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NEWS - WEBSITE 3.0 IS COMING - 14JUN2010 |
Today - NYC
Monday - Bill McDonough in Charlottesville, VA
Wednesday/Thursday - Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) interviews in San Diego, CA
Friday - Mike Reynolds at an Earthship in Taos, NM
Sunday - Home
Follow our twitter account for roadside entertainment. May even try to get ustream working via the phone.
And away we go!
David, Sam and I will be jumping into a car in a few hours to head down to Charleston, SC for the wedding of a close friend. We’ll be back next week to continue posting and to also announce a bomb of a secret. Hint, it involved some mega interviewees and a massive road trip.
Till then, we all hope to make it back in one piece… the Palmetto state awaits! Hopefully some roadside boiled peanuts do to.
Yesterday, December 7th marked the one year anniversary when David and I finally drove our big white rental minivan up to the steps of Pratt’s Architecture School and began to unload our equipment into the chair’s office after crossing 4,000 miles of the country. When the car finally stopped in front of the building, two cold guys stepped out to be greeted by a man saying “you must be the filmmakers from California.” We were startled from his response and quickly figured out he had been notified by a friend of his and recent attendee of our SF Going Away Party about our pending arrival. Due to our frigid reaction to the below freezing temperatures, lack of proper clothing and California license plate the man knew we were the ones. That was the moment we met Pratt professor and Architect Newspaper co-founder/editor Bill Menking. That was one year since production began and our New York lives started. You can jump back to that time to read some stories here.
Yesterday also marked the celebration of David’s Birthday. Many of our new New York friends and some old hometown friends found their way out to the East Village for a daunting pub crawl. We had to wait last year to David’s birthday to leave San Francisco in order to get the cheaper rental fees for turning 25. Amazing how quickly a year has passed but still more astonishing is how much has been accomplished.
- Sam (aka Archiculture Publicist) and David at the surprise bar
Needless to say another year has gone by in the making of Archiculture raising the grand total to 3. We can’t wait to share the studio story and our footage.
1:30AM Get home from server training, asleep by 2AM.
5:30AM Awake to phone alarm ringing from the dorm floor. It is dark outside.
6:00AM Leave with pre-packed equipment from office, no 6:15Am once we eat a toasted bagel each and check all equipment groggily.
6:45AM Walk in rain to subway in Brooklyn and arrive at Penn Station.
6:55AM Wait in the now heavy pouring rain for Bolt Bus.
10:00AM Sit/Sleep on Bus for 3 hours, stop once for pee, buy least fatty snack option of crackers and a pack of gum for stale sleep breadth.
11:30AM Awake at South Station in Downtown Boston to our first feeling of hot/humid weather this year, it is 84 degrees.
12:00PM Have a half hour to kill, so we grab food in Chinatown.
12:15PM Pick up our Zipcar from nearby garage.
1:00PM Arrive at Autodesk’s offices 17 miles outside of Boston. Pay $2.50 in tolls at $1.25 increments. Shoot a few minutes of the next archicast.
2:00PM Set up interview and discuss project with head PR guy.
3:00PM Interview Phil Bernstein who is the Vice Present of ACE at Autodesk and a professor at Yale. Key person to discuss the past/current/future use of technology within the studio and profession.
3:45PM Drive back 17miles to return Zipcar to parking lot a few blocks from South Station.
4:00PM Get stuck in torrential down pour in doorway to protect equipment.
4:15PM Arrive at South Station with an hour to kill before bus takes off. Finally find cheap non-fried food at Cajun, Cajun Restaurant in a side of Red Beans and Rice for $2.19. Sit next to doorway to train platforms watching Suited professionals run awkwardly to their commute. Discuss fundraising and lack of support.
5:30PM Back on the Bolt Bus at Gate 21.
10:00PM Arrive at Penn Station to a dry NYC after sleeping for 2 hours, writing, trying to sleep for another hour, studying new job’s menu and sketching concepts for a potential website/video gig.
11:00PM Arrive back at office from 17 hour day all for 30 minutes of interview which may end up being 30 seconds of the film and spending $140.
1:00AM post blog about it….
That’s right, I’m writing this post from the road. Free WiFi on the new Greyhound service between NYC and DC called the BoltBus makes it all possible. We got a little too busy meeting, interviewing and seeing a few old friends while we were in DC to post. So I thought it might be interesting to take advantage of this amazing mobile internet feature and write from the road. I’m somewhat obsessed with this new bus service and would strongly recommend it to anyone who is used to the Chinatown buses for their East Coast journeys. The buses are brand new, offer electrical sockets per seat, have wireless internet and a ticket could be bought for a dollar if purchased far enough in advance. We ended up spending $55 for two round trip tickets but the woman we waited in line with spent $2. That is insanely cheap! We discussed instead of looking for office space to rent for the project, turning the Bolt into our extremely inexpensive mobile-office for a few months… $2/day x 31days/month x 2 people = $124 dollars for monthly rent for a 2 person office space. It is as if the $4 per gallon gas price has not made it to Greyhound Corporate yet. Just another massive advantage of working along the East Coast is the extremely inexpensive and frequent options for distant transit.
Other commentary on the DC trip will be posted shortly along with other details of our Archiculture Campaign Tour.
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Writing from the road in New Hampshire. For our spring break we headed north into New England, where the remnants of winter are still packed high on the sides of the road. We are interviewing students in their hometowns and questioning their parents about their offspring. Yesterday was Central Valley, NY, today is Amherst, NH, and tomorrow is Connecticut with a brief pit stop in Boston tonight for St. Patty’s Day. Stories and photos will be up shortly.
This is our first blog entry from the other side of the country. We manage to cover 4,000 miles of road and 60 plus hours of driving. We made a few stops along the way including a quick jaunt into Austin, TX and New Orleans, LA. More importantly, we were able to squeeze in a meeting with our script writer, Eric Krantz and grabbed some coffee with a potential editor, Pierce Cook.
We are excited to be in New York and look forward to establishing new networks. Please bare with us as we get acclimated to our new surroundings and get our office up to working capacity.
