Paris, France

This was meant to be updated daily, but its been hard to find a decent internet connection long enough to get all m research finished and update this. I'll have to try harder.

So with one week down and four to go, I did some major work yesterday to figure out just what I am doing here. I decided that the best route for me is not to do a single report or research on one topic. So far, my experiences have been way too varied and chaotic to boil all my thoughts into one coherent topic. I decided I would be much better off coming up with a series of essays which are put into a single compilation which documents my travels and experiences, and hopefully with a singular architectural thread. So far I have come up with three or four different topics that can be expanded into essays, and today I spent some time riding the Metro and documenting some of the things I had seen earlier this week but had not had a chance to document. My "schedule" says that by today I should be writing an outline for just how I am going to pursuit the analysis of the candidate buildings I was also to have picked by today. Instead I have the bones of about four essays, and plenty of other documentation to back up my experiences. If this continues for another four weeks, I will be sitting quite well. The key now is consistency.

I am also waiting for a reply from my advisors, Profs. Ford, Kinnard, and Dripps. This is a rather strange deviation from my original proposal (though I've kept it as one of the essay topics) but whether this will fly with them has yet to be decided. However, I feel better about it, since my mind has already been stretching in several directions, and what's more, I have something to show for it already. The greater challenges lie in creating a thread that binds all of these essays together, and most importantly, how this fits in with any type of final project for my thesis. At the end of this I may have some "research" but more likely I will have several criticisms, cultural barometers, manifestos and interpretive zeitgeists that are all well and good, but don't get me any closer to a thesis topic.

Maybe that will come. I'm only 20% through this trip, so there is still much more time to figure out the common links, and how to turn this into more than a pretty paper.