After taking a night off to give our minds and bodies a good rest, we reconvened in studio today to make a final decision. It was pretty evident that our decision had already been made for us based on the both constructive criticism and honest truths of each scheme given to us by the jurors. After much thought given to it the night before by each, we all agreed that Group 3’s scheme was the most realistic to be able to complete in the time given, the most design-build oriented, and also the most city approval-friendly of all. In my opinion, today’s meeting was more of a time for us to make sure everyone was on board with the design and to make plans to move forward.
Refresher: Group 3 presented us with a pattern of Jenga-style lit columns laid out in a sporadic, yet thoughtful grid pattern. The construction process would be simple and clean and also require very little hardware to assemble. Another plus is that all materials involved in the structure are either already available to us, or would be very easy to come by (scrap wood, cable, etc.). It’s obvious that this was the route to take, however, as stressed by the jurors – the design has a long was to come before it can be considered our final product.
We went on to discuss whether we should attempt to combine aspects of the other schemes with the one we decided on. To be quite honest, none of the four schemes presented were even remotely similar. I feel that if we chose to try to incorporate the others, we would be doing so for the wrong reasons, and in turn it would take away from the design and simplicity of it as a whole. We made a decision narrowing it down to one… now’s the time to move on and improve on this scheme, not try to bring the other three into it.
Tonight the goal set for all of us was to make this design our own and to start to impose each of our individual strengths on the design. With only tomorrow and the weekend left, tomorrow is going to be a crucial time in studio. We’ve got a lot of work and compromising ahead of us in the next 72 hours, but hopefully it will pay off, and come Monday, we’ll have one heck of a design to present to the Design Review Committee.