As of Wednesday, studio is officially underway – the kids have cleaned up and reorganized the classroom, they are well underway with organizing all of the left over materials from the BEST project for delivery to the Rural Studio, they have their next project and they have their next reading. As if all that is not enough, we are going to try to get wikifish.org back up and running again, so that we can revisit the issues of studio culture and students rights. Right …

Because of our curriculum transition the Program of Architecture currently has a double handful of students participating in a wide variety of our off-campus “field Studies” programs. We have 15 students at the Urban Studio in Birmingham, 25 students out at the Rural Studio in West Alabama, 17 students in Rome, 15 students in Istanbul, and 16 students in Florence. Later this semester we will have another contingent of 18 more students depart for Rome, and later still 8 or 10 students make an extended two week …

The new semester is almost underway, but before we can begin we have to get the last one closed out. In the Fall the BEST project ran right up to the last day of finals, and after a full court press that lasted three days straight, we hauled everything out of the coliseum and back to Dudley Hall in the freezing cold rain. The students were real troopers, but pretty much at the end of their tether. Saturday night ended with basically jamming everything that would fit …

Each year the Auburn University College of Sciences and Mathematics (COSAM) and the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering host the “South’s BEST” (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) national robotics competition in the Beard-Eaves Memorial Coliseum. Every fall fifty or more teams of high school students from around the United States converge on Auburn for the annual competition, bringing with them bands, cheerleaders, dance teams, mascots, friends and family. All told, approximately 5000 people attend the event.

In 2002, we were invited by the co-directors of …