Busy week

Let's see: monday I struggled with figuring roofing options for my library project in architecture studio. Tuesday in our human factors class, our teacher asked us to write reviews of the class. The evalutations we write at the end of the semeseter actually get back to the teachers for a year. Normally, people hurry through evaluations, and almost nobody writes anything in the comments section. Now that we had his undivided attention, nearly everyone in the class wrote half a page of scathing comments. That is really saying something.

Wednesday morning I woke up at 6:3o and drove into Phoenix to meet with my mentor Jeremy Jones at DWL architects. I wasn't impressed with the office exterior, as it was built back in the 1960's, but the inside was very modern. I got the office tour, took a look around. DWL is a firm of about 30 architects, so it is pretty large by industry standards. My mentor, Jeremy Jones, is the head of design there. Historically, DWL has done a lot of arizona infrastructure, college, library, hospital projects, but Mr. Jones was brought on board a few years ago to refocus the company on adding interest and more modern design.

I sat in on a design charette with about six or seven other architects. DWL is responsible for redeveloping a large tract of land adjoining ASU (can't tell where) and I saw a presentation on site considerations, limitations, square footages, programing requirements etc. Then we got out our trace paper and pens and started sketching possible site layouts. After about 45 minutes, we compared designs and discussed them. Afterwards, in Mr. Jones office, he told me that I spoke way to rapidly, and that when explaining projects, I need to slow. my. speech. down. which. adds. emphasis. and. conveys. confidence. He also said that one of the strongest skills architects need is negotiation. He's going to help me develop it.

I drove back home and went to ANOTHER meeting, this time with the honors college along with the other honors students in the college of design. Although I havn't taken an honors course in three semesters, I promised to attend the meeting. I'm really glad I haven't wasted my time with extra honors work. There were only three other students in upper division in the honors college. They talked about how honors work just added weight to thier workload, and not richness, and how the honors thesis is a living nightmare with no architecture faculty support.

Today I was lucky to have two classes cancelled. I took my test in human factors. I feel pretty good about it, a B+, minimum.

One really amazing thing I've found online is that google is offering its Google Earth product free. This is a really cool little program which connects to google's mapping servers. It's hard to describe. Imagine an arial photo. Make it high resolution to be able to pick out individual people and make it zoomable. Add topographical data and a tilt feature to show the landscape in 3d with the map overlaid on top. Add a layer of Yellow Pages, a world atlas, and a road map. Make it searchable for a certain coffee shop to a certain city.

Now imagine it covers the entire world. That's essentially google earth. What's really cool is you can save location marks and 'fly' between them. The server runs fast enough that it looks like you're falling straight down at very high speed. There's also an online community layer you can turn on which shows higher res images, like the burj al-dubai, that mega hotel off of dubai, or military buffs point out locations of certain planes or weapons on military bases.

So far I've logged every place I've slept in europe and flying between them its like doing my tour again. It's really surprising how small the world really is. So anyway, I highly recommend it. Go see the pyramids and the grand canyon. And my apartment. Below, this the site our library project is on. Those are the mcdowells in the distance, and taylor's middle school is at below right off of Thompson Peak Pkwy.