Annual Intern Event!

Please join us in an enthusiastic celebration of mentorship!

The AIBC and the Intern Architect Committee invite you and your mentor to attend the upcoming Mentor – Mentee Event. This event is an informal and social evening dedicated to building mentor relationships across all levels of the profession, from students and architectural graduates to Intern Architects and fully-registered members.

Thursday, November 4
5:30 – 8:30 p.m.
AIBC Gallery (#100 – 440 Cambie Street at Pender)
Vancouver, BC V6B 2N5

Complimentary refreshments, entertainment and prizes.

While mentorship is a required part of the Intern Architect Program, it happens more informally throughout one’s career as an architect. Mentors enhance education, offer advice and direction for professional experience, and help build professional networks. They are teachers, counselors and friends.

No matter how far you are through the IA program, chances are your mentor has been a large and positive part of your internship experience. This gathering is the perfect opportunity to not only thank your mentor, but to also connect with other IAs and members of the profession.

To confirm you attendance, please r.s.v.p. to Courtney Healey IA.AIBC (courtney.healey@gmail.com) or Registration and Licensing Administration Assistant Emily Tyler (etyler@aibc.ca).

We look forward to seeing you there.

Intern Architect Event 2009: 20x20

With summer now officially over, it is time to announce the upcoming annual Intern Architect event. The Intern Architect Committee (IAC) has been discussing this issue, and has chosen to revisit the 20x20 event organized last year. Our intent is to use this Pecha Kucha inspired event as an ongoing and continuing event that would be organized at regular intervals in the future.

As a refresher to those unaware of the origins of this type of event, Pecha Kucha originated in Japan in the late 1990s as a method devised by graphic artists to present their work while minimizing the amount of constraints and requirements. Each presenter prepares an audio visual based piece, consisting of 20 images, with each being shown for 20 seconds. This ensures the presentations do not last more than six minutes, allowing many presenters to speak during one event. Today the Pecha Kucha formula has been replicated throughout the world and these types of events are a common occurrence in numerous cities.

This year’s event will take place on Thursday, November 12th at the Architecture Gallery (AIBC). The event will start at 17:30 and refreshments, as always, will be provided.

We are looking for between five and eight speakers for this event. Preference will be given to Intern Architects and architecture students. Presenters will have the opportunity to showcase their work, ideas, or other interests. An honorarium will be presented to all of the speakers. Please contact us if you are interested in being a presenter at this year's event.

In order to ensure the event is well attended and financed, the IAC will to launch a targeted advertising and sponsorship campaign. Emails and flyers will follow shortly. To encourage guests to come and participate in the event, a draw for numerous architecturally-themed prizes will also be organised.

Please mark your calendars, and we the hope to see many of you at this exciting event!

Structures Seminar 2009

The AIBC will once again be hosting Prof. David Thaddeus, AIA, NCARB in November 2009. Prof. Thaddeus will be presenting his Structures Seminar at the AIBC offices on November 6 - 8, 2009. This seminar offers three full days of workshops, mock exams and questions & answers that focus on preparing Intern Architects for the Structural Systems division of the ARE 4.0. These workshops present the technique, strategy and skills invaluable to all interns preparing for their exams. The registration form is now available on the AIBC website. The registration deadline is October 28th. Please contact AIBC Registration Coordinator, Roisin O'Neill, at roneill@aibc.ca if you have any questions.

Annual Intern Event 20x20

The annual intern event, hosted by the Intern Archietct Committee was held at the AIBC on November 6th. This year's event, 20x20, was based on Pecha Kucha - an increasingly popular show-and-tell format through which presenters are allowed 20 images and given up to 20 seconds per image to speak. This lively evening attracted 5 diverse presentations. It was an unqualified success!! We are particularly happy with the turn-out wich saw many interns attending the presentations and sharing fellowship, food, drink and good conversation. The 5 brave presenters each received gift cards in the amount of $100. Six lucky attendees won gift cards for various venues worth $50 as door prizes.

The gifts and prizes were generously sponsored by the Architectural Foundation of British Columbia for which we are deeply grateful.

Following are the list of presenters and their respective topics.

• Allison Holden : Femininity in Architecture
• Ariane Truong : Floating Architecture
• Varouj Gumuchian & Gary Schilling : Eclectic Creativity
• May So : A Land Flowing with Milk: Rothiemay Farm, New Brunswick
• Abdel Munem Amin : Amazonas Brasilias : A tale of a broken Nomad

Considerable interest was expressed in repeating this event next year -- something the Intern Architect Committee is keen to do. For those who are interested in presenting a topic at the next intern event, please send an email to interncommittee@yahoo.com and a brief description of your topic.

Solid Footing for General Structures Seminar

by Jeff LeMay IA.AIBC

The recent ARE General Structures workshop featuring David Thaddeus, AIA, NCARB, provided an excellent overview of structural concepts and solid preparation for the ARE General Structures exam. The 3-day workshop hosted by the AIBC in Vancouver November 7th -9th was attended by 27 intern architects from B.C., Washington, and as far away as California.

David Thaddeus’s amicable and engaging communication style made the three full days in seminar not only bearable but often enjoyable.

David’s extensive collection of 2D models made for the overhead projector clearly depicted the transformations that occur in structures under various loading conditions. His use of colour coding for different types of forces in his digital presentation was consistent throughout the seminar and made note taking and review easy. David never hesitated to pause for questions and confirm we were all on track eliminating our anxiety over being left behind.

David’s presentation was a thoughtful balance of structural concepts, equations and example questions from the exam. The concepts presented formed a useful review of the structures courses taken in school, but David presented them in a way that made them accessible for interns with or without a structures-heavy education. These concepts were underscored by a slide show including images of innovative design solutions and arresting structural failures.

The equations David presented served to consistently and cogently underscore the concepts. Eemphasis was placed one those most often featured in the exam. David successfully straddled the line between the 3.1 and 4.0 exams, ensuring a useful seminar for interns on both exam tracks. Significant time was allotted for practice questions. David also offered useful time saving strategies such as eliminating impossible answers from multiple choice questions and thereby avoiding unnecessary math operations.

This engaging and useful seminar is a recommended event not only to interns studying for General Structures but also to those who wish to enhance their structural knowledge for use in practice.

Testimony from Abdel Amin IA.AIBC:

"The things I found useful were the techniques Thaddeus presented to save time and eliminate needing to calculate every math question. He offered an exam taking plan of attack which I thought eliminated the need to ‘think’ during the exam and tempt misinterpretations. He made it simple and quick so you weren’t prone to confuse terms, especially when the equations were involved. I also felt that he explained the concepts more clearly where the Kaplan Study Guide was unnecessarily math heavy and light on explanations. He explained the theories better and we were better equipped to do the exam because of that. There isn’t too many calculations in that exam compared to the theory so if you don’t have the theory down, you may have trouble with the majority of the questions.

Also, the 2D structural models that he had were very useful. You can see clear as daylight what happens when forces act on the systems that are under consideration. I need to see it to believe it. You can talk for hours but if I can’t see it/ visualize it I won’t believe it and it becomes much harder for me to even remember it for the exam. I don’t think I am alone in thinking like this.

If I were to do all this again, I would schedule the Thaddeus course to be 2 weeks before my exam. I feel you need to do some studying before to get the most out of the course but leave yourself enough time to be able to read and review new concepts that you weren’t aware of after the course. I ran out of that time and had to wing it as much as I could as it was eating into my review time. I scheduled the exam for the Friday after the course so I ran out of time to thoroughly review the additional readings that he recommended.

The money for the course is well worth it. For the amount of time that you are there, a total of almost 30 hrs I think, it works out to be around $10/hr. Less than half of what you would spend on a tutor or another course which isn’t catered to passing the ARE specifically."

The Intern Architect Committee will be arranging for Prof. Thaddeus’ return for 2009. Stay tuned for further details.

Intern Event and 20x20 Show

Since 2003 the Pecha Kucha presentation format of 20 images lasting 20 seconds each has been spreading around the world. This year we’re going to bring that format to our yearly intern party!

Join us on Thursday night, November 6th for this year’s Intern Party and 20x20 Show with door prizes, music, free food and drinks. Make sure to mark it down on your calendar and come on down to the AIBC next Thursday night! Please send a quick r.s.v.p. to the Intern Architect Committee at interncommittee@yahoo.com so that we have a good idea of numbers for catering. The Intern Architect Committee would like to thank the Architecture Foundation of British Columbia for sponsoring the door prizes for this event.

Intern Architect Committee proudly presents this year's intern annual event: "20x20!"

Since 2003 the creative process of a public meeting at which a series of presenters display and speak about a series of 20 images for no more than 20 seconds per image has become a popular event worldwide. This year we want to unleash intern creativity at our intern event by hosting just such a meeting. Join us on Thursday night, November 6th for this year's Intern Event: 20/20 show, prizes, music, and fellowship.

We have timed this year's Intern Event to coincide with two other AIBC events so that interns from around the province can attend. The November 6th date not only coincides with the Remembrance Day weekend, but also with the 'Law & the Architect' course being held at the AIBC on the same day. The next day, Friday November 7th, David Thaddeus will begin his 3 day intensive ARE Structures Seminar to help prepare interns for the structures ARE exam. We've already had a lot of interest on his second appearance in Vancouver.

We think the Intern 20x20 event will be a great way of showcasing our local talent.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

To make this event truly successful, we need you to submit presentations. If interested in presenting at this session, please send us your name and a brief description of your presentation. Spaces are limited so let us know as soon as possible.

Here are the rules:

• Every presenter will show 20 slides on a topic of their choice, and will have a maximum of 6 minutes and 40 seconds to talk during their presentation (up to 20 seconds per slide) .
• Each presenter will submit his or her 20 slides as .jpg images no larger than 1024x768 pixels in size and clearly labeled with presentation sequence 01~20.
• Deadline: 5pm PST on October 31st, 2008.
• Email your slides in a zip file to this address: interncommittee@yahoo.com.