Studio Update

By Sean Hartman

So midterms are passed and great ideas are still being generated on the East St. Louis project. We are down to the daily grind of working on our master site plan and detailing it out and figuring out how pedestrians will flow thorough our site. This is taking a little longer than I thought it would have taken to complete but have a team of 4 people working on this it has its challenge because everyone has their own idea of what they think should be placed where. Sometimes you have to come up with a compromise and take elements from each other's design and incorporate it into one finalized site plan that everyone agrees on that can be tweaked later if need be.

We are also finalizing our building layout so we can figure out our structural system that we are working on in our ARC 541 class. Also we have been working on figuring out our occupant loads, means of egress, and plumbing fixtures. We have done extensive code research to make sure our buildings met the IBC, NFPA, and East St. Louis Municipal code requirements. I thought doing code research would have been easy, but it is quite time consuming and can be very tricky if you do not read the code right or interoperate it wrong. We also have done extensive research on zoning, and site analysis for the area to help us figure out what kind of design issues we were going to have to design too.

The end is near and it seems like that we have more time than we actually do. Some of us have a lot of things to get accomplished between now and the end of the semester. With that said time flies when you are in a daily routine of working on a project and sometimes you get caught up and keep coming up with ideas for a project. As architecture students we tend to keep changing things up till the last minute, and when the time is up and we present, we wish we would have done something different. Now with that said I think it is time to get back to work on studio because there is a lot to get accomplished before Friday for our groups pin up of our master site plan and progress check.