.ten.

this post will contain some pitures from a recent lecture i attended, at my alma mater. who says that nowadays? i guess i do! oh well, on to the real business. this recent lecture was actually more of a casual conversation among peers, i am speaking highly of myself, when i call myself a peer or Thom Mayne and Peter Cook! honestly, they developed their dialog that was very inviting and casual. not like a stuffy discussion that could have easily happened had this been USC of 10 years ago.



peter cook sketching on the chalkboard.



thom was off sketching somewhere.



casual discourse my favorite kind.

i am very glad the new dean is working hard at deveolping the lecture series which was severely lacking at my times at USC. the great parts of this discussion, to me, were the anecdotes. both peter cook and thom mayne have achieved great successes and they now seemed to talk as the teacher not the student. while they reminisced of the late 60's, the period of time which they attest to as the defining period of their careers. during the 60's they were the students, mayne more than cook. for both however they were exploring things that were not considered general architectural discourse at the time. i believe in the saying that one is always a student, and never done learning. i was describing this concept to my friend after the lecture. my friend, jennifer, who is in the begining stages of her research for thesis at SCI-ARC, was confiding in me that she felt like she was not as smart as some of her fellow students. (forgive me jen! for using you as an example). but i assured her as she has a few years in the architecture community, that she is not alone. i too, often feel behind in my knowledge of this profession, but as i told jen, there is much to learn and you cant learn it all in school. i feel like i was saying it more to myself than to my thesis crazy friend!

but as long as the effort and want to learn is there, then who is to say when the role of student is over.