91视频

Ninety high school students in the Portland-metro area are learning firsthand what it’s like to work in a range of professions in the building industry as part of the 2012 ACE Mentor Program of Oregon.

Nationally, the ACE Mentor Program has paired up more than 60,000 students with architects, engineers and contractors.

Locally, this year’s program boasts 60 volunteer mentors who are working with students from more than 30 area high schools in after-school sessions. During the sessions, held in the offices of local firms from the building industry, students work in small groups with their mentors on real-life projects that teach them how buildings and spaces are designed, engineered and constructed.

This week, two students describe development of their projects.

Megan Mueller

Living in Oregon, we are surrounded by the labels of 鈥済reen鈥� and 鈥渆co-friendly,鈥� but I never knew exactly what made those buildings and structures achieve these ranks.

Then my group went to SERA Architects, and learned about creating 鈥済reen鈥� buildings.

I never knew how much it took to create something capable of being labeled that way. I didn’t know that there was a checklist of many different things that the building had to meet before it could be labeled with an eco-friendly tag. There was the amount of water used, the amount of energy recycled 鈥� every single thing I took for granted as just being there when I needed it. I had never thought about where my shower water goes or what happens once I turn on the light.

So many people think they are being green and eco-friendly by reducing the amount of paper they use or using less water, and no doubt that is a good thing to do. But learning about these buildings has shined a whole new light on what I believe to be 鈥済reen living.鈥�

Meryl Kruskopf

As I enter the doors of ZGF Architects I can tell immediately I’m in the right place.

The room is paneled with wooden slates, giving the openness of the elevated ceiling and the contrasting black tile floor a welcoming feeling of warmth. The floating stairwell reminds me of ZGF’s work in the Port of Portland headquarters, a building I recently toured for Engineer Week. As I ascend to the firm’s offices I feel as though I’m floating upward. Today we are learning how to draw elevations and sections. Elevations are basically drawings of the building as if you are staring at it head-on, a one-point perspective of an exterior face of the building.

A section, which was demonstrated to us through a three-dimensional foam model, is a drawing of a cross section of the building, including everything in that slice of the building. A section would show floors, walls, structure and stairs or elevators.

While my group easily understood these concepts, drawing these pictures was another challenge altogether. We still hadn’t all agreed on the same floor plan, so every wall had to be double-checked and debated. It seems that above all technical aspects of our project, communication is the most difficult.

Hopefully we’ll get our thoughts together enough to present at next session’s mid-review.