The competition deadline
for this China project is getting close. It will wrap up everything by the end
of this month. On yesterday’s meeting, we just received the checklist for all
the drawing materials we need to work on. It’s a full list of A4, single-spaced!
I love working on competitions if I’m not doing both school and work at the
same time. While interning full time in London ZHA, I was also fortunate enough
to participate in a competition. The pace of it excites and challenges every
cell of me, and brought me to another zone that I didn’t even know I’m capable
of doing.
Doing over 20 hours per
week on work could easily loose the equilibrium state between school and work.
Like life always is, it is easy to just dedicate to one thing, but very difficult
to balance work, life and ambition. What truly brings me a lot of pressure is
the balance between the amounts of work I were given in relation to my
perfectionist pursuit on the quality of work I want to deliver. Since English
is my second language, it takes me much more efforts to read, write, and
research. For the deliveries (either drawings, essays or presentations), if
they are a cup of water, I’ll have to prepare a bathtub of water in order to
fulfill my standard of quality on that cup of water.
Since the school could
easily takes up all my energy, I always hope that during the hours I could
work, I’m just making productions. Unfortunately, as a group, there are always
meetings to check-in and set up next goals when everyone is present. Thus,
during the hours I could dedicate to work, most of the times are the meetings.
Which also means, in order to have stuff to present during the meeting, I’ll
have to work after hours. It is such a struggle for me for the time after work
since there are both loads of school and work, but I already exhausted from the
day.
For this competition,
I’m in charge of a hotel room design, both layout and 3D. Deliveries including
renderings (with material and light PS-ed), and line works that demonstrate the
spatial organization. In addition, there are also final PS work of elevation
and some renderings. All of the work I was assigned are the fun parts. The only
issue is the time!
The good thing about
making my own design projects in school is that, the product only has one language
through out, and could easily being seen as a whole piece. During work,
especially in big firms, there are multiple hierarchies, a design could easily pile up different
languages. Till the end, it is very hard to connect all these languages together.
Of course it is great to hear so many different voices on how their perception
of the design is, and I learn a lot from the critiques.
My original idea on
designing this specific hotel room is everything can flow as one piece: There
are rhythms of emergence out of the wall and become the functional elements,
such as the desk and shelves; bed could also flow and slowly become a sofa;
Lighting, ceiling, and floor pattern help tight up all these elements as a
whole, and at the same time they echoes with each other.
I guess the process of
finding connections, as well as making subtractions between different languages
generated by different voices is the crucial challenge for the early stages of
working.
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