The trees came down today, along with a few new temporary relationships in the group(he he he). Yay!!! and as things in the field begin to develop this project becomes more real. With the reality of the project comes the reality of how much we have to still learn. I always expected to come out of school knowing most of what i need and the internship was just to hone that knowledge in to a streamlined practice. I quickly came to the realization last night as to how much I have to learn. Prime example, the plumbing plan. No one in our class had ever done one and the only one we could find to use as a guide was the one from last years project, and apparently they were in the same situation as us. As Mr. Fakelmann always said "you can only draw as good as what you are looking at."
huh, thats the first time I've ever agreed with that one.

Let's just start by talking about the project. Simply put we are building a home for a family in need with the help of the community and Habitat for Humanity. This statement brings us to our first problem, the family. granted we have been designing without a specific client for our entire school career, this is a bit different since someone will actually be occupying this project.
(I don't want to sound like I'm complaining about this project, but when I
use the term problem mean it more as hurdle. If architects are problem
solvers we are going to have problems to start with. )
The next problem is/was the site. First we had to find it and now we have to clear it. Aside from the monetary issues involved in clearing, there are the green issues. We would like to tread as lightly as possible on the land, and will still try, its just turning out that lightly is not as lightly as we all hoped. How do you tread lightly and keep trees when you are told that those many of those trees will pose treats to the house we are building. So in order to fulfill our obligation to our clients and our project they must go, forcing our green architecture to tread a little bit more heavily on our site.