A lot has happened in my life in the last month or so. I’ve been to three different countries (Germany, Hungary, and Serbia) and finished one class (Human Response to Sound & Vibration) and one major project, which is the bulk of what I’m going to pontificate about today.
As I have mentioned in previous entries, my Room Acoustics class had the challenging task of designing a hypothetical opera house for a competition in Montreal. The two architecture students I was teamed up with produced the layout, CAD drawings, and renderings of the entire complex, while I focused primarily on the acoustical design and analysis of the various rooms. We spent the week leading up to the submission deadline completely engrossed in the project in the architecture studio since it was a re-exam week and we didn’t have any other scheduled classes or assignments. [Tangent: The idea of re-exams was novel to me when I first started studying at Chalmers. I personally don’t agree with the concept of a re-exam because I believe that it makes more sense to retake an entire course and not just the exam over and over again until a passing grade is achieved, but that could just be because I wasn’t used to this system before moving to Sweden. Regardless, I don’t plan on having to take a re-exam any time soon. I probably just cursed myself by writing that!] But anyway, despite spending the entire week working on the project, we still had to pull an all-nighter in the Architecture building the day before the project was due. Apparently this is a regular occurrence for a lot of architecture students around deadlines, but for me spending 30-some straight hours in the same building was a bizarre experience – fun and team building in some ways, yet hellishly exhausting and frustrating in others.
The war room for the week. Photo by Brett Seward.
