Exit Interview

(1) What is your essential question and answers?  What is your best answer and why?

                What is the most important factor when designing a "green" structure? An architect should consider window placement and style, utilize alternative building materials that are found on-site, and designing so that a structure can have bio-mimetic characteristics. My best answer was an architect should consider window placement and style because window orientation is a small yet important energy efficient way to save energy and ultimately money.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

                This was the answer that seems as the most reasonable as the best answer because as people around the world are becoming more energy aware having great window orientation can help you be green while not changing your lifestyle. Many people think that simply adding a solar panel makes a building green but this is not true. Being green is a lifestyle for those who wish to make a true difference but green architecture allows for the average person to save energy because the energy saving techniques are incorporated into the buildings themselves. 

(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

              There were no major problems that did not allow me to complete my senior project. One small problem that did present itself was the challenge of finding a mentor close to my house. Many of the architects I contacted were located in Pasadena or in a city that was a large distance. I resolved this problem by contacting the activities coordinator of an organization called Uncommon Good. This organization has recently constructed an adobe building which interested me in the energy savings in buildings. Luckily for me the offices of the firm that designed the building were located in Claremont which is only minutes from my house. 

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

                Solar Energy: Fundamentals to Building Design by Bruce Anderson was one of the my most important sources because not only was it loaded with what seemed like unlimited information, but also the word choice by Mr. Anderson was easy to comprehend.

My second most important source was Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism: Concepts, Technologies, Examples by Dominique  Gauzin-Müller and Nicolas Favet. This book gave me a broad understanding of sustainable architecture and the ways that it could be achieved. This book also gave me my second and third answers and elaborated on both topics.

Independent Component 2

(a) Statement saying: “I, student name, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.”
(b) Erik Peterson, My mentor, an architect for Claremont Environmental Design Group.
(c) Done.
(d) Interpretive
   From the hours of volunteering that I helped my mentor I was greatly impacted the most with the duration of the process as well as the patience and knowledge required to make a building go green. Research is also important, as my mentor greatly emphasized, and he used this to teach me even more. After researching and explaining the concept to my mentor I was able to make changes to a residential unit that had already been built and modified to be "green". I had to see what techniques I was able to use on this specific structure and I also had to explain why it was unique to that structure.

In the majority of all architecture there are a variety of printers in sizes and purposes. This one for example, is for 24 inch paper that makes the blueprints easier to read because of its size but difficult to move around.

When an architectural firm has been in business for 30+ years, the amount of blueprints saved from previous projects grows and storage becomes a real issue. About 10/13 of these rolls all have the same structure but are in different stages of the design process.

BY having printer accessible in the office extremely precise blueprints can be printed instead of having to be drawn by hand which could lead to mistakes.

Technology is slowly taking over architect business because of the efficiency and its ability to save paper and money. This also allowed my mentor to email my blueprints to review in an instant.


Applied

  This allowed me to answer my essential question in a more detailed way. Before this Independent component I had just researched the ways of making a building green but with the help of my mentor I was able to make the physical connection with all of the knowledge that I had previously read. During my final presentation I hope to have the students complete a very similar task as the one that I was given but of course in a shorter time span and will less detail but enough for them to grasp the concept. Also from this independent component I was able to better understand the design process of a structure because everyday that I was working on it represented one week of work that an architect would do due to the fact of having to meet with other engineers and architects. Every time I returned, my mentor would have some corrections that needed to be fixed in order to get the building approved. Of course it was not always a very small problem, sometimes a smaller problem led to even bigger problems.