You have a much better chance of winning the studio lottery than the 'actual lottery'


So technically I didn't win. Bernard Tschumi was my first choice (out of 17), but it is widely assumed that just about everybody puts him as their first choice. It's obligatory. You go to Columbia. Do your duty. take Tschumi.

So my actual, or 2nd choice was David Benjamin's studio. 2nd out of 17 isn't so bad, especially considering that I got my 3rd choice last semester (out of only 7). Nothing to complain about here.


It is a studio rooted in questions of technique, namely designing by interfacing Catia with several optimization software. Nobody in the studio knows Catia at this point so this could be painful.

The studio brief is for an airport in Mumbai, India. Just how we fit in the optimization is up to us. It could be anything from structure, to circulation, to optimal runway layouts to name a few. The software is not meant to do these things directly so a bulk of the challenge will be thinking up ways to 'trick' the software into performing the tests that we want it to.

On a more general level I was interested in the studio because it promises to be a forum for asking questions about the future role of computers to "give us the right answer." Not to say that design is something that really ever has a right answer, but that computers can play a role in testing within the constraints that we set as designers.

So for now I will be playing with Catia.