THE SUMMER OF.....

It's hard to believe everything that has happened this Summer.
From being taking charge at project meetings at Watershed to *spoiler alert* becoming engaged to Hilary, my girlfriend for the past four years.
I've also been able to hangout more than expected despite the time the "Class" end of the internship has taken up.  I just finished the final paper last week and now I have freedom to finally get more involved with my research into my thesis idea: Taking the idea of affordable and efficient apartment housing and having it benefit from sustainable design to better the community and bring it together.

Watershed Studio has been an adventure in itself, being able to convince contractors I know what I'm actually doing and prove them wrong when they don't believe I did something right is such a great feeling, I just wish I could of had that kind of confidence when I was presenting projects back in the gallery at Norwich.  Here's my main project I have been working on, a studio apartment/green house building as a secondary house for this guy in Colchester VT, right on Lake Champlain.  The building has a structure in front that is both sculptural to the clients wants and functional as it provides protection and exposure to just the right amount of solar gain, both reflected and direct into the apartment and green house.  The green house is obviously downstairs and the apartment is on the second floor with its own entrance.

Actual Building Below with the Apartment / Green House Above, I had to use LIVE, I mean BING Maps because Google Maps are too slow to update the Lake Champlain Area apparently

With the Summer coming to a close in the next couple weeks, it will be very awkward to get back into a school studio atmosphere for a "grade" but I'm sure I'll be fine.  I hope before I'm done this Summer I can have this project in the Construction Documents phase because I want to see it as close to all the way thru as I can.
With the little bit of Summer left I'm hoping to balance "free-time" with friends returning to Norwich with the research I need to do, considering this will be my last College summer and I'll be off to doing a more semi-permanent architecture job in an office that does even more sustainable design than Watershed.  We'll see

My friend Joan and I photoshopped into a Colbert photo ... if you knew the joke it'd probably be even funnier