Vertzone house – How to kill and resurrect team spirit in two weeks

This is a second post about our second semester project, if you would like to see more click here.

The brief moments of bountiful cooperation ended. From now, each of us was on their own. We were supposed to come up with plans, elevations and possibly sections, renderings and other materials, to support our idea. And at the end of the second week, our outline was evaluated by another group, which decided, whose outline is going to be further developed as a group project for the semester.

I knew it will come, the procedure was the same in the first semester. I must admit that I am very competitive by nature, but now, competing against my group members felt just wrong. Of course, I wanted to win, but is it really the best solution to put us into an octagon and let us fight to death? Okay, that is a bit exaggerated, but I would rather continue with our initial productive afternoon and design the outline together. I am sure that would definitely strengthen the bonds between us. But it was not my decision.

So I started to work, the process is always messy and painful and this time it was no different. Since our idea was already born, I wanted to further strengthen it. I also started to play with the programming inside. One of the interesting things was, that although I always advocate on behalf of sketching, during this outline I mixed both sketching and Revit, to quickly go through and judge my own layout. Probably because of this, the process got incredibly shattered.

I wanted to connect the profile of the site to the house itself, and thus, the slope of the roof, parallel to the ground, was born. This allowed me to chase the idea of two-storey living room and slowly, all the pieces started to make sense.

I am terribly sorry that you must witness my terrible sketches, but how I already mentioned, my sketches does not last longer than few hours, my sketches are just tools. So this one is, once again, just super simple sketch I made now, writing from my desk at home. But since I started this blog, I should probably save some of my less ugly prettier sketches.

I would like to pat myself on the back further, but I must confess that my design was far from ideal. I did not know what. I had that feeling that not everything is perfect, but it is hard to figure these things on your own. And time has passed and it was time to put my skin on display and hope for the best.

Probably my first serious rendering, made in Revit. The idea has its shape now, but it is not a final shape. The final refining will be done as groupwork.

The day of judgement was here. We slipped our outlines to another group and we also got handful to judge. Judging work of other people is both interesting and unpleasant. I knew that most people gave their best to the work, still only one can win. And so we discussed, judged, discussed little more and finally gave them our verdict. We decided whose work was supposed to be “built”. And we also get our result from our classmates. I won´t stretch you further. I won, although it was quite close. I was happy and sad at the same time. I was happy because I won. I was sad because only one of our houses could be “built” and we had to reestablish team spirit.

How we did it? We sat together and fixed holes in my design. It is amazing to see your idea on the vivisection table, carefully analysed from basement to roof. And as a group, we put every piece of puzzle together. And then, as a team, we presented our house, in front of our teachers and colleagues, and it went very well. And since I am so satisfied with our presentation, next time I will present our house in all its glory to you.

To be continued…

Ondrej