Monday Nov 4th 
Micro Homes Competition (3h – Project Management) 

Today I altered the schedule a little bit for micro homes. I continued designing a few options. Micro homes are tricky because you have to chose which program to favor. You can’t really do all the activities at once in such a small space. They’re like stand alone studio apartments so I continued sketching and modeling.

Tuesday Nov 5th 
Micro Homes Competition (5h – Project Design and Development)

Today I was working on the micro homes competition again. Today i focused on a vertical scheme and making sure that all the programming can fit in if we have a very small square footage on each floor. Tomorrow we are going to have a small design charrette with everyone’s ideas. The design I have today is modular. The more micro homes the bigger the upstairs terrace.

Wednesday Nov 6th 
Micro Homes Competition (3h – Project Design and Development)

Today we all got together for a design charette for the micro homes competition. The site is open so we discussed what type of client we wanted to design for. Half of us wanted a very dense urban couple and the other half were thinking more about a young farmer couple. The competition wants to design for an off the grid micro home so our two interpretations were completely different. We then decided on a compromise: urban gardeners. We also chose the material we would go with for our envelope which would be shipment container materials. We discussed energy systems and chose a site on Stroble street. We talked about the schedule and decided to go on a site visit tomorrow morning. I then sent out the meeting minutes and started to look for precedents that met some of our criteria.

Thursday Nov 7th
Micro Homes Competition (3h – Project Design and Development)

Today I started developing a new scheme on our specific site and tried to fit all the program within the boundaries on shipment containers, changing the orientation, merging multiple together etc…we are still in the conceptual design phase but it is very exciting. We are all working on different designs and we will decide what to go with next week.

Friday Nov 8th 
Micro Homes Competition (3h – Project Design and Development)

Today, first thing in the morning, we went on a site visit on Stroble Ln, for our competition work site: we learned a few things:
1- it is an elevated site
2- there is a bike rental station
3- there are bus stops
4- there is a school nearby
5- there are restaurants nearby
6- it is next to a low income housing community
7- every house around it has the same orientation
8- there are other public amenities
All of these work to our advantage and although the site does not flood we are choosing to say that it does.
We went back to the office and continued working on the design taking into account what we had learned

Lessons learned:

This week I’ve learned more about:

• The importance of idea sharing and charrettes, which contribute to an overall better design
• A lot can be learned about a site visit vs. assumptions on google map, because being able to experience the site vertically, horizontally as well as its surroundings gives you a more holistic idea of the context.
• Shipment container architecture and ways in which you can fit programming into these containers
• More about off the grid living and