Intership: Week 1

Happy Halloween!

My final review is past and gone, thank goodness. I wasn't as prepared as I would have liked. I didn't have any perspectives as usual even though I know they are the most important because they weren't required and I'm just plain not good at them. I also ended up having to present earlier than I thought and therefore had to talk about the site information for our jurors which I wasn't prepared for and subsequently froze up and fumbled my presentation. I was also the first to be reviewed by a somewhat harsh critic so I was a little crushed afterwords. Whatever. It was a five week project so I guess I shouldn't have expected to make as much progress as in past quarters.

But now I'm a week into my internship and I'm enjoying it for the most part. Sitting in a chair and leaning in to see my computer screen makes me pretty stiff by the end of the day. I haven't gotten to do much architectural stuff yet, but I've been working on some marketing stuff. I have to keep a journal for the internship anyway so my first two posts are below. I know I need to be taking pictures, but it's kind of awkward to take pictures of people while they're working away and I'm supposed to be doing the same. I'll post when I take some.

Mark, the principle, is pretty cool but likes to give me crap. He does that to everyone, but I'm not as good with my comebacks yet. My mentor, David, has been pretty great too. I worry that I'm working too slowly and not making enough progress on my projects, but I'm learning and he hasn't said anything about it. I only have a month left which is unbelievable. Then back to SLO to earn some money and see my kitties!


Day One

Today I arrived and sat down with my mentor, David, and went over a few projects he had lined up for me. The first is updating the mailing list for their promotional materials. The second is a marketing magazine for their residential projects. This involves designing a layout that can be used again for their commercial and institutional projects later on. The third project is working on the submittal paperwork for an online architectural journal called Formness.
As the first two projects weren’t ready, I spent the day researching projects and putting together the submittal forms for each project. It was a good first project to get me familiar with the firm and their work. The firm had published 15 projects previously with a similar online journal, so I worked off of the submittal form for that project and resized all the same pictures.

Day Two

Today I continued work on the Formness submittal forms. I searched through their digital portfolio of press releases and photos to fill in as much detail as I could. After exhausting my resources, I printed a copy of the forms for each of the 15 projects for David and Mark to review.
David then put me to work helping Keith on the El Camino project. I was tasked with finding the spec sheets for a long list of plumbing fixtures the owner had purchased before bringing in Mark Horton Architecture for the remodel.

mid-review

Friday was the mid-review for our projects. Eight hours of presentations on two hours of sleep was difficult.
I hate reviews. Not because I don't like giving presentations (those are getting easier) but because I always feel so inadequate. I worked really hard to get stuff done for this presentation but still didn't have enough progress to show the reviewers. I got a few good critiques but I could tell they wanted more.
I think my problem is that I take too long to make a decision. I struggle hard with design. I always end up hating my project which makes me not want to work on it. It seems like design comes so much easier to most of my classmates and I find myself trying to keep up with them, but I just can't.
At this point I just want to get my degree done and then figure out what I'm really going to do with my life. The thing is I like design, but I don't love it. I don't think I'm good at it, and maybe if I was I would enjoy it more.
Enough of my whining. Here's the plan I spent soooo long on (and it's still not done).



Here's a diagram to explain things.



I'm not posting my other drawings or sections because they are going to change. A lot. Okay, time to learn sketchup. Hopefully, that will help me get up to speed.

Week 2

Week 2 went by quick! I've been going back and forth again and again between two different organizational layouts, but I think I finally made a decision. I think half the reason I struggle with design so much is that I make too many assumptions and that I never know how to move forward. The other half is that I get distracted too easily. I didn't used to...
Anyway, now I know what I need to do, it's great. I just hope I can get it done in time. It probably didn't help that I took a mental health day today, but sometimes you just need a break.


Concept model


Organizational Diagram


Rough plan


Entrance sketch

In other news, we did an office visit Wednesday at Field Paoli, the firm that did the renovation on the Marina Branch Library (our site). The talk we heard was really helpful, informative, and inspiring. It was also really helpful just to see how their office works. Then on Thursday, we had our first case study meeting with Arcanum. The guy we met was a Cal Poly grad who had gone through the S.F. program so it was really good to hear his story and see what he's doing now. The project we're going to be studying also sounds really cool: a historical renovation.
The mid-review is next Friday so I'll probably have much more to talk about next week.