Due to some completely insane planning strategy, Wednesday included a field trip, a lecture and then as many hours as you could possibly put in on your studio project before the final crit on Thursday. For most of us that meant fewer than 4 hours of sleep (I got 2) after what had been a pretty long couple of days preceding.

But, let me start at the beginning. Our field trip on Wednesday morning was a “wood”-themed trip. We had two local architects (Elias Cueto and his partner, whose name I didn’t catch) take us to a sawmill and a carpentry shop where they create furniture of their own design. Both architects were super enthusiastic and knowledgeable and it was a great field trip.

First we went to the sawmill. I’ve never been to one before and generally it was more or less what you would expect. Two interesting things I learned: 1. sawmills are about drying wood not really about cutting it, the thinner you can cut wood, the faster it dries so the game is to optimize the thinness of the wood with the orders; 2. everything at the sawmill is automated so that no people ever actually directly interact with the saws/planes/routers and the wood. I posted several photos of the process.

After the sawmill, we went to the carpentry shop. The shop itself wasn’t that interesting, but there we got to see several of the prototypes and talk with the architects about their design process. Two of their chairs (the Maria stackable chair and the Margarita dressing chair) are shown in the photos. If I could have afforded one, I would have ordered a Margarita dressing chair, but with shipping the built to order chairs are pretty pricey. Check out the Sedes-is website for more images and more about the collaboration.

On returning to the studio, we had a lecture about building materials. The lecture consisted mostly of some extremely interesting photos of unique building materials shown very rapidly. I wish I had a copy of the PowerPoint, but lacking that, I don’t have much else to say.

After the lecture, we began the push to finishing up our projects. As of Wednesday afternoon, I didn’t have much to show for my design aside from pages and pages of sketches rough ideas, so I had LOTS of work to do. I did finally get some pieces done to show my design, but not enough really and one of the criticisms I had was that I needed more to explain my design. But, more on that in the next post…