Arielle - SITE VISIT TIME

Wow I’m really lacking on this blog.

I finally went on a site visit! Actually it’s been like 4 site visits so I finally got that done off my checklist. One of the site visits was for a public park in Richardson along the side of a DART line (a passenger rail that operates within the DFW area). We went to oversee the progress of the planting and concrete pours for a specific bench that curves all throughout the site. The bench itself is almost 1,000 feet long and has a blue light under the bench crest that looks reallyyy nice at night. They also went to check out the construction of these artisan pavilions. The pavilions have this paneling that goes along the top to the back with these ellipse cutouts that make a decorative shadow pattern on the concrete (i want to learn how to do the math to be able to make patterns like this)

shoutout Andrew Duggan (he's always unintentionally posing)

They had a soft opening for the first half of the park (for some stupid reason probably related to the city wanting to make money) even though construction was nowhere near done. After the soft opening I visited the site again and saw that so much had been rushed. We had some rain that washed away some of the turf so there were some patches that had been spray painted green (you only notice if you look close enough), the pavilion had some structural problems (because they rushed the welding of the panels) which will need to be fixed by basically starting over, and lots of the planting needed to be fixed. (this is what happens when you have bad project managers)

Another site visit involved me helping survey a backyard for one of our residential projects. We basically used the survey equipment and did everything we were supposed to do in Nick’s class (but didn’t cause of rain). We got like 50 different spot elevations for this yard that was only like 19,000 sqft. It was pretty fun even though we were just looking through a telescope at a giant ruler. I also got to learn more about sump drains and such.

The actual thought of water and debris just constantly sittin in a pipe waiting to overflow makes me wanna vomit

I’m loving these site visits even though I basically am just tagging along and observing the site. It’s fun to see what goes on before the finished product. Hopefully I will go to a site soon to see planting in action, or to see installation of special statues/furniture/equipment/etc.

Here's more photos for my bottomless dump