Asia Gaines

Week 1

In college, I plan to study architecture, and in preparation for my studies, I have decided to work with Carter Design Associates (CDA) as part of my Senior Independent Project. Donna Carter, the founder and CEO of the firm, has taken me on for the project because she firmly believes in supporting upcoming generations. To become more familiar with the work Ms. Carter does to run an architectural firm, I have been visiting their office space in downtown Austin since spring break. On March 22, Ms. Carter and I drove to San Antonio to facilitate a public hearing on the proposed renovations to Brackenridge Park. Because of the park’s rich history, consultants with skills specific to preservation and restoration like Ms. Carter and her firm are really important. The public hearing was meant to have open dialogue between environmental/structural experts working on the project and community members concerned for the wildlife and heritage trees impacted by the park plans. Unfortunately, the public felt silenced by the meeting’s procedural structure. Seeing angry citizens is part of the job and I think I learned a lot about how an architect’s design evolves and undergoes significant change when considering public opinion.

On March 25, I helped the associates at CDA by identifying the base zone of a project they have in Beaumont, Texas. To do this, I had to locate Beaumount’s geographic information system (GIS) and read the town’s Code of Ordinances. The GIS map color codes various base zones in an area and those base zones correspond to specific uses for a lot. For example, the lot CDA is working on is in the General Commercial-Multiple Family Dwelling-2 District (GC-MD-2). However, the lot does not reach the minimum width of typical GC-MD-2 lots, thus making it illegal. Additionally, the base zoning strictly prohibits dwellings of two or fewer families, therefore banning any idea of the duplex the lot owners wanted to build. Despite the bad news, Ms. Carter was hopeful that an amnesty from the city would resolve any issues.

This week I observed one of the associates at the firm as she was designing a residential space to be visitable. The term, within the scope of architectural rendering, means that someone occupying a wheelchair can easily move throughout the space, but it is not fully equipped for disabled living. Visitable spaces consider elevation to the width of doors. Via Zoom, I attended a meeting with another associate and client converting an older home into office space. The project is still at the stage of collecting necessary documents and finding a contractor.

The largest task at hand this week was an interview the firm had for an upcoming project. CDA is hoping to be hired by the State Bar of Texas (SBOT) to provide architectural services at the historically designated Bartholomew-Robinson building on Lavaca Street. Looking at the Request for Qualifications that the SBOT sent, the CDA created a project outline for their interview. It focused mainly on possible uses of the space since it is currently only a facade and has considerable damage from rising dampness. Because limestone and concrete are rather porous, when incorrectly set in the ground, moisture seeps up into the material and causes rising damp. It hurts the structural integrity of the building and poses some problems for its future stability. Beyond the outline, I helped in selecting photos from previous CDA projects that could be used to showcase their ability to accomplish certain design features. I also searched the Austin History Center for archived photos and background on the building. I really enjoyed the process of curating a vision for a practically blank canvas. The Bartholomew-Robinson building in particular has so many different elements from various renovations over the years that CDA hopes to streamline in their designs. I believe they are a good candidate for this project, but the associates won’t know for some time if they were hired to complete the task.

Outside of the office, I began watching an online course dedicated to software used for building projects called Revit. Hopefully, the video course will give me a solid background on the program before I observe drafting at the office next week.

Brackenridge Park

opinions written by community members at the public hearing

Bartholomew-Robinson building

The three towers of the Bartholomew-Robinson building weren’t part of the original design. The Victorian turrets were added nearly five years after its initial construction and remains the only example of French second empire architecture in Austin.

Revit Rendering

a LinkedIn course with Paul F. Aubin

Week 2

Unfortunately, I was recovering from covid this past week and was unable to work on my internship in person. When I was feeling a little better in my quarantine, I virtually joined a meeting for a project on a historic site downtown set to begin construction soon. Currently, the site is prepared to move forward with reviewing necessary documents to approve certain designs.

In my isolation, I also watched more instructional videos on rendering with Revit software. The chapter I focused on this week in the online course navigated different 3D views in Revit. Paul F. Aubin outlined the dramatic and presentational differences in axonometric or orthographic projection and perspective view. The various 3D views can help to better understand structures when working with building informational modeling (BIM).

Next week, I will be organizing previous projects my firm has worked on into a public website. This will familiarize me with their work and other problem-solving techniques required of conservation architects.

Week 3

Thinking about what I want to present as my final project, I spent this week preparing to build a model of the Connelly-Yerwood House. I chose to model the late Victorian-style home because of its significance to the black community in Austin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. As I have been observing at Carter Design Associates (CDA), I have encountered different types of projects at various stages of production. Because CDA deals primarily with preservation projects, architects at the firm begin by researching the history of a site and its structures. I turned to the National Register of Historic Places to begin my research, and spent most of this week combing through listings of buildings in Travis county. In Austin, notable historic buildings like the Governor’s Mansion, Laguna Gloria, the Austin History Center (formerly the Austin Public Library), and Paramount Theater are listed in the register. Formerly private homes like the Connelly-Yerwood House, historic districts, and more modern buildings from the 1950s and 60s are also listed. Within a listing on the National Register of Historic Places is a continuation sheet describing the complete history and construction of a building.

Located at 1115 East 12"' Street, the Connelly-Yerwood House was built in 1904. As the neighborhood changed by communities serving Samuel Huston College and St. Peter's Church, Kate and Michael Connolly and their nine children sold their home to an African-American doctor, Charles R. Yerwood, and his wife Nan. The daughter of the Yerwoods, Dr. Connie Yerwood Odom, achieved great success and many “firsts” as a black woman in the public health field. The home was occupied by the Yerwood family up until the late 1990s until it was purchased by the Anderson Community Development Corporation. In 2000, ownership was transferred to the City of Austin, and restoration efforts began. The original floors and tiles were preserved and the porch and fish-scale shingles were replaced. The facade remains a pastel pink and seafoam green which are the colors of Dr. Connie Yerwood’s black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

As I finish the video course on Autodesk Revit, I can use the skills I’ve learned to render the Connelly-Yerwood House digitally. Once creating a digital floor plan from the draws in the home’s continuation sheet, I can scale everything into a physical model of the home. Making both two-dimensional and three-dimensional visuals of this structure will help me learn an important step of architectural design.

The Connelly-Yerwood House

ca. 1980

generic floor plans of the Connelly-Yerwood House

For my internship this week, I assisted with the more interior design elements of a project. On Monday, April 25, I helped one of the architects at CDA assemble three presentation boards. The boards have various samples of carpeting, flooring, tiling, baseboards, countertops, and laminate finishes for a new police station being built. Architects have to think about functionality of surfaces and their maintenance depending on the project, so this presentation board might not be the final version. On another project, an associate and I began choosing finishes for a Victorian home being converted into a commercial space. With commercial buildings, there is more complex life safety code that needs to be recognized. We decided on wainscot tiling of staggered white subway tiles with light gray grout in the restrooms. Wainscot is when a material accents the wall up until a five-foot mark and then becomes a normal wall of paint on Sheetrock. We thought the restroom counter should be white with a light wood laminate cabinet underneath. The owner wants to achieve a clean and modern look throughout the building, so we also chose appropriate white, gray, and accent green paints. My knowledge of interior design and color scheme theory is pretty limited, so this was a good introductory experience.

I was fortunate enough to sit in on a meeting regarding Buda City Park, a project CDA worked tirelessly on last year. They designed restrooms and an amphitheater for the space and it looks incredibly nice. However, the contractor failed to complete some aspects of the project, so engineers and architects on the project have come back to make a list of discrepancies. On May 3, I plan on joining the site walk-through CDA architects and other teams have scheduled.

To end the week, I finished organizing the firm’s website. I got to read more about their previous projects in the process. One that stood out to me was the restoration of the Ulysses Cephas Home. Cephas was a blacksmith and leader of the black community in the Dunbar neighborhood of San Marcos. The community showed concern for the loss of many historic landmarks in recent years, so the city of San Marcos purchased the residence and restored it. Instead of restoring all original walls, CDA opened the home to accommodate more occupancy for future community engagement. To recognize the previous function of the space, CDA designed the flooring to highlight the original floor plan in a darker shade of wood. It is amazing to see how something so simple can really honor and appreciate generations of history.

Restroom Finishes

Presentation Board

Cephas House

ADVICE TO FUTURE PARTICIPANTS:

I am so glad I have the opportunity to finish my time at St. Stephen’s working on my Senior Independent Project. Through an internship with a mentor outside of the St. Stephen’s community, I got the chance to learn more about a field I am interested in. I am able to get hands-on experience and devote a lot of time to architecture outside of a traditional learning environment. Trying to develop your interests into a course of study can be challenging initially, so I highly encourage future students to think in terms of what they want their final product to be. Once a student has a more streamline concept of their end goal, staff and faculty are willing to help as much as possible. Five weeks sounds like a lot of time, but it goes by quickly when working on the project. Students have the potential to learn a lot in these short weeks, so I suggest the juniors seriously consider the opportunity.

Week 4

This past week, I focused on modeling and conceptualizing structures. As I mentioned previously, I wanted to dedicate time to develop both a digital and physical model of the Connelly-Yerwood House, a Victorian style home in Austin, Texas. I accessed Revit to begin making digital versions of the floorplans. On Monday, May 2, I tried my best to use the limited measurements and not-to-scale drawings of the structure from its National Register of Historic Places continuation sheet. I quickly found that closets and doors as drawn in the continuation sheet are not very realistic. The flaws of my guesstimated dimensions were much more apparent in Revit. I encountered similar challenges when making floor plans for a library from initial drawings made by actual architects. While the online course guided me through the basics, just messing around in the program has taught me a lot more.

The Connelly-Yerwood House

This is clearly still a work in progress. I really struggled with properly attaching a roof. I also didn't get a chance to place windows because I was too busy trying to interpret whether some of these walls are necessary or not. The hallway especially seems overcrowded with doors and closets.

Late last week, Ms. Bartek gave me access to the St. Stephen’s archives were there is documentation of various projects for the school’s campus. Drawings from the archives include Helm Fine Arts Center, Tennis Academy Center, and a library proposed in 1958. The designs for the library are heavily inspired by Mid-Century Modern architecture which was popular at the time. Fehr and Granger, the architects working on the library, also designed other buildings on campus like the chapel which incorporate lots of Texas limestone. While uncovering these drawings, I also came across older photos of our current Brutalist style library. Brutalism is an architectural style that emerged in the 1950s and has iconic examples like the Geisel Library at the University of California in San Diego. Up until the early 1990s, our current library looked more like a mall with a tall atrium running down it. Again, this kind of digging into history is crucial to every site an architect encounters. Historical relevance is important because one never knows when they build over artifacts or undiscovered fossils. For example, my internship mentor was telling me the other day about how they found a cannonball on a government building project which they had to archive and store properly.

After researching in the St. Stephen’s archives, I attempted to create a digital version of the 1958 proposed library. Unfortunately, I had little success as the photos I took of the drawings rendered the inch to foot scale impossible to properly interpret. Here again, I guesstimated the width of rooms and hallways. One thing interesting about the library is that it is significantly larger than the one students use today. The 7,500 square foot plan accounts for a visual aid room, reserve books, and rows of stacks. Because we live in such different times, this added space is unnecessary now. Moving forward, I would need to measure the drawings of the proposed library in person.

Within the Revit software, I found some of the functions like drawing walls and doors rather simple. However, I struggled to attach a roof onto any of the Connelly-Yerwood House’s walls. The proposed library looks even worse when I attempted to add a roof because the program insisted on a sloped roof despite the Mid-Century Modern look that heavily encourage flat roofs.

For my physical model of the Connelly-Yerwood House, I ran into similar issues pertaining to dimensions. I guesstimated different aspects of the structure and ended with an eighth of and inch being equivalent to a foot. I used balsa wood provided by Ms. Horton for structural components and poster board for assorted surfaces. In the final week of my Senior Independent Project, I hope to further improve all of the models I began working on this week

At my internship, I spent some time looking over photos to be displayed on CDA’s website. This gives me an opportunity to ask associates in the office about things from various projects that interest me. When I went on the site walkthrough of Buda City Park on Tuesday, May 3, I saw another side of the professional field. Different teams working on the project were in attendance: two guys from the City of Buda, an EMP (electrical/mechanical/plumbing) engineer, a landscape architect, and an irrigation technician. This site mainly has electrical issues, but the structural problems that CDA handles are generally split between the amphitheater and restrooms CDA designed. The contractors did shoddy work throughout, but most were dealing with code violations, aesthetic flaws, concrete work, and cheap building materials. For example, the main back wall of the amphitheater does not have the proper anti-graffiti concrete finish. Every team organized, updated, and reevaluated their punch list as part of documentation of the contractors failing to do their job. This documentation is for court where they are already looking at over a million in repair/liability fees. Much of this could have been avoided had the contractors not used all of the project’s contingency money and not agreed to 100% completion. CDA has been involved with this project for almost seven years, so for me seeing this point in the process came as a reality check into the scale of such large projects.

Page updated

Report abuse