Some Work Stuff

I thought I might put some posts showing some of the work that I am doing since I have several people that ask me what I am working on. This way you can all look at this, and leave me alone. JK. I have been working at SmithGroup now for 3 years, the first year-and-a-half as an intern while I completed grad school, and as a professional, (?!?), since then. I have mostly worked on civic, and office projects thus far. Although I have worked on many projects, there are just a few that I would consider myself a real part of the project team. This is typically because as a “design” guy, I generally work on only the early part of projects and don’t really follow through all the way, (I just get to do the fun stuff).

So here are a few that I feel I had a significant role in so far.

Two Waters (The Salt-River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community Administration Facility) (You can see why they wanted a shorter name)

This is a large complex of four buildings that houses the governing body for the tribe. Obviously the design draws on much of the history, traditions, and culture of the two tribes, as well as the context of the surroundings. It is being constructed now and should be done in late 2009. I was able to work on the early design and I even won a competition to come up with the name and logo for the project!

Central Park East

If you live near downtown Phoenix you can see this project under construction right now. This project has changed a lot over time. I was more involved during its initial phase when the project had two towers and it covered a whole city block. Due to complications, it was cut down to a single freestanding office tower. Although I really liked the original idea, this project is very cool, and it should be a very unique, forward-thinking, and add a lot to the downtown Phoenix skyline. It uses several “green” principals and tools and incorporates state-of-the art technologies.

This is the old version of the project

Here is the version under construction right now.

Avondale Old Town Library

This is the first project that I did from beginning to end. I worked on the initial design, drew the construction documents with one other guy, and saw the construction. It is a small branch library, but it was a lot of fun to work on. We had a small team work on it in the office and I really enjoyed the experience. I also learned a ton from this project due to being involved all the way from inception to construction.

Chandler City Hall

For a while now, this project has basically been my life at work. We have been working on it for several months and we are currently in the design development stage, where we are fine-tuning the overall design. Like the Avondale project I am going to follow this project all the way through, with a few big differences. First, the scale is much larger, with a much more complicated process. Secondly, I am working for the first time in Revit, which is a new program that we use to draw projects. It is supposed to make doing our jobs much easier, but until you get very good at it, it just makes your life horrible and makes you feel like a moron. Construction should be done in 2010, and it will be a LEED Gold building.