Ahhh, ACE, good to have you guys back.  I’d like to begin by personally thanking Trevon, Ted, and Xavier for turning in Sketch-up snowmen!  Seriously, you have no idea how excited I was when your snowy little emails pop up in my inbox!!!  I’m gonna assume that the rest of you are still working out the kinks in Sketch-up and will turn in your massings of compacted snow, and pieces of coal to me later.  (Although to be fair, if anyone takes a picture of their REAL snowman over the next couple of wintery days, I’ll post those on the site too :))

In all seriousness though, aren’t you all excited ACE has started back up again!?  We spent most of the meeting on 10 January sifting through programming ideas for our theater.  It’s best to throw out every idea possible, outlandish or not, and then discard the ones that might not fit in with our whole idea.  We went through some basic things pretty much any public building needs: a lobby, restrooms, mechanical room, area for circulation (stairs, elevators, escalators, etc.), administration space, kitchen, storage, etc.  Then there are spaces that are pretty specific to our building type: the house and stage, dressing rooms, prop loading/unloading, rehearsal space, flyaway, etc.  As for any of the spaces mentioned above, the size and location of each of these spaces is entirely dependent on the buildings’, size, location, orientation, and use.

Once we’ve established WHAT we need in our building, we must figure out HOW is fits in the building.  This is where the bubble diagrams come in.  You’ve all started planning the uses of this theater, but I hope you’ll spend just a little time over the next two weeks continuing to think about how each space relates to all the others.  For example, the dressing rooms and green room should be adjacent to and have direct access to the stage, and the bathrooms should have access from the lobby.  On the other hand, the kitchen shouldn’t be located immediately next to the theater (ever worked in a restaurant?  Kitchens are LOUD, and cooks have potty-mouths, and you don’t want to disturb the show).  Also, when you put together your diagrams, consider the size of the bubble according to the size of the space you plan on it being.  The bubble used for the bathrooms shouldn’t be the same size as the bubble used for the theater…they’re not going to be the same size rooms, nor do they carry the same amount of importance in the building.  (Also, continue looking to other theaters out there, and looks at how the spaces are planned out…this might give you an idea about how our building might be oriented.)

Next meeting: Site visit on 17 January

WE ARE MEETING AT GOETTSCH OFFICE, 224 S. MICHIGAN AVE, FLOOR 17 @ 4:30

WE ARE LEAVING THE OFFICE FOR THE SITE VISIT AT EXACTLY 4:30 – DON’T BE LATE!!

We will be taking cabs from the Goettsch office to the site, the University of Chicago Medical Center located at 5624 S. Drexel, Chicago, IL and will be eating a tasty little snack there before beginning the construction tour.  When the tour is done, we WILL NOT be returning back to the GP office, but can help guide all of you home.

If you don’t bring your signed permissions slips before the site visit begins on Tuesday you will not be able to participate in the tour, so please be sure to bring them!  You also will not be able to participate unless you are wearing hard, closed toed shoes, and clothing that fits tighter to your body, to avoid snagging on unfinished building materials.  Below is the permission slip if you need another one because you lost it/dog ate it/ran out of…paper towels.  Hope to see you all on Tuesday, the site visit should be a lot of fun, and I’m super excited!

ACE UCMC Permission Slip <Print it, sign it, gimme it.