Leo A Daly - Omaha on the Boards

After a few weeks of development, Sabrina Ahern and I are proud to release a new Leo A Daly Omaha website! The website will be updated every few days with new information. We're excited to share the office designs, projects, community involvement, publications, and more. So, check it out, bookmark it - and let us know what you think!

http://www.leoadaly-omaha.com/

Sand in the City!

For the second year in a row, I participated in the Sand in the City competition - a major fundraiser event for the Nebraska Children's Home Society. As a volunteer "architect," I worked with First National Bank's team to create the sculpture "Savings Story." We sculpted Hamm, the pig from Toy Story, and then carved other Toy Story characters on the surrounding stacks of coins. My direct responsibility was the carving of the title coin at the front of the plot. We had six hours to complete the sculpture, and four of mine were on that coin alone!

Also, I was handed the "Most Valuable Designer" award. That basically means I produced great drawings for my team to build from. Sabrina Ahern, another designer at Leo A Daly, got that award last year - so I had a great mentor! We decided we'll keep trading it off every other year. :)


Also, many thanks to the Omaha Camera Club! They had multiple people taking photographs all day. Here are more pictures from the whole competition: http://occ.smugmug.com/Events/Sand-in-the-City-2010/12477949_QXH5N#894380681_br9GP.

Viva Vdara!

We're back! Have been for about a week now, but have slowly been getting back into the swing of things. We went to Las Vegas last weekend, April 8-11, as a pseudo-family vacation. We met up with Jeane and her boyfriend Matt, and Greg & Collette (Grant's parents) at the MGM Grand on Thursday. When we arrived, we were even upgraded to the MGM Signature Towers - no objection here! Thursday night we walked the strip a couple times and feasted at the MGM Grand Buffet. Friday morning, we went out to Greg and Deb Wolfram's house for breakfast - it was nice to see something off the strip! If I remember correctly, Deb is Collete's cousin. During the afternoon, we walked all over the strip, ducking in and out of casinos, from the Wynn back to MGM. Friday night, we ate at Todai, an amazing seafood and sushi buffet. Mmmmm! Saturday, we walked around even more, and scored some free tickets to Blue Man Group from Bill Lager, a close friend of Greg's. Thanks Bill! I've posted a lot more pictures on my facebook profile, most of the ones in this post deal with the following paragraph...

Saturday morning, we cleaned up our room and the MGM, and Grant and I headed over to Vdara in CityCenter for our one night there. I worked on Vdara for my first 2 years at Leo A Daly. It was so amazing to see something you draw stand before you in built reality! When we checked in, were were upgraded (again) due to availability to a panoramic suite! Basically, a room with 3 walls of glass, 270 degrees of views! Check out this site to see a description and floorplan of our suite: http://www.vdara.com/suites/panoramic-suite.aspx. Enjoy these, and check out facebook for more from the rest of the weekend!

Entertainment Center: Wiring and Gyp Progress

Little by little, we're making progress on the Entertainment Built-In. As long as I stay out of the way, Grant gets work done. :) He has run flexible conduit throughout the component shelf for surround sound speaker wires. He also wired (with a little phone help from my dad) a small spot on the left wall for future wall art or a photograph and a recessed rope light under the component shelf for "mood lighting." Following all the wiring, he started hanging all the gyp board (last picture). We're actually all done with gyp board, and he's already started taping and mudding the whole built-in. Kinda messy - and I definitely dust way more often with all the sanding going on!

Entertainment Center

After browsing new furniture, antique furniture, modular wall systems, etc, we decided to design and build our own built-in entertainment center. It'll end up being more of a component shelf that runs along the wall. Grant has recently informed me that we're just leaving the blue stripe and plastic table that you seen in the last picture. It seems to function just fine. Ha, we'll see about that. :)

BlueCross Centre - field trip!

Okay, my turn to talk about work. This is the new headquarters for BlueCross BlueShield under construction here in Omaha. I worked on this project for just over a year and a half, and I'm super excited to see it taking shape! I served as the CAD coordinator (working between two different software platforms, AutoCAD and Revit), helped with LEED documentation (a green building rating system), and a few design decisions along the way. It will be 10 stories tall plus a penthouse mechanical floor with open office areas, a workout facility, conference rooms, cafeteria and kitchen, training rooms, and supporting mechanical areas. We had a "field trip" with the architectural staff that worked on the project last week. I've attached a few of the pictures below. Also check out www.tetradcorp.com. That's the building owner's website - they have a live camera update from the top of the Travel and Transport building as well as a couple renderings of the design.

Our Leo A Daly sign with Kiewit (the contractor).

The precast concrete installed in this picture covers the loading dock and mechanical areas on level 1.

This is from the loading dock looking up at 10 stories of steel. The orange fence is temporary fall protection. We were only able to go up to level 6 because the fence hadn't been installed on the upper levels.

This is the first section of curtainwall to be installed. It's a large cantilevered area that holds the exercise facility and aerobic studio. It overlooks the Keystone bike trail and the Papio Creek.

This is taken from level 6 of the building looking down at the sitework for the parking garage. The large drill and crane in the back are for the auger-cast piles. See how little the people are? Crazy.

This is also the first project I've worked on where I got to sign the beam. Sounds dorky, but I'm pretty stoked about it. Basically, anyone who worked on the project can sign the beam and it's put in at the top level. It's not structural, and remains uncovered. I made my mark on architecture! Literally!

New House: Tile Preview

In order to illustrate what our architecture schoolin' bought us, here's a little preview of our kitchen materials and tile pattern. As seen in the first picture, we've already ordered the cherry cabinets, we're pretty much decided on the tile, and we're still working on the laminate color for the countertops (the one shown is a pretty strong candidate). The second picture shows what an architect does with an hour to kill over lunch. In order to estimate the amount of tile and supplies we need, they need square footages. Plus, I/we wanted to see what the kitchen would look like with an angled brick pattern to follow the 45-degree angle of the island. Therefore, the floor finish plan in AutoCAD. Now we have a really, really close estimate of how many square feet of square versus angled tile area we have. Nerdy, I know. But I can't help it! :)