Where did you learn to draft? I didn’t really. I just did my best in architecture school. No one taught us anything about drafting. Had you moved into AutoCAD at that point? No. At the U, there was a computer room, and you could go down and enter coordinates. I made a wireframe model of my thesis project, which was a housing project, so that I could overlay it and draw the building in 3D. After about eight months at Valentiner, I started working on the computer there. They were pretty early adopters. It wasn’t AutoCAD; it was a digitizer pad with a little pen. I was the queen of that; I was so fast at it. And then we got AutoCAD, which was a little adjustment. I became the queen of that, even to the point that, as a partner, I was still designing in AutoCAD because I knew that software. Then we switched to Revit. I was totally in favor of it but didn’t work in it enough to really be able to learn to use Revit effectively. I think it’s an incredible tool. Talk about some of the projects that taught you about architecture. The client relationship part of a job is the best part. I love finding out what they need, but I also feel like I’ve educated myself about the process of K-12 education. It’s part of my job to open the minds of teachers. I don’t want to just hear how they teach or how their classroom could be better. I want to talk about how you imagine teaching in your wildest dreams: “What if you had no parameters?” How can we make the building facilitate that kind of teaching paradigm? All of the schools used to be — and many in this country still are — what we call “cells and bells”: a hallway with classroom, classroom, classroom, classroom. The kids go into those classrooms and get education shoved into their little heads. That isn’t the best way to learn because the best way is different for everyone. Fortunately, many of the schools of education are starting to teach teachers that small group work, collaboration, The City Library Yuma Main Library 12 REFLEXION
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQxMjUw