Well…. I can’t believe this project has come to an end. The past two or so years working on this building has been a surreal experience. I’m sure I’ll always look back on this time as one of the most rewarding, enjoyable, stressful and educational experiences of my life.

Firstly, I would like to thank Jo for welcoming me, from day one, into the project that she thought of over two and a half years ago. This type of experience is rare, and I feel so privileged to have been able to enjoy this ride with Jo! She is easily the most generous person I have ever met, and I am in awe of what she can achieve.

Many strong friendships have come from this project. From the builders, suppliers, trades, sponsors, supporters, fellow students and many others. One of the best aspects of this project was to see others share such a similar passion, and the collaboration with so many people has strengthened this project to a level that I never expected.

We were certainly naïve when we begun this project. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The amount of administration, cost, time, people, labour and organisation that this project called for was far greater than I expected. However, what we got out of it was more than we could have imagined. We have learnt so much, and have established a greater understanding and confidence in our passion for architecture.

This project taught us architecture from the perspective of someone who is making architecture. Our build team, along with passionate sponsors and trades, passed on so much valuable knowledge that has increased our understanding of building and architecture. Every architectural decision has a consequence. Not all of our decisions were right, but we learnt from them. It’s hard to specifically describe what we have learnt, but I can honestly say my understanding of design and its relationship with building has improved more than I thought possible from this project.

I hope others that were involved got something out of this project. I am passionate about learning architecture at a 1:1 scale; it’s quite a powerful educational tool. It is so clear to see and learn from something that is right before your eyes, or in your own hands.

Being involved in this project (and finishing) has increased my confidence in my architectural decisions. It has increased my confidence in working with others, and taking on risky, exciting and large-scale adventures.

I am thankful and appreciative of our builder Daniel.  He was passionate about passing on his knowledge. Questions would be asked every day, that is what the building did; it asked us questions, we would need to find the answer. Jo and I built a very strong relationship with Daniel and the build team (excuse the pun – I thought it was appropriate). We lived and worked together for about eighteen months, sharing and learning from each other’s experiences. I think Daniel’s interest in design grew from having such a strong role in the design decisions of the building. We would have been silly not to include Daniel in design decisions, in particular details, as he knew how to put architecture together; what worked, what didn’t, how materials performed. Our knowledge improved from having such a strong relationship with our builder. It was a very strong partnership that we will have for a long time.

I agree with Jo that fine detailing does account for the success of a building. But, it is only through such a strong understanding of the structure and how the elements of a design get put together that allows well detailed finishes. Like Jo, the knowledge I have learnt from the nature and properties of how a material works and performs is one of the most important aspects of this project. We were quite experimental with the materials that we used. We did this so that we could learn from building with a variety of materials.

I look forward to more egresStudio adventures. Let us know if you have an idea. Our next project that we will work on is the ‘Bath House’ project. This project is a collaboration with the University of Newcastle and was launched earlier this year. Second year students used our site to design a ‘bath house’ that would compliment our building. They had to look into how the building would be constructed; understanding the structure and details of their designs. A selected design will be constructed in 2012 by architecture students from that year. I hope they gain the valuable experience from working with the 1:1 scale that I did.

I look forward to seeing you all at the Longhouse. I will be more than happy to show you around. We will keep you posted when we lock in an official launch party date.

Thank you all for your support over the past two and a half years. All of our builders, sponsors, suppliers, students, friends and family have shown an amazing amount of support.

Design is a team sport and I am very lucky to have been part of this team. (I know this is how Jo ended her blog, but I loved it so much I thought I would steal it!)

Dean.

Well its finished! What can I say? I didn’t think this day would ever arrive, it perpetually seemed like that build still had another ‘eight weeks to go’ and then suddenly it was done.

I’m simultaneously relieved and enormously disappointed that this very exciting project has come to a completion. It will be odd not to have 14 people for dinner each night, early starts, and a tired but satisfied body at the end of each day.

I have been trying to reflect on what has been the greatest learning experience, and it’s hard, there have been so many. I think, for me, it would have to be the relationship that we built with Daniel, Joe and Zack from EF Building solutions. They shared their skills and knowledge and allowed us to be involved in the built to a much greater extent than we ever thought would be possible. They taught us about the structure, but most of all the finer details of finishing a building. They shared their tools and their time freely and I have learnt so much from their patience. Their dedication to the build and to the students involved has been fantastic and I can’t thank them enough. Hopefully we will be able to team up again for future projects.

Another wonderful aspect has been the support from the building industry. We have had 39 local and national companies jump on board, providing almost $300,000 worth of support for the build. Their willingness to be involved, surprised us, with some companies volunteering services and materials without even being asked. They all supplied us with a greater knowledge of the products than would we would have gained from a normal build. Many came on site and explained the way to get the most out of their products, and all were involved simply for the unique educational benefits that the project was supplying to architecture students.

It has been great to have so many students involved. I haven’t done the final count but there were a lot, from 7 different universities, all adding a different flavour and perspective to the build. Collaboration is such a great way to learn about anything. I thank you all for your time and assistance, it was a pleasure to work with each and everyone of you. We have many fond and funny memories that we will continue to laugh with over the coming years.

From a design point of view I have learnt that so much of the success of a building comes down to the finer detailing. Its time consuming and costly and is often overlooked in projects that have fantastic award winning designs, but up close fail to deliver on the detail side of things. We were lucky that we were on site every day and able to make these decisions as we went, rather than being locked into design at the beginning of a project, with all alterations being timely, expensive and difficult to make.

I have learnt what extremes I should push materials to – not ‘can’ but should, to make the most of them to retain their integrity. Rick Leplastier came to visit and pointed to a tapering piece of timber and said :

‘why did you do that? One of the first things the Jorn Utzon taught me was never to take a material out to infinity – it can’t possibly perform as it should to that extreme’.

When we asked what detail he would have done, he said he couldn’t/wouldn’t say, but it is an aspect that we shouldn’t take lightly. The funny thing is that John Roberts, our favourite lecturer from Uni also often spouted that same advice. Rick also commented that a relationship with your builder is the most important part of a build and I totally agree. I see on Facebook all of the time people complaining about their tradies. I loved them all! They were all so willing to share what they knew about building, working as a team with them made everything so much more successful.

I have learnt a lot about budgets. Grand ideas need grand budgets. Even with $300k worth of sponsorship we still managed to blow our budget out of the water! What you want is not necessarily what your budget can afford to build.

I have learnt just how important the specification documents are at the start of a project. We wrote ours with almost flippant abandon, not realising how much they should direct a build, and how much a part of your contract they should be. Variations from those words can be timely with contracts needing to be amended and costly delays resulting. Thankfully ours was pretty much tossed just a short time into the build, as it was clear to all involved that this project was going to be a very fluid one, which changed and matured along the way. An agreement and a handshake has been the strongest contract that we had with our builders, and often suppliers, all who were true to their word.

My knowledge of design has been greatly enhanced, with so much time on site being able to reflect on every design decision. Did we make all the right ones? Not a chance, but we learnt as much if not more from the ones that didn’t go quite as planned.

And lastly, a huge thanks to Dean, who has been with me right from the start of egresStudio, from inception, to design, to admin, to building, he has been a fantastic partner to share this experience with. He has become part of the family, and it will be weird and sad not to have him around all of the time

This weekend we have our first guests staying in ‘The Longhouse’ and in the tradition of things it was finished with about 2 minutes to spare. I spent the last 48 hours building, shopping, decorating and cleaning up – no sleep and not much in the way of food, but we got the thing finished on time, with builders helping to the last minute, writing welcome notes on blackboards, sweeping floors, getting linen and assembling furniture.

The guests love it. It has been great to see them with the breezeways opened up, sipping wine and eating cheese, gathering around our concrete benches, using the building exactly as we intended.

Hopefully after a short break we will launch into another project, perhaps not quite so grand, but no doubt just as rewarding!

Thanks for all of your support and interest over the past two years, it has been great to have you all on board.

Design is a team sport and I am very lucky to have been part of this team

Jo

Dean

October, November and December were busy months for us, with students joining us from Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Newcastle, Prague and the UK, helping us get our building out of the ground, with the steel frame being finished in time for our Christmas break.

We were also joined by new sponsor partners James Hardie, Bluescope Steel, Great Lakes Windows, Wood Solutions, and Active Hire.

Our sock tans got worse, our muscles firmer and our smiles a little bigger as our building finally started to take shape. Its been an amazing experience helping put our building together piece by piece, watching as it starts to look exactly like those sketches we started with months ago.

We have had a great team of student labourers, with Mary Beatty, Luke Hallaways, Jess Summerhayes, Mark Tisdell, Ashley Pincham, Laura Harrison, Alice Boyes, David Neuhausl, Eleanor Tullock, Josh Matthews, Kelsey Shanahan, Nicole Larkin, Sascha Parkinson, Kriss Sogee &  Kirsty Cadger all joining the egresS team.

We were also joined by Greg Schipp a lawyer from Bale Boshev, one of our great sponsors, who swapped his pen for a drill and enjoyed the chance to meet all of the students  involved in the project.

A few brief rain delays in November allowed a spot of Aqua Golf and wine tasting and gave us a few early afternoons, a nice change from the usual 6pm finish! We visited sponsors, got our heads on NBN news and took the chance to work on some of the finer details of the build.

Wines (and beers!) were drunk over BBQs and pizzas, cards and games of Taboo were played. Dean learnt a little more guitar and Greg, Eleanor and Nicole shamed him with their banjo, mandolin and guitar skills!

Long 11 hour days on site were tiring but rewarding. We all learnt how to use angle grinders, drills, saws, nail guns and carried tons of steel. Columns were craned into place, bearers and top hat joists bolted into position. Ezy Flow, our steel fabricators allowed us to help with most of the steel installation, an experience we hadn’t anticipated getting. We helped carry, screw and bolt the steel together, leaving only the heavy steel for the crane and experts.

We also constructed our own light steel infill walls and sheeted the flooring in yellow tongue. This will be our work platform until our beautiful recycled tallow wood flooring goes down toward the end of the build. Bathrooms had villaboard laid, and joists were blocked out to help spread the load of our sliding doors and walls. Rafters went on, completing the frame and giving us a true look at the size of our building.

We experimented with concrete mixes for our kitchen benches (yet to be finalised) and watched as our plumbing went in.

Our 3 x 6m glass doors arrived on site and were man handled into place by the whole crew. The windows have been a learning experience for me personally. We started with bi-fold doors, and engineered the building to allow these to be top hung. I decided to change to sliding, and made the assumption that the doors would also be top hung. I didn’t specify it in writing, assuming that no one would be silly enough to want 200kg doors that weren’t top hung! Result is doors that need a team of three to open, with no one to blame but myself. SPECIFY everything in detail!!!!!! We also neglected to draw or specify that the sills were to be flush with the flooring…we have still achieved this, but are now left with a gap at the top of the door which will need to be covered with some aluminium angle. Again, SPECIFY!!!

Dean and I took on a firmer role as contract administrators, expanding our architectual experience, keeping an eye on budgets, programming, design, and material selection. Weekly Monday morning meetings with our builder, Daniel Reitsma helped us keep on top of this task.

All students had the chance to be involved in some architectual detail decisions – do we pull the very heavy doors out and notch out 5mm from the blocking to ensure they sit as flush with the finished flooring level? This was physically a very difficult task but one that we decided  would be worth the effort in the end. Future connections of cladding and window frames were determined, Daniel only wincing slightly when we chose the most difficult finishes!

Our cladding, cut from rafters sourced from an old wool shed in Western Australia, milled to retain their aged grey face, arrived on site along with our  decking. We made a difficult decision to change our recycled iron bark decking to new 33 x 180mm plantation blackbutt. Nowhere near as pretty, but $45k cheaper.

Working with a real, and very tight budget has been a learning experience. Our university projects have token or no budgets, so we become accustomed to designing buildings that would be beautiful but very expensive to build. Our project forces us to try and find the best compromise between what we really, really want and what we can actually afford. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we are able to construct a building estimated to cost $960k by our quantity surveyor for under $650k! Our aim is to save at least another $50-$100k before the end of the build. Lighting, plumbing fixtures, solar, paint, electrical and furnishing sponsors are still being sought to help us meet this aim.

Our year wound up with the usual giving of gifts, the answers to interview questions for Dean (yup, he chokes in front of a camera), rose coloured glasses for me ( I worry that every design decision I make will be a dud), and Nerf guns all round.

When we pick up tools again on the 17th of January we will be sheeting our roof and cladding our walls. We will be joined by new students and a few old ones will return. I can’t wait!

Jo xx

We welcomed new sponsorship partners Boral, Entire Concrete, Uni Pier, National Pumps and Irrigation and QPN (quarry Products Newcastle).

But it hasn’t been all building work, Dean and Jo were lucky enough to be asked along to the Glenn Murcutt Master Class as student helpers. This two week long class held by Glenn Murcutt, Peter Stutchbury, Richard Leplastrier and Lindsay Johnston is attended by architects from around the world. This year’s group also had the added treat of having Rick Joy sit in on 2 days of crit sessions.

As student helpers we were teamed with groups of architects, essentially working as their slaves, making models, helping with layouts, throwing in our comments and suggestions and lending advice on designing for the Australian climate and vegetation.  The first week was spent down at Murcutt’s Boyd Art Centre at Riversdale, the site for the brief. The students joined the group at the end of this week, viewing the site and observing their first critique. The following week participants and students travelled to Sydney where work continued at the Carriage Works, developing schemes, working on presentations and learning from Australia’s best architects.

Evening talks by all of the tutors were a highlight, especially Richard Leplastier who started his talk with the words ‘How can you design a building if you don’t know how to build one’, the very words that sparked the creation of egresStudio.

As well as the architecture, there were dinners in China town, beers in Newtown and catching up with other student helpers who Dean and I first met at the Murcutt Summer School in 2007 and 2009.

Back on site design changes were considered, engineered and then sadly let go due to having to stick to our real life budget (I really wanted those in-situ concrete parti walls!).

egresS also had the pleasure of welcoming Alice Boyes from UTS. Alice is a construction management student and was keen to get some real site experience. She assisted with set out and excavations, preparing the site for foundations. She joined us for dinners by the outdoor fire back at Villa Provence and early bedtimes due to the shear exhaustion of labouring!

With the site set out and excavations complete, we were able to pour all of the concrete for our uni piers and foundations. This week we were joined by Zack, a student from Buladelah. Zack and Dean wielded the wheelbarrows full of concrete while I played with boy’s toys like jackhammers, concrete vibrators, nail guns and drills! Unseasonably hot weather scored us all some sun burnt necks and sock tans and was a nice change from the cold and rainy conditions that we had become accustomed to.

Sitting back yesterday and admiring our achievement, Dean and I decided that one great part of this project so far has been reading and implementing engineering plans, and learning how to interpret them as we set out the foundations.

We have increased our building knowledge, increased our food consumption, developed some more muscle and worked on our unsightly tan lines. We have refreshed our enthusiasm, spending time with our mentor Rick Leplastier and are excited about the next phase – concrete block retaining walls, driveway and the steel frame construction. In a few short weeks a building will really start to appear on site!

Jo

Finally!!!…a truck was on site this week. The preparation for the concrete slab for our bushfire water tank was complete, and it was time to get in and pour some concrete. The 4m2 slab will be the base for the corrugated iron water tank, located under some trees not too far from the position of our building. We have organised this tank to be installed at the start of the build so that we have some access to water.

New tools were used by the architecture gang, for example, nail guns, which were used to construct the timber formwork for the slab. Every day we are not only learning the process of constructing a building, but the very valuable physical skills that are involved in the build.

Site fencing has been installed around the building perimeter. We battled strong winds that were gusting up the site in the process. This fencing will also help to protect the vineyard that we are closely working in. Irrigation lines for the vineyard were also dug up, capped off and exposed for the imminent arrival of the excavator. A little bit of vine pruning was tackled in the spare time, just making sure that the site will be able to look as good as the building that it will soon share.

Of course, more Seinfeld was enjoyed in the evening over a couple of beers with the entire gang of builders and students. New sponsors have jumped aboard which we are so very grateful for, welcome to Centor, who will be supplying our door hardware, and also, National Pumps and Irrigation, supplying water filtration and irrigation needs.

In the next week or so, we will look after remaining site preparations, such as temporary construction fencing, bringing in a site toilet, site office, site storage, permanent camera stand/house and some site storage. All to be completed before the excavator arrives to make some much anticipated mess and soil movement; booked in to arrive soon.

We will keep you all posted on this…

And yes, we were all too excited and doing a bit of a dance as soon as we saw the first truck on site. Happy times!!

..Dean

This week Dean (T-Bone) and I joined Builders Daniel Reitsma and Joe King (Special K) on site getting the vineyard ready for the build.

Monday morning -
*quick trip to the hardware shop for tool belts and gloves
*pack builder style esky with enough food for 20 people (anticipate Dean and I will have huge builder style appetites – smoko, elevenses, lunch and afternoon tea.
*load tool belts with bananas, mars bars, tissues, iphones (essential for the facebook updates) and coke -we have no actual tools!
* Head off to site for our first day of labouring.
*get laughed at by builders
*get stuck into the hard work!

As the building is to be located in the middle of an existing vineyard, a selection of the vines needed to be removed along with their wires, posts and irrigation systems prior to excavators arriving on site. Throw in a little pruning then head back to Villa Provence (base camp for all during the build) for curry around the outdoor fire.

Day 2 – rain delayed start (builders don’t like getting wet), then a full day on the maddocks, sweating away as we dig up 50 vines to be kept for future landscaping works (clay soil is really hard to dig btw).

Pizza feast for dinner – all too tired to cook. Dean tries to learn guitar, watch some Seinfeld (T-Bone episode), compare blisters (apparently I didn’t work as hard), then early to bed to recover from the days exhaustions.

Day 3 -wake up too sore to move, outside pouring rain. Soon discover exactly why builders don’t like to work in the wet (its cold and unpleasant). Install silt fencing, finish up the vines then call it quits by morning tea! All head back to Villa Provence for warm showers, mugs of steaming tea and chocolate biscuits.

Back to the world of architecture, emails, sponsorship hunting and sketching. Excited to have things underway, and looking forward to next week, back on site.