One of the highlights of summer is hosting interns who are currently in Architecture School. It’s even more meaningful to have an intern who grew up in Sonoma County. Kiely Rowe is a third year student at the University of Hawaii Manoa pursuing a Bachelors of Environmental Design, with core classes in Architecture.
Kiely joined TLCD in June for a nine week internship where she is doing rotations with each studio. Today is National Intern Day, so we thought it would be fun to hear directly from Kiely about her experiences this summer.
Open Practice Studio: My first week at TLCD I was welcomed into the Open Practice Studio. My mentor Mitchell introduced me to the world of Revit and Enscape, showing me his work on recent projects. Later I got to sit down with Ian, and he shared some of his experiences of being an architecture student in college and showed his masters project, where he got to build a LEED certified addition to his school. I was really inspired by this project and his insights on what it was like working in a large team to plan and construct an additional lecture hall. To finish up the end of a great first week, the firm volunteered at Food For Thought to work in the gardens where I got to know the whole team a lot better while digging in the dirt and helping the community.
Having grown up in Santa Rosa, I tend to notice when new buildings start popping up, and one that has been of interest to me since construction started was the apartment building at 888 Fourth Street. Little did I know that soon I would get to do a site visit there to monitor the progress. This (so far) was one of my favorite site visits. There were tons of teachable moments at this site with David and Mitchell as tour guides and great teachers. I learned about post tension concrete, fire safety walls, and how annoying it is to architects when switches and outlets are not aligned correctly. It was truly inspiring to see the beautiful views of the hills and surrounding area that were created from the units, not to mention from the rooftop area as well.
My favorite moment from the Open Practice Studio was when David got off the phone with a client with some exciting scope opportunities. All of a sudden ideas were flying around, Revit files were getting pulled up, and as David likes to say “sugar cubes were getting stacked” to figure out the best way to accomplish this. This moment really sparked a flame of joy in my mind, getting to see the passion for design that everyone in this studio has.
Education Studio: Another site visit was with Em (a Senior Designer at TLCD) and Maria, a recent high school graduate who was shadowing that week. We visited RL Stevens Elementary School, and got to participate in an OAC (Owner, Architect, Contractor) meeting. I learned a lot of new terminology and it was really interesting to see how the three parties communicate with each other.
Later that day Carl took Maria and I on a second site visit and OAC meeting at Kawana Springs Elementary School. We got to walk around the site and see the progress on the new construction of the multipurpose building. Having two site visits and OAC meetings in one day was a very exciting learning experience.
During my time in the Education Studio I was introduced to my summer-long research project on All Gender Restrooms. While it may sound like a funny topic to be studying – it is very relevant to today’s design world. I am learning about how important it is to have all gender restrooms so that everyone has a safe and comfortable environment to use the restroom in without being forced to pick between two gender segregated restrooms. I am diving deep into building codes, learning how to design in Revit, and figuring out how to use Enscape as a rendering tool to further communicate my designs. I look forward to presenting my findings and my design proposal to the office during my final Wine Wednesday with the team. I hope my research will help the firm consider how important these spaces are and give them some design standards to work with for their future projects.
Health Care Studio: For my final three weeks with TLCD this summer I will be with the Healthcare Studio. I am already scheduled to go on a site visit with Chelsea and have been working hard on formatting construction documents for various projects. I am excited work with and learn from the Healthcare team to close out my summer full of educational and inspiring work experience!