After two years and more than 100 videos.
Thanks to you guys.
I was able to finally quit my job and start my own architecture business.
I met my dream client and I'm working on some really cool projects,
but when I thought everything was going perfectly fine,
the universe threw me a curveball .
It feels a little bit steeper than I thought it was gonna be.
This is the site right here
from about that pole to probably somewhere over there.
And it's one of those areas with no sidewalks and nowhere
to park your car because people don't want you to come here.
And yesterday, actually, when I came here
with the client, we parked our car right here.
The neighbor came out and told us to move our car
in like 10 minutes.
So I meet this Rhino model before I came here
based off of a survey that was done in 2006.
I'm standing right over here.
There is a slightly less steep slope over there.
So will enter into the site from that way.
Good thing I brought my boots.
There's a lot more trees than I expected.
So the site ends all the way up there.
So we're not even close yet.
So let's continue.
Whoa!
this over here is the protected oak tree.
I think it's going to be really nice to design around it.
I stayed in a house in Italy over the summer one time,
and it was right next to this massive oak tree.
And it was just so beautiful when you open the windows,
you hear silence
and you hear the rustling of the leaves.
And when you wake up early, you can actually hear
the birds wake up with you.
So yeah, I'll just show you where
on the site we are right now.
So we are right here.
And that's the road just over.
This entire thing is the site.
As you can see, it's so steep over here.
And it would have been impossible for us to walk up this path,
this entire area is very, very steep as well.
And there's just a lot of trees around.
But I don't think I'm going to try to even get up there.
So we're facing east a bit
northeast,
and because it's in a slightly hilly area,
I think it probably has its own little microclimate.
But apparently it gets really, really hot here because the Oakland Hills
blocks a lot of the fog and the cool air from coming down this area.
So super hot and a little bit more wet in the winters.
I want to show you that massive bird's nest.
Here is the highlight of my architectural experience right here.
So I'm getting some footage of the site with my Insta360 one camera
and because it can grab a 360 view of the site, it's
so much more helpful than just being able to grab photos or videos.
There
are four inches.
I made it to the top of the site, so the site actually goes in
further up till about that point.
But once you get there, we have this house,
so that's probably not the most ideal place to site.
Our building.
There is a little bit of a flat area right here
where the house could potentially sit on.
And if these trees were cleared, the view from here
would be pretty,
pretty nice.
The most important part of a site visit is
you need to feel the site.
And listen to the site.
And become one with the site.
Hem..are you okay?
One of the things that I noticed when I was there is how quickly got dark.
We were there until about 4 p.m.
and it was already starting to get dark and that's because we have this
really steep hill.
If so, that's me right there.
And I mean, you can already see how steep the slope is, right?
So that way is north, that's south.
And so if the sun
is rising from the east, making its way
west, you can see over here
there's a very big shadowed area.
And especially as we get into the winter months,
when the sun starts getting lower,
you get to even a bigger shadowed area.
And I also tried doing a proper Sun study and that's what I found here as well.
And I remember when I was staying in Bolzano
in northern Italy, which is also a very mountainous region,
that was one of the biggest complaints there, that it got dark so fast.
There's also a lot of trees on site, which is going to be
creating a lot of shadows.
By the way,
guys, this little device helped me through all the overhead shots in my model.
The Insta360 Link is an extremely versatile webcam
because it's got a gamble design that allows multiple configurations.
I'm using the overhead mode to record my model and it records high
quality 4K videos with a half inch sensor and a really large aperture lens.
It can be easily attached to all standard arms and it only weighs 100 grams.
The camera has dedicated software that allows for a lot of customization,
including manual focus, manual exposure and your gimbal movements
with position presets.
You can also record videos directly in the app.
It uses A.I.
to track your movements when you move around.
It can also be controlled with hand gestures.
If you're working in an open environment like mine, it's got a noise
canceling feature that will get rid of all of the background noise.
Check my link in the description if you want to know more.
So if we can place the building, maybe somewhere around here
on top of the hill, that would be ideal.
So you can get the nice morning light,
You can get the nice light from the south during the day
and you can also
get a nice evening light as well.
And you will get this incredible view of the hill
there is that view into the neighbors house, but
we can probably create some landscaping around in.
The other option is to place it in the middle of the site,
which is closer to the road.
So it's going to be easier for bringing materials up.
We're not going to have to build
as long of a driveway, so it's a little bit more efficient.
But of course your period of daylight is a lot shorter because,
like I said, it's blocked by this hill.
So in order to maximize daylight, this is roughly 3000 square feet.
Maybe we can have these two volumes kind of fanned out so that we can
try to get as much glazing surface area as possible.
Or maybe we could do
something like this so that this top volume
is getting a little bit of that southern light.
And maybe these two volumes are connected so that this bottom volume borrows
a bit of that light or we could potentially stack it this way
so that we have lots of surface
area facing the morning sun.
And again, the top volume gets a little bit
of that southern light because over here it's a little bit less steep.
I'm going to just borrow this tree as a column, but
maybe we can have a staggered configuration like this
so that this area still gets a bit of that
nice morning light.
The only problem with placing the building on top of the hill
is that you see this line here.
If you look on the city of over in the zoning map,
this area is called the Ridgeway overlay area.
I didn't get that. Could you try again?
And in this area you can build up to a maximum
of 18 feet in height and 500 square feet.
The site also
starts to narrow in this direction and it's also quite a ways up the hill.
So it might be a little bit more complicated to bring materials
or try to build something all the way up here.
We're still in the pre design phase, and so we're not even getting
into the design part yet.
And so the point of this exercise for me, it's
not to identify exactly where the building is going to go
because we're still waiting for a survey and the Geotech report.
And honestly, once we get that, we might find that
some of these areas are going to be really hard to build on.
Maybe the soil is really loose and we need a lot of fill.
And so really the point of this
is for me to try to identify some of these conditions
and try to create different scenarios.
So when I do have a conversation with Geotech and Structural,
we're not making the decision purely on structural
conditions or solar conditions or cost,
but we are looking at things a little bit more holistically.
We can actually talk about the pros and cons of each option
in terms of the space and the experience in the light.
And I find that when you come
a little bit more prepared with your own preferences,
you can have a much more interesting conversation.
I presented some of these ideas to the client
as well as some different options for how the building could sit on the site
would have flowed to what it embed.
Would a cantilever or or would it be a combination of them?
Now, as an architect, of course, you want to start designing and start
moving into the next phase.
But as a business owner, you have to make sure
that you're not moving into the next phase until you finish
one phase and get paid for that phase.
So it's going to be another couple of weeks until we get
the survey and the Geotech report, which is actually perfect
because during that time I'm not going to do any work,
but I can start thinking about a concept for this building.
There's something that came up when I was talking to the client
and we were having a really long conversation
about our vision and what we wanted to build, and we both agreed.
We wanted to build something really unique.
And he asked a question What is something
that everyone wants but nobody has?
I know that's really out there, but I just want to let you chew on that
based on what we talked about today and that question,
what do you think is the concept that I'm thinking of in my head?
Let me know in the comments.