Answers to the quiz

As of writing this post, I only had one response on the quiz. William Nobles, your answers are almost completely right--rock on!  Let's see:

A is the office building.

This is the Monadnock Building, the tallest masonry-structure commercial building. The top of the exterior walls are 18 inches thick, but the bottom of the walls are six feet thick.  See why people would rather use steel for a tall building's structure?  You use a lot less space to hold up the building, which means you can rent more of it to tenants.  Originally, the design included brick that would fade from dark purple at the bottom to golden yellow at the top.  The dark purple ended up being used for the entire exterior.  Some students thought this was a government office building because a government building would be a kinda plain-looking skyscraper.

B is the church.

This is the nondemoninational chapel at MIT, by Eero Sarinen, one of my favorite Modern architects.  Honestly, MIT is a great place for architecture tours.  A good pal of mine from grad school who lives in Boston took Guy and me on a tour of MIT and Harvard a couple of years ago when we spent our birthday weekend in Boston.  If you can ever go, do so.

C is a government building.

This is the Denver Public Library in Denver, Colorado, a little something by Michael Graves.  Graves is mostly known by nonarchitects as the guy who designs all those cool kitchen and house gadgets and stuff at Target.  However, he was an architect first, and I for one actually like his stuff.  It's a bit like Facadism and a little on the two-dimensional side, but I like it.  Unlike a lot of PoMo architecture, it's got a sense of humor.  Speaking of sense of humor, someone in this year's class thought this was a government building because it might be a prison.  Someone else thought it might be a government office building, because each piece of the building might hold a different department.

D is a residence.
This is not just a residence, people: this is the Glass House by Philip Johnson.  Mmm.  That queen knew how to do some crazy shizzle.  Behind the photographer of this shot is the Brick House, which has solid walls except for a few small circular windows.  I can't even tell you how much I want to see this house, this place.  I'm sure if I ever get to New Canaan, CT, I'll just fall to the ground and weep.

Building E is also a government building.
This is the Phoenix Public Library in Phoenix, AZ, by postmodernist and really-good-but-reputedly-kinda-vain architect Will Bruder.  I had to do a project on the unusual structure of this building, and it's pretty cool.  I only got a B on the project.  Shoulda had Bruder present it for me.  In the lecture last year, some students thought that this was the church because it looked like the megachurches you see these days.

Finally, F is a train station.  It was also built before the Civil War.
St. Pancras in London, England is also a hotel.  In the lecture, this was seemed to be the easiest for everyone to get as built before the Civil War because the students associate Gothic architecture with really really old buildings. 

Later this week, the story of some EPIC FAIL public housing. 

Back and (mostly) rested

I just got back into Denver, where it is 46 degrees and misting rain.  When I left Atlanta less than four hours ago, it was sunny and 88.  I took li'l Lucky for a walk at 10am and was sweating like Paris Hilton in a spelling bee.  So now I'm here and feeling much better rested than I expected.  Usually, Kitty and I overbook our time together, but we spent the time only having about one thing planned per day, which means we ended up doing a lot of sitting around in the Happy Kitteh Cottage, drinking coffee and reading various magazines.  We had some wonderful goofy moments, about which Kitty will probably post because she's the one with the photos from Mom's cell phone camera.  We were nearly kicked out of Michael's, the craft store, but I think we avoided being ejected from the property because our behavior was just weird enough that it was Nature's way of saying "do not touch".

Anyway, I'll do answers for Monday's quiz shortly, and I'll drop some interesting stories on y'all later in the week.  Word.

Time for another Guess the Building Quiz!

Okay, just like last year when I went to do my architecture lecture, we're doing the quiz again.  

 

Here's the deal: if you wanna play, just for funsies, post your answers as a comment. I'll hold off on posting all the comments until I'm back from Georgia in order to give all my peeps some time before "pencils down." Whatchu do is write the letter of the following pictures for your guess of the answer. Bear in mind that some of these questions have more than one answer. So, have a look and give it a shot. And yes, I know that I have some architects in the my readership. You can play, too, my peoples.

 

The questions:

1.                  Which of these do you think is a church?

2.                  Which do you think is a government building?

3.                  Which do you think is a train station?

4.                  Which is a residence?

5.                  Which is a business or office building?

6.                  Which of these do you think was built before the Civil War (which was 1861-1865, for those that got a D in History)?

Building A:

Building B:

Building C:

Building D:

Building E:

Building F:

Rock on, and good luck!

Vay-cay-shun, all I ever wahn-ted...

Thank Jesus, Mary, and Eero Saarinen, I'm in Georgia finally for a long weekend with my sister, Miss Kitty. My plane landed last night around midnight in Atlanta, and about two minutes after they opened the door to our aircraft, the fragrant humidity wafted back into the plane and folks began exclaiming, "Man, I forgot how humid it was here! I was not ready for that!" I was thankful for that humidity, however--it makes my hair curl nice and purrty, and I don't have to wear moisturizer for the whole weekend.

Today was spent getting French manicures at our favorite li'l local spa, and tonight will be lasagna and brownies with Mom out at the Happy Kitten Farm, where the cats roam free, the dogs have a porch to sit on, and the cell phones don't pick up. Tomorrow will be more debauchery and evening drinks and cookout with Linda Lou, Kitty's colleague, for whom I'm doing the guest lecture. Sunday is yet more debauchery, and then Monday is the lecture (well, a girl's gotta work). I'll fly back Tuesday afternoon.

I can't begin to describe how ready I was/am for this long-ass weekend. I was so annoyed and furious at work (not a good way to be when you need to stay employed), and I really didn't have any tolerance for anything but reading magazines and going for a walk. Working out made me tired and annoyed, working made me cranky, and cleaning the house left me homocidal. So this weekend came at just the right time, before I ended up on the evening news, or worse, "Cops". So I'm gonna go hang out and do lots of nothing following by dropping some knowledge on the chirrens. Stay tuned: Monday is another architectural quiz, so be ready!

The Gropius Coop (for a new WAD reader)

So I got an email a couple of weeks ago from Jon, who lives in a house designed by members of Walter Gropius' office The Architects' Collaborative.  Jon wants to get four chickens and build a coop for them himself on his historically significant and sacred property, so his chicken coop can't be a) huge, b) glaring and obscene, c) hard to build, and d) cutesy-pie.  While looking for a Modern chicken coop design, he stumbled across my tripe of a blog.  Bless his heart.

So he found this post and or this post and/or this post about starchitects' chicken coops, and he emailed me with his sketches of the coop he'd like to build.  May I say that it was a good sketch, and with a little staring at it over a cup of tepid coffee, I figured out what he was trying to do.  What I got from Jon's sketches is that something the size of a 4'x8' sheet of plywood is about as big as he wants to handle, but the coop also needs to be off the ground and have defensible space, what with the small predators around his house.

I asked Jon if I could try to do my own sketch for his Bauhaus-inspired coop, and to my delight he said yes.  So, here's my Brrkhaus.

The exterior includes lap siding and a cantilevered roof made of two 4'x8' sheets of plywood and a little wooden trim on the edges.  To match Jon's house, I've included two 2x4s standing on end as a vertical element to allude to Jon's chimney.  4x4s support the chicken wire that makes up the chicken run.  I can't decide if I should include some more lap siding along the far end of the run to evoke Jon's house as well.  (Jon, can I put your house on WAD?  It's so completely awesome, and your photo of it does it justice.)  Strip windows on one or both long sides allows light in, and a sliding panel allows Jon access to the eggs.  Let's have a look inside, shall we? 

 Inside, we can see the 4x4 columns (at the edges of the structure, no less--go Mies!) and the 2x4s providing lateral support and a material for tacking the chicken wire floor to the building.  The underpinning panel flips up toward the outside and will allow Jon to rake the poo out from under it.  The sliding panel at the bottom of the occupiable enclosure slides up and is held up by a hook (or something, I haven't worked it out yet), which allows Jon to get eggs from the nests without bugging the hens too much.

I'm wondering about the dimensions I'm showing on the drawings.  Kitty, when you get back from Nash Vegas, would you mind commenting on how big Jon's coop should be for four chickens?  I'm thinking it should be around 3'x7' max.

Happy Memorial Day and hold tight...

...cuz I've got a few nice li'l posts coming this week.  However, I went plant shopping with my good pal Ethel on Saturday, and I've got to get those plants in pots today.  (Yesterday was spent hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we went for a four-mile hike and got rained and hailed on.

So while I work on those posts and do some more work on my guest lecture for my sister's colleague's class a week from today, err'body in de club get tipsy and have a great Memorial Day.  Word.

Pardon me, my ROWE is showing

Some of you may recall that as of the beginning of 2009, all hourly design staff including moi are at 36 hours a week.  I was at 36 hours like everyone else until FCH started in earnest.  Shortly after Intern Kimmy and I got on the project full time, Bosley sent us an email saying that we were allowed to work up to 40 hours a week on the project.  I was having to work 40 just so I could get 32 hours on FCH--other little proejcts that I was wrapping up for Sven, Howie, and Prudence kept taking my time.  Finally, now that I'm 95%-100% on FCH, I'm still only getting about 38 or 39 hours.  The project actually takes up my extra four hours that I was hoping to use to do some writing.  I'm still finding time for that on Tuesday and Thursday nights when Guy is at pool league, but if/when one or both of his leagues shuts down for the summer, writing with someone else in the house gets harder to do.  

Still and yet, note that I'm still barely at 40 hours a week with a full project to do.  First off, having help makes all the difference in the world.  I did Wheatlands with very little help, which caused my 60-hour workweeks.  Intern Kimmy's efforts are making the project less arduous and way better.  She's comfortable with Revit and fantastic with Adobe Illustrator and PageMaker (very handy for doing presentation graphics).  I don't think she's at 40/wk either.  We get it done with a little time (an hour or two) to spare.  While it's not enough to write a book, it's enough to let her leave a little early on a Wednesday and catch a yoga class or an afternoon bike ride, and I can get my laundry and grocery shopping done, which frees up my weekend for actual fun.  Having these extra four hours has made it easier to do things like take Maddy to the vet or even deal with my own doctor visits.  One day, I just came home and took a nap.

There's this concept of the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) that I initially rejected but now it speaks to me.  Summarized, it's that we should pay people for the work they accomplish, not for the time they're warming a seat in the office.  For many workers, technology allows them to work from more places than just their desk, so why not?  While this only works somewhat for architects (if you draw, you need some badass machines to run software like Revit), there's still some merit to it.  Sometimes in the past few weeks, I've found myself turning 6.5 or 7 hours' work into 8 because I didn't know if Bosley was going to suddenly need something.  Why can I not help him from afar, or in a timely manner when I return to the office first thing the next morning?  Again, if I can do eight hours' work in 6 or 7, why am I being punished for my efficiency and made to stay in the office?

There's a small ray of hope here, though.  Our office recently implemented Newforma, which is a project management software that links well with Outlook (a Microsoft email program).  In a recent office meeting, Bosley made the point to the entire office that every level of DA's staff--partners all the way down to interns--should know how to use the software and use the new file naming conventions.  "The idea," Bosley proclaimed, "is that no one's going, 'hey Pixie, where's that thing from Wheatlands, or that drawing from Kansaska?' You don't need other people to find stuff for you--you find it yourself."  That's the kind of thing that most higher-ups do, but I don't think anyone at DA does it more than Howie.  If this gets implemented the way Bosley means for it to be, it means fewer interns and young architects having to be on call for the whims of their bosses--one step closer to ROWE.