a more active role in their relationships with clients. They are using their skills as problem solvers and extending their reach to become problem identifiers. To do this, they need to be experts of communication - not just of traditional 'architectural' communication, but of communication to a vastly diverse and ever changing audience - in order to help make more informed, better educated decisions about the implications of their actions. 

Does this even make sense to people who are not currently heavily entrenched in the architectural education? It feels like I am taking the last year and a half of observations about our education and pinning them down to one paragraph. I have no idea if everything else in my head is making this appear successful to me, or if it really does convey the information I want it to (ha! this is a small representation of the most essential skill we are being taught; how to absorb an overflow of information and communicate it effectively to a given audience).

lecture Series - John Peterson and Public Architecture

poster by andi solk, m.arch option III student and head of the lecture series committee

When possible, I try to catch the guest speakers we are privileged to at the University of Oregon. It can be exciting to see people who are fully dedicated to professional practice speak about their work, and most of them know how to keep their audience captivated with interesting stories and sexy pictures. If nothing else, when a guest lecturer visits the school, it provokes students to go out of their way to look at some unfamiliar work. This in turn broadens our education and sometimes I walk away from a presentation having found a major influence and inspiration. Some favorites of mine have included Kengo Kuma, Anna Maria Orru, and James Wines.

It's not always easy to get architecture students and professors to attend these lectures, which is part of what made Friday night such a nice surprise. John Peterson of Public Architecture came to Lawrence Hall 177 and spoke to a rather enthusiastic, comparatively large crowd of students and professors at 5:30 pm - a time when most people in Lawrence are either burned out from a full week of studio and headed to happy hour, or anxious to get home and crash because they've only slept six hours since Wednesday. I think the attendance at John's lecture speaks partially to the caliber of the work his firm has accomplished, and volumes to the common interest in our community revolving around design as a means for social activism. John Peterson is the founder of the 1% pro bono design program, an offshoot of his private firm, Peterson Architects.

John's presentation was a really nice way for me to cap off the last few weeks. His message, his firm's work, and his passions were clear and admirable. But it was his delivery and the intentional, often successful strategies he used to communicate the importance of an idea to the audience that most impressed me. I have spent the last seven or eight months trying to understand the role of architecture today and how I possibly fit into it, or what I am doing with this education. Over the last few weeks I have done my best to narrow my interests in order to articulate them for a fellowship that I am applying for through the University. What excited me about John's lecture was not only that the work he does is making an enormous impact on the way we define and understand architectural practice, but his presentation was so obviously representative of the skills we are trying to learn in the architectural education - whether we know it or not.

Between now and Friday I need to have an essay written to map out my academic plans over the next year and a half. I will be using this blog to help write that essay. Any feedback, critical or not, would be extremely helpful this week - even from my mom, who will undoubtedly tell me how much she likes my work :)

TED Talk - Joshua Prince-Ramus authoring processes over objects, the Wyly Theatre

For a little background, Joshua Prince-Ramus was a founding partner of OMA New York, the American affiliate of Rem Koolhaas' Netherlands based firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Shortly after the success of the Seattle Public Library, JPR separated from OMA and renamed the firm REX.

He is part of the TED brain trust, and gives a damn good presentation that speaks to a pretty wide audience. The latest one is about the Wyly Theatre Building in Dallas. His intro is about the schism between creativity and execution, authoring processes versus objects, and the relationship between the architect and the client(s). Chronologically, these are some highlights:

1:00 - "We are for decorative purposes only" - referring to the state of architects and architecture today.

3:47 - both owner and architect alike are empowered to critique architectural manifestations based on positions taken. This leads to 'the lost art of productively losing control'.

5:20 - a diagram showing how agenda should fit into the projects and the clients' constraints (seen below)

9:00 - Diagrams

11:25 - three basic configurations for the theatre, the technologies used and some renderings to show the different uses.

16:36 - time lapse video showing the building change configurations

"If we are so good at our craft, shouldn't we be able to conceive of an architectural manifestation that slides seamlessly through the projects and the clients' constraints?"

-Joshua Prince-Ramus

If you enjoyed this video, check him out in an earlier TED talk while still with OMA:

And finally, here is the timelapse film from Stewart Mayer on Vimeo adding some clarity and music to the film shown in JPR's presentation:

Wyly Theatre Timlapse, Dallas Arts District from Stewart Mayer on Vimeo.

diving right back into it

Well hello my beloved friends and family. For the last few weeks I have been wondering how to jump back into this blog thing. In my head I thought I would write this monumental, all-inclusive post that would serve to summarize the past 5 or 6 months. The longer I searched for the theme or the style of this formidable resurrection post, the harder it was to write.

Part of the hesitation was that I want to change the focus of this blog. I had been using it periodically to show my own work and our life in Eugene, but since last fall I have taken an interest in writing as a medium to express architectural themes and spatial properties. It is an overlooked and undervalued component of our work here, so I would like to start using this blog more frequently as a means to articulate the process of my education (which I had been doing a little) as well as track my own interests and inspirations as they come to me. Every term there are dozens of projects, people and events that inspire me, so I would like to pass them along and figure out what they mean to me by articulating my thoughts to you. With that said, I may disable the email function of this blog, as I do not want to overcrowd your respective inboxes.

So today, instead of trying to catch everyone up at once, I will write this post as if there was no break. Every so often I will do my best to post some work from the fall term, but until then I just want to get started reviving A List of Books.

Here is a project I came across the other day while reading dezeen. It is not my own work and it is only indicative of my education as it happens to be a beautiful project from the mountains of Japan.

The Kuri at Chushinji by Katsuhiro Miyamoto & Associates. A Kuri is built to house the priest and his family, as well as provide a space for intimate community events.

The concrete roof was formed first. It reminds me of the roof at Le Corbusier's Ronchamp. Concrete is one of my favorite materials for its flexibility and strength - both structural and aesthetic. Despite the high carbon emissions produced by its main ingredient (cement), there is room for improvement through the use of byproducts such as fly ash and recycled aggregate. It is also one of the most widely available construction materials around the world, making it applicable to a range of projects.

The roof is meant to play off the traditional temple form. Many of these temples last hundreds of years thanks to impeccable care and sanctity of use. Over time the interior walls and layouts of temples go through modifications and renovations, but the roof form remains constant. This roof was designed with the intention to last 100 to 200 years.

photos courtesy of the dezeen site, taken by Takumi Ota

Traditional Japanese architecture and Buddhist teachings emphasize an awareness of the seasons. This picture shows the blurring of the boundaries between interior and exterior environment. If you look closely you can see the interior wood framing touch the roof without any layers in between. The gaps left over by this process visually and physically connect the occupants with the elements. The visible, single roof element also serves to unify the individual chambers which are partitioned by interior walls and screens.

I love this section drawing. This project exemplifies the type of scale that I would like to work with right now. The further I get in school the harder it is for me to grasp designing large buildings. There is an approach to space on a small scale that I can feel. Perhaps it is something that will change over time as my abilities develop, but if I want to evoke emotion through architecture, I have to be able to put myself inside the building during the design phase.

Final Review, Osaka, Tokyoooo

A lot has happened since my last post, so I'll break it up into a few posts while I wait in the airport for my flight to Beijing. On a side note, I am waiting for about 6 more hours than I was supposed to thanks to my brother and I both missing our respective flights this morning - it was my fault as i was the one with the alarm. We were pretty terrified that it would cost us both the rest of our savings for the trip, but his ticket had no charge fee and mine was only a hundred dollars. We got pretty lucky on that one!

So last Monday was our final review for the term (pictures here). This was a group studio project so I worked with three classmates and the other groups had anywhere from 4-6 members. One of my partners is a landscape architect student in his final year, and the other two are architecture students. It was a pleasure working with them and we ended up with a nice project. We all added something different to the group, but the best part was that we were able to communicate with each other rather effectively. It was a great group dynamic. For our design we focused on an important intersection in downtown Kyoto called Shijoomiya and developed it with a planting design, urban park space and commercial center to connect the existing transportation and commercial fabric to the street level. This used to be a pretty busy hub for commuters and businesses, but a train stop was removed several years ago which has caused the area to lose its appeal.  Our group found a lot of inspiration from the Lotus flower (which is obvious when you see the boards). We presented six boards showing our design:

The students on the floor, professors and visiting reviewers in chairs

Professor Ron Lovinger during another group's review

The first four boards

The last two boards

A detail of the first board - an introduction to our presentation. I painted this to reflect the style of scroll paintings in Japan and China. Everyone responded so positively to this painting, especially to the koi. After dabbling in art on and off since high school, it was the first time that one of my pieces triggered such a visible, positive emotional response in such a large audience. It was a really nice way to cap off the term and the work we had been putting in during the first four weeks. 

This was our final board, after the plans and sections were presented. We decided it would be a good idea to show the impact of our design by creating a comic strip that responded to the Japanese culture of Manga and Anime. The board illustrates a narrative of the four group members taking different routes of transportation to the center of this intersection. The main idea of our design was to create a meeting place for people, a recognizable center for Kyoto amongst the different modes of transportation (a center that the city is currently lacking). The comic really helped show this idea. Michael Bowles drew the whole thing up over the course of about a week (which was pretty amazing if you ask me), then we all traced it onto the paper and the two of us water colored each character's journey in a different color. The response from the students and professors was inspiring. I really enjoy the idea of representing architecture in a non-traditional manor. Often we are taught very limited methods of representation to capture the feeling of a building such as doctored photographs, realistic renderings, plans and sections. Architecture is such an emotional, artistic and imaginative response to a given set of circumstances that in order to communicate a proposal there must freedom of expression and interpretation. I'm not saying it has to be completely abstract or on the other hand without any of the practical components, but my favorite presentations include both the realistic details as well as the conceptual motivations. 

Our professor Daisuke translating for our guests


Caitlin's group presenting their project


Peter Baker and Ali McQueen


Quin and his group's boards



Ron explaining something about a Cheetah?

Off to Beijing! More to come, probably not until I return to the States!

Final Media Review

This summer term is broken down into three classes, one is studio, one is a special studies class and one is a media class. The media class consisted of daily water coloring class as well as individual lessons from two of our professors. We had our final on Monday and we were expected to have about 14 completed paintings. 

One of the main reasons I chose to come here was to develop my water coloring. After spending about 6 weeks focusing on it last summer I knew I would not get much better unless I dedicated a large chunk of time to it. I have been a little frustrated because I am not improving as fast as I wanted, but we are only half way into the trip and I think I am starting to see signs of the improvement I was looking for. 

I took pictures of all the work I showed at our final which you can see if you click here. 

They chose 3 paintings from everyone to show at school in the fall and these are the 3 they chose of mine:

We made this stop on the way back from Nara

This is a view of the Katsura River in Arashiyama. This place is so beautiful when the sun goes down. My friend Caitlin let me borrow her camera and take some pictures after I painted:

Caitlin working on a masterpiece!

This one is on the way up to the top of a mountain that overlooks Kyoto. 

I knew I would enjoy water coloring, but I also want to be better at freehand sketching, so I have been trying to capture some of these places with quick sketches. I really enjoy the way these have been developing:

This one is inside our temple complex at night

The temple garden at Kongbuji - in Koyosan

This is my favorite of all the work I have done here. I used my ink pen, a little bit of water, and then added some color at the end. It is at the entrance of Daishen-In.

Koyosan and Nara

Hellooooo,

It has been a while since I have posted anything because A) they have kept us very busy and B) I don't know how to possibly narrow down everything into one post at a time. Instead, I have been posting pictures every few days and waiting to write about specific topics or themes as they build up in my head. We had our midterm review on Friday, which means we were in the temple for four days working to put together our presentation, but then we got the weekend off so I caught up on some water coloring, sleep and Karaoke!

Last week our professors and the head monk at Daishen-In took us to Nara for 3 days. On the way we were privileged to a night in Koyosan which is the headquarters of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Koyosan is a town of only about 4000, 2/3rds of which are monks in training. The head monk, Osho, trained here as a child before changing sects. We left Myoshin-ji at 6 in the morning in order to get to Okunoin by mid morning. Okunoin is the largest cemetery in Japan, and it surrounds the mausoleum of the founder of Koyosan, Kukai. 

This was truly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen in my life. The trail leading up to the mausoleum is 2 km long and dates back over a thousand years.  Yes, the scale was impressive, the textures and colors were intense and the sense of history was overwhelming but the timing was the most powerful part of the morning. We were so lucky to see this place in the most dramatic setting imaginable. Fog had moved in and deepened as we progressed to the mausoleum so that each grave, tree, fountain and offering was more emotional than the one before it. On any given day this place would be beautiful, but that day was a once in a lifetime experience. Every person I talked to that night felt emotions they had never felt before. 

Here are some pictures from the morning:

The beginning of the trail, before the fog really moved in. The trees in this cemetery were some of the largest and oldest I have ever seen.

The bibs are used in prayer of children who have died, or to protect the living 

This might be the best picture i have ever taken. 

towards the end of the trail

When we reached the Mausoleum we walked into the main temple where a monk was leading a chant, then gathered with Osho in back of the temple where he led us in a chant of prayer and thanks in front of Kukai's tomb. I was not allowed to take pictures back here, but it was a moving experience that made several people on the trip lose it. At this point I was more in shock than anything else or I'm sure I would have done the same. I watched a sparrow fly down from above, right through the Torii gates leading to Kukai's tomb.  It was the first time I have ever been so moved by a piece of architecture. Had the gate not been there it would have just been another bird following a seemingly random path. Thanks to her route from directly above us, through the middle of these gates to the other side (a side forbidden to all of us), she represented something much more meaningful and put the final touches on an experience I will never forget. The emotional response to architecture is something I have yet to really understand, but it is the primary reason I want to study it. I know happiness can be created by architecture, but it can never just be about the building. The context in which the building is experienced has to be valued just as much if not more than the building itself. Or maybe there should be no differentiation between the two? The minute the two words are separated they become isolated elements. Anyway, This guy has a nice write up about Koyosan, including some great pictures. I don't know him but he has some good info about Buddhism and the town. 

After we loaded back onto the bus we headed to Nara for the next two nights. Nara was really fun but I will save the writing for tomorrow after we have our final review for media. We need to have 14 water colors done, and 40 by the end of the trip, so I will probably start posting some pictures of that stuff. 

I Just want to leave you with some highlights of Nara:

Freakishly small deer 

The largest wooden structure in the world

More cute Japanese kids (mostly for Kaitlin :0) )

Tea ceremony with a view of the city in the background and the garden in the foreground

Ok I'm off to bed, but I hope people are enjoying these pictures. If you really like any of them, or want me to explain any of the ones in my albums, email me!

 Love you all and Happy 4th of July!