Politecnico house

6 team members, 4 nationalities, 2 unit systems, 1 project

 

Completed Spring Semester 2010-11 (1st Year of Grad School at Politecnico di Milano)

Skills utilized:

  • Architectural design

  • International collaboration

  • Project management

  • Environmental design

  • 3D design (Rhino)

  • 2D drafting (AutoCAD)

During the spring semester of my first year of grad school, I had the great opportunity to study abroad at the Politecnico di Milano in Lecco, Italy as an exchange student. This house was the major project of the semester, and taught me a whole lot more than how to put together a drawing set. The class was split into teams of 6, my team being comprised of myself (American), three Spaniards, a Mexican, and an Iranian. It was a very interesting mix of personalities and architecture backgrounds to put into one project. Each did some conceptual designing after the first class, and selected one person's design to move forward with. My design was selected by popular vote, and so I became the de facto project leader. Apart from designing the overall style and form of the house, I also created graphic standards and AutoCAD templates for the group to use so that the final drawing set would look like a cohesive document.

While the rest of the group followed my lead and broad design decisions, there was one aspect of the project that I found from the start I'd be learning a lot from my teammates about, that being designing and thinking in the metric system. There wasn't even any question about it, and I'm very grateful that I had the experience to go through a project in metric. As a way to wrap my head around it and be able to visualize the dimensions we talked about in group meetings, I devised a 1.2 meter grid for the house, which equates almost exaclty to 48 inches. The 4' grid was of course an easy thing to work with, and be starting there, by the end of the project, I was actively, fluently thinking in metric.

In all, we produced 90 pages, of which I drew 20. Throughout the process I would redline drawings, and give feedback, but also regularly be challenged by my peers to defend my decisions. There was a lot I learned from them about the European materials palette, among other things, and many times deferred to their expertise.