School: November 2005 Archives

This is a week of crits. We had a bunch of architects and instructors in today to see our desk setups. Tomorrow our instructor is going from desk to desk critiquing our work. Friday we have our "exit interviews." It's a paradoxical mix of rushing to get work done -- we can work between crits to adapt our designs to the feedback -- and sitting and waiting or listening to somebody rip your work to shreds.

Here's my desk this afternoon:

I finished off the site model with a couple of little massing models. They're pretty rough, but I just wanted to show relative size.

Tomorrow afternoon, a half dozen architects descend on my studio to discuss what I've been doing all quarter.

Tonight, I stayed late and managed to bruise two fingers making this (the glue and the bottle of mini-bungie cords are holding it while the glue sets):

It's a 1/32" scale topographic model of my site with the plan drawn on it. Tomorrow I will drop in some small cardboard massing models where the two buildings are on the site, but the bruising on my fingers is bad enough that now I need to give them a rest from cutting board. And some sleep would be nice, too.

I have a set of technical pens, Rapiographs, and they are the biggest whiney babies of the pen world, I swear to god. Today, as I'm drawing details onto my final studio drawings, they are cloggy and spitty, and my hands are covered in black ink. I do need to give them another go through the ultrasonic cleaner, but I think some of the finer nibs need to be replaced, especially the one in which I made the collosal mistake of using white ink -- official Rapidograph ink, but it turned out to be cloggier than the fine black ink that's the standard.

I'm on the edge of just trashing the set and replacing them with Rapidoliners, which are the same basic thing but with disposable ink cartridges that incorporate the nibs, so every time you refill you get a fresh, unclogged nib. I am about to walk up to the campus store and see if they have anything in a double-ought (0.30mm for you metric types) technical pen for a reasonable amount, because mine just, well, blew up. I wonder if you get a discount for coming in covered head to toe in India ink.

Also in the misbehaving studio supplies this year are the metal 18" ruler with cork backing that has been shedding the cork backing despite repeated re-gluings, and the 36" metal straightedge that... well, who knows what happened to it, but it is no longer in my bin of rulers, nor is it anywhere in the studio, so all I can imagine is that it has made its escape after years of putting up with me using it to knock objects off high shelves. Oh, yeah, and the parallel rule for my drawing board (which, admittedly, I never use any more) snapped a connector and is no longer parallel. I'm trying to decide if the repair is worth it.

Of course, everything has to break or need maintenance right when we're 24 hours from deadline in studio.

This weekend the Cal Poly AIAS took a field trip to San Francisco. I joined them for part of it, because I didn't see any point to going to hang out at Fisherman's Wharf but there were two firm tours and a visit to the De Young on the agenda that I was interested in.

The rebuild De Young museum is nice, but clearly needed more thought given to circulation and usability. You enter a courtyard, and when you get to the door you realize there is a ribboned-off passage to your right, so you have to leave and come back in. Then you get in the door and there are ticket counters to your right, where you stand in line again (no ribbons this time), then there are stands at the entrances to the exhibits that say, "Ticket Check Point," and a lot of people seemed not to understand that they didn't need a special ticket to enter there.

The collection is OK. Not all great but some nice pieces. The museum itself was more interesting, but only in the sense that I found it a good study in how not to make space easy to understand.

I've been filling up my sketchbook with little tiny sketches to get my mind around my design project. The basic shape is good, but a lot of little details in the connections are weird and confusing. I was unsure until last Friday about just how wide this building was going to end up being.

So I have a lot of this:

I also threw together a quick slice model on Monday, to get a better understanding of my roof slope. It doesn't look half bad, and I've worked it out so the center hallway (what appears to be between two doors but actually is between two closets) has a tall ceiling, but not mine-shaft tall, while the rooms to the sides have a ceiling that comes down to a reasonable height.

Yes, I am a big fan of the scissor truss. They just seem lighter and more elegant than a plain old triangular roof truss.