Arriving on January 7th, the girls moved into Morrisette House while the boys divvied up the pods, and then everyone went to dinner at El Tenapa. The next day was the official kick-off for Rural Studio with symposium as a get to know you time. On Wednesday we visited the job site where we are reconstructing St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Old Cahawba, and Perry Lakes Park were we will be designing a kiosk and some signage. Thursday and Friday we participated in “neck down”, an activity in which no thinking is involved, merely physical labor. This consisted mostly of working with the superthesis on their projects and finishing out a pod for some of the second year guys.
Week 2 started out with a tour de Rural Studio. We saw about twenty five percent of the projects, and discussed the good and bad parts of each one, how they have changed Rural Studio, and how Rural Studio has changed the projects. On Tuesday, we went to the job site and began setting up scaffolding around the existing structure and began sorting out the original pieces of the church. We came up with our own system for sorting out these pieces so that we can see what needs to be fixed or replaced later on. Wednesday was our first official rain day, so we organized teams to work on the different major projects, and assigned rainy day tasks to each group. Then we went on another tour of projects, these being the lesser known, or more recent ones. Thursday we had our first meetings with our other classes. Dan’s class, Ways of Seeing, began with stretches and contour drawings. Then we had Materials and Methods with Dick, in which we took our first test. Finally we had Architecture History, again with Dick, where we looked at lots of slides of buildings with common elements, and then we went to sketch, and it was cold.