May 31^st

Classroom and Museumstechnik Berlin

Today to we started class at 0900 hours. The class took part in an activity consisting over 30 circles. In 3 minutes you had to fill the circles with pictures or ideas. The was an exercise to see the creativity and precision of each student. Whether some ideas we drawn within the circle with basic ideas. Compared to those who drew outside the circle and used more than one in each drawing. This shows the idea of research and the idea of how to think outside of the book and to see who can come up with their own original ideas.

After this class activity we were then given our final project guidelines. The parameters have to do with an existing researching topic. The intent is to find something in Berlin that you find interesting. And then to see if this idea would be applicable in the United States. Once given the guidelines students went around class sharing their ideas with each other to see if anyone wanted to work on the same project with each other. In the end there were 9 project groups that got configured that are going to be presented on Sunday. Each presentation should be around 8 minutes due to the number of groups.

After going over these ideas we disbanded for lunch and regrouped together around 1310 hours. From here the class walked 20 minutes to the Museums Technik Berlin. This is an engineering, design, bidding, and fabrication – they tend to do it all. This firm did the fabrication for the Neues Museum. In Germany the same firm cannot do all 3 processes of manufacturing a building. He began to tell us that it is very hard for this because it is three different companies trying to work together that speak different languages. The other struggles are that they have to get the Museum or whoever hired them, their approval. He also began to explain that when bidding on a job it is usually the lowest bidder that gets the job. But now that is slowly starting to change, due to the fact of experience and quality. He also gave insight that for clients they expect a Mercedes S class when in reality are paying for a VW bug. So they have to try to give them the best bang for their buck.