Amsterdam, A visit from the GSD, Midterms and a Third Birthday
The past two weeks have been rather eventful. We’ve had a spontaneous afternoon trip to the Amsterdam office to present our work to Rem, a visit from a GSD studio, our midterm presentations and a third birthday.
Two weeks ago, some of our studio went to Amsterdam with AMO to present some updates to our presentations. We stayed for dinner and then ventured out to explore Amsterdam for a bit before heading back to Rotterdam.
Earlier last week, we had a visit from a studio from the GSD. It was really lovely to see familiar faces again and hear about life back across the pond.
On Friday we then had our mid-term presentations. We each presented our topics and the research we had carried out up until then to a (rather large) group of critics. Our internal critics that day were Rem Koolhaas, Samir Bantal, Janna Bystrykh, and the rest of the AMO Team. Externally we had critics coming in from all over Europe: Niklas Maak, Federico Martelli, Stephan Petermann and Clemens Driessen. Initially Mark Lee, our chair, was also meant to visit from the GSD to facilitate an exchange with our peers at Gund, but last minutely, he was unfortunately not able to make it.
Being able to hear all the presentations in such detail and in close succession was really fascinating. It made apparent to us many of the links that exist across our topics, though they might appear rather separate at first. We wrapped up the presentations with our semiotics investigations from our workshop earlier this month. The same night we then celebrated our third birthday (Happy Birthday, Charlie!) with some celebratory post-mid-term drinks and food before beginning our weekend of some well-deserved rest.