Greg’s Senior Exhibit Journals
January 23rd, 2008
For the first few weeks, I was trying to figure out what I could do. The thing I always thought about was being this program called Revit for architectural drafting. Another thing I have always liked is cooking, not like making soufflés and brisket but desserts specifically. In effect, another idea was to do some kind of cooking thing and do some kind of cooking related process but I don’t think that would be challenging enough. Both ideas would e very fun for me and I am still having trouble choosing between them. I asked Mrs. Blashford to be my mentor because well, she’s already my advisor and I feel like she pushed me to do better through AP World History. I’m hoping that this all goes over well, but the presentation factor is already freaking me out and the finding the summer learning process is already a problem for the Revit idea (although I have found a few options). I just want to do something enjoyable.
February 7th, 2008
So I have definitely decided to do Revit as my senior project and I found someone who could help me learn this. Her name is Heather Voorhaar and she is one of my dad’s associates who just moved to
February 17th, 2008
I have now taken an initiative and realized that I need to begin learning this as soon as possible. I have done a couple tutorials and even started on my first Revit design. I definitely want to do something to design for the school because of all this talk of a new Gym and the furthering of all the plans to make a new building for arts and what not. I am now working with Heather, an architectural book, and Revit education book. I think this might also be hard because of all this school work we have been given. If I am going to learn this, I need to start as soon as possible and school is really slowing me down. It just another thing I hate about all the work they give us. I just read Mrs. Aldrow’s email and saw that I need to meet with Mrs. Blashford after winter break which I think is in two weeks and I’m not sure what we are really supposed to talk about but I will deal with it later. Onward Ho I guess.
March 12th, 2008
There are absolutely no updates to be given this week. I have not changed any ideas nor have I changed any future plans. The only thing that might be remotely different is that I have an urge to build a real life model of the idea I came up with on Revit last month. I hope to be able to simulate it in real life but I have a while until I’m going to have time. So, for these two weeks, Greg signing out.
March 29th, 2008
Once again not much to talk about this week. The woman I was going to take a class with (which turned out to cost 600$ a day) was trying to contact me about a “flex time” class. The class is essentially just a phone tech support so all I can actually do is call with questions. I don’t know if it’s worth the money (although I don’t know the actual cost at this point), but she seems determined to enroll me in one of these classes. I don’t know if I will pay for the tech support, but the choice will later come
April 8th, 2008
There really once again is not much to say, I have some offers from another person in the architecture field to help me with this program, but because of the SCA not responding to me I really cant plan out anything for summer activities until I hear from them. Oh well I shall see. I’m just extremely angry with SCA because all my crew members from the past summer have gotten their positions in cool places like
April 23, 2008
Still waiting is the theme of my life right now and I hate it. I guess my main goal is to not complain because I’m still waiting for SCA to respond gosh dang it! I want to badly to understand this program and it’s been so long since I’ve used it. This project is starting to get intimidating and I do not like that. Too much going on in my school life right now but hey I’ll deal with it. Iris Medlen in the one who originally tried to make a deal with me at the
May 10th, 2008
Nothing new has really occurred, I am still trying to figure out what is going to be my learning process this summer. There is the demo-session at my dad’s office but I don’t know if that is going to interfere with school. School is all I’m trying to figure out right now. To much is going on with all these crappy English projects. We shall see.
May 28th, 2008
At this point, I have a class with Ellerbe Becket, my dad’s firm who are inundating the program. It will be on June 12-June 14, obviously a three day course. It’s the beginner demo so hopefully it will be very helpful for my level. I have used it before obviously but in many attempts its just impossible to do on my own despite the help books. I wonder now if this is even a feasible project to attempt but at the same time, I am going to try really hard to get this done. I have Revit 8 right now but I think I need to reserve a copy of Revit 9 before the class. I need to see if I can even get it in the first place. Also these senior journals are starting to get repetitive. I wish I only had to do one journal per month. Just a suggestion for whoever reads this.
June 12th, 2008
I write this from my chair in the Ellerbe Becket Office, in a corner office in fact. Essentially I am learning a lot about this program, its faults as new technology, its limits, its advantages, the basic concepts, and step by step creating a “craptastic” building in the process. What I have come to understand from our Avatech instructor is that this program is a complete wipe of the old technology, AutoCAD. While its essentially a data base of premade drafting components rather than the manual draw everything line-by-line concept of AutoCAD, I now know that it really is a difficult at my level to make a free-form building rather than a boxy standard tower. I am afraid to understand that this technology is just not there yet. Yes it is hugely helpful on the small things, but when you come to the point where you must design an abnormal shape and snap walls to it, things are super limited. It is carless when it comes to perfection, and it assumes that others will clean up it’s mess later. My only issue is that these things are hard to compare to AutoCAD, because im the only one of fourteen that have never used it. Oh and P.S. the class goes from 8:15AM (I have to get up at 4:30AM to get here), to 4:00PM nonstop. So my butt hurts really badly from sitting eight hours straight plus the 3 hours it takes back and forth. I am effectively been sitting for about 12 hours a-day since Tuesday, but today is the last day Hooray! The people in the office are really helpful, and I can’t wait to put this to use and make it work.
June 26th
I have officially am done with the Revit classes but I feel like I haven’t progressed a whole bunch. They told me that the advanced class would be later in July so im looking forward to that making this more helpful. I started working on it and I have a few sketches done out. My first challenge should be room adjacencies as my dad warns me. I guess I have to wait to find out what’s going to be the hardest aspect.
July 10th
So the biggest challenge as I thought it was the room adjacencies. It’s so much harder than I thought it would be because of room functions. You have to place at least all the rooms connecting to the pool which means that everything has to be rung around that area and naturally the building becomes a box. I have taken like five tries at a complete form but every time a problem presents itself. I have all the spaces and I have a few new books about natatorium regulations. I have also compiled a bunch of pictures from architecture magazines to help me get inspired. I get the pictures from Architecture Review and a few other magazines from my dad’s office.
July 22nd
AT this point I have come together with a room adjacency plan and I can start building on my lines and concept of design. I started drafting the topographical map and putting the property lines in place. I also put the boundary and building pad. I could go on forever but I don’t think anyone is going to know what im talking about. This combined with summer work and reading is kind of a lot. I don’t know how im going to do this when school starts because it takes a lot of time to get done. I really hope that I am going to be able to render the model well on my computer (the process of creating a realistic view of the building from multiple stationary angles). Um Yeah…So I don’t want to bore the crap out of anyone but I guess its more fun for me. I just like the artistic process but I feel weird working on it around people because they wont understand what I’m doing. Not as though it’s a big deal but its always hard to explain to people exactly what they are looking at.
August 15th
So after being in
August 24th
I really have nothing to talk about at this point. Haven’t done anything with my senior project since I got home from
September 7th
For a while I haven’t really don’t anything with my senior exhibit. With all the school work I have had zero to no time. I literally have nothing to report and the new senior journal idea would make me look horrible because I haven’t don’t anything and I can’t fill up that much of a page.
January 28th, 2009
1) The Reason I chose this subject/Summer Activity (2 minutes)
2) The Process (24 minutes)
-Site Work (5 minutes)
-Positives and Negatives
-Environment (5 minutes)
-Positives and Negatives
-Floor Plan/Spaces (7 Minutes)
-Positives and Negatives
-Interactive
-Adjacencies or Circulations
-Ergonomics (7 Minutes)
-Positives and Negatives
-Interactive
-Anything Ergonomically Specific
3) Final Model (4 Minutes)
-The physical representation, give people chance to look at it, ask questions etc.
I think my goal is to make a clean and smooth flow through plain info to interactive activities. That’s also another one of my goals; to make it an interactive presentation. I don’t want to bore people with plain info and I think that’s a good way of doing it. My next step is to figure out what those activities will be because they have to be only a short amount of time without losing meaning and that can be a problem. I’m sure ill figure it out though.
I’m currently laughing at my last post because my perspective on it has changed quite drastically. I’m still going with the Revit model and it is going slowly. I have serious concerns that I am going to run out of time because I’m now considering a physical model and that my focus might change but I am yet to figure it out. So far the drafting process is limited to the shaping of the pool area and the floor print in general. I am angry because one of the parameters of the locker rooms in showers and I completely forgot to put in a space for them and situating around spaces is not going to be forgiving.
Mr. Dawson had said when I interviewed him that the natatorium should not be drastically different from the other buildings and it should carry the same design theme as the upper school. What I need to do is take picture of the masonry in the high school, metal columns, the mullion patterns (the things that crisscross windows and hold in the glass) in the large windows, and the wrap around patterns in the masonry (there’s a word for it but I’m totally forgetting it). I did some searching on the web for some sites that I could get premade models for the revit drafting and I found a good site called Revitcity.com. Essentially the program is based around premade models all meshing together through parameters and a database. Say you wanted to put an aluminum chair into your model. Older programs required you to draw it in a 3-d spectrum line by line but with the new Revit software, the creators of the program have premade chair models that are found commonly in the architectural field. You can also go to that website and find a model that others have uploaded to the website. For example, I needed a sliding counter door for the concessions area and Revit did not have a premade model for one. So I went onto the website and found a model someone had made using the families function of Revit (which is way to complicated for me to use) of the exact door I needed. Its intent is to be a quick way to draft something however I have found that the makers of Revit cannot have everything predrafted and sometimes that website doesn’t have everything. Their solution to that is the family function but as I said before its really complicated. Essentially what you do is create say a model of a window to use as a base. So you have to code it somehow so the program recognizes which parts are the height, width, depth, etc. The point is to make it so that if you want to change the window height every other aspect of that window will be altered to compensate for those changes. So if I changed the height from 4 feet to 10 feet the number of mullions between the window panes will increase as well in order to stabilize the structure of the window. If you ask me that’s just a complicate task that I don’t have time for so that website is really a great help. So long for this time.
January 5th, 2009
So recently my Revit subscription ran out which was a nice surprise during my Christmas vacation. Soooooooooo all I can do now is look at my Revit file but I can save any changes that I make and I really don’t think it’s worth another $300 to subscribe again. It’s majorly disheartening but it does present the possibility to change the focus of my project. I emailed Mr. Eckerson and told him that I will shift the focus from Revit to just designing a building in general. That way I can do a physical and digital rendering of my model for the natatorium. So for the digital part I plan on using Google Sketchup which I have played around with since the seventh grade and it’s just something that is a very familiar program. That way the digital part can be drafted in a matter of weeks (unfortunately Revit did not achieve its goal of being time saving). For the physical model I am looking at a catalog for a company called Utrecht up in Washington. Apparently it’s the place that all the colleges order their art supplies from.
I haven’t got to much to talk about but rather just a bunch of plans for the next few weeks. I have a new presentation idea. I think I have to make my presentation super interactive or else people will be bored out of their minds. I want to come up with at least three games that people can to for a minute or two. I’m not sure what they would involve quite yet but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe it could involve the adjacencies because that’s the only thing that springs to mind. I’m sure I will come up with something.
Now that I’m sitting down I just realized I have absolutely nothing planned for the written document. An easy solution would be a step by step guide to designing a building with each thought and how I handled it. However would anyone actually want to read that? Its frustrating because I’m directing my focus all on the model right now and everything else involved with this senior exhibit is just getting pushed aside. It makes sense though because if I don’t finish this I will have nothing and its really getting down to crunch time. I wonder if anyone else is so burned out about this right now. As much as I appreciate the opportunities this project provides I think we kind of got the short end of a stick with this whole transition from this year to next year’s drastically different senior exhibit. Not that that’s Mr. Eckerson’s fault or anything because anyone could have been put in his position and they would have no control of it. It’s just kind of draining and seems like a project that’s not really part of our school anymore. Even on the day of the presentations last year it was like, oh good luck but I mean it’s not a big deal. Haha I should stop complaining and actually do work. Long way to go.
Since the last post I now have an idea for the written document which would just be a mild summary of my why I chose to design the building the way that I did. The four presentation categories were site work, environment, spaces, and ergonomics. I would use that order in my written document as well. I don’t think it’s worth getting specific about what those include at the moment however I will when it comes to doing the written document. I need to get the model done though. I can’t wait until we have a week where we just do practically nothing so I can have some free time for once. All I have left is interiors and that might be pretty monotonous but it needs to get done.
Today we got the sheet with the rehearsal stuff and all the names with the outlines and what not. It made me get all excited and now I just want to get my presentation done so I can give it and be like ah here it is do you like? I don’t know but it’s just one of those times when you hope the end product will be as much as the work I put into it. Also since the last blog entry I got that little activity together and had my senior exhibit class do it and it seemed to be quick and effective in its point. With the advice of Mr. Eckerson I have also trimmed it down from three activities to just two so that they don’t take up too much time and I can get the rest of the information across. I don’t think that will sabotage any interactive qualities of the presentation. I still need to figure out what the point of the second activity would be and I think it should be something with ergonomics. For some reason the example that keeps coming to mind if why a door knob is at the height that it is on a door and also why halls are a certain width or door openings so tall. It should be that hard to think of something but then again I have been thinking about it for a while none the less. Weird.
I also need to decide whether or not limit my presentation to the building I have designed or with other aspects of architecture. I mean I will probably us pictures of other architecture to create comparisons and what not. But mainly I mean talk about architecture in general. I am heavily leaning towards just focusing on my building and I feel like that should be an obvious choice but the title of my senior exhibit is making me ponder the possibility. Actually yah know what, I am deciding now that it will just focus on my building in specific. Woo!
It is weird that the presentations are approaching this close because I feel like I haven’t thought about the actual presentation and hammered anything down indefinitely. I think I have been too worried with the actual model itself to think about actually presenting it. I have also thought about what Nicholas is doing and I wonder how similar my plan is to his. I think I need to be careful though because if I see his I might get his design in my mind and copy something unintentionally. I don’t know, that’s just one of those things that get caught in my mind.
April 18th, 2009
I have finally finished my rendering which I am SOOOOO happy about. Now I need to figure out what exactly my presentation will involve. I plan on taking a bunch of screen shots and incorporating them into the power point presentation. My rehearsal is on Tuesday and I think I just need to put up a PowerPoint and bring in a couple of book like my graphics standards manual and my inspiration binder thing. I also need to make sure that I have my activity ready for the presentation. I did a few practice runs and my presentation came out as exactly 30 minutes which was a huge convenience. My biggest concern will be to talk slowly, explain any terms that a common person would not understand, and to make fluid transitions from topic to topic. Honestly I am not too worried though because I’ve done 30 minute presentations on things I know less about. After seeing other senior exhibit presentations I just feel like I have to live up to some standards of excellence here.
I have not met with Mrs. Blashford in a while but I did show her my model a long whole ago and she really appreciated it which was fun to see. I am looking forward to what people think of it. I’m not sure if that’s just having worked so hard and wanting congratulations. I guess that’s kind of pompous but I guess that shows I will enjoy doing this kind of work in architecture school. Part of me says that I am not as prepared as I think I am for college in terms of the experience other students have had in architecture but I feel that this has helped me some.
Mr. Eckerson told me my panel would have Mrs. Blashford and Mrs. Clark Evans on it at least but I do not know who the others will be if there are any. I need to make sure that the presentation is engaging enough for them to find interest in it. I just realized how choppy this journal entry is and I think it’s a clear indication that I am really nervous about this. Everything is scattered about in my room and I need to compile everything for Tuesday. This clearly could take up hours of my day haha but it shall not break my spirit.
Once my rehearsal and presentation are complete then I will be able to write my final journal and my year will end (except for AP exams of course ugh!). I cannot believe that this year is coming to an end right now. The final presentation marks the end of this process and to me I can’t wrap my head around it. BUT it is not over yet so I am going to finish checking over my PowerPoint which Microsoft word is insistent on capitalizing and also on the ‘m’ in Microsoft…yeah what no I was going to say that I need to go do another run through now so I can get on the fast track to being done. I CANT BELIEVE IM FINALLY DONE RENDERING AHHHH!
Why yes this is the day before our journals are due but this is a perfect time to write my final journal because everything is done at this point which I feel very weird writing. I went back and looked at my first journal that I wrote about picking a topic and I laughed how I was freaking out about the presentation already and could not find a learning activity. This whole process has really gone over very smoothly. I can’t say enough how much I have appreciated Mr. Eckerson and Mrs. Blashford’s help in this process. I think this was a difficult year just because the senior exhibit just started to go in a new direction and everything I’ve heard about it for next year seems so different. I wonder how people will change it up next year and make our school proud.
A while go maybe even a month I had my final presentation. It went very well despite the color problems we had with the projector, everything kept going red and green at first. All my judges and observers told me I did a great job which I feel like is kind of the standard procedure but I was happy with it overall. My activity went well and people seemed to be really engaged in the process. I was surprised when all the questions were directed at certain process in the design…process, when I figured that most would be silly ones like “what was your favorite part” or “what was hard”. I did get those questions asked to but I did end up finding those to be hard to answer. The other seniors in my presentation seemed very supportive of me which was greatly appreciated. However there was bad communication between me and my dad because he wanted to see the presentation and I was nervous he would make me nervous. Then I missed the senior exhibit reception which was the final public opportunity for me to show it to him I guess. Whatever though, I will show him eventually.
My written document was adapted from advice Mr. Eckerson gave me. He suggested that I do a piece about how I designed it from start to beginning. It came out to be seven pages which is short compared to the potential length it could take on. I think it’s unfortunate on one side because there is so much I could have said about this project when I didn’t get to. Some of it good, some of it not as positive. Writing it really gave me some perspective on what I had really accomplished. Of course I am proud and what not but now I can go back and look at it if I ever want to.
It is extremely weird as I have said before that this is coming to an end here. Tomorrow I will hand in the written document and officially it will be the end. I feel like it is a moment I should cry about however I don’t see myself doing that. I hope that everyone who has seen my project has enjoyed it because I loved doing it. Our school should really savor its senior exhibit program because it’s so unique and helps us discover out interests. While sometimes it is a pain in the ass, we all get through it and turning it in t the same time is like this unifying ceremony for everyone, or at least I feel like it is. For whoever reads this I am sure you are partly responsible for me accomplishing what I have so far and I hope you enjoyed it. I cannot thank you enough for helping me and I honestly don’t know what to say. I have always been afraid to really apply this to my life and realize there is life past high school. As my senior quote says, a ship is safe in its harbor, but that is not what it was built for.
