Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Degree Project Class notes November 29,2006

To All:

This is a follow up communication from both Marc and Dan. It is intended as a alarm bell memo expanding on the verbal statements we gave in our last class meeting regarding what we feel is the complete lack of acceptable performance on part of many students. We are developing a list of those students who, we think, are in major trouble and will issue appropriate letters to each by Friday. We will not allow anyone to pin up at the final review that has not developed their projects as requested by us both in writing and in class crits. We will make the decision, of who will present or not by Sunday December 10th. On that day you will be asked to submit your work for our evaluation. Those students who are not allowed by us to present will be either failed immediately or put on probation and reviewed by a school committee (us plus others) at the end of Winter break.

In an updated class schedule on October 5, 2006 you were informed regarding the work required for the Midterm Review. You were told the following:


“The student must prepare a degree Project Proposal that contains the following items:


-A well formed ‘theoretical framework” (based on synaestesia research)

-"material practice” (or performance technique) how research becomesoperational in your project-how the design activates cross modal associations.


-Degree Project definition: documentation of site and program (researched)

-Draft booklet containing all of the above.


At midterm fewer that five students had anything resembling these requirements. Through class meetings since we tried to get these items out of you without success in spite of numerous suggestions and requests that you develop your projects. While it is already too late, nevertheless we decided to give you one more chance to go into high gear and produce what is required. This is the last call before we either fail you or put you on probation as described above.

Anyone without these items well developed will not be allowed to present on December 12

On a more personal note we, Marc and Dan, fail to understand your lack of focus and lack of passion for what should be the most important project in your work at Pratt. Obviously the school is wrong to entrust you with independent thinking in the fifth year. Many of you appear confused, inarticulate and obsessively preoccupied with your own head and being (identity) and unable to look also at an exterior reality, out there in the world. In other words some of you seem trapped in an introspective private world of “false poetics” unable to connect with others, both people and things outside of yourselves. This is manifested both in your writing and drawings as well as in your inability to develop a factual and analytical base for your projects in addition to the theoretical content. Another demonstration of this is the fact that in spite of all the rich synaestesia research, readings and class presentations that all of you did, almost nothing came through in your work to date. It is as if you went there and came away with nothing, unable to make use of it. To some extent this also reflects negatively on your education at Pratt. It is very depressing!All this is not to say that you are not all talented and intelligent students and that the class discussions were not at times quite wonderful. This is the mystery of it all: Why such a good group is so muddled and not performing. I hope you take this in the constructive manner as it is intended.

1 comment:

Alex Gryger said...

In Response to Marc and Dan

To All:

I will start by prefacing the following by stating that in being self critical, I know that I still have much work to do on my thesis and I will not be satisfied with myself until I do it and architecture, space and form, is born out of my efforts. I have learned during my years at Pratt that when faced with sometimes-unfathomable amounts of work, good things will happen if we just start working with a plan, even if our efforts seem small at first. Having a good idea of where we want to go is important because it guides our efforts, making them more productive. At the beginning of the semester, I had a certain amount of resistance towards that way in which the book assignment was imposed upon us as a sort of institution of the thesis program, but ultimately, in what I think was a particular moment of maturity, I came to terms with the book when I realized that it is a proven formula for making a rigorous project from start to finish. In defining the variables of that equation, we make it our own and I am sure that since I have not developed every aspect of a project on my own before, without that ready-made formula I would almost certainly forget to consider something important and just be generally lost.

That said, I have also been frustrated by where our class is going at the moment. We admittedly don’t have much time for discussion together and I am disappointed that of late most of that precious time has been squandered trying to make light of topics that we as fifth year students should be able to speak about without having the words dragged out of us.

Speaking from my own experience as Jonas Coersmeier’s TA, I would spend 2-3 hours every Sunday and Wednesday night talking with the students about their projects and it took a tremendous amount of energy for me to be able to do that, remaining supportive, clear, intelligent, and aware of their projects and capabilities. It took even more energy when I spoke with students who were less able to communicate or were producing less. Consequently, I have a lot of empathy towards our professors and I think we owe it to them to be as clear as we can about what we are doing. That said, I am not trying to suck up to our professors, I’m just trying to say that through my own experiences I cannot take a position against their demands, which are not unreasonable, and retain my humanity. They can give us much better criticism when their energy is not wasted simply on trying to understand the work. Speaking for myself, I am not proud when I feel that I have not done enough work to have a productive class.

I know and respect all of you as colleagues and I know you are capable of doing good work. I have seen it before. I want to know what your ideas are, but I am frustrated because, to be blunt, most of the time, I do not understand the ethereal “false poetic language” that many of you speak. Please let me understand your work. Everyone should read and reread, Bachelard’s introduction to “The Poetics of Space.” Read it with a dictionary and look up every single word if need be. Bachelard’s work is a philosophical work, not a novel. It calls for a complete objective understanding of the author’s idea, first. Only then can we be critical of it and begin to make our own interpretations. Maybe some of you won’t agree with Bachelard, but I think his definition of poetics is pretty good.

Okay. I am done. Thesis means a lot to me and I spent a lot of time writing this because I care. Our group has so much potential and it would be really sad if we weren’t all still together next semester.