Prepare for the ARE Vol. 4: Project Planning & Design

Course Overview
(music) Hi. I'm Kevin Griendling, an architect and professor of architecture in Southern California and welcome to my course, Prepare for the ARE Vol. 4: Project Planning and Design. The ARE is one of the greatest challenges in your professional career and one that will prepare you for success in the world of work. This course will help you develop a winning strategy for passing the exam, by focusing on understanding the basic knowledge required to pass and how to translate the test specifications into an actionable study plan. Some of the major topics that we will cover will include: environmental design strategies, structural design concepts, materials properties, and various types of cost analysis. By the end of this course you'll understand how to leverage your knowledge and resources to see a Pass on exam day. From here you should have a solid action plan to prepare your studies and deep reading, extract relevant study concepts from source materials, and break down the NCARB guidelines into bite-sized chunks. I hope you'll enjoy learning these exam prep strategies and prepare for the ARE Vol. 4: Project Planning and Design with Pluralsight.

Materials Tips: Wood and Steel
In this module, we will learn a few material tips about wood and steel. First, let's begin by discussing the origins of material. There are four general types of material uses. They're going to fall into the category of structural materials, architectural finishes, product-based materials, or hazardous materials. To begin our discussion, let's understand some various general categories of structural materials. There's heavy timber construction, which is where wood beams and columns are set up in a post and beam configuration to support and transfer the loads. The historical development of structures began with heavy timber construction principles. First it began with wood construction, then it grew into masonry, concrete, and early metals, and then it involved into steel and more refined metals. That post and beam structure began in primitive shading techniques. The origins of basic material engineering began with the essential primitive shading requirements. These are things like lean-tos and teepees, and they utilize a post and beam structure with both a rigid sheathing layer on the lean-to and possibly a flexible cladding on something like a teepee. Regarding masonry, engineering for masonry goes back thousands of years with stacked stone or mud in order to create walls, and this is also the time period where concrete and early metals were beginning to be discovered and integrated to create composite assemblies. Furthermore, eventually history led us to advances in technology that really allowed for steel, and even better, composite construction utilizing steel, concrete, and/or wood. The exam will not likely ask any more detailed questions than simple composite assemblies and material selections. Remember that the Project Planning and Design exam is about selecting materials and locating them, not about the details of how they go together.