In the time since our graduation, the world has kept spinning. The team quickly returned to work on the project with the time for outside work quickly approaching.

After all the labor poured into iteration and preparation, we are ready to make our plans a reality. In Rural Studio fashion that means it’s mock-up time! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We must get all our ducks in a row, or at least some of them into a decently straight line. We worked on transforming the core and house elements to a smaller scale, while also putting the finishing touches on details with the help of Dan Wheeler.

We are also double and triple-checking our structural strategy with Joe Burns. On top of this, we met with Thomas Paterson to discuss our general lighting strategies, which, like many other things, needs more iteration. With all this help, everything is looking good enough to get started. So, we have officially broken ground on our mock-up and things are progressing smoothly.

It is fascinating to realize that there is another layer of complexity in construction that we must reckon with beyond the seemingly overwhelming complexity we face with our drawings and design. It is a lot to keep track of and easy to make a mistake, which you then find yourself taking time to fix. One of the incredible opportunities of Rural Studio is that we must work through all these problems as a team and truly understand the repercussions of what we design. No one does it for you; if we find a problem, we must think ourselves out of it.

Groundbreaking News: We Broke Ground

So where are we today? Well, we are busy finishing the foundation trenches and prepping our pieces for the assembly. We have built the core base and the walls. We also have the formwork assembled and rebar cut to size.

Throughout, we have been critiquing and altering our process and design. As soon as we finished the core base, we became aware of how we would build differently and how it would be designed differently. We all know that design has a long way to go and that even as the house itself is built, we will see things we would change if we could do it again. But that’s for future teams to figure out.

For now, we are pleased with our progress and do not want to slow down anytime soon. At the time of writing this, we are hoping to pour our mock-up slab in one week! It has been a welcome change of pace to do some physical work. We’ll see how long that disposition lasts in this heat. But for now, we are happy to swim through the humidity towards our next task.