The cats are away, as the proverb goes… Tigers in this case. Both studio professors are involved in an academic conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, spreading the good news about what is being accomplished down here at the CAC.C and learning about pedagogy happening around the continent. This also means that we have no direct direction; the training wheels are completely off for the next few days and we have to manage ourselves and the project, alone. Many of our team members are going out of town for various reasons, and will have to work remotely. Also, we have an external deadline today for the City of Greenville. We need to have a completed mock-up and a set of Construction Documents by the time Professor Pastre returns. We need to order materials and hardware too.
Challenge accepted.
Herding cats, namely, Tigers, can be a challenge, but in the profession of architecture it quite often occurs when many moving parts must be coordinated for a project to become a reality. This is exactly the kind of education that you can’t readily obtain from a typical design studio. That’s the a main reason many of us decided to join Studio V, for this unique experience of project management in a real world environment.
Construction of the mock-up has given us a clear understanding of what is working in our design, and what could use some more work. That goes for the process of construction, too. We have found many instances that took a long time to do on site, but could be done much faster using a prefabrication method. Making sure all these things we’ve learned from building work their way into our set of Construction Documents is another challenge presented for the next few days.
It has been gratifying to get out there and work with our hands and solve problems together in the mock-up phase. Now lets tackle what this weekend has in store!
