Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Life of an Architect's Playhouse Competition; My Submission

Life of and Architect (LoaA) is a great, and humorous, blog dedicated to advocating for our profession. Each year Bob Borson, creator of LoaA, hosts a Playhouse Design Competition to support Dallas CASA, which serves as voices in court for abused and neglected children. What's not to love about this... design for a cause that helps kids! Even if I did not make the cut.

This year I submitted a design which, as I just said, did not make the final cut, so I thought I would share my failed attempt here... and follow with a discussion on how 100% of this effort was done within the Revit 2018 beta - for fun:)

My design idea stemmed from my families hobby, which is urban chicken keeping. We have egg laying chickens in our backyard, which is within the city limits. The image below is our modest coop and outdoor run which is connected to a 16 foot square garden. In the middle-right of the photo you can see a door from the run into the garden.


Also, notice in the iamge above, the light fixture I wrote about yesterday. Oh, and the main section of the coop is the mostly-enact remains of a large chandelier shipping box for the hotel my father-in-law works for.

Here is my design, speaks for itself... mostly.

Considering one of Bob's recent posts, I guess all the glass should be screening so the kids don't melt in Texas. Here in northern Minnesota we literally still have traces of snow in mid-April! So the windows for the kids and chickens made sense at the time!

This image is printed directly from a Revit sheet. Nothing was exported or imported. Other than Revit itself, I used ArchVision's Dashboard add-in for Revit in order to place the entourage (RPC content).

Everything here was done within the beta version of Revit 2018. I have been active in the AutoCAD and Revit beta programs for years. I find the best way to test software is to do real stuff in it. Randomly picking buttons and running commands does not adequately test the software.

So, even though I did not make the cut, I had fun working on this while, at the same time, beta testing the latest version of Revit. And, as I mentioned, this is for a great cause so I wanted to highlight that as well!

You should consider entering a submission next year. being one of the 27 finalists out of 1,100 submissions would be great, but supporting a good cause is even better!