Finally Friday!! After a busy week of work, meetings, and more work; we are coming to our final meeting of the week. We will be meeting this evening with two of Charleston’s finest engineers and architects: Reggie Gibson and John Moore. Reggie has helped Clemson architecture students in the past years and has done an amazing job. Our professor, Mr. David Pastre has spoken very highly of his ability to solve problems creatively without diluting our abstract ideas. We as students surely recognize this opportunity as a special one for Reggie truly brings a special focus that many architects aren’t very enchanted with, engineering design. If you go to Reggie’s website (http://www.reggiegibsonarchitects.com/portfolio), he states “Of all the Vitruvian principals, we like delight the best.” This is referring to the Vitruvian triad: Function, Commodity, and Delight. It’s not common for an engineer to be on the “delight” side of the triad, they usually sit somewhere on the “function” or “commodity” side. Engineers are naturally trained to be as efficient as possible, just as architects are trained to be as creative as possible, and Reggie will help our team with our current design’s structural issues while still challenging us to be creative and innovative.
Pictured above: our most recent model iteration to show for our meeting today.
John Moore, a previous principal and structural engineer to EM Structural focuses more on function. John will work as the person “bringing us down to earth” per say. He will helps us make sure our design can stand and withstand the elements for a long time. It’s important for us to have a diverse set of eyes helping us through the design process to come up with a cohesive, interesting, and functional project. Architects rely on structural engineers in many ways such as: load calculations, natural forces that will apply to our structure, and how our structure will withstand the weather over time. John will help bring our lofty ideas down to earth and serve one who will make sure our space functions well and does it’s job. Without someone like John on our team, it can be difficult to be innovative in the design process. When architects become “too” innovative, they sometimes forget about the function of a space and it’s commodity.
Today will be an awesome day with some experienced individuals! We are looking forward to the direction these meetings will take us!