it all started beginning of july with lorenzo, in his car on the way from milano centrale to niguardia. "there's this housing competition organized by the city of milan - you should join... but hurry up, deadline is september 12th."
then some weeks later, the information package arrived... someday somewhere architecture officially born.
what started out as an innocent design exercise of a lone urban designer, finally turned into a collective adventure with international dimensions. as it is kind of hard to have a post delivery drink together, the least I can do is introduce you guys to each other...
according to the rule, a samurai takes any kind of decision in seven breaths - "to be able to break through to the other side"... for faramarz, it hardly took one breath to decide to embark on a last minute flight to milan and deliver the boards in person (and what a person)... he left with a cd and some documents on saturday afternoon, and delivered two boards, the report in triplicate and a stack of papers to the italian bureaucracy, well in time on monday. right now he's chilling in zurich (well deserved).
urs, the invisible force behind fara's european adventure. he offered fara shelter and red wine in stormy lugano, helped plotting and mounting the boards, drove all the way to milano, and inevitably took his share of delivery stress. thanks urs!
when corey decided to drop out ten days before the deadline (and I hesitated a while whether to go ahead or not), suddenly everything pointed in the direction of nathalie. through a faramarz/margery human resources campaign, she was aboard just a day later, working full force on the 2d drawings, bound to finish them, with a steady hand and restless mind. instantly and very fluently, nathalie became a big part of the project. in the week that followed, one of those great collaborations unfolded.
gounaud rendered both sections, on two late night sessions, whether nathalie begged for it or not.
dida offered her midtown office as a cozy and efficient new york home base for someday somewhere. connections to the world, a superb music collection, a professional printer, a fuzzy couch for scattered power naps, and daily delivery of zabar's delicacies, supplying essential doses of vitamins and carbs. during the last week, dida dealt with fishy DHL policies and organized fara's trip.
all this, only the visible tip of dida's iceberg of support and comforting omnipresence...
esteban assisted rod at the panama city branch office. sleep deprived by his thesis project, still very helpful on the 3d modeling of the quirky west facades of the tower.
matteo equally took some time from the last stretch of his doctorate's thesis for translating a bunch of paragraphs into italian, most of which on a page that didn't make the final cut - scusa matte...
monica knows how stuff is actually built (in europe), so it was great to have her around in the initial design phase for feedback and ideas on the architectural/technical side of the project.
fortunately with rodrigo little explanation needs to be exchanged for efficient results ('ghosting cutaway isometrics' included), because this time he was joining in from a couple of thousand miles away. thanks to skype, we could exchange files and feedback swiftly, along with a healthy dose of smalltalk, from panama to new york and back. huge buddy crafting cute line drawings. rod also delivered the cost estimate, and a freestyle bio of someday somewhere architecture, calling us 'an international consortium', only after ethymological research though - "we're not lying"...
cristina, just days after returning from her honeymoon in the caribbean, joined in as a dedicated translator, enthousiastic as ever. and is unselfconsciously responsible for the name of our consortium.
umba - paper capagruppo - was there from the very beginning, with a crucial site visit, until the very end, when I fished her last piece of translated text out of my mailbox, just a couple of hours before fara's plane took off.
voilà.
the last week of the work - the rush to get the ideas presented decently - ended up being as brutal as any other charette. maybe worse, I was wondering with nathalie on a late night session. but it was great to share the project in all its angles with you guys - it definitely keeps the lone urban designer going... and this world wide consortium poses an interesting precedent, if you ask me. skype is a winner.
in the initial phase, still on my own and regarding chances to win as microscopical anyhow, I decided to go ahead with a more unorthodox neighborhood layout. as much as I believe that our scheme with private gardens offers a valid alternative to the tower-in-the-park competition outline, I realize at the same time how much it further reduces our chances.
enough disclaimed - announcement of the winners is scheduled for coming saturday, september 24th, at 12:00 in the urban center in milan. curious to see what others came up with...
