With just one week until Year 2 of Studio H starts, we’re racing the clock to complete the Windsor Super Market structure. The open farmers market pavilion is about 75% complete – the roof will be finished this week, and siding will start going up tomorrow. Left to do: front access ramp, sun shades, and interior stall build-outs (for vendor set-ups). We took this video this morning to walk through the space and explain the circulation and structural qualities.

This week, we began roofing. At 20+ feet in the air, it’s a treacherous game, and students are not allowed up on the roof, but there is much prep work and cutting to be done at ground level as well. First, the permanent bracing was installed (photo below) to laterally stabilize the structure. Permanent bracing Our roof consists of roof joists and rim joists (at the sides), on top of which will sit a sheet of treated plywood, and then an EPDM rubberized roof. The

Yesterday we finished up the last few bays of decking, and filled in the spots that needed custom fitting between the truss beams. The most gratifying part was trimming the end of the deck: we had overcut our deck boards along the front side of the building where the deck is angled out, gaining about 6′ in width from one side to the other. We used a circular saw and guideboard to run down the entire length of the deck, cutting the boards back to

Now that our trusses are up, this week we started laying down the deck for the market structure. The deck will accommodate 8 vendor stalls (trucks pull up to one side of the building), and visitor access along the front, via ramp that slopes along the topography of the site. First, we measured off and attached joist hangers between each of the 8 bays at given, regular intervals. Into these joist hangers, we cut and dropped in our joists and secured them in the hangers.

We found out last night that Studio H was the runner-up in the Design Education Initiatives category for the Core77 Design Awards! The inaugural award, given out by the design publication Core77 and juried by some of the design world’s most notable authorities, seeks to recognize excellence in all areas of design enterprise (15 categories), celebrating the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. Check out the award page and all the other winners and categories here. Thanks Core77!

Yesterday (Friday), we raised the final 3 trusses and put the temporary bracing in place. The full scale of the structure is finally visible and it is awesome! This weekend, we’re working on getting a few bays worth of deck joists in place, and then we’ll replace the temporary bracing with the permanent bracing structure. Next week we hope to have the entire deck finished. Today (Saturday), people who came to the farmers market stopped to check it out, and definitely slowed down in their

Last week, we raised the first 3 (of 9 total) trusses on the Windsor Super Market pavilion. And yesterday, we raised the 4th, 5th, and 6th. Our Studio H students Erick and Kerron were on duty for the morning shift and got to witness firsthand their own designs being hoisted into the air and turned into standing structure. We’ve been assembling our trusses in groups of three because it is the most we can build in a single stack on our space-confined site. It works

We’re super excited to announce that Studio H will be running for a second year (and hopefully many more) in Bertie County. On Tuesday, the Bertie County Board of Education approved our agreement to run Studio H in partnership with Pitt Community College to 20 new junior-year high school students as part of their school day (half of their school day, every day, to be precise). Like this year, students will earn transferable college credit, high school elective credit, and will be eligible to earn

On Friday, we successfully hoisted 3 of 9 trusses into place. With the help of a local contractor and his boom truck, we lifted the 2,000-pound trusses into place and lowered them atop the Sonotube foundation piers, which has already been drilled out with brackets attacked. These trusses, once fully braced, will support the roof and deck of the farmers market pavilion (the bottom of the trusses will be where the deck sits, the top at roof level). Each of the three trusses took about

After prefabricating our 9 trusses in the shop (read about the crazy process here), we disassembled each truss and began bringing them down to the site in pieces. The trusses were too large to fit on a trailer without disassembly, so they must now be reassembled on the site. Thanks to our coding system, which noted which truss, which of three layers of the truss, and which joint point each individual piece of lumber corresponded to, we were able to follow the codes and assemble