Presentations II

Well, it's all done folks, my time here is almost up. And now I've finished all of my classes for Spring 2009. For the last assignment, I put together a smattering of the research I've done on Medieval churches for a presentation, and we had a fairly informal jury review of our semester's work.

My presentation

I say 'fairly' informal because, to be fair, we didn't even know we were having reviews of any sort until the day before. We were all under the impression that we'd just have our work for the professors to look at -- not that we'd have to give a 15 minute presentation on it.

The look of panic

Basically what mine came down to -- and what a lot of people's came down to -- was a personal, independent study of something in Rome. We weren't trying to draw conclusions, or make any kind of statement about what we were doing. For the most part, we were just spending a lot of time looking at and drawing something we really liked. But suddenly, we had to give reasons, have intentions, and have some kind of important conclusion based upon what we studied. Which, you know, is tough if you were just drawing the Roman skyline, making a sectional cut through a street, or looking at church porticoes. Actually, John Mansour (the joker I did this project with) put it best when he, after being asked why he did his project, said, "I turned to Scott and said, 'You know, I'm going to draw this.' So I did." John's a simple man.

And this is not to say that this was a particularly stressful presentation. We've been having these for four years now, and we've gotten pretty good at winging it. And the feedback was really good. We had a visiting juror from the American Academy in Rome, who provided really great insights into Roman history and culture, and in general into the ideas behind architecture. We had a really great time, and it was really fun being able to see the culmination of everyone's work.