On January 24, 2019 at 01:33, highfigh said...
I didn't study at a school where they teach people to draw pretty buildings, it was MSOE. We learned how to make them stand and why, not to hope they don't fall over or collapse.
If this method takes into account actual building materials and methods, and doesn't end up with designs that can't be built, then, great.
Most architects don't do their own renderings, but they do need to show the new building in place, so why would they make it seem that the viewer is 3' away from it?
Your use of exaggeration (citing three feet as a reasonable distance) makes it look like you don't understand, so, here: Let's say the building is to be on a two-lane street in an old neighborhood near a metro downtown, built soon after 1900. The street is two lanes. But to show the design elements of a new building, the rendering shows the building from a hundred feet... which is about twenty feet inside the building across the street. It is not possible to see the view that is shown in the rendering.
You would use 170" instead of 14'-2"?
Yes.
Why? If you were working with plans and elevations, I would be surprised if the builders don't give you a hard time for that. In a classroom situation, it would never pass.
I agree that it would never pass in a classroom situation. I stopped going to college after I got my BA because it was becoming increasingly obvious that college was an artificial world, and I'd better get out here before becoming trapped in the academic world. Remember, when people say "It's all academic, anyway," they mean it's not realistic and it doesn't matter.
OUR 2x4s are 1-1/2" x 3-1/3", but what's available in Saudi Arabia? (I could find out, but I would have to wake a friend in order to ask)
Our 2x4s are 1 1/2" x 3 1/2", not 3 1/3". (Does your tape measure have thirds? Relax, I know it was a typo.)
But we were defining how we wanted something built. We asked them what the standard wood sizes were and they had blank looks. We had just barely started working with them and we had not learned that pretty much everything in Saudi Arabia is made with steel and some variety or agglutination of sand and stone.
While every construction worker in the US is likely to carry a Skil Saw, in SA they all carry grinders.
Back to the wood: They basically had to import any wood that would be used, with its major cost being shipping (since we weren't going to be specifying walnut plywood or anything nuts like that). This was wood for the structure that seating was to go on, and it was a component of the audio characteristics of the room, so our designer decided to specify what he had worked with for years, to minimize errors due to unfamiliarity with materials.
As for 170", yes, that's what I'd use. It's very easy to divide 14'2" by two, but divide it by three. Or mentally divide 15'7" by two. That's easy, it's 7'6" + 3 1/2" so 7'9 1/2". I think. Or add several numbers that are feet and inches. Adding inches alone is simpler.
I think this is one more example of real world versus academic world. The guys I see measuring on the job measure and calculate in inches.
Throw out metric. Typical American.
I was using a bit of slang and I was not clear. Someone would give a dimension in inches, and I would yell out -- which I characterized as "throw out" -- the equivalent dimension in metric. It started with temperature, when I saw American eyebrows go up when someone said 35 degrees was too hot to work in.
