Ok. Change in direction.
We're going to backtrack a little. What we've done so far with the planning has been really helpful in giving us an idea of how much space some of these areas are going to take up, but somehow, we managed to skip an important step...massing.
So, what we're going to start doing is moving away from individual rooms and back to whole spaces, i.e. dialogic labs, lobby, etc. And I think that by doing this, we'll be able to concretize our main organizing aspects, i.e. ramp, light wells - elements that we really want to put in our building. Since we know that these are things that we want, I think it will be a wise move to go back and put these exactly where we want them and let them be the guiding influences of our (later) planning.

I keep trying to play w/the digital media to accomplish what I'm trying to do, but I think that now I'm going to go back to old fashioned modeling. Whenever I do that 3D stuff on the computer, I ultimately spend more time trying to figure out how to do something than actually doing it. So that's what's on the agenda for tonight.

While we missed a lot of work last week due to a project due in another class, Jake and I have kind of divided our efforts, trying to be a little more productive. Jake has done more planning, and I've been sticking to working out our performance criteria. Then we come together to talk about what we've been doing and to comment. And you can see pictures of our final performance criteria proposal in the "pics" link above.

Last night, though, I started trying to re-orient myself in the planning concepts. Jake has been doing a lot of autocad work, and I thought that I could use sketchup to start to get an understanding of the space that we think we'll be dealing with. I drew up a column grid with some floor planes and started trying to place light wells where we've been putting them so far.

But from here on out, we're going to put away the Performance Criteria and work predominantly on the physical building. There are still a few small things that we know we need to do on our "box," but we're ready to start making some definite moves with the building and may give the box one last tweak in the weeks to come.

10.22.03

8.30am - 11.30am
Planning of Dialogic Lab "Pods"

1.00pm - 5.00om
More Planning

1:00pm - 4:00pm
Apparent Space Revisions

8:00pm - 12:30am
Started trying to lay out spaces for the Dialogic "labs"

10.20.03

9:30am - 11:30am
Apparent Space Revisions

3:00-5:00
Apparent Space Revisions

12:00am - 1:00am
Apparent Space Revisions

10.13.03

Before we left for our field trip, Jake and I took a trip to the site to make our own observations. We took some pictures, did some sketches, and hung out for a while talking about some of the issues we felt were pertinent to our building and its position in the site. (Pictures will be posted soon...)

We also met again yesterday (10.12) to do some scheduling and to refresh our memories on some of the things we'd talked about before heading to L.A.

We got together this morning after having looked back over our Environmental Design research, so that we could work some more on our apparent space sections that we'd started while we were at the site last week. We made some pretty good progress with them (I think), and Jake was going to take our sketches and try to put them into the computer in 3-D!

I will hopefully start putting together some elevation configurations to get us started, but if not, then we'll start working on that tomorrow.

9.1.03 - 10.2.o3
Just an update on the past week, and I'll be more consistent about writing soon...

Since Monday, while Jake has worked on this website, I've been researching Sustainability pretty extensively. This is such a huge field, and I thought that since it's been 3 years now since we took Passive Building Systems, that I would give myself a refresher course and spent a lot of time looking at the broad categories of Sustainability, i.e. solar power, hydrothermal power, etc.

Then, starting on Wednesday, October 1, Jake and I both moved on and began looking at the issues that we'll be encountering with "Universal Design." We're working with other people in studio because the field is so broad. Jake has done a lot of research about handicapped and elderly/aging people, while I'm trying to concentrate more on gender and racial issues. So far, information about regarding gender issues has been fairly abundant, while the racial arena is proving to be a little more difficult. Sirobe and I have e-mailed Rachel McCann, hoping that she might be able to give us some leads regarding African American architects and architecture.

That's all for now. We'll be doing some site work tomorrow...