This building is protected by Batman

Its 11:08 pm and I'm in studio along with about half of the studio, and we're crunching for the final presentation coming up tuesday and wednesday (I go tuesday). My boards are printed and my 1/32" scale model is done, and I'm 75% done with a 1/16 scale model. So I'm in pretty good shape overall.

It started snowing last night, cold, hard, dry crystals. When we woke up this morning, the snow was still coming down and several inches deep. We elected to take mass transit to school instead of learning to drive on ice by the school of hard knocks. One of my studio mates spun out on her way here and did a 180, so I'm happy that we walked. Still a few inches of snow on the ground although it stopped about midday. Really cold weather next few days. 

The thesis students presented today and yesterday. The big name guest reviewers were Juhani Palasmaa, the Finnish architect and author, and (surprise!) Kenneth Frampton. No, not that one. The one who is among the most famous architecture critics in the world.

Anyway, here's a quick demo of how I do my renderings:

I started with this photo of the site: (the parking lot is my site, not the brick building).

and I used Revit software to model my building and make a rendered image of what it would look like at night from the same angle:

And then I combined the two, changing the day photo to a night image with lighting, added people, an overlaid image of falling snow at night, and snow on the ground to get this final image:

process

Here's an example of how my process flow works.
I have three types of apartment units, each a different size, that I put together in a somewhat rational or potentially interesting way. I'm using Revit to do all of this work at this point. Each unit is actually an identical component so that later on, I can edit that component and all of the units of the same type will change. Once I had the basic unit blocks, in Revit it's simple to put them together and move them around. The purple blocks are two bedrooms, the light blue blocks are one bedrooms, and the green blocks are studios.

I've also created a site model in Revit, which I link this file into to let me see how my massing works in the site- that is, how it relates to buildings nearby, how it looks at the corner, scale, etc.

I have a corner site with two massive buildings to the west and southwest of me, and a big ugly postmodern governmental building directly to the east which creates an ugly triangle of parking. From a bird's eye view, it would look something like this:

I've actually set this image up in a very deliberate way, since I have an image taken from Microsoft Bing maps that has almost identical point of view in relation to the site. As masses, these don't really tell me that much, and its better to look at the building in more detail. So I take this image into photoshop with the Bing aerial photography, and in about two minutes I have this:

Using the same techniques from different perspectives within my Revit model, I take snapshots of my digital model that correspond to actual photos I've taken of the site.

And with the same process in photoshop, bring this image into the photograph. There is a bit of set up work where I have to trace out the tree and the light pole and the traffic light, but once you set up the foreground as a layer, I can quickly swap in buildings to test them out. This lets me really get a feel for how the building might feel in the site. I've set up about three or four of these kinds of images from different places around the site, so it really streamlines the process. 

It's been a long week, and its only Wednesday night

Saturday night I was on a boat of the coast of Mexico, partying wildly with family and contraband liquor. Monday morning I was back in the office. Sunday was a long day.

Yesterday, I found out my office is changing its health benefits again, which is never a good thing. It's almost to the point where I may just try to find my own insurance. I have no faith whatsoever in insurance companies. I fully expect them to try to get the most money they can out of me while providing the minimum amount of care they are legally obligated to provide, and to fight me every step of the way. Our new fringe benefits company actually brought in reps for each of the health companies they were selling us, so we were subjected to the dog and pony show. My mistrust level went through the roof.

Then I went to the dentist for a tooth cleaning, although I didn't tell him my coverage was expiring in two days.  It was uncomfortable, the dentist asked me to not brush my teeth so hard, to take out my aggression elsewhere. But on the shiny side, at least I don't have any soft spots or cavities.

At work, I was assigned to a Revit committee, where I was bemused to finally get upgraded to "Revit Guru" status, joining the ranks of the other three or four Elite Reviteers. No badge though. Just a long meeting to try to figure out how to standardize and implement better Revit practices within the firm.

Today, I also wore a tie as I had to present some glass samples to the head of our biggest client. That was a little nerve wracking as I usually don't have a lot of face time presenting to clients. In fact, I almost never present material. I really really need to work on my speaking and presentation skills. My intent is to join the local AIA in Missouri and see if there's any groups that would help that, or all else, toastmasters.

Tomorrow is one of my coworker's birthdays, so he, Saori and I went out to celebrate during lunch. We went to Gallo Blanco, a Mexican cafe in uptown Phoenix in the swanky Clarendon boutique hotel. The food was really good. I got a pork torta (sandwich). Highly recommended for lunch. Not sure if they have dinner. Afterwards, coffee ice cream before heading back to the office. My coworker is turning 30, a milestone that doesn't stand too far off from where I'm at, and when I asked him about it, he said that he was happy with what he had done with his 20's.

Tomorrow is July 1st. It is a deadline to log in hours over six months old in the IDP (intern development program) for NCARB (National Council of Architectural Registration Boards). This means that if I want to get credit for work I did before January 2010, I have to get it in. I was pretty close, but I still scrambled a bit last night to log my hours. The website is still really buggy since its under the internet pressure of all the other people scrambling to get hours logged in, so they extended the deadline by a day.

Another thing related to that is that I realized my NCARB registration will expire at the end of August, and that because its less than 60 days away, I can't renew online. I was worried initially that I might lose my hours, but I think the worst thing that could happen if I can't renew is that I will have to pay an additional $40 a year after I re-establish my registration. It adds up, especially if I keep my registration current through taking the ARE (architectural registration exams). I've sent out some emails and I'll make some calls to nail that sucker down though.

Next Thursday, I'll be flying out again to St. Louis to look for apartments/houses. The only thing I've done is bought a plane ticket and arranged to meet a friend to see his apartment. I still need to line up places to visit, maybe locate an agent, figure out whether I'll need to rent a car or if I can take local transportation, and reserve a (cheap) hotel room. Or, I need to make close friends in St.Louis in very short order.

Can I please go back to this?

Park & Ride

It's been a few busy days. Memorial day was nice and sleepy in the morning, and then we went to a cafe and on to mom's house in the late afternoon for dinner and a movie. We watched Porco Rosso, another animated movie by Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away and Ponyo. It's a very different kind of movie- it has the look of a kid's movie, with ridiculous air pirates, but its actually much more geared to adults with lots of ambiguity and nostalgia.

Tuesday Wednesday were long days where I jumped off my current project to help out my coworker with some design options for a park and ride. Park and rides are basically bus hubs for commuters with tons of parking. There's actually a lot of fun designing them, since only real thing they need to do is provide shade and seating. Revit has been very helpful with this- basically the program is being used as a conceptual design tool. Monday, I took a hand sketch of a plan, and by wednesday night, I had a relatively photorealistic rendering of what it would look like, complete with people, plants, cars, etc. I actually developed two designs simultaneously. And then this morning, we generated shade studies. 

We picked a perspective view of a bus stop, like you were standing there looking at it, told the computer that the location was Phoenix, AZ, and asked the computer to show us how the shadows would be from sunrise to sunset on July 17. It took about 40 minutes for each design, but at the end, we got a nice, 30 second long animation of how the shadows move around the platform. All this was done with the same program. I'm actually debating getting a student licence for Revit, since its less than $200 and usable for up to five years. That's cheaper than SketchUp was when it first came out, before it was bought by Google. 

Anyway, this afternoon, I went to a client meeting, which is always very interesting. I wear a nice shirt and a tie, and the glossy shoes, and we sit at the biggest table I've ever seen in person. You could probably get 30 people comfortably around this table. It fills the conference room. The meetings are interesting because the top administrative staff, the people who make all the decisions for the large organization, are also there as well as their counterparts in my firm, and from the construction firm. And its interesting to see how they communicate, how they present ideas and discuss things, and really, just witnessing how top-level decisions are made that have the potential to affect hundreds, if not thousands, of people. 

That probably sounds a lot more insidious than it actually is, if you consider the fact that the corner circle K affects thousands of people in some way. I'm just happy I can tag along and listen and see firsthand.

The Women of Revit

Here's an interesting rendering I did a while ago:

From Revit goodies

This is one the medical science rooms in the building I've been working on. I wanted to show a human figure to compare the feel and scale of the space, so I loaded an "RPC Female," put her by the sink, and rendered the image. Something about the scene is kind of evocative. Is she lost in a memory? Is she mentally preparing herself for her first day of class? Is she tranfixed by some unspeakable act just out of view? With a half-dozen characters and a complex building model, I could write and illustrate a novel. 

Who was this person? Why was she dressed this way? She looks like a grown up version of Anne of Green Gables. RPC stands for Rich Photorealistic Content, licensed in this case, by Archvision. Or maybe we bought her. Packages of a dozen RPC people start at around $400. Well worth it for Revit, in my opinion. Interestingly, this RPC woman, I can't remember her filename so let's call her Anne, is not a 3d polygon. When I look at this in a non-rendered state, she's a cardboard cutout. What is really interesting is that when the rendering rays shoot through her or by her, she tells the rays how to react depending on the ambient light, other light sources, etc, so in the final rendering as you can see here, if you look at her sleeve or cheek, the light is falling from the right direction, and you can't see it here, but she does cast a shadow.*

The way they get these RPC people is that they photograph real people. They do it from numerous angles and use specialized software so that when you place one of these people in your model, they look correct and in perspective and shaded correctly from any view. If you browse the website offerings, its kind of surreal and amusing. From "College Students Vol.1": 

Sixteen young adults representing a variety of ethnic backgrounds make up this very popular collection. From carrying books and backpacks to just hanging out, these RPCs will add great variety and interest to any scene of any campus.

The company also offers a middle east collection ("in modest clothing"), a ("terrific-looking") African-American offering, a parks and rec group ("Everybody's kung fu fighting at the local park."), and even a collection of traveling Asians ("The world is a very big place and people from every corner of the world can be found everywhere.")

I think we can all learn a good lesson from that last line. 

*Interestingly, however, they don't reflect. You can't see her reflection in the glossy tile behind her, although you can see the reflection of sunlight on the floor. They're kind of like vampires. It's especially eerie in the bathrooms, when they're standing by a mirror that doesn't reflect them. Actually, Revits current rendering engine won't trace the rays more than two bounces for mirrors. So a mirror reflecting a mirror only shows darkness. There's also a slightly errie sense from rendering an image standing in front of a mirror. The photorealistic image makes you feel like you're standing there, but the mirror only reflects the wall behind you. 

More Fun with Revit

Last week, I was working on VCT (vinyl tile) patterns and I wanted to show the client what the pattern would look like in a real space within the building as opposed to a 4x4 grid of the typical pattern. So I figured out a pretty easy way to create a pattern and load it as a material to render. I've been having some fun with this. I started with a blank wall segment in photoshop 4" wide by 12" high, so I could set up a 1" grid to lay out tile. With that grid, I brought in various colors, or you can also bring in images, and then saved the whole thing to a materials folder as a JPEG.

In Revit, I created a new material and loaded the image for it, and set the image to be 2' typical (so that each tile is 6") and added a bump pattern that would give a tile and grout texture for that same scale. With this basic set up, it was now possible to play around with various tile pattens because all I had to do was save over the old tile JPG with the new one, and Revit would render the scene with the updated pattern.

Ole!

[Updated: later this afternoon]

For those of you not familiar with computer modeling, this is not a photograph, nor an edited photograph. This is a rendering, a completely computer-generated image. It took about an hour to 'build' the model of the bathrooms in 3D, two years of nudging walls and sinks and counters around, 20 minutes to set up the rendering parameters, ten minutes to make a festive tile pattern, and about five minutes to actually render.

The Studio Effect & Revit

Last weekend, Saori and I went to St. Louis to visit the architecture school's open house. With a week of reflection, its occurred to me that this was actually a pretty slick piece of marketing on the school's part. Any architecture student can tell you that they learned the most from their classmates- more than the professors whom they see perhaps for a few hours a few times a week, and more than from the lectures and other classwork. As a student, your primary source of inspiration, debate, new skills, and new ideas comes from the people with whom you spend 80% of your waking hours, the other students.

WashU encouraged all admitted students to attend the open house. This included many people who are also looking at other top schools in the country. One open house brings together some of the best and brightest students in the pool. The school provides ample opportunities for socialization, including encouraging a bar group the first night, all meals together, a happy hour with free beer, wine with a lavish dinner of small tables, and an open bar at a local club/bar. Hell, even I made friends and talked with a bunch of different people. You start to think, hey I could get along with these people.

It's illusory and a little misleading as not all of them will end up attending. However, it was very effective with me, and I do hope that most of them do attend, as I would like to get to know all of them better, and what they can bring to the collective table.

One other thing I thought was interesting was the software encouraged by the school. It sounds like most of the students are working in SketchUp, AutoCAD and Rhino, Rhino being the 3d modeling software (replacing the useless and painful FormZ of my graduating class). I'd really like to continue using Revit, as I'm really fast at it now and it can do so much so quickly. Build one model and boom boom boom, plan, sections, elevations, renderings, flythroughs, etc. We'll see. I almost want to get a new minitower to run revit exclusively- dell outlet sells some 3.0+ Ghz processors for less than a grand, but I'm debating how much more performance I'd get out of it compared to my souped up laptop I bought over a year ago. I'm sure I'll figure it all out.

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.