nostalgia

it seems fitting that i would write a new blog post when i see two of my best friends from MIT in one weekend, since my blogging has been one of the things i left behind in my MIT life. its weird, but i know i run from place to place, and have a tendency to make really good friends and then leave them behind when i leave a place. i know i do it, but as i grow older, i feel more and more guilty for doing it. i feel like it should be a mature thing for me to keep in touch with people who live in different time zones, we have the technology to do it for pete’s sake. but i’ve managed to always consume myself in my new life and forget about the old one. my new year’s resolution, albeit 6 months too late, is to keep in better touch with old friends. if its just a monthly email or IM conversation, just something to keep in touch with people that i was once really close with. so if you haven’t heard from me in a while, make sure you guilt trip me for not talking to you, and remind me of my 2009.5 new years resolution.

Tags: friends, MIT

AIA National Convention

I’ve been in architect land since Wednesday, and was finally able to come up for fresh air when I got home at 8 PM tonight.

I left for the AIA National Convention in San Francisco Wednesday morning, not really knowing what was in store for me or what was going to happen. Since this was my first year as a member, convention was free (saved myself $450, definitely a good thing), and since it was within driving distance of Fresno, there was pretty much no reason not to go. With official approval from the boss the week before, Haley and I loaded up my car and took off.

We stayed with Haley’s friend, Lisa, who was generous enough to let us crash on her couches three nights in a row, and sleep well into the morning on Thursday instead of waking our lazy butts up. I didn’t really expect to be so exhausted. I only attended a few seminars, but those few hours of intense thinking fried my brain. (Obviously sitting in front of a computer for the past 9 months has turned my brain into jell-o). Anywho, I did go to the first general session, which was inspiring and got the gears going in the right direction for the rest of the convention. The afternoon session taught us about life-work balance, which I found interesting because it gathered opinions from successful women in several different fields, not just architecture. Thursday was our lazy day, but ended on a positive note with recognition of our firm receiving the AIA IDP Firm Award 2009-2012, although it would have been nicer to have recognition throughout convention on one of the many flat screen TVs in the Mascone West Center. I don’t even quite remember what happened Friday, went to another seminar about preservation as sustainability, which revitalized my desire to do preservation architecture. This morning was a three hour long ‘business meeting’, in which delegates met to discuss bylaw amendments and such. We were actually quite lucky that not many people from our local chapter went to convention and we were able to vote on the issues at hand instead of simply sit and observe.

Overall I’d say it was a good experience, I still have some digesting to do and life plans to re-map and figure out, but nothing negative. And obviously, who doesn’t love San Fran?

Tags: AIA, AIA National Convention 2009, San Francisco

delta’s personality quiz

so i got an email from delta asking me to take a personality quiz. in exchange i would get 500 miles free. 5 minutes for free 500 miles? why not.

as i was taking the quiz i ran across this question and busted out laughing, cause anyone who knows me or has driven with me knows i say this a lot:

i think answering yes to that question was almost worth more than the 500 free miles. almost.

helvetica

i’ve been meaning to watch ‘Helvetica’ for a while, and i finally got around to doing so tonight. if you haven’t seen it, you must. it seemed especially pertinent to my field of work, since all day log i analyze the placement of a letter, but i never really thought about the history of that. nor really, how i move that letter.

at one point, one of the ‘grandfathers’ of typography was talking about making posters and how it used to take them hours to put a poster together, whereas now the same thing can be done in a half hour. and it dawned on me that i really dont know any other way to do it. i don’t know how you would print a poster, layer upon layer, all i know is to click a button and shift a layer around and now a different one appears on top. the end product is mostly the same, but i wonder if its more flat, because they’ve all just become ‘on/off’ layers on a computer screen rather than red printed on top of blue printed on top of white. its amazing that we can produce things much more rapidly, but is it sucking the life out of graphic design? or rather, does it make the good ones stand out that much more, since basically anyone can graphically design something on a computer, but only the good ones can make it look like something the masters would have produced by hand?

and lastly, a few favorite quotes from the movie, cause i’m a nerd like that:

“dont confuse legibility with communication”

and

“you are always a child of your time”

Tags: helvetica graphic design art typography

the other side of things

last night i went to a community meeting for the fresno unified school district. about two weeks ago i was crunching out scope work for them, along with a few other people in the office. i got to focus on the redesign of one high school, which was highlighted in last nights meeting. i pretty much showed up as a spy and just wanted to listen to what people said without telling them who i worked for, but i really had to control myself when the slide came up with my high school’s design on it. i really wanted to jump up and be like i did that! i had a huge sense of pride for the drawings, and even though it surely is not the final draft and probably will be changed, this was the first time i’d seen something i’d worked on presented to the community.
responses to the design were pretty good, and there was only one comment about the pool… which i was expecting… so overall i think it went well. and it was fun to be a spy for an hour

Tags: school design pride planning

what i miss

its been about 6 months since i’ve been in Cali, so i think its about safe to write about what i miss in Boston and know that i really do miss it.

1- bridge loops.
all of them, but mostly miracle of science bridge and the harvard bridge.

2- snowfalls.
i’ve seen snow fall once this year, and it was a 5 am in the morning so it was not as satisfying as being fully awake (i am most definitely NOT a morning person)

3- newbury st.
and people watching and trying to find the craziest outfit of the day…

4- walking down comm ave
and seeing everyone walking their dog and the big sidewalks and the sun trying to reach its way through the trees in the median

5. tavern
dark & stormys and risotto fritters. enough said.

6. walking across the bridge
driving home just isn’t as satisfying

Tags: Boston

why architecture

its been a long, rough week. deadlines weren’t met, and a revamping of everything was required at the last minute, so something i was hoping to be done with is still ongoing. however, today i was able to get a bit of relief from it all with a site visit to another job, and i was reminded why i do what i do.

we were standing in a college science lab, with a small group workshop going on behind us. we had previously discussed the drawings with college personnel, but the teacher whose classroom we were in and are renovating hadn’t seen the revised plans yet. she snuck away from teaching her workshop and came to look at the drawings. other people were talking, but she walked up next to me and i pulled the drawings out and turned to the page with a 3D model of what we had planned for her classroom. a slight ‘oh!’ escaped as she saw it, followed by ‘oh thats wonderful, just wonderful’, and you could hear the happiness in her voice. with a simple drawing showing how much better her teaching space would be, i felt like i had made her day.

the ability of architecture to affect the human population is what draws me to the profession. knowing that at the end of the day i have made a difference, or helped to make a difference, in someone else’s life, or several people’s lives. you can see the results, you can hear the appreciation of the people who use it. and even those that don’t fully understand how you’ve changed their lives, those that just show up in their knew school without thinking about who helped put it there, i’ve changed their life, too.

Tags: architecture school people

what is LEED?

for any of my twitter followers, you’re probably getting sick of me posting nothing but ’studying for LEED’. unfortunately, it has kind of consumed my life and i have not much else to tweet about.

what is LEED exam? The LEED exam is basically a test administered by USGBC (US Green Building Council) testing you on the credits system USGBC established to determine how ‘green’ a building is. By fulfilling a credit you get one point, and the number of points you get determines your LEED certification. 26-32 points means you’re LEED certified, 33-38 points gets you LEED Silver, 39-51 points means LEED Gold, and 52-69 points means LEED Platinum (not an easy task).

Basically the test is pure memorization. You need to memorize each credit and the requirements for each, as well as any standards associated with that credit and have a general understanding of the intent of the credit (why it made it onto the LEED credits). The exam is a 2 hour exam, administered on a computer at a testing site, composed of 80 random questions that quiz you on different parts of your knowledge base of the credit system (intents, requirements, standards, etc.) Apparently they use some fancy scale that makes all the tests equal, and in order to pass you need to get at least a 170 out of 200 possible points.

There’s a bunch of different study guides out there, but I began by actually reading the LEED New Constructon manual. As is typical me, it has way too much information in it that I don’t need to know. So we switched to flashcard studying, and then I realized I basically just needed to memorize the credits in order and thats what was going to work for me. I’m glad I did the other things; I picked up on little things by reading that aren’t in the flashcards and you wouldn’t know by purely memorizing requirements. The only hard part is now making myself sit down every night and write out as many credits as I know, and attempting to learn new ones. Tonight I learned:

Water Efficiency

WE Credit 1- Water Efficient Landscaping

1.1 Reduce by potable water use in landscaping by 50%

1.2 Use no potable water in landscaping OR no irrigation system. A temporary irrigation system must be removed within one year.

WE Credit 2- Innovative Wastewater Technology

2.1 Reduce potable water use for building sewage conveyance by 50%

2.2 Treat 50% of wastewater to on site tertiary standards

WE Credit 3- Water Use Reduction

3.1 Use 20% less water than established in the baseline EPA 1992

3.2 Use 30% …

+1 Use 40% …

So basically any one of those credits (2.1, 3.2, 1.1, etc.) that you fulfill earns you a point. Luckily Water Efficiency is an extermely small section. There are 6 sections overall; Sustainable sites has 8 credits and each credit has about 4 possible points. Maybe I’ll start writing them out on here for practice and to prove to everyone how much memorization really is required and that I’m not just being a study-a-holic by tweeting ’studying for LEED’ all the time…

Tags: LEED, study, WE- Water Efficiency

furniture

it took me 4 hours to put together my new desk last sunday, but i’d say i’ve sat at it for at least 8 by now so those 4 hours were well worth it.
i’ve been trying to figure out why im so excited to have a desk. maybe its because i finally got rid of the last box from the move. maybe because it fits so perfectly in the alcove of my bedroom, and the easy pass to my bed reminds me of aphi days in the quad. or maybe because i actually have a need for it right now since i’m studying for the LEED exam.
whatever it is, i’m glad i have a desk. i feel somewhat more rooted now. maybe that last box really was keeping me unsettled, more so than i thought.

Tags: furniture desk

skiing at sierra summit

today i took a quick trip up to sierra summer with andrew and haley to get ski/snowboard for the day (i skied, they snowboarded.) the nice part is that its only about an hour away, so its easy to make a day trip up there. its also a small mountain, so its worth it just to go for the day and feel like you got decent amount of the mountain under your belt.

i don’t remember the last time i went skiing; i think it was december 2006 when my family went to mt. tremblant for christmas, and even then the snow was terrible (practically non-existant) so there wasn’t much skiing. i’m always surprised how fast it comes back to me. i’m not a great skier by any means, but i probably go faster than your average person down the mountain (i’m kind of addicted to speed). legs were a little shaky at first, i’ll have some bruises tomorrow i’m sure, but overall a good day.

and typical beautiful california weather:

Tags: california, sking, snow