{"id":30953,"date":"2022-02-09T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T09:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.architect-us.com\/blog\/?p=30953"},"modified":"2022-02-09T15:50:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T14:50:38","slug":"first-month-how-many-feet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.architect-us.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/first-month-how-many-feet\/","title":{"rendered":"First month: How many feet?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Already one month has passed since I arrived in New York<\/strong>, and four weeks going to the office in DUMBO, Brooklyn<\/strong>.
\nRight after Christmas, with Omicron<\/strong> arriving at its peak, everyone at the office -except three of us- was working remotely, which meant I meet everyone through daily Zoom meetings.<\/p>\n

It was a strange way of getting adapted to the new life and routine: from schedules and commuting – I mistakenly took the subway to Williamsburg once and still managed to arrive on time- to software, English, and different workflows. But it also made the arrival and change not so sudden. I was assigned to different projects, where I started learning how the office worked, organized, designed, and how different the design and documentation of a project is from Spain<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Finally, this week, more people have started coming to the office and I’ve been able to finally meet them after so many times seeing just their faces on the computer. It’s nice to have the studio busier, having bigger lunches, and moving around different tables.<\/p>\n

However, the biggest cultural change has been without a doubt UNITS. Realizing that every single line I was drawing I had no idea how long it had to be was terrifying at first. For those unfamiliar with the Imperial system, distances \/ areas, even of course drawing scales etc… are measured mostly in feet and inches in architecture. 3 feet is almost but not exactly 1 meter, and there are 12 inches in each foot (which makes feet to inches conversion not the quickest), and the best part of inches is that they are divided in fractions of inch (\/2 \/4 \/8 \/16 \/32…) which means sometimes things will measure 4 feet, 11 inches, and 5\/16 of an inch, and you will also have to type that on the computer, something that would be worth another post about how to figure it out.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly it gets easier and more fluent with time, although I don’t think I can ever get completely used to it and will continue missing easy, fast meters and all its multiples and divisions.<\/p>\n

I’ll let you know how the adaptation goes.<\/p>\n

Until next month!<\/p>\n

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