Winter term wrap up

The winter term is officially over. Kate and I celebrated by spending the day up at Willamette Pass skiing with a pair of bald eagles in 50-degree weather. It was a relaxing reminder of why we moved out here. The term itself was another whirlwind, but one that taught me a lot about what I have learned here, what I want to be learning over the next year and a half and what I think I can contribute to the world as an architect. Yes - after seven terms I can finally see myself becoming an architect, maybe. 

A big part of this term was a studio project for designBridge, the community design/build organization I have been working with since the Fall of 2008. The winter term design studio is the middle installment of the "designBridge year", an academic year of three classes dedicated to pre-design, design and construction of a real project. Our task since September has been to work with Camas Ridge Community School to design a bike shelter for the students and faculty. I wish I could explain all of the benefits I have experienced by working on this project, but it is too much for me to wrap my head around let alone communicate to anyone via blog. Instead I will show some pictures of the final review, and hope they can serve as cues to expressing the value of this term.

From dan gilman's photos

The photo above was taken at the end of the review. We are a team of four grad students and five undergraduates (not pictured is a grad student in the landscape architecture department).  An immediate component of any project is the number of people working on it.  Each individual brings different strengths, weaknesses, design styles, schedules and personal interests to the conversation. More people does not always mean more productivity. It was a learning experience in itself to try and understand how to get the most out of such a diverse group of students. I never would have been given the opportunity to manage so many people had it not been for this project. Even if I went straight into practice after graduation it would be years before I became a project manager. I have learned a lot about myself in this process and it has helped me understand what I need to work on before being in this position again.  From dan gilman's photos  This is a photo during our review. Pictured are several members of the team, a couple of professors from the University, an architect from Eugene and the head coordinator of Safe Routes to School Eugene. Another valuable lesson of this studio was the effort required to coordinate between all the different parties involved. The vast majority of my time was dedicated to communicating between the client (Camas Ridge), the city of Eugene, the school district architect, our professional mentors and the local architect volunteering his time for a separate project in development at the school, an outdoor classroom. The dynamic between our bike shelter and the outdoor classroom deserves an entire post of its own, but I will shorten it for everyone's sake. It was an interesting relationship because both projects have at one time or another been dependent on unconfirmed grant funding and both are being done by separate design parties. Early in the term we decided to move our site closer to the outdoor classroom and think of these projects as having the potential to create one large benefit to the school rather than two separate, smaller projects.   This resulted in some rather challenging design questions along the way:  1) The outdoor classroom is waiting for a grant so its future is uncertain. How do we design our bike shelter, in such close proximity to the proposed outdoor classroom, to function at its best with AND without the addition of the outdoor classroom? 2) The parents of the outdoor classroom have a rather specific idea in mind for the architectural language of their structure (shown below, a rendering generated by the architect volunteering his time to the outdoor classroom). It does not exactly mesh with our design interests, to say the least. How can we design our project to speak to this architecture without compromising the integrity of our own work?  A rendering of a separate project in close proximity to ours, the outdoor classroom by Pivot Architecture Images from final review  These two photos illustrate the final theme that jumps out about this term; the lessons learned working on a real project. The photo on the left shows a few people looking at our permit set, nine pages of architectural drawings to be handed over to the city for approval. A few members of our team worked extremely hard on this (not me). The night before our review I went over to FedEx to pick it up and it was quite a unique feeling to see all our hard work over the term summed up in a nine-page, 22" x 34" document.  I don't know what felt more strange, picking up the permit set or seeing our full scale mock-up come to life (right photo). The full scale mock-up was a requirement for our studio final. We chose to build one end of one of the shelters and the planter/bench beneath it.  Never before had I designed something of this scale to then see it erected. I literally finished designing the planter on Thursday and the build team put it together over the weekend for our final review on Wednesday. I designed something and someone else built it. I actually felt like an architect. It was a bizarre feeling, one that is not often felt by students. It was a reminder of what I observed during the 2007 Solar Decathlon (website and inhabitat article). Those team leaders had such an obvious and admirable sense of pride for the house they had worked on over the previous two years. They put everything they had into the design and construction of their house, and this was the first time I felt that same connection to any of my work here.  Sketch models and our poster presentation from dan gilman's photos  Our presentation included the permit set, the mock-up, a poster and a really beautiful site model. It was all well received by the community in Lawrence Hall. We dropped the finished permit set off at the city on Friday and now we are gearing up for construction if all goes well at the permit office.