Architect Registration Exams/ARE/Oy

Let's hope this doesn't happen.

I’ve been out of school for about 3.5 years now, and have finally committed to taking and completing all of my AREs. I’ve taken and passed my first 3 (out of 7 total), and am currently studying for Structural Systems. I haven’t taken a practice exam yet, so I don’t know really what I’m up against, but let me tell you – having not touched structures in 3 years, review is difficult! It certainly comes back after practice, but it’s really frustrating when the study materials are terrible. And by terrible I mean atrocious. I’m using Kaplan study materials for ARE 4.0, and I’ve never seen any study guides this bad. Ever. How bad? Let’s break it down.

Errors, Errors and more Errors: Sure, every book has a typo here and there. Even books that have been proofed really well. But this is just ridiculous.

• Example calculations will switch between units (say kips to pounds) w/o noting the conversion.
• Example calculations will use the entirely wrong value for an equation. No idea where the value came from, but it sure as hell doesn’t belong in the calculation. Best part is that the final answer typically reflects a calculation using the correct value, despite the incorrect value being shown.
• Example calculation will simplify the calculation, but not explain how or why it was simplified. Which requires me to backtrack and see where units and values were combined.

As a company providing study materials, these sorts of mistakes are inexcusable. If it happened once, maybe twice, it’s something that could be lived with. But the fact is that I second-guess everything I read, which is terribly frustrating when studying for any exam, let alone one that determines your professional future. Not to mention that it costs $210 each time you take a test. This shoddy level of work results in my reading every section, deconstructing it, reconstructing it, then reviewing it again. To Kaplan’s credit, this approach certainly makes me more familiar with the material. But you shouldn’t really have to question your study guide in the first place…

LEEDing the way…

dur da dur…  bad title, but point is i’m finally studying for my LEED exam.  LEED, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is essentially a rating system for green buildings – it’s market based, so it’s trying to change the game slowly as the market demands.  it’s been doing fairly well – green buildings are in higher and higher demand for their energy efficiency, more comfortable environments, and health benefits.  LEED is currently in version 2.2, but is gearing up for a new version soon.  there is now a certification for new construction, schools, homes, existing buildings, core & shell, retail, healthcare, and neighborhood development.  the new version of LEED will include more regional rating components for the US – right now, it treats every building the same, tho a building for Arizona should be designed drastically differently than one in NY.  developers and users are jumping on the LEED bandwagon – users b/c LEED ensures a generally more enjoyable and healthier working/living environment, and developers b/c a green building generally has lower maintenance costs and creates a market demand for the space.

though sustainable design/development is about much more than what is covered in LEED, it is a good tool to get the building industry moving in the right direction, and as time goes on, LEED will only get better w/ updated versions and revisions.  i aim to take the test and be certified by the end of August.

Go Green Monster

back from the dead

talk about taking a break.  my last post was back in october 07 – let’s see, what was life like back then?  aside from my daughter not having been born yet, not all that much was different – of course, my daughter being born is all the difference it takes to go from day to night, black to white.  two totally different worlds.  life has been good since she was born in november – watching her grow everyday is pretty much all i care about at the moment.

i’ve finally gotten back into the swing of finishing some renovations on the house that i started before she was born – hopefully i’ll get them done in the next month so that i can move on to the next round of fixes: remove the crappy corrugated plastic overhang on the back porch and replace it w/ a trellis.  i’ve also started the design for our landscaping, which won’t exactly be cheap, but is the first thing to do when increasing home value.  major home renovation (aside from painting and installing wood floors) will have to wait.

i’m completing 100% construction documents for my current project this week.  very exciting – i’ve been on the project since design development, though i’ve watched and sat on crits during schematic design.  it’s a really nice and simple, small addition to a university building here in austin.  next week i’ll move onto a new charter elementary school project, which will be really exciting.  it’s set to be LEED silver, which means i finally will have the time to actually get LEED certified (which was on my to-do list since last september).

haven’t done much travel since the munchkin was born, aside from going up to dallas to visit w/ her grandparents.  did go to houston one weekend for a friend’s wedding shower – it was pretty much my first time there, but only had time to visit the contemporary arts museum.  great exhibit on…contemporary design.  mies’ museum of fine arts was across the street, but you need more time to visit that.  i’m excited to go back – some good architecture out there.

also went up to NY for the first part of passover – at 5 months old, it was munchkinface’s first flight.  she did pretty well, but that was thanks to the tubes in her ears installed 2 wks prior – she already had 4 ear infections, so tubes were pretty much the only recourse aside from constant doses of antibiotics, which are not at all cool.  she was a bit fussy in NY – i think the flight, plus change in scenery and new crib were a bit much.  she got to meet some of her cousins and spend precious time w/ my parents and sister, which of course is the most important part of these visits.  2 days after we returned, my sister came to visit for 5 days – it was great.

ok, good update.  back to work, and hopefully some more regular posts again.

UT SolarD rockin the house

so the 2007 UT SolarD team has been hard at work on the National Mall the past few weeks, and today inched up to the #5 slot!  i’m super psyched for them – they’ve put a huge amount of hard work into the project, and they deserve to do well.  hopefully they’ll be able to push up another slot, though they’re behind GA Tech by about 20 points, which will be pretty hard to make up.  the #1 and #2 slots are held by Univ. of Maryland and the German team, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, and are up by too many points to catch. the German house is really beautiful and elegant – bringing that European architectural and engineering prowess to US shores.

baseboards, Sketchup, and rest

yesterday we completed Addendum#2 on our rushed project, a school of engineering for a university in N. Texas.  Cindy’s been ready to strangle me b/c i’ve been working late and weekends, not having much time to spend w/ her during the last few weeks of pregnancy.  i’ve also had to finish painting the baseboards before they get installed tomorrow.  so it was w/ great relief that i left the office yesterday at 5:30p – that’s right!  not 3a!  it was amazing.  i went home, bought some more baseboards and mini-rollers, painted a bit, and went to bed by 11p – it was incredible.now i’m working at home, spiffing up a sketchup model of the project that the university will be able to use for fundraising.  there’s a bunch still to do, but i’ve been divying up the day between work and painting baseboards.  those should be ready to get a final coat in a few minutes, actually.tomorrow i move on to my next project – an infill/renovation for UT School of Nursing.  it’s been in schematic design for a little over a month, on and off.  it’s looking pretty nice, i’m looking forward to getting into something a bit smaller in scope and not as rushed.  it also helps that we’re building new structure instead of living w/in the confines of a building’s earlier structure, which had been a bit confusing on the engineering project.my little baby’s on the way – we’re just over 2 weeks from her due date!  i’m so excited that it’s hard to focus on much of anything, but it helps a lot that this deadline is finally over.  now i can focus on cindy, the house, and work in a much more balanced manner. 

twitter like

don’t want to start a twitter account, it’s just one more account to maintain – but i do want that functionality.  blogging will have to remain the method. weekend working: construction document set going out on monday, it’s our drop-dead date on this project that has been an extremely cool mess.  the client is clueless, and this is not typical architectural disdain for a lesser mortal – this guy says one thing today, which is different from what he said yesterday and different from what he’ll say tomorrow and contradicts every email and documentation he’s ever sent.  the budget gets cut back, and half our design will likely be VE’d out.  anyway, our deadline has been moved back and back, and it can’t be pushed back any further.  thank god.  i have a baby coming in a few weeks and i need to finish working on the house!  cindy has gone into nesting mode and is freaking that these things aren’t done, but i can’t do them until this deadline has passed. 

Learning Curve

I’ve been working for about 3 months now, and as seemingly everyone discovers upon entering the workforce, I now realize I know nothing.  Not to discredit my five year (forever) education – I learned design and not necessarily specific material assemblies.  I was taught to research the newest and most cutting edge technologies – technologies that can’t really even be used in architecture yet.  The purpose was to expand my (‘our’ in the case of the entire student body) horizons – to think of everything as a component of architecture.  Who says nanotech and shape memory polymers can’t be structural and design components of architecture?  If it isn’t yet, it’s only a matter of time, and the fact that we look at these materials as such will put us on the cutting edge of architecture when it comes time for these materials to become a part of our repetoire.

On the other hand, I didn’t really know how to structure the hanging facade from a cantilevered room that I designed for the project I’m working on, and I really had no clue how to specify the glazing hardware or connections or to look up the codes for the butt-glazed window wall that I also designed into this room.  I designed it, it looked beautiful, but where do I go from there?  I was given free reign to pursue this, it became my mini-project, but I felt pretty overwhelmed to actually specify materials.  After creating a material assembly from scratch our of locally reclaimed wood, threaded rods, 2×4’s, metal studs, and sound insulation, a new coworker told me about a product that did the exact same thing.  She thought, in fact, that I had specified that product since my assembly was nearly identical.   So I moved over to using this ready made assembly, speaking w/ the architect and sales rep at the company to make sure a few things could be customized for our project, and it will work wonderfully.

Next up was the glazing. All of the glazing details in this building involved steel plates and steel bars.  We pretty much reinvented the wheel because it was so beautifully minimal.  Glazing sits on 1/2″ x 7″ steel plate, and is locked in by 1/2″ square steel bar on each side.  Well, with the massive amounts of butt glazing, that detail wasn’t going to cut it – we needed more structure to hold our tall spans of glazing.  The detail would work for our standard replacements, but not for a window wall.  So I was told to look at a particular detail on a previous project, which used a ready made glazing system often used for glass rail walls.  Pretty much an aluminum channel w/ neoprene blocking holds the glass in place with a solid 1″ bite or more to hold the glass.  Well, our details are steel.  This aluminum channel would be sitting on a steel shelf.  Aluminum and steel don’t mix – the aluminum corrodes.  We could separate them w/ another neoprene gasket, but then we’d have the clashing aesthetic of aluminum with steel.  So now I’m looking at using a steel channel instead of aluminum, but nobody makes such a product.  We’d have to customize a steel channel and specify the blocking and gaskets.  It will work, but we need to engineer it.  I also had no idea how these channel systems worked, so I had to disect the aluminum channel system to reassemble a steel channel system.  It’s fairly simple, but until I learned how it worked, I had no idea how I’d get this together aside from specify ‘Steel Channel’.

And that’s really where this all started. In school, we learn to specify ‘Steel Channel’ or ‘Spider Connection’ or sometimes we might even get specific enough to call out bolt and stud sizes, but in general, the emphasis was on design.  That’s really how it should be, because we can learn the nitty gritty on the job, which is what I’m doing.  But if you’re burdened with making sure you know exactly how to assemble the building while learning to design, your horizons will generally be diminished.  Not to say that we should be designing completely impossible things – our structure courses keep us in line, but knowing how an aluminum channel glazing support system actually works is rightfully kept to the sidelines. 

update from work

haven’t really been posting since i started work, hope i can pick it up again soon. there’s been so much going on that i haven’t had much time to breathe, let alone blog. where to start?

last i wrote, i had just graduated and gone camping at canyonlands national park w/ my dad in utah. it was his first camping trip EVER, so we were really looking forward to it. the park was gorgeous – red, rocky, and desert. the area we hiked was the meeting point for three distinct areas of the park – one area that looked like the grand canyon, one that looked a bit like bryce cancyon, and another that was a bit like bulbous blobby rocks. my dad couldn’t handle more than 2 days of hiking tho – we couldn’t finish our first day’s 8 mile hike, but did ok on the 4 mile hike the following day. after camping we hit a hotel in moab and went rafting down the colorado – nothing serious, class 2 rapids at most. it was beautiful to coast down the river, though, and appreciate the scenery. this was my dad’s favorite part of the trip. i don’t think he’ll be camping again any time soon – or ever really. on the upside, the 6′ tall tent i got to make his camping easier will make future camping trips for my budding family quite comfortable. we never really do more than car camping anyway – park the tent at a campsite and go on day hikes.

about a week after i returned from utah, i started work. i’ve been here about 2 months now, and it’s been great. we’re in a major crunch and are trying to get our construction document set out in 2 weeks. it’s been a super fast paced project from the get go, but we’re in the home stretch. we’re renovating an existing classroom building from 1930 (2 story) and it’s 1980 addition (1 story). we completely demolished the interior, and are creating a 3 story atrium in the middle between the 2 buildings. the top story of the atrium will be a kalwall ‘box’, providing daylight to the atrium and surrounding hallways. the kalwall sits on a copper ‘sleeve’ – the move is if the copper and kalwall were fitted right into the center of the building. the atrium is divided in to 3 laboratory bays, separated by 8′ tall terra cotta walls – the rest of the wall from 8′ to the top of the kalwall is glass, so that the daylight can diffuse across all the bays. there are also 2 study pods that are going to hover in this space, sticking out from the second story of the existing building. these study pods are what i’m spending most of my time on right now. i’m covering them in reclaimed wood, and have been working on the size, patterning, spacing of the boards, and aligning the module with the structure. getting the spacing to line up with a 4′ module from the kalwall box and how the study pod protrudes through the existing wall and into the adjacent hallway has been really stimulating. here are some pics:

aside from work, we bought a house, and have been busy doing our renovations. this house was the right price in the right area, but was so ugly that i had real reservations about buying it. during our 3 visit to the house before going through with contract i finally started brainstorming renovation ideas that would not only make this house rock, but would also make us a hefty profit when we sell. i’m pretty sure that the house hadn’t been renovated since the first owner died or moved out. he lived in the house since it was built back in 1965. all of the walls were these dreadful shades of tan, peach, aqua, and sky blue. they were all lit by single incandescent bulb fixtures from the center of the room, which provided this shallow deathly pallor. i felt like we were moving into a slum when i walked down the narrow bedroom hallway. the killer was the living room – it has an 8′ wide sliding glass door w/ this amazing retro yellow/mustard curtain. it’s not really retro, tho, b/c it’s original. all of the walls were polyurethane coated wood panels, which bled into the kitchen where all of the cabinets were similarly finished. it was horrible. every room except of the kitchen and bathrooms was carpeted. here’s what happened:

we moved in, ripped out the carpet in every room, and got to painting. all paint was sherwin-williams harmony paint, which emits ZERO V.O.C.’s. indoor air quality is extremely important, and slowly people are getting more educated about the amount of chemicals we breathe on a daily basis. of course, that was to a degree all for naught b/c beneath the carpet in the living room, we found vinyl sheeting glued to the concrete slab. it took me 4 days of scraping to get that shit off. i rented a power scraper from home depot which got about half of it off, but i had to resort to using Jasco chemical crap to dissolve the glue, which had hardened over the last 50 years. i kept my pregger wife out of the house while i did most of that stuff. we painted the wood paneling in the living room white w/ a purpleish pink accent wall. it looks awesome w/ the retro curtain, which we kept. the front room, which had been set up as a dining room and formal living room when we looked at the house is now just the dining room. it’s too small to be both. it is now a bright white.

we laid hickory hardwood in the living and dining room using low V.O.C glue from Mapei. that glue is super strong – it took over a week for that stuff to come off of my hands.  it was such a pain in the ass to lay hardwoods that i’m hiring somebody to lay the remaining 180sqft in the office and hallway.  we should have hired somebody in the first place – it would have saved time and labor.  it wasn’t really such a pain, but it’s definitely back breaking.   we were originally going to go w/ bamboo, but the only bamboo in our price range was of low quality and therefore soft enough to easily dent and scratch.  in terms of sustainability, then, our floor has the positive aspect of not being shipped halfway around the world, but not much else.

the baby’s room is now painted a soft cheery yellow w/ white trim, and will have carpet tiles in various shades of light green.  we designed the room unisex, but cindy won the battle of finding out the sex, and we are now well aware that our baby is a she.  i don’t like designing the room around a sex anyway.  the hallway is now white instead of nasty tan, and it feels so much bigger and brighter.  it’s amazing what white, or any coat of paint for that matter, can do to your perception of space.  the master bedroom is still halfway primed – we’ll probably finish it in a month or so when everything else in our life settles down (hardwoods are completely installed, vacation is over).  the bedroom will be mostly white w/ a khaki accent wall, which will go well w/ our natural beech wood furniture (it’s all ikea veneer, but that’s the color).  we painted the office yesterday – white again.  it had been some sorry shade of off-white – you didn’t realize how OFF-white it was until it was being repainted.  a much cheerier room now.   once the painting is complete, we’ll lay baseboards everywhere which will pretty much complete the current renovation.  in about 2 years we’ll probably do a major renovation which will expand our square footage by 800-1000.  the ideas are churning in my head – plenty of time for refinement.

anyway, we did most of that in about one week, and that had 8 of our best friends from college visit austin for a weekend.  we packed just about everybody into the house which still had boxes and paint and hardwood everywhere.  this trip had been planned long before we found the house or set the closing date.  chaotic is the word.  but we had a great time despite the incessant rain.  it rained all summer in austin, and that weekend was no exception.  as soon as they left, though, it stopped raining and we haven’t had a drop since.

so that’s about it.  plenty in the span of 2 months, i feel.  oh yeah – the reward program changed at the place where we had our registry, and we found out we’re eligible for the top prize – a 37″ flat screen sharp aquos lcd!  i called up and the thing is already shipping – we should get it this week.  super psyched to get something that rockin’ for free!  it looks to be about a $1299 value.  that’s a hardcore reward gift.

DONE!

having completed my last paper for an incomplete class from last semester, i am now officially done with all coursework for my Master of Architecture with Specialization in Sustainable Design from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.  phew, that’s a lot of words.  I’M FINALLY DONE!!!!  HOORAY!!!!!  GRADUATION THIS SATURDAY!!!

taken an offer!

fantastic – i just accepted an offer today with my top choice architecture firm here in austin. they extended the offer last week, and i was seriously contemplating the offer from my 2nd choice, but ultimately the quality of the outfit at firm#1 took the trump card. the design, engineering, and project goals are more in line with what i want to do and how i want to develop as an architect. they’re reorganizing the firm to have a more progressive design focus, and there is a major push on tech research, with relationships formed with MIT Media Lab and other outfits that i don’t yet know about. supposedly a laser cutter is in the pipeline. there is also a major focus on sustainability, which of course is extremely important to me, and my focus on sustainability likely gave me a big up in getting the job. the benefit package is really good, and they’re flexible on me taking time when my child comes into the world this november. 🙂 and not that it made a difference in my decision, but having our offices on the 22nd floor of a 23 floor bldg (one of the tallest in austin) with balconies doesn’t hurt either!