What an Architect REALLY Does During the Day

what an architect does within an average day can be difficult to pin down even for the architects that live at each time there's almost no such thing as average one day can be completely different from the next with vastly different types of activities sprinkled about like site visits or client meetings or on the other end days spent in front of the computer this is of course completely dependent on the number of projects that you're working on as well as their stages and the designer construction process but that's what makes it interesting that's why i'm here

in downtown chicago at a firm called valerio dewalt train and associates it's here that i spoke with a friend and former student of mine from long ago she is currently an employee here at blair dwelt train and she agreed to discuss what she does and to try to paint a picture of a typical day hi my name is hibba i'm an architect at valerio dual train i went to school at university of illinois urbana-champaign and then to the yale school of architecture and i've been working here for seven years i'm part of the design studio

here at the firm the organization of architecture firms vary from firm to firm at this firm we don't have a very typical hierarchy in a way that we all get to work on projects together and side by side with all of the different experience levels you get a lot of experience in a variety of project types but also a lot of different aspects of the project we don't have a really specific specialty so we work in a variety of projects we have hotels we do tech interiors we do warehouses we do multi-family homes we do

student housing education all different types of things so i followed hibba to her death to see what she was working on that day today i'm working on submittals um i'm working on a project called for vanderbilt university we're doing graduate student housing and we're actually in the last phase of construction and administration so the building um has already started construction and right now i'm working on uh submittals that the contractor is sending me so revit is one of the main programs that we use at the office the way revit works is you are drawing and

building in 3d at the same time so we draw all of our floor plans in revit and we're also building them in 3d so we have a good idea of what the building looks like at the same time as documenting it because at the end of the day we can't take a revit model to the construction site and build off of it we still need these documents and we still need this document step for the construction administration phase every thing that you kind of find in this document you'll find a digital form in here and

it'll range from larger floor plans to very detailed shots of how parts of the building go together and that's all created in this one program as a content creator and as a designer i'm constantly in the position of sending large files to folks i send images and videos and 3d bottles and you name it there are a lot of ways out there to solve this problem but the best that i found is a new service called smash smash allows you to send unlimited number of files and unlimited file sizes at truly blazing speeds much faster

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get to my page to download or they can even preview it if they want while they're doing that you can actually control what they see you can even create pop-ups for while files are being downloaded that include messages or self-promotional content watch my videos then you can monitor the activity of the file to check if it's been downloaded it has so many features and it's so easy for an exclusive discount for smash use the link in the description and you'll be sending files quickly and professionally in no time okay so a submittal is essentially a

document that the contractor sends to us and it can fall into any one of these categories so it'll range from concrete to masonry furnishings plumbing hvac all of the different categories and they'll basically run by the architect and any other consultants that we have like engineering consultants about what they're about to build um on site and so i'm actually working on the door schedule today ironically creating and checking door schedules are comically regarded as one of the least exciting tasks of an architect and it's often the butt of jokes when people want to complain about

the monotony of their job but we wanted to show exactly what it's like so hibba took me through it this submittal does take quite a bit of work um since the project is so big and there are so many doors this specific submittal is very lengthy this will take a couple days to complete at least i've been working on submittals for i mean at least like three months now or something like that um i have to go through each and every single one so there's a lot of cross-referencing that has to happen so i have

to check all of these different things hibba went on to explain all the steps that go into checking the list of doors and making sure that every single one is accounted for in the design this includes checking a number of different parameters so each store is labeled with a number that number is course corresponds to the floor plan that that um door is in and so let's just take this for example so 0115d she went on to explain that she checks the size of the door whether it needs to be fire resistant or not which

direction the door opens and she shared her cheat sheet for determining which direction it goes i find the door in the model so this has to happen for every single door in the project so i'm gonna have to locate it in the floor plan see where it is um it would be locked from the outside and you're pushing inwards so based on this little diagram here that i keep all my kind of references up to make this go quickly i verify yes it's an lh door a left-handed door okay and then i move on she

also has to check the details of how the door meets the wall and this is for every single door in the 500 room residential building when i'm done with something i obviously highlight it in pink so that i don't lose track of it because there's so much information this document's actually 108 pages long and it's full and it just looks like this um for a while but essentially what happens is if i go through this whole entire thing one time i find a bunch of edits i'll send that to the contractor they'll take the revisions

they'll send us another revision and then i'll go do the whole thing again um and compare if they picked up our edits and when everything is good to go we write no exception taken and that means it's good to go ready to go in the field and they'll continue forward with that portion of the construction just to prove that her days aren't always sitting in front of the computer we decided to take a short trip south to a project that she recently completed it's called convene a flexible working environment and event space she took me

on a tour that includes all sorts of different spaces like the more public areas and the board rooms the phone rooms the small conference rooms and the large event spaces we discussed the overall process for the project and looked more closely at one of the more interesting parts to discuss what days were like during all of its phases this is convene this is where you enter this is a reception area um everything here is uniquely built is where you check in um over here to the left you have your code check and then you have

this kind of feature wall that will bring you into the secondary space this wall essentially started off with the concept of having a really structured grid just like the grid of the city in chicago in the design phase of this portion we went through i don't know maybe like 15 different iterations of this specific type of like warped grid could look like a typical day of designing this wall would basically look like going into rhino figuring out how big this wall would be kind of mapping that out then dividing it into different boxes and then

manipulating those boxes in different ways and we would run through a set of that bring it into a rendering program render it so that the client wouldn't see just a 3d model making it presentable enough for them to see and then we would present kind of each of the visions for this space to the client after we decided on what we wanted the wall to look like we had to document it on the construction documents so we had to figure out how do we communicate this 3d element in 2d so how we did that we

focused on a lot of different angles of the this wall feature we drew them all out and we dimensioned it so that um someone could develop a budget from it someone could get the vision and someone could understand okay how do we take this to the construction phase for the construction phase of this project which is kind of the most exciting for an architect because you see your vision come to life there are all these different groups that are communicating together at this phase to make sure that um the construction is going to look exactly

like how we want it but it's also going to be able to be built each of these can stand on their own and then they were built separately and then they were attached to the wall how they're each made up is we have four plywood pieces that come together and they're mitered right here and then we have a plastic laminate color piece that's uh in on an inside and a reflective mirror backing this whole unit comes off so in the construction phase we had a bunch of these all lined up on the floor um and

then how they worked when they were put on the wall this part of the wall um is built in structural a metal stud wall they would take a scissor lift and they would stand up and two people would come and they would take it and there would be brackets on the back of this and they would hook it up to the plywood pieces thanks edba for taking us through one of your days as an architect and thank you viewers for watching if you enjoyed this video please consider giving it a like and subscribe to the

channel if you're that sort of person all this interaction really helps youtube to know that you like seeing this kind of content you might also enjoy some of these other videos which come out on thursdays see you over there [Music]