In the last couple of weeks, we have been preparing to build a pod for our materials and methods class, but also to give us some opportunity for design, considering that the St. Lukes church project is mostly construction and has only minimal design aspects to it.
The main premise of the pod was to finish design as quickly as possible and get into the ground in about two weeks and then finish most of the construction in an intense 2 weeks build marathon after which we would be completing the in weekends during the rest of the semester.

We began our design phase with all of us doing charettes over a day, and starting to review our ideas together with thesis. We picked the three most promising design proposals and started to elaborating them in three groups a series of reviews we pinned down one final design idea and started to flesh out its details. In the meantime we got thumbs up to start building on St. Luke’s in old Cahawba, so again we got split up in two groups, a temporary pod team of six and a church team of seven. There were some changes to the design to make the proposal more constructible and made some decisions considering the position and orientation of the Pod.

We quickly figured out the positions of the four Sana tube foundations and with the help of Johnny Parker we started drilling the holes Monday morning and managed to get the auger piece stuck at the first hole. We quickly figured out that the clay was the biggest problem and after a lot of work, including digging out the thing in hard rain we managed to get free by afternoon.
Tuesday we finished drilling the holes, having learned from our past mistakes not to drill down to fast into the soil. After having done that, we build the batter boards and bracings for the Sana tubes and got ready to receive the cement truck.
The pouring of the cement went fine without any major issues and we got it finished in about one hour.

The next phase of the project started as soon as the concrete was sufficiently dry – we framed the floor platform, consisting out of a roughly 10′x15′ square and a 4”x10” cantilever extruded north, held onto the platform by four flitch-beams.

Edit: There was a tornado warning while I was writing this post and I had to leave the red barn - I will finish this up once we are back from Chicago.