England: the land of imperatives

Just in case one doesn't know how to act in England, reminders are routinely issued, both verbally and visually.

Everyone is familiar with "mind the gap." However on Sunday and Monday, Bill and I were struck by just how many directives were being issued by public announcement systems on all matters of behaving with decorum in public. We were told how to cue (queue?) up in the elevator (lift) upon exiting the subway. Crosswalks were painted with the words "look right" or "look left." But our favorite imperative was issued upon arriving at the Oxford train station. We had to take the lift to a bridge that crosses the tracks. A number of people had lined up ahead of us with their suitcases in hand. As the last two travellers entered the crowded elevator, the elevator exhorted those passengers to "stay calm." When the elevator returned to carry us and another couple to the street level, we noticed that we did not receive such an admonition. Did the previous group test the patience of an elevator waiting to close its doors? How did it know?

Still in love with train stations

In case you don't already know this about me, I love trains and train stations. In fact, my honors thesis was on the evolution of trains stations and wayfinding. So the first thing I wanted to do was visit St. Pancras. When we last visited London, the new train shed addition had just opened, but the hotel was still under renovation. I was disappointed to learn that the hotel still hadn't opened. But this is the front of the building.



We went inside the terminal instead. It has been three years since it had opened, and I found that the windows were dirtier. All things considered, these windows are better maintained than those of its neighbor next door, King's Cross.



The following day we left London for Oxford from Paddington Station, below. The train stations of the 19th century have been compared with the cathedrals of the high middle ages. Paddington Station is most similar in this regard since the terminal and the train shed are combined.



Below is a good view of the "transept" intersecting with the "nave" or the main shed.



And of course, no visit to a train station is complete without a ride on the train!

A dearth of blogs

Simply way too busy. 'Nuf said!

A "grave" matter

I am procrastinating, no doubt about it. A week ago I had an occasion to write a letter in French. I haven't studied French since 1976, except for a summer audit a few years ago in French for doctoral students who need another language for research. When I wrote my letter to Diane, that's my French friend, I was surprised by how much French I remembered. I did check lots of things, just to make sure that my accent marks were going in the right direction. That's when it occurred to me that the accent grave seems superfluous to an American like myself. I was puzzled by this...I think I was puzzled by this when I first studied French, but never really articulated it to myself. However, the other evening I think I figured out why it seemed so unnecessary to me. As a person who speaks English, there really is no rhyme or reason to the pronunciation of many of our vowels. Whether it's a long E, short E, or silent E is related to simply knowing the word and a few rules on phonetics. I don't need an accent mark to tell me how to say elephant, for example. Likewise, I don't really need an accent mark to pronounce chevre (sorry, I can't insert the accent grave here) properly. Nor do I need an accent mark to differentiate it from the e in mes. On the other hand, I do like the accent acute. If you're going to have an accent mark that one makes sense.

Last night I wrote a letter to Kikka's parents in Italian. Frankly, my Italian is not very good. Not that I can speak French any better than Italian, that's probably a toss up. The fact of the matter is that I intend to visit Italy this summer. Toward that end, I opened up my Italian textbook a few minutes ago. Like the French, the Italians have both kinds of accent marks. However, I haven't been able to discern the difference between the final e in perche' with an accent acute or the word amore without one. To my ear, it sounds the same as the word che without an accent mark. On the other hand, the accento tonico grave as in citta' (sorry, again I can't insert a proper accent here) does make sense.

All of this to say that I really am procrastinating. I want to know Italian, but I'm just putting off studying it. And at that I have succeeded!

Ah, lovely Spring 2010

Isn't spring a lovely time of year? Here is one of my daffodils. The problem with spring, however, is what comes with it--Mountain Cedar pollen is my nemesis, for sure. When everyone else is outside enjoying the weather, I am inside taking Zyrtec. So you can imagine my delight when I had an absolutely brilliant idea on Friday. I was sitting on the fireplace hearth in the office (yes, we have a corner fireplace, but it doesn't work) when John Oliver, the father of one of Billy's former soccer camp coaches who works down the hall from us, had just asked me if he could leave his keys and glasses in our office while he went out for a run. I wasn't going anywhere, so I gladly agreed. Now our office is on the second floor of what used to be a bank building. I was looking into the hall when I had my dead-brilliant idea. I could use the balcony walkway as my own personal walking track! No HPER fees, no UA parking tickets, no inertia over getting TO SOMEPLACE to exercise, and best of all, NO ALLERGENS. I had flats on Friday so I took my first walk. Here are some shots of my new track. This is looking from the north end of the building to the south. Our office is located off to the right on the northwest corner of the building.

In the center of the building there is a connecting walkway. Isn't this the most beautiful track you've ever seen? All of the arches remind me of Roma. In addition, when I get to the south end of the building I can see the Ozark plateau. Best of all, there are no San Pietrini for me to trip on (and break my wrists)!

I took these pictures on Friday, just two days ago when it was warm enough to go without a jacket. Now look at it this morning. According to the TV, we've had 8 inches of snow, and it's still coming down! The only thing holding up the metal yardstick is the snow!

As for my spring allergies, they do disappear with snow. No Zyrtec for me today!

Face to face

OK, I've dilly-dallied enough on this blog, one that has been pending on my computer for several weeks now. I'm not sure if I've lost my muse or if instead my failure to publish this one is just a sign of work picking up. I have been spending a lot of time (nearly all of it) at work on the computer, so this blog is dedicated to explaining what exactly it is that I do.

When I used to sew, seam selvages were generally set at 5/8ths. I always thought that to be an odd figure, but apparently 5/8ths is the ideal fraction when constructing things like dresses, jackets, and buildings. Why can't they, Vogue pattern makers and builders alike, set the measurement at 1/2"? Americans think the metric system is so hard, but I don't recall there being any fractions (the numerator and denominator kind) when I was using the metric system in Italy. No, in Italy there were just decimal points. Decimal points are easier to add than fractions (the numerator and denominator kind).

That said, I've beeen busy at work building lots and lots of Revit walls. You see, I'm constructing an existing building in Revit so that we can reconfigure the space for a new tenant. This is a very big building, more than 40,000 square feet (3,716 meters squared, if you're really into the metric system)! Unlike CAD where you draw a rectangle that's supposed to look like a wall in plan, a Revit wall is made of the layers that real walls have, e.g., your 2 x 4 (which isn't really a 2 x 4), a metal stud, gypboard, sheathing, bricks, etc. Now in Revit a typical office wall is made up of 5 components: 5/8" gypboard, a core boundary, a 3-5/8" metal stud, a core boundary, and another 5/8" gypboard. The result is that you end up with lots of 5/8ths lengths to add up in your head . Now while I do own a calculator that adds feet and inches, including fractions of inches, it sure would be a lot easier to add them in quarter- or half-inch increments instead of in 5/8ths. But as we have seen, Vogue designers and builders seem to prefer that things be made in this 5/8" dimension.

Ever wonder what the difference is between an interior designer and an architect? Well, aside from the most important fact that designers don't move weight bearing walls, we tend to think of walls in their finished form, that is with gypboard on them. However, when architects draw plans, their primary audience is the builder. Builders think in terms of laying studs. After all, you have to have a stud before you can nail gypboard to it. So the set of existing CAD plans for said building that I brought into my Revit drawing had the walls laid out in stud widths, not in finished wall thicknesses. Also, among some firms in the pre-Revit days, it was common practice to construct 4" wide walls when the metal stud was really 3-5/8" wide. In other words, there isn't a 1-to-1 correspondence between the plan I'm using as my base plan and the plan I'm building in Revit. In addition, not all of the real building walls conform to the original CAD plan. The whole thing makes your head spin, especially if you're trying to think of the walls like architects and builders when you've been trained as an interior designer.

You might ask yourself, who's to know if you've chosen to align your 4-7/8" wall to the right side or the left side of the 4" CAD wall? Well, you see there are existing dimensions on the CAD plan, so I know that between the studs there really ought to be, for example, 14'-4". Since the real building has some walls that differ from the original CAD plan, there are other dimensions written in pencil that reflect the difference between two finished walls (the way I'm accustomed to thinking). The real issue in dimensioning comes down to how you interpret face-to-face: from face of stud to face of stud or from face of finished wall to face of finished wall?

Of course when you dimension in Revit, you don't measure from face of STUD because Revit doesn't provide you with that category, per se. I was getting a little mad at Revit that its designers didn't consider this possibility when setting their terminology. So you can imagine my delight when at 1:48 a.m. one morning I had an epiphany of sorts. You recall that above I mentioned that Revit walls have core boundaries, but in real walls they don't exist (which is why in the example above there are no thicknesses associated with the core boundaries). Well, my "Eureka" moment came when I realized that these core boundaries referred to the face of core which can be set wherever one wishes to set them. In other words, if I want, I can set my core boundaries at the faces of the stud so that I can properly dimension the walls in Revit. To have figured that out (it seems so obvious now) was a monumental breakthrough for me.

You can begin to imagine that my little head is about ready to explode by now. While my Revit plan looked like the CAD underlay, the real test came when I went to dimension it. My dimensions had to match either the face-to-face of stud or of gyp throughout the building. While on the subject of dimensions, let me make this comment. American dimensions use imperial units, that is feet and inches. It's not uncommon to see a dimension that reads "17'-6 1/2". Our counterparts in Italy, on the other hand, would annotate a comparable dimension "5.2" with the unit being in meters. (That's not an exact conversion, so if you're the mathematical sort, please don't hold me to any rigorous conversions here.) My point is that the metric dimensions when strung out from wall to wall just look tidier than their imperial units counterparts.

Enough said about building Revit walls and dimensioning them. Let's move on to the pretty picture above. You may have been wondering what its significance is. This is called a schematic drawing. Basically, it's like a quick sketch of a possible configuration of different but related spaces. The schematic above was done for a recent submission on a job. The rooms are scaled spaces according to the program of the job. Our firm submitted four different schematics for the same project. Schematics are a really useful tool in space analysis and design. This was my first real attempt to use a software called Illustrator.

When I'm not working on the tenant finish-out or on schematics, I'm usually working on redoing our master submittal document. Generally, when commercial projects need an architect, calls for submissions are published in newspapers; these are called Requests for Submissions or RFQs. My architect, Tim, decides which jobs are best suited for the firm and submits the firm's standards of qualifications accordingly. The document is pretty large; some parts are legal, others descriptive, the rest is like a portfolio of similar projects. I am putting all of the pages that might go into a such a document into an InDesign document. Here I get to put my English degree into use. So far I'm up to about 96 pages! Of course, in any one project not all of the pages would be used. There's a section for churches and religious buildings, another for commercial, one for residential, multi-family dwellings, and so forth.

Another part of my job is to meet face-to-face with clients and vendors. The vendors sometimes take me to lunch and always have fun catalogs they leave with me that contain their new products. Sometimes the vendor meetings count for CEUs or continuing education units. On Tuesday, Tim and I will head over to the Town Center for a CEU on paint and the "trendy" colors this year. During the CEU itself, the vendors aren't allowed to "push" their own products, but they do provide useful technical information about things like floor coverings, paints, etc. Of course, everyone knows that once you know and understand the technical elements of such products, you'll choose their product because you've made a personal contact with their rep. Sometimes, we get fun little gifts from the vendors. My favorite to date is a calendar from Sherwin-Williams. There are flip pages for the days of the week, dates, and months. Each page is a composed of several of SW's colors. It's very cheery. On Tuesday, Tim and I each are supposed to be given a gallon of Pittsburgh Paints. That will come in handy since Bill has to paint our garage ceiling this spring.

Generally, the public thinks that interior designers and interior decorators are the same thing. However, interior designers (like me) are responsible for understanding the technical qualities of the products used and for selecting finishes that meet fire and safety codes, especially in commercial settings. In addition, we also have to understand and employ proper egress paths and distances when designing commercial spaces so that they comply with fire codes.

I guess you understand now why it took so long to launch this blog. It's not exactly a fun read or an easy write! Well, if you made it down to this sentence, I thank you for your remarakable attention. Hopefully, my next blog will be less technical.

On Curling and on other things Olympic

I like to watch Curling and yes, I even find it exciting at times. Why? I think it's because I can imagine myself as an Olympian at this sport. You'd certainly never find me in a Super-G because both heights and velocity scare me.

I love to watch the Olympics. In fact, Bill loses me every two years to Olympic coverage, beginning with the Opening Events.

Ghana has sent it's first winter Olympian to Vancouver. He is the sole representative from that country and his name is Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong. I know why he is named that. Kwame Nkrumah is the George Washington of Ghana and our dear friend Samia's late father.

I'm an avid enthusiast of the World Cup in soccer, too. During the World Cup I cheered for Italy. During these Olympics, I have been cheering for America first and Italy second. I guess I'm in need of another trip to Italy. Booster shots are a good thing.

P.S. Go America Curling Teams!