Zumbro Zen by Eric Odor, Jared Banks, & Courtney Kruntorad Photo: Troy Thies

I’m particularly proud of this project. It’s the Star Tribune’s Home of the Month for September 2011 and is going to be on the Homes By Architects Tour in Minnesota on September 17th and 18th, 2011. I did the drawings back in late 2008 on ArchiCAD 11. You probably won’t see my name in the articles. I wasn’t the lead designer. But I shoegnomed the project. I often join projects after SD and much of DD is completed. The project was going well, but slow and Spring was approaching. The team needed someone to come and save them. When you work in Minnesota you’re either racing to beat winter or hurrying to be ready once winter ends. If you don’t start construction soon enough, the snow and cold arrive and you have problems. If you wait too long once winter is over, your clients will miss their first Thanksgiving or Christmas in their new home.

While it’s awesome to win awards and share the home with the public, the main reason I am so proud of this project is that it was a paradigm shift for a coworker, Courtney (as a teacher and mentor, this is a great joy). Courtney had used ArchiCAD for a while, but wasn’t getting it. And honestly she wasn’t enjoying the program. She missed AutoCAD. She’d still revert to SketchUp to do 3D modeling. But the two of us working together changed that. We produced a tight set of well coordinated drawings, on time and within budget. By the time we finished this project Courtney was 100% committed to ArchiCAD and the BIM way. Later in 2009 when Courtney left SALA Architects and was doing various freelance projects with other architects she told me “I’m never going back to 2D. It makes no sense.”

Not my greatest 3D image

This project wasn’t the paramount of BIM. The contractor didn’t even have e-mail. Another critical team member had a cellphone but refused to use it. How do you push BIM with a team like that? The details were all done by hand, scanned, placed as PDFs, and properly linked within the model. The interior elevations had way more 2D on them than I would like. It was a teamwork project. Not Teamwork 2, but clunky old how-did-we-ever-work-that-way Teamwork 1. The client never saw the model, save for one 3D view on the titlesheet. We hardly even looked at the 3D model. There were no fancy renderings. But the project was a huge success; ArchiCAD informed the design and helped us make decisions. And it set both Courtney and I up to do some awesome projects afterwards.