Virtual Levin

I apologize for not posting earlier, the last two weeks have been very busy with course work. The project that I am working on required going out to our site several times--several times because the weather would not cooperate again. The first day we tried to survey the area, a thick fog rolled in. The kind of fog that is in scarey movies. The second day we tried to do our survey it started raining after we got to the site. We did our survey anyway but got soaked. Things are different here, not only because we are in a foreign country, but we dont have the luxury of a car that is easily available to us. So we end up doing a lot of walking and our site surveys take the better part of the day to finish.

Since I am not a landscape architect, a major part of my project was doing the site surveys, research, writing the report and powerpoint presentation, and assisting with the creating of drawings once the landscape architect had the base map drawn.

On June 23rd we had our first presentation, a rough presentation, for the clients so that we can get feedback on what we needed to correct, change or make additions to with our designs. That week we spent a lot of late nights in the studio, which meant walking home for dinner around 5 and returning to the studio to work until 10 or 12 pm.

It was interesting to see the design process and be part of it even though I didn't draw. I assumed Heather would do some renderings to go with my work and we would be done, but that was not the case. The renderings took several steps, first of which required photos so we have a ton of photos of the 1.6 km stretch of road. Then they had to be scanned, cropped etc. Our maps needed to be manipulated in illustrator.

Our presentation went well and there weren't many changes, but it still took all last week to get the project finished, which meant finishing the powerpoint and translating to spanish, finish all our designs and maps and finish laying out the plant pallet. In doing all this I have learned how to use adobe illustrator--and there was definately a learning curve.

I will tried to post the powerpoint but it was too large to send over the internet with my connection here.

The first "semester" ended today and this morning we had a meeting with the San Luis organization to learn about our projects for the next "semester." I will be one of 3 people (2 planners, 2 landscape architects) to be working on a management plan for a farm.

But first, we get a week vacation and I will be heading back to San Jose.