J.T. Pennington - Week 4 Lessons Learned

Week 4 : September 18th - September 22nd - Worked primarily on private residences and measuring an existing building with a coworker.

Lessons learned/reflections: My biggest lesson this week was the line between doing the best job that I can at a task, which the excellence is often what my stubborn pride makes me seek to achieve, or balancing that task with the speed at which I know I can go as fast as possible without making mistakes. My coworker and I took almost 3 hours to measure this existing building, which I thought was a good amount of time, but I was going too slow for her.

"You're drawing too slow. We need to go faster."

I raised my eyebrows, a little hurt at her tone - not her words. She took some of my sheets of paper from my pen when we were on the upper apartment floor and divided up to sketch a few of the rooms without me so we could measure and finish the job as soon as possible. All of my sketches have a black poche filled architecture with red annotations, because it seems like a good way to record existing conditions. I think pencil may be the best method, in case you make an error or hear a dimension wrong. The red single line architecture drawings belong to my coworker.

They work just fine for inputting the existing spatial information into a plan and I had to relearn that we're not always making beautiful drawings - that was the function for the hard line drafted plan - this sketch drawing was just to be the fastest way to record the existing information and get back to the office.

Images of work completed:

Measurements of an existing building in downtown Charleston, SC. We were measuring the existing space for the owner to look at some parking calculations to see if the owner could divide the property and provide the required number of parking lots to a new tenant based on the zoning codes.