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This Issue 11/01/2007

Also in this issue

• TXTual healing
• From the editor
• Mr. Squirrel's Dream Interpretations
• Defibrillator

Waiting outside an apartment just past 40th and Spruce streets, College senior Peter Logan looked like an indie version of Mad Max, with slim jeans and a black jacket festooned with zippers. It was a Saturday night in September and like most students who had ventured past the western edge of campus, Logan was dressed to party. But the event he was about to enter - an invitation-only gathering at 4047 Spruce - would turn out to be anything but your garden-variety, Natty Ice grind fest.

A friend ushered him in through the hallway to the living room, where fifteen or so students were spread about the dimly lit, blue-walled room. On one side a handful of undergrads sat on couches sipping Yuenglings and mixed drinks. Across the room another group clustered around a wobbly table.

At the table's center, a tower constructed of crisscrossed wooden Jenga pieces teetered on the verge of collapse. The skeletal structure was riddled with so many holes that every successive turn seemed to be its last. And yet, in seeming defiance of gravity, the rectangular blocks gutted from the edifice continued to collect at the top, and the spindly tower crept higher and higher.

The game concluded like all games of Jenga: with a measure of disappointment. Someone dragged their drink across the shaky table, causing the tower to buckle and topple, spilling pieces across the table and the floor.

As the night progressed, more guests filtered in. Logan, who had started a new game of Jenga, began to question whether it was possible to beat the game to the point "where you physically can't go any further." His preoccupation with structure continued as he proceeded to arrange the blocks to resemble Stonehenge. Nearby, three girls stood up and began dancing. Before long they sat back down, resigned that their attempts to liven up the atmosphere had failed. "You know why we can't get a party?" one dancer commented. "It's because we don't have ambience."

They had an excuse: most of the party's guests were architecture majors. And in the veiled world of undergraduate architecture, long work hours and insanely involved projects collide so that the spheres of academic and social life become one and the same.

Undergraduate architecture at Penn is as rigorous as math or physics. But instead of doing problem sets and taking the occasional exam, architecture students work on amassing a body of drawings and models that are evaluated at the end of the semester. The tasks range from constructing small containers and drawings to modeling landscapes and buildings. Given the specialized material and intense work hours that architecture projects require, the major creates a close-knit group of students - there are only a combined total of 58 junior and senior architecture majors at Penn - who straddle the line between strict pre-professionalism and full-on art school.