Looking at that picture, the end of my project seems closer than ever. I still need to create properly sized furniture and arrange it in a few different ways, but wow. It's been a lot of fun, and truly interesting/challenging. That took me two hours! Just trying to get it to actual scale, and figuring out Visio. It's not pretty yet, but take it from me: it works!
Funny enough, the consultant hired to do the building plan handed in their initial sketches right as I was putting the finishing touches on my own preliminary layout. The consensus: not great! She went through the whole floor, but I'll focus on the library (for obvious reasons, personal vendettas, yadda yadda yadda). First of all, the consultant had all of the shelves facing parallel to the windows. This essentially would block any light from coming into the building, and Louise had specifically mentioned wanting perpendicular shelving. The front/main desk was actually placed so that part of it was behind a wall column, which doesn't make for a great first impression. And finally, there was other assorted weirdness as well: file cabinets floating out in the middle of rooms like islands, shelves extending a few rows past walls the were lined up against (creating walls of shelves in the middle of the space, which would be somewhat bizarre)... basically, most of the things that could've been done wrong were done wrong. At the very least, it gives me a good idea of what not to do! I would post a picture, but that could cause some trouble...
I also went to a capstone poster session informational yesterday morning. Turns out: since there are so many of us graduating this semester, they've done away with the 'minute madness' portion of the proceedings! In lieu of that, everyone has to hand in an abstract (200 words or less), and these will be compiled in a program for the day's events. So I suppose I'll just be standing next to my poster, answering questions. I think I can handle that! Though I will have to remember to schedule the business school's printer, since apparently it gets sort of hectic near the end of the semester.
By next week I hope to have at least one finished floorplan with furniture. After that, I've just got to write up my narrative/suggestions for CTR, and I'll be finished! If I wrap things up a bit early, I'll have time to revise and work on poster design, which will be nice. Not to mention other classes. All in all: still work to be done, but I can see the finish line. That's a good feeling, to say the least.
Joel, good job using Visio, and the timing of the "designer" plan is pretty funny. Letting light into the library has a LONG history, and has dominated library design from the beginning, as you can imagine. And a pillar in front of the front desk is hysterical!! Oh well. I am sure you have glanced at Pretrosky's history of the bookshelf book...its not bad, but the 1901 "Care of the Book" is better...nothing beats monastic libraries, and I think the chained book might looks cool in the right context. I had heard they were going to release you from minute madness. Standing in front of a poster is more like a real conference, but take it from me, have a "take away" If you can afford to have some cute book-marks printed with do's/don't summarized ,or useful websites, or just something funny with your blog URL on it, that would make a good impression. When is the poster session anyway? I sure want to be there!
ReplyDelete