Architects

I've been going to a lot of architecture talks lately and I've noticed a few things.

1) They all have notebooks. Moleskin type things, smaller than a paperback size, i.e. "pocket size." And they are always sketching in them and then writing very neatly beside these sketches. On one hand, I think it would be cool to have one of these things to bring around and jot down notes or whatever that comes up. On the other hand, I'm no good at sketching and would just end up writing randomly all over the thing. And then probably abandon it after a couple of pages. Even though these Moleskins look sophisticated and all, I think I would rather have spiral bonded graph paper. I think people use Moleskins because they're nice paper to write on. I agree. But I like 8.5"x11" and I especially like spiral bonded notebooks.

2) The PowerPoints almost always have black backgrounds. And the pictures area always arranged very neatly. It's such a contrast to PowerPoints by engineers were the background is usually white or some Microsoft theme with some squares in the corner and pictures placed hapazardly. I think the black background thing is cool. Especially if you know you'll be in a dark room and your projector does it right and you end up with only your pictures on the screen. Ther are exceptions though. When I took 11.001, the TA was a landscape architect and his slides had a white background. To this day, I still don't know what was so special about his slides but they looked really, really nice. Professional, elegant, and simple.

Anyway, I'm starting to think structural engineering might not be as boring as I thought. It would be kind of cool to work on things that people see. I've been keeping an eye out for summer opportunities to work with structural engineers. Just to try it out.