National Museum of the Marine Corps

My Visit to the National Museum of the Marine Corps

By:Lucas Shubert

One stop my family and I made while site-seeing over Thanksgiving break was the Marine Corps Museum near Stafford Virginia. It was a very interesting experience from parking lot to exhibit. The outer form of the building is unique and structurally honest. Most of the building formed a circular bunker under a built-up rampart. The center of the circle was a conical glass shape with a massive mast jutting through the center into the sky. The march toward the entry of the building, flanked by two-story precast retaining walls, was somewhat ominous as well as monumental in scale.

On the grounds around the museum proper exists a chapel, several statues and miles of wooded paths. The chapel seemed to be a favorite place for marines to share their nuptials, after learning that it was booked constantly throughout the year. It was a simple wood and glass structure placed on top of a small wooded hill overlooking the museum.

Once inside the museum, after passing through the metal detectors approaching the front desk, I was greeted by a huge several story volume as the ceiling opened up. Large exhibits were present in this central lobby- three on the floor and four airplanes hanging above.

The layout of the primary exhibit area was a somewhat linear path around the circumference of the central circle. It was chronologically ordered, beginning with the conception of the Marine Corps and ending with present day conditions. I’ve never been to a museum with so much information presented in the forms of models, images, and text. It seemed like someone could spend an entire day in just one section of the museum absorbing all the information.

After spending a couple hours walking through the exhibit path back to the center lobby, we rode the elevator up to the second floor to get a better look at the airplanes hanging within the cone. A clerestory hallway lead around the circle to a restaurant and tavern. At this point I noticed that a lot of people were confused about how to get back down to the first floor (myself included). It turned out we had to walk all the way back around the circle to the stairway where we came up. That part seemed like poor planning. After visiting the gift shop near the entrance, we left the museum.

Curtis Park

Case Study

By: Megan Gebke

        My case study for my thesis is Curtis Park in Denver, Colorado.  Many points relate back to my own thesis which involves master planning a neighborhood in St. Louis just a couple blocks north of the Edward Jones Dome.  Curtis Park was first of many suburbs in the Denver area.  Like my site, Curtis Park was filled with diversity among nationalities.  The neighborhood thrived, filling with beautiful Victorian and Italianate architecture.  In the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood began to decline.  People left the suburb to move to the city or elsewhere.  This left the site abandoned and buildings vacant for years.  My site in St. Louis did the same thing.  The neighborhood was left empty.  Some larger homes were split up into several units and became low income housing.  Because of the vacant lots, crime and danger rose in the area, which led to getting a bad reputation.  In Curtis Park, things started looking up when in 1975, they became named to the National Register of Historical Places.  People became familiar with the area and realized beautifully built homes were left vacant.  People started slowly moving back to the area.  Today Curtis Park is one of the top suburbs in Denver to get a building permit.

         With my project, my site, Old North St. Louis, has started a restoration group.  They have started to change the perception of the neighborhood, but has a long way to go.  My goal for my thesis is to create a master plan for the site that will become economical and safe.  To create a place where people will want to live and small businesses will want to thrive.

Case Study

Thesis Case Study

By: Sam Harshman

I'm going to use this blog to brainstorm/ plan out my case study for my thesis project.  Just real quick if you don't already know, my thesis is based in Little Rock/ North Little Rock, and will pertain to completing a bike trail with parks and designing a bike shop on a little strip on the Little Rock side of the Arkansas River. 

This Christmas break, I plan on making a trip to Little Rock to visit the site and interview some people who use the trail.  Some of the things I will ask will be

            1.  How often do you use the trail?

            2.  What do you use the trail for?

            3.  What do you like about the trail?

            4.  What do you not like about the trail?

            5.  Do you own a bike, roller blades, etc...?

            6.  If answer to 5 is no, do/would you rent any of the mentioned devices?

The answers I get will help me design the trails and parks along the river.  It may even answer some crucial questions about the bike shop and how big it would need to be or if this is even the right site for the project.

The more research that I do on this project, the more I think about choosing another city that has nothing like Little Rock has, and develop a riverfront bike trail system for a city that needs it.  This is a question that I need to answer this Christmas break in order for me to continue on my thesis.  Any feedback would be nice. Thanks, and have a nice Christmas!

The Narrative

The Narrative

By: Van Dwinnells

         How things come together is at the heart of architecture; the interactions of specific elements and the creation of zones with all their varying amounts of light and volume.  These connections are what offer unique experiences.   Whether they are from one zone to the next direct or only visible, the intrigue, the understanding that there is something more drives us to search it out.  It seems that in order to create an interactive space there needs to be a complete understanding of this separation and it is the obligation of us architect to at least reference this through visual cues like permeation or transparencies, at least in some manner.  It is our duty to narrate spaces.  In memories, the permanence or sticky factor of a space and how we use it is determined by how we remember it and what occurred there.  These memories are created more easily and reflected upon through a narration.  It sometimes can be simpler to explain a series of circumstances, i.e. a story, to better emphasize a situation than only giving specific details.  In my mind this is very similar to a descriptive piece of literature.  A noun is better accented by the adjectives and sentence structure, giving new life and meaning to a generic depiction.  In a way, our architecture can represent the adverbial structure that dictate why and how we do things surrounding this noun.  Therefore, our construct is that of a descriptive yet kinetic nature based on the subject of the narrative.  I reference this idea, because I have been thinking about how we view our lives.  Maybe we see it as a timeline.  Some of us see our lives as a film.   Personally, I see my life as chapters that enable me to scan them in order to go back and replay these individual narratives as desired.  It is my belief that paying close attention to the narrative and working out a series of events within the context of our design problems we will inevitably create a more interactive and experiential environments; one's that will be more memorable.      

Revit Shortcut

Revit Shortcut

By Josh Rucinski

One of the worst things and conversely best things about revit is the 'vg' command or the visibility settings.  They will make or break your output.

But how can you get a great product that is presentation worthy?

Well what are the elements of a great line drawing?

Lineweights

Clarity

Vector-based

Clean and legible fonts

Here's a game plan you can use.

Once you have determined the number of levels of your building.  Select a floor plan in the project browser.  Right-click and make a duplicate.  Name it Z-first floor or something like that so it will always be at the very bottom of the drawings.

Using the 'vg' settings set the lineweights and cut pattern settings.  For walls use the solid fill, use your design sense to give line weights. TURN OFF underlay in the properties pane.  This creates a lot of lines in .dwgs.

IMPORTANT: Once you made this, never use it to design your model, use the other floor plan.  This is a print-only plan, you want to fire and forget when it comes to the settings so you do not have to do it again.

Copy this floorplan for however levels your building has.  Set the view depth settings to capture the correct floor.

When you are ready to print, export the drawings as .dwg.

Open AutoCAD

With the right settings in revit, you should have very little to tweak.  If you have a lot to do, look at your VG settings in Revit again.

Save a print settings.  Using the colors revit assigned to layers, define lineweights in AutoCAD and have them print out monocrome.  SAVE THE SETTING!!

You can use this setting forever in AutoCAD.

Finally tweak your pretty vectors in a vector-based program like Illustrator or CorelDRAW.

-Josh