Have you ever looked really hard at one of the numbered boxes on your calendar? That box represents the earth completing a 360-degree rotation and 584,000,000 miles travelled on its yearly revolution around the Sun. At the equator, the earth is spinning at 1,040 miles per hour. Even in the stillest moment, things are moving very quickly! In order to not get left behind, and to get the most out of each earth rotation, planning and scheduling can be invaluable tools.
In the scope of our semester, this is the point where we find ourselves; attempting to organize our time so that we can meet the deadline for our “Cropstop 2.0” project. We’re beginning with two weeks of research and revisions to fully understand our project in order to make informed design decisions. The next two weeks consist of regional design; developing design strategies for Cropstop success across the country. Next we have one week to nail down our specific Greenville Cropstop design. Once that’s complete, we’ll work in tandem with the Solar Decathlon project, helping them design and fabricate their “smart wall” system while also creating our construction documents for the Greenville Cropstop. We’ll spend the first two weeks of October mocking-up the structure with an experimental CNC plywood framing system developed for the Solar Decathlon project and making sure we understand all of the construction details. In the last half of October construction will ramp up as we fabricate as much as possible off-site in our shop facility, and then in the first week of November we’ll transition to on-site construction in Greenville.
Theoretically, this gives us the last month of the semester to complete and document the project. However, it is very likely that everything will not go according to plan, and we will improvise and adjust our schedule, and roll with the punches. What’s important is that the plan exists, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
The concept of the Cropstop itself is also driven by our inevitable relationship with time itself and this spinning dance between the sun and the earth. Plants grow from the daily sun’s rays. Crops go to feed children in our schools. These children are the future of humanity and our civilization. Lets use the Cropstop to get local, nutritious food to those who hold the future in their hands and their brains!