Planning represents a crucial—yet conceptually often overlooked—aspect of any constructive project. In what order do you assemble and fix different elements? How long should each task last? How many people, and whom, should you dispose of and at what moment?  

      

   

    Preliminary planning of the construction process. All elements are named after the following nomenclature (made in great part by Eric Gozzi):

        

               

    Composing groups to coordinate the different tasks was also key. Who excels at what tasks? Who works well together? In response, 5 groups of 3 were created (ranging from 'E1' to 'E5' in the planning above). Each group had a precise series of tasks to accomplish. 

    Ultimately, the planning was truly useful on site—particularly in the earlier stages. However, as different problems were encountered, many acts had to be altered and the order of assembly as well as the composition of groups also consequently modified. All in all we were positively surprised that we were able to advance much faster than what we had initially planned.

                                                 Drawing (AutoCAD) of the construction process

While we were doing the prefabrication of our frames, we needed to send the final Rhino file to the engineer in order to have his agreement to build our project. We did a skype with him to see the load descent in the proto.

At first, when he used our system of bracing and kept our wall at height meters high, we had 1800 kilograms at the left foot of the protostructure.

The engineer, Stephan and Teresa helped us to change something, like the bracing or the walls, in order to reduce the weight that went down to the foot. 

At the end of the Skype, we made a strong decision but we all agreed that it would be even better than before. The solution was to low down our walls. Given that we had already made every frames, we chose to take away one series of frames for every walls, which means that every walls was 1.66 meters lower. This choice allows us to have not so much bracings, and allows us to keep the energy of the project, which is the space that are created inside those vertical walls. What's even nicer is that the horizon with the Marechal's screen showed up again, and the link with their project is stronger than before.

Here is the scheme of the load descent that the engineer sent us when our walls were shorter.

We still have 650 kilos that goes down to the left foot of the proto, but we are going to dig 50x50x50 holes to put the proto inside and then put concrete.

The last week before going in Evian, which is the fifth week for the House phase, we all worked on doing the prefabrication. We started by going couple times at the cutting site, we used the measures of our drawings and of our Rhino files.

We then made some templates to assemble our frames with a right angle and with the correct distance. 

We then all screwed our frames. All our frames are built in a way that every horizontals sits on the horizontals of the proto, and that it won't be too heavy to lift it up.

                         

Making the template and having with fun with Leo                         (placing our frames in the template with Charles and Philippe)