Unusual Phoenix

This week, my company sent me to two days of Revit training. Revit, for those not in the building trades, is a computer program for designing buildings. See the end of this post for info about Revit. I was going to write just a bit about it, but its a complicated program and I have mixed feelings about it.

The class was held up in Peoria, a bit of a drive from work, but at least coming and going, we're in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, which was gridlock. West Metro Phoenix is definitely the less charming half of the city. For the most part, its either low rent or low quality knockoffs of Scottsdale suburbia, which is pretty revolting in its own right. If west Phoenix were a SimCity game, it would be endless blocks of beige "mission style" subdivisions interspersed with a "center" block consisting of a 1) Starbucks, 2) Home Depot, 3) Blockbuster Video, 4) Target/Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and 5) Papa Johns Pizza. I say for the most part, because I still haven't seen all of it. Old town Glendale is nice. I actually like it better than Mill Ave in Tempe.

Anyway, class was all day, but it went pretty fast since its active learning with the software, and at the end of the two days, I got a Certificate for Having Completed the Class. Feels like I should keep it in my bag of holding. The instructor was very good through, and stayed after the class to answer our individual specific problems.

It's been a fairly busy weekend, Saori's been working overtime both today and yesterday on her company's entry to a Valley-wide design competition to "Flip-a-Strip." The competition, hosted by the SMoCA, is to have local architects take an existing (retched) strip mall, and turn it into something better and more "engaging." Conceptually, I like strip malls, especially when you compare them with the megacenters. Small businesses, variety, and you can drive and park right in front of the store, instead of in the center of a burning lake of asphalt. However, they can also really suck. The one Saori's working on is six small rectangular boxes in the middle of a lake of asphalt. Not a blade of grass or even sidewalks. The competition entries are due Monday, so Saori is still at work, slaving away with her colleagues.

Today, I drove up with her and drove over to my old elementary school, the Montessouri way up north of Dunlap and 14th St. I had not been back to the area since I left second grade. This was the Phoenix I fell in love with. This neighborhood, tucked up against the mountain, has a great organic network of streets which rise and fall with the land. No grading at all. The houses are all different and vary from a collection of shacks to cutting edge architect designed homes. Desert trees and flowers everywhere, and the desert mountain landscape a tangible presence. My old school should be a model of desert architecture. Cinder block or brick construction, low pitched roofs with 4' wide overhanging eaves, circulating water pools, overhead sun screening, and high clerestory windows. I would have hopped the fence to look around inside if it were not for the security cameras. (Strangers poking around elementary school campuses just don't look good.)

Also today, plenty of study for the GRE which I take next weekend.

I moved my discussion and opinions about Revit to the end of this blog since it tends to key to a more estoeric audience.

What makes Revit (short for "Revise It") different is that it is a category of BIM software, or Building Information Modeling.

Basically, everything you draw has information attached to it. Historically, if I drew a brick wall on paper or in a basic drafting program, then it would just be two lines with the space between them filled in. I would have to indicate elsewhere in notes that it was a two wythe thick common brick wall with a running bond. With a BIM program, if I want to draw a brick wall, I click a "wall" button, select the type of wall I want, and draw a line and the computer generates a 3D wall along the line I drew. The advantage of this is that now, all the pieces of the wall are there to the finest details. I can see it very generally in a floor plan, or I can zoom in and see the individual bricks in the wall. Because its in 3d, I can cut sections through it at will and the program generates all the drawings I will need to build this wall.

If you want to look at it this way, before BIM modeling, the building as a whole existed in the collective minds of the designers which various 2d drawings supported, in varying accuracy. With BIM modeling, the architect builds a 3D model of the entire building and the program generates the 2D drawings. All the information is stored parametrically and in databases which can be sliced and diced and any shiny new thing you can do to data.

It's exciting to me because it automates a lot of the tedious things you typically have interns or low-level drafters (like yours truly) do. Theoretically, its supposed to drastically reduce the amount of work you have to do because any change to the model gets instantly reflected in all the sheet drawings. I say "theoretically" because it depends on how much you play by Revit's rules.

For me, Revit feels like it was designed by an advanced race of robots. When you play exactly by its rules, its incredibly easy and the work flies. When you want to do it your way, when you have a particular way you like your stairs to work, or a certain way a wall connects to a floor, then you have to wrestle that bull to the ground and beat it into shape where it still growls at you. Yes, its wonderful it calculates and generates stairs and railings for you, but what if you don't want one of the three types of stairs that it comes with (or ten for that matter?). There's a laborious process if you want to alter a standard piece, and you have to have a lot of experience with Revit to do it with any competency at all.

Photo update

Added more photos from my adventues over the last week, including relaxing at the cafe, studio at night, hiking south mountain, and wandering around Tempe Arts Festival. Click the photo to go to the full album.

And now, for something completely different

Friday was a surreal day.
I began by going to bed at 3 and waking up at 6 for work. I left my house at 6:25 on my bike, and arrived at work at 7:15. I live less than a minute walk from a bus stop, and a ten minute walk from a bus stop on a line which goes directly to my destination. The distance between my house and my work is about ten miles. This was the fastest I've ever gotten to work without a car. I dare say there is something a bit off about this whole arrangement. I worked the morning, and then biked the ten miles back home. Actually going home was a lot better since I discovered I could bike along a trail along a canal which ran diagonally towards Tempe. The streets of Phoenix and its sidewalks are in terrible condition, occasionally not even fit for human use, let alone bikers. I try not to ride on the streets anyway as drivers in Phoenix pride themselves on being some of the worst in the country, and are about as observant and caring to bicyclists as a windshield is to flies on the autobahn. Especially in downtown phoenix, which is totally under construction at least until Sky Harbor Airport finishes buying all of it.

One of the studios in our semester went to New Orleans a few weeks ago. Saori's studio road tripped out to San Diego. Another studio went to LA to look at urban forms there.
Our studio took a trip across the parking lot to Gammage Auditorium.

In some strange tie-in to our studio, our professor wanted us to experience a show called "Guided Tour." This is put on by a British performance artist named Peter Reder in ASU's Gammage. From his website, it is described as

Guided Tour is a promenade performance sited in an historic building. It's a tourist experience for the disenchanted, a quiet interrogation of the notion of the authentic and our thirst for the original. Guided Tour was premiered at McEwan Hall at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005, in association with the Traverse Theatre as part of the British Council Showcase, and has since been presented at the Tretyakov Gallery www.tretyakovgallery.ru/english/ Moscow and in Bucharest in 2006.

In this case, he was using Gammage. It was very surreal and pretty funny if you get British humor. He started the show by explaining that he played the role of the tour guide and asked us if there was anything in particular we wanted him to tell us, like if we wanted Gammage to be haunted, for example. There was a large group, about half of us students, and we followed him around. The first thing he pointed out was that his picture on the posters outside the box office was much bigger than Billy Crystal's and elaborated on the intense rivalry they had. We of course had been well warned that the facts on this tour were not necessarily true.

Then he led us outside up the ramp of the building to point out and discuss at length the significance of the Twin Palms hotel, and IHOP as its functioning breakfast room. The tour was a strange mix of guided tour of the spaces without really explaining them, and slides and video of people who "could have been" relatives and family members of his. My favorite moment of the 'tour' was when he brought us to the bust of Wright, and told us about the great and important works of Wright and how this wasn't one of them. He then said that since we were architecture student's he wouldn't talk about the design aspects which we already knew but would instead elaborate on the strange, lewd, and lurid personal life of FLW. We stopped in front of a glass case of old photos of women and he took on a guided tour of FLW's mistresses, wives, daughters, and other strange people in his life and the doom which seemed to follow all of them.

We finished the 'tour' watching a movie of his mother, very experiential absurdest non-speaking, non-explained piece, in the sub-basement workshop of the lyric opera theater, and getting let out from one of the loading bays. One of my friends from studio turned to me suddenly and asked "what the hell did I just do with the last hour and a half of my life?" I could only shrug. I got some of it, but the last ten minutes of video totally lost me.

Saturday Saori and I took the day off, mostly bicycling around Papago Park (I was surprisingly not sore from my 2o miles the day before) and taking photos of the canal system there for her studio. That night, we went to Janette's apartment for a reunion party with people from the Buenos Aires trip. We brought a bottle of Caxhaca 51, which Janette promptly hid from the other partygoers. There was sangria, there were tapas, and there were, miraculously, empanadas. I got the address of a store in Phoenix that has them and apparently they also have Mate and all of the good herb's paraphernalia.

Today was a work day. Lots of reading and sketching, and blogging.