Termination by cantilever by letting the two members intersect and pass through one another. Each could stand a little more length however this works well enough. A complex problem has been dissolved - the environment demonstrating its own thesis.

Plastering, painting and planting all at once. This is extreme fasTracking 10 days away from opening. The sprinkler system is still going in over this area and this will require further patching and painting while moving scaffolding through a garden - certainly providing an unique building experience.

Soon, there will be water under the bridge bringing smell, sound and movement to the environment - a place of rest and contemplation steps away from an intense collaborative workspace.

There is always the point, in a project, where visually the project turns and the final results begins to emerge. We are on the threshold of this now.

The 2 by 3 meter screen hanging from the Masts is primarily for providing viewing to the elevator Balcony - it also makes for some interesting viewing from below. There are 20 flat screen monitor, in addition to four projections screens hanging on the Armature system. Viewing is ubiquitous no matter where you walk.

Work began in the afternoon on the Entry POD which sits at the intersection of the ramp. column and the columns around the radiant Room.

Just-in-time, literally, the container arrives with POD components. It was quickly unloaded and sorted. Within minutes work on the Garden Pod began. This POD has four workstations, in a quite environment, which can reassemble in the center to create a collaboration table.

The Garden landscaper provide us, as we requested, more built up areas to relieve, a bit, the flat and linear aspects of the design. planting proceeded today at a good pace.

By the end of the day, the design started to emerge out of the confusion of the construction activities. This is a space of many zones and sub-zones. Three different architectures are integrated into a single whole. It can function as one large room or as many different areas supporting different learning and work modalities. Each of these has a distinct feel and sense of life. Each acts as foreground and background to the other spaces.

As every light in the NavCenter can be controlled individually, light - or lack of it - can be used as to sculpt the space and change the feeling of it. The lighting, along with the landscaping in the Garden and scattered throughout the space, become an active design tool in the hands of the users of the environment. The construction lighting in place now does not reveal this aspect of the design. Over the next few days, the permanent lighting will be completed and this aspect will reveal itself.

The POD turntable has to be put together upside down, then flipped to be placed onto the platform with rollers.

This is an exercise in teamwork and in leadership as one person has to make the calls and be responsible for safety, avoiding doing damage or damaging the object itself.

It is like a ballet seeing this accomplished in a few minutes.

The turntable has to be place before the rest of the POD columns. Once in, the work can proceed on the upper ring and top of the POD. The space under the turn table and the turntable itself has to be wired for technology and power. This requires real time coordination so that no one is held up in their work.

The Garden POD has several individual pull down workstations for private work and also configures, in the center, as a table-in-the-round for four or five people. This will make a quite, pleasant, restful space - in the Garden - for personal work or a small meeting. An example of the kind of variety the typical workplace is lacking.

The overall architecture of the meeting, the detail of each module of work, catering, name tags, logistics for nearly 400 people, presenters, knowledge objects, research materials, brochures, media clips, organizatizing for documentation... these as but a few of the threads to be pulled together.

The ground floor and the first floor have to be configured to meet the requirements of this meeting, exactly. The basement set up for storage and support. We are not just doing one meeting here, we are setting up a complete operation that will have its next event at the end of the month. Every system, is yet untested.

The is perhaps the 30th time an environment like this has been set up in the last 15 years. Some of the people here are seeing and creating their first one. Some their 10th or 15th. It is by this means that the tradition is both passed on and recreated every time [future link].

Environments like this have to be “practiced” into being. they cannot be “made” - they are too complex for this. Now, after a year of work, we are just at the beginning of the real creative effort.

Early today the electrical crew - just-in-time- provided the rough wiring for the Garden POD and then did the same for the Center Master’s POD and the Entry POD. Now, all three can be buttoned up. We are pressed to get this done so that the decking and flooring can be done friday. The lighting for the PODs will be installed the first of the next week. We worked these details out yesterday afternoon.

The POds are now getting their tops. These can be opened by the POD users who can control their vertical and horizontal degrees of openness, closeness, light and sense of exclusion and inclusion.

The outer Airfoil Ring intersected perfectly with the header of the POD and the suspension cable was reattached exactly where it was before the marriage. Both the big PODS are intimately connected to the Armature each in a different way. They, in effect, extend the Armature out into the space around the 60 foot ring which defines the radiant Room [future link].

The Garden area progressed today with the stream being made more natural in its sound ad rate of travel. The plants are fitting in well. the light has not been turned in yet so this is still a question.

The garden POD is to be a restful experience - still a work environment but one of another pace from the other work areas in the NavCenter. This is an amenity sadly lacking in the typical workplace - made scarce in the name of economy and efficiency when in fact utilitarian architecture is nether. Instead of managing the costs down, the knowledge workplace has to be the consequence of managing quality, performance and creativity up.

The Entry POD, viewed from the Balcony, getting “fit” to the column. The POD is literally anchored to the this column and focuses, along with the floor pattern, the diagonal view to the column at the far “upper” right that “squares” the circle of the Armature which also circles the square of the inner columns. This is a reference to Da Vinci as are the Wings yet to come [link: leonardo wings].

Around, counter clock-wise is the Center Master POD here shown getting its domed top put in place. There panel open up like flower peddles there by facilitating prospect and refuge vertically. This also changes the light within the structure. The PODs are a “room within a room” and are spaces with their own integrity that also can configure (horizontally and vertically, in different ways to embrace and interact with the large environment.

Between these two PODs and the corner columns is the first Armature Lolly Pop column - this sits on the “arrow” of the diagonal floor pattern which cuts across the space. The floor pulls you into the Armature from the corner; the PODS and the Lolly Pop columns define this part of the entry experience.

The dome of the Entry POd - and the POd itself - is subordinate in scale to the other elements around it. It has presence but does not distract from the “pull” of the rest of the space.

The flooring of the PODs is olive wood which has a stronger pattern than the other woods and is also the accent materials where the various patterns intersect one another in the large space.

It will be later tomorrow when the flooring will be totally exposed and the patter revealed. This patter both directs the flow of movement in and out of the space it also stresses the diagonal view of the space while honoring the column pattern of the original architecture which is still the dominate definer of the “large” volume within which everything else is set.

Each side of the colonnade has a different feel and specific function.

On the far side from the entry is the garden which serves a a backdrop of light, greenery water and tranquility to the other activities taking place. This background can be brought anywhere into the NavCenter by the video system.

Each aspect of the composition enfolds the rest.