We’re about to tear down this old building. It’s a windowless cold storage facility, a giant drive-in refrigerator. 25 ft wide and nearly as tall. The interior is lit by metal-halide lights that buzz, loudly. The walls are constructed of 6” insulated panels, clad with sheet metal. The reverberations in the room are scary and endless. When you speak to someone 10 feet away from you, the flutter echo drowns out their response, warping words and decreasing conversation to a wavy mess of sound. Sounds stay way longer than they are welcome- a random “whoop” can hang out for minutes before it loses it’s noise and cedes the space to the hum of the lights.

Sara returned from travels in Europe and shared some of the architectural inspirations she found there. A specific area of her interest involved the traditional synagogue forms of London, as she visited and documented these sites. We discussed the specificity of Jewish architecture to the rituals practiced in the synagogue and the way in which the Synagogue architecture relates to the city through its external forms. We discussed the power of expressing continuity of religion through a shared spatial arrangement as a universal way to relate, globally, despite national or language barriers.

If you can correctly identify a problem, it's already a historical condition. Going beyond solutions, we have to envision the potential beauty of our design implications, how spaces will evolve and react to the environment over time. Speculative design should be an instigator, raising questions and creating a mirror-world to aid our thinking, an alternate reality that continues to influence our own.

Steve switched courses to talk about the different ways architecture is expressed in album art, from pure representation of buildings to graphics influenced by the process of creating architectural drawings and diagrams. Showing a series of album covers, with the accompanying music in the background, the group talked about the architectural significance of each image.

Emily baked bread with a recipe used in ancient Rome. We all ate the bread. The talk centered on 3 microscopic elements that fascinate her. . . Yeast, Slime-molds and bacteria.