Previous entry:
Some Drawings

Next Entry:
New Knitting Needles

Home:
One Truth For All

Archives

• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• July 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
• April 2005
• March 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• April 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 1969

January 11, 2006

Class Report

I've got my school schedule all worked out now: 19 credits, which sounds like a lot but is actually a pretty workable load. Almost all my classes are Tuesday and Thursday, which sounds great until I tell you that they start at 7 in the morning and go until 9 at night. I get some decent breaks in there, but still.

My studio is doing a neat project this quarter: years ago the College of Architecture and Environmental Design put together a proposal for a Renewable Energy/Sustainable Design Research Center, but what with our budget being slashed into tiny pieces and the students even having to vote ourselves a special fee to ensure that there were enough classes that current students could graduate, it's been shelved. So we're going to use the proposal and the proposed site (on campus) and design it. This will allow me to develop an idea I have for modular plumbing (so you can easily switch out, say, experimental toilet designs). We got a glimpse of the program today, and we are starting our first exercise in the process.

Technorati Tags: drawings, floorplans, school

Also this quarter I'm taking my last engineering class: Large Scale Structures. So far class has been a fascinating series of lectures on the properties of concrete (OK, you may not think it is fascinating, but I do). The only real problem I have with that class is that the teacher's handouts use some of the densest, most confusing layouts I've ever seen. You really have to study them to make sure you didn't miss anything, because there is no hierarchy or organization.

On the technical side of things, we have Environmental Control Systems II, in which we have spent three lectures learning about light bulbs. Then we go on to electrical plans, mechanical systems, HVAC. I think I'm the only one really enjoying that lecture, too. In the lab for that class, we've done an energy audit, where we listed all the lights in an apartment and wrote a report on how much energy they were using. Was OK. Not as interesting as it might have been if I had never done that sort of thing before or even thought about electrical consumption.

Then I have Construction Contracts, about which all I can say is that I am really appreciating the Business Law class I took at College of Alameda two summers ago. Because if I had to try to make sense of what the teacher is saying without having a nice solid grounding in contracts, I would be so completely lost.

And then a fun class: Housing Design and Development. A lecture class about various forms that multi-family housing comes in, how it gets designed, how the development is financed, and how it can be used to build communities as well as basically warehousing people. We did a little design exercise the other day, where we were given a site (mine was a duplex on a 25-ft lot, so the inside space was 21-ft wide) and a list of rooms and minimum room sizes, and we had to design a building in 20 minutes. This is mine:

It's 2015 square feet (the average new house now is 6000, can you believe that? Our house in Alameda is about 2000) and has four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. One of the bedrooms has an en-suite ADA-compliant bathroom. And somehow, even though I HATE master bedroom suites, I managed to work one into there (we were required to or I would have just left it out). Overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

In that class we also get guest speakers to talk about various housing issues. It's really interesting to see what people think of as being important in housing, especially established architects. The guest last night was showing us a development he designed and he asked how many people in the room would want to live there (it was Modern Architecture, so maybe not everybody's cup of tea). I knew I wouldn't because none of the units had yards, so no garden, and no place for the dogs. But that never even occurred to him as a drawback. In fact, one of the things he touted was the lack of fenced in yards with dogs in them. Well, to each his own.

Anyway: this quarter looks to be interesting. Lots of making things, I think.

Posted by ayse on 01/11/06 at 8:22 PM