Week 8 Recap

Remember we will not be meeting for a few weeks!  In the meantime enjoy the holidays and let’s get ready to start with our feet running on the project in 2013.

For all of you that missed this week’s meeting, you missed out on Architecture 101.  We learned about plan, elevation, and section views by slicing and dicing up some peppers and trying to draw what we saw.  Unfortunately, my attempt was a complete failure, but several of the students and mentors exhibited some exceptional work.

Nice job to everyone! There were some great looking drawings out there.

Where We Go From Here

Next meeting:

Goettsch Partners office @ 224 South Michigan Ave, Floor 17

5:00 – 7:00 on January 8th

Remember keep thinking MAKE-WATCH-PLAY!

This week we announced that we choose the short stack for our project! The CEO of Big Sky Development, Ronald Trump, flew in to discuss what his hopes for the project were.

Ronald Trump pictured above.

He is hoping for a highly sustainable project that also incorporates the culture of Chicago into its design. after he left, we were able to dig deeper into our site. We broke up into small groups and started a site analysis that will help us as we devleop our ideas further.

See you all January 9th! Enjoy your winter breaks!

Week 6 task was to design, build and manger a project from the ground up. Given a certain budget and a list of materials at a cost, students built and designed a structure that would fit a 6″ x 11″ x 4″ dimension to support a pop can on top.  It turned out to be quite a challenge. With limited time and money, students had to turn drawings on paper into built form. I think everyone had a blast with this exercise and learned a lot of the real world challenges of the construction fields.

Last week we started our evening with some puzzles, followed by ACE pictionary! Two teams competed on their knowledge of discipline related concepts and their drawing skills. After the games, we split into groups to debate three options for next year’s projects. The teams then presented the pros and cons for these and voted at the end for their favorites. We are currently discussing the results and will have a project to announce this wednesday!

Week 7 Recap

Alright, it’s official – I have no idea what week it is.  I thought last week was week 6, but apparently our past meeting on Tuesday was the 6th or 7th week. Anyways, I am just going to pretend our last meeting was week 7 and keep moving on.

For all of you that missed this week’s meeting, you missed one exciting activity.  The construction mentors gave everyone the challenge of building a structure that could span 6 inches and bear the load of  a soda can.  The activity was set up to challenge everyone’s ability to plan out  a building schedule while trying to minimize the cost of the structure.  In the end, 2 teams were disqualified, 1 team had a good structure, but it failed under the weight of the soda can and one team followed all of the instructions and its bridge withstood the Dr. Pepper can.

Sorry to the team whose photo I didn’t get in – I forgot to take it.

Nice job to all of the teams; all of the mentors were impressed by your efforts.  Privately, we were talking amongst ourselves about how we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to do it either.

The instructions for this assignment were intentionally vague to encourage the students to ask questions.  Remember there is no such thing as a stupid question – they avoid at lot of problems down the road.

ASK QUESTIONS?

Where We Go From Here

Next meeting:

Goettsch Partners office @ 224 South Michigan Ave, Floor 17

5:00 – 7:00 on December 18th

At our next meeting, we will be getting into a topic that everyone is extremely interested in, Architecture.  Some come to the meeting with ideas!  So bring you creative side with you and let’s find out just what the folks at GP do on a daily basis  See you on Tuesday!

Remember keep thinking MAKE-WATCH-PLAY!

Random Fact of the Week:  The observatory elevators housed in the Willis (Sears) Tower are the fastest in the world at 1600 feet per minute.

It’s been awhile since we posted anything. We hope you all are still following this blog. =) This week we worked on our conceptual massing, program of our building, sketches, and physical model. There’s quite a lot of work to be done for next week’s presentation to our “client”, so work hard! As always, if you guys have any questions, feel free to contact.

Check out some of the photos from this week:

Last week we were lucky enough to visit Power’s construction site at Loyola’s campus. This was a great intro into the construction world and also a great way to see how all three disciplines come together. A big thank you to Power!

Team 4 spent week 6 exploring the concept of modular design. Since the year’s project will be a modular school design, the students worked on creating small, conceptual models of spaces they thought could be repeated and work into a flexible school environment. They started out doing this individually and then later on broke into 5 teams to share their design. The teams used aspects from each individual’s design and combined their ideas to create 5 designs. The teams then presented their designs to the group and discussed the pro’s and con’s of each design.

Week 5 Recap

Week six was our introduction to engineering! To introduce everyone to the coordination that is required among different disciplines, we did a coordination activity where we had to coordinate the location of steel beams, ducts, electrical wires, and various plumbing lines.  There was no right or wrong arrangement; however, some arrangements were a little bit more practical than other. See the pictures below to see how each team tackled the task.  As the structural engineer on the team, I want to take this opportunity to say that there will be not cutting through any steel beams!

As the project moves forward, we are going to need some students to act as the engineers, so if you are interested please let Mike or myself know.

Where We Go From Here

The next meeting will be on next Tuesday, December 11th, at GP.  The theme for the meeting will be Construction 101, so strap on your hard hats and let’s get ready to go.

Remember keep thinking MAKE-WATCH-PLAY!

 Random Fact of the Week: The Chrysler Building in New York City was the first building in the world to be more than 1000 feet tall!

College Night

The Week 4 meeting focused on discussing issues related to college- including planning and funding college careers, how to evaluate different college options, and what to do once you finish college.

Some big takeaways:

• Make use of all available resources. Teachers, counselors, ACE mentors, etc. all have different experience relating to the college process. Be proactive and seek advice from a variety of sources.
• Consider what YOU want/need from you college experience. College offers an incredible diversity of opportunities, consider how an individual school relates to your goals.
• Financial planning is important. Take the time to fill out the FAFSA (www.fafsa.ed.gov/) to apply for financial aid. Seek out scholarships and apply to as many as possible! When you do decide on a college, talk to the college administration to find out what financial aid they have available.

Finally, if you are seriously considering a career in Architecture, Construction, or Engineering, please make use of the collective knowledge ACE mentors have in planning for a college experience in one of those industries. Learn from the mistakes (and the successes) of those who have gone before you!