Hello good-evening.
The past two weeks have been very interesting. Did the small odd jobs and started on a major one -so huge there's not enough memory on a cad drawing. A new school- Christel House in Ottery, which was funded and designed by Americans. A teacher approached us to add additions to the existing school. They needed store rooms, a technology room, a pavillion and sports facilities such as netball, basketball & tennis courts etc as well as a track, which i'm pretty excited about. Phase one went under-way (store & tech. room), had meetings and changed there minds. Just great. Spent all that precious time for nothing. Lesson- give proper briefs/make sure the client knows what he wants/provided as many suitable options before they waste your time. But this is how it goes so we wait for phase two.
Did my share if administrative work aswell. Went a few times to council/called them for progress- which was a drag ofcourse but there was this one particular lady whom I have'nt seen before. She gave me some insight as to why we need to pay certain fees and what forms we need for particular jobs & their purpose. Very informative and paticient but I still dont like council. Filled in a couple of complicated forms-they all the same to me. I even got to speak to the traffic engineer for an ammendent-felt so empowered. Its nice communicating with the top notches face-to-face.
Went on site to Constantia, an old client who wanted to add a boundary wall & make his driveway parallel to his house-which is currently at a slant due to the curved boundary. Seemed pretty simple untill we drew it up and realised the degree of the slope. It is Constantia after all. Did some changes to the ground-took a little & gave a little now we have a semi-floating sliding gate (need to add a rack) but at least we dont have a 30 degree sliding gate or 2300mm high walls. Small architectural problem effectively solved. Lesson-clients want certain things, to achieve them-we have to provide smart solutions that are funtional and legal. There are certain obsticals that affect design that clients are sometimes not aware of i.e. sloping sites /heights of neighbours boundary walls (depending on the nature of location/property).
Mr Bossman also ask me to design a bench for a bay window for his holiday house. A small exercise to see my idea/point of view/design skills, compared to his prefered option. He ended up combinding my idea with his and started building it today-What! Cool!
There are many aspects to architecture-from tiny benches to sloping sites-and either way the experience/possibilities are always wonderful.
Happy learning.
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