Now to lower expectations; it's simply a personal favorite of mine. Feel free to disagree.
Once again, this comes from my Park Lane project in Hawaii (see Monster's Inc. for interesting background info). This specific slab comes from the amenity deck of the building. This is where all the residents of the buildings come to relax, party, walk their dog, etc. This graphic will summarize it better:
So what you need to know here for my engineering perspective is that all of this stuff is super heavy. You could probably guess that pools, hot tubs, and full grown trees aren't light. It's my job to make sure this can safely exist 50 feet above the ground. It's currently under construction.
I was in the throes of designing this amenity deck at my lowest lows. For one, it was an enormous slab; it's the largest slab I have ever put in one model. It took almost an hour to run the load history analysis! Imagine waiting an hour, and a quick glance at your results tells you that you forgot something. Not a fun feeling. Secondly, there are a lot of details to figure out how to accommodate so much architecture everywhere. And lastly, everything was just plain old heavy. It wasn't easy.
In my despair, someone came to my rescue as usual. This time it was my former co-worker and podmate, Eric. Eric is one cool cat who is working for Forell/Elsesser down in San Francisco now. He's Asian-American but he's definitely more Jeremy Lin than your high school's valedictorian. But then again, Jeremy Lin went to Harvard and Eric went to Stanford...so maybe he's both. He's from L.A. but irrationally likes all the Philadelphia teams. And I gotta say, I'll be rooting hard for the 76ers this year because of him.
In his perfectly American English accent, he said to me, "Trace, your slab looks an awful lot like the Millennium Falcon." [mic drop]
You would not believe how much I lost my shit after he pointed this out. I showed all my coworkers, showed my friends, showed my bosses, It was great date material too. I couldn't share it with enough people.
Star Wars Infatuation:
I loved Star Wars as a kid. I remember a Christmas where I got the trilogy and think I watched the movies daily for the rest of the break. My friends in Rapid made up a Star Wars-like fantasy world that we played in (TSFG - Terrain Space Forces Galactic - we were so nerdy). We were space captains on our bikes riding around the neighborhood. I was in denial for a long time about how bad the the prequels were. I had convinced myself that they were great movies. As I grew up, I realized that there were far more dedicated fans than me, and I decided that I should temper the fandom a bit. But that didn't stop me and some friends from camping out for Episode III!
Now you can see how thrilled I was when I found myself designing the Millennium Falcon as an adult. What a treat. This is my Symphony No. 9. It won't get any better.
But there's still some good stuff to come. So don't fret.
