This past weekend was pretty calm and uneventful, especially for being Fourth of July - my friend, Andrei, invited me to have dinner with his host family (bison burgers!), I had a picnic with Julie, Stephen, and Elaine on the Commons on Saturday, and I grabbed lunch with Andrei on Sunday (Cinderella's!) - and when the week started, I got switched to the Audi Project at work.

The Audi Project is a project that my firm is working on for - you guessed it - Audi, in Germany. They're redesigning their "campus" to make it more connected and more accessible to their workers and to the general public. The design consists of interlooping and overlapping roads, central hubs, and walkways that will allow people to access the buildings. The main architects on the project are going to Munich this weekend to present the final design.

Of course, an architecture presentation would be nothing without a model, which is why I got switched to the Audi project for this week! This entire week consisted of lasercutting, gluing, taping, gessoing, more gluing, more lasercutting, more gessoing.... you get the picture.

I worked on the model with a recently hired full-time employee, Gina, who I became fast friends with. We both quickly learned that double-sided tape and sandpaper are magic items, after struggling on Monday to glue sheets of etched plastic sheets to acrylic and paper, and Thursday and Friday to gesso glue seams so that they were hidden.

Gina and I were both racing to get the model finished, since the main designers are leaving on Sunday and neither of us were really fond of the idea of going in on Saturday. This meant that I worked overtime nearly all days of the week, and we finally finished up at 9pm on Friday. We laid the project out on the office coffee table (we had been working in the shop to assemble) as a Christmas present for Sung, Eric (both of the main designers), and Nate (Harvard GSD intern).

The process:

For the buildings, we lasercut the floor plates out of 1/32" museum board and cut the same footprint of each floor out of 1/2 cm acrylic (we had to run the laser cutter 5 times for each cut, and it smelled god-awful). We then used double-sided tape to assemble it, after realizing from tests on Monday that glue wouldn't work, and handcut scored plastic sheets (and then scored for the curvature) to line the outside of all of the buildings.

For the landscape, we cut out the fewest amounts of sheets needed (to minimize the number of glued seams) from 2ply museum board, and then gessoed each sheet to make them white. We had to give each sheet around 3 to 4 coats, and then we sanded them down. Then, we glued down the sheets and gessoed the seams to camouflage them. We cut out spacers for the bridges out of the same 1/2 cm acrylic along the exact length of the flat bridge tops, and glued them down with some magic scotch glue (I should find out what it actually is...).

Finally, we handcut doubles of 1/2" foamcore to mount everything on, and lined the ugly foam edges with bristol paper.

TBLR: Close up of the spacers underneath the elevated roadways; full shots of the model, and a close up of one of the buildings and the hand cut plastic sheets

Sung and Nate were very, very excited when they saw it. On the other hand, I've probably shortened my life by around 10 years this week just from the amount of toxic fumes I've breathed in.
Other things that happened this week:

While I was at the host family's place, Andrei, myself, and a couple others built a 3D puzzle!

We didn't finish all of it, but I tried to angle the camera so you couldn't tell

My momma came and visited on Tuesday, and we had the first Vinci meeting in the office! Mom really liked the tree scheme (which is hilarious, because we nearly scrapped it on Monday - no one likes working on it). I took her to Cosi and she agreed that it was very good for so cheap, although for some weird reason she thinks the flatbread is too dry.

Veronica and I introduced Catherine and Doug to Yume wo Katare, a quaint little Japanese ramen place in Porter Square. Catherine wasn't a huge fan - she didn't like how we had to wait for so long for the food, she didn't like how you couldn't share the ramen, and she didn't like the public "shaming" for not finishing - although I go around once a month with Caitlin and Harvey. To each his own, I guess...

The only order you can get at Yume wo Katare (variations include less noodles and more pork)

We went to the Michael's in Porter afterwards, where Catherine and I reaffirmed our friendship by getting (overly?) excited about soft yarn and free patterns. I ended up buying 3 double-ended nail art pens (6 colors!) and spend the rest of the night doing my nails (I'll probably end up doing a whim of the week about nail art, once I have enough designs racked up in my instagram - follow me!).