Graduating Student, Melany Telleen
My thesis paper is on the Mona Bismarck house, which we, and by we I mean anyone presenting there later this semester or attending my defence, will all be very familiar with in the next few weeks. The title is :
Mona Bismarck American Center – Mona Bismarck American Center
https://www.monabismarck.org/about/mona-bismarck-american-center
Architecture, Decorative Arts and the Construction of Identity in Paris, 1956 – 1983.
In the 1950s, Mona took a (not particularly distinguished) late 19th century house and remodelled it to construct a frame for herself, utilising 18th century fragments of the aristocracy and 1930s attitude and luxe – layered on the 19th century and of course the 1950s – so it deals with all the layers and past lives of the house and how this all intersects with changes happening in the fields of decorating, collecting, and the way we look at ‘style.’ I was able to locate images of the original layout and earlier iterations of the paneling in other rooms, other houses, which I thought was really exciting.
Aside from working on my thesis, I am renewing my VISA, and still found time to buy a book titled,Making Dystopia. 500 pages of ‘modernism is an aberration, alien to history… a quasi-religious cult,’ so very different from my thesis.
If I have to leave those reading this with any advice, it would be advice I actually gained from others –
It isn’t a research paper. So stop. –
And – Write a chapter and leave it – you can go back later and fix it, just move on.