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China / Travel — Comments Off on Studio-ing
27
Jun 08

Studio-ing

Now to focus on the work at hand.

Our studio work is going well. Our team includes three MIT students and two Tsinghua students, consisting of a South African, Australian, two Chinese students and an American. Luckily we work well together and are able to produce a large amount of work in fairly short time. The studio project is the redevelopment of a giant state-owned steel mill and industrial site on the Western edge of Beijing. This week’s work was focused primarily on the conceptual framework and overall planning of the project. We gave team presentations on Tuesday and Friday, worked pretty hard and the work was reasonably well received. On Friday we finished our presentations, went to the hotel packed a bag, took an overnight train to Xi’an and were visiting the famed Terracotta Army before we knew what had happened.

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China / Travel — Comments Off on Begin Studio
20
Jun 08

Begin Studio

Friday, June 20th On Monday we arrived in Beijing, got settled into our hotel, rented bicycles and formed teams. We were introduced to the project with a lecture and had a welcome banquet dinner with the Tsinghua students and faculty.

On Tuesday we woke early and went to the site of the studio investigation. The site is a gigantic and functioning steel mill that will soon be relocated and the site redeveloped in some manner. We toured the plant, site and did a brief site analysis survey and returned to campus by early evening. We then did some work and got organized for more work.

Wednesday, the first day of studio work. A decent working day, interspresed with meals including a visit to Tsinghua’s largest dining hall. Quite large for a 20,000 student undergrad population.

Thursday, the second day of studio work. More intensive working day with shorter, but delicious meals interrupting a study stream of productivity. Incidentally, we have ventured outside the walls of our protective bucolic campus only three times. We must improve that statistic.

Friday, busy work morning preparing for our first formal team presentation. Findings of site analysis and preliminary proposals. It went well. All teams produced a ridiculous amount of work for 2.5 days.

Starting with this blog post, we now have a weekend of a bit of free time. Tonight we’ll all have a relaxing dinner and then do some Beijing touring over the weekend. The next studio assignment goes out tomorrow.

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