Drawings turned red

Over the holiday season we have worked from Sydney on an office fitout project - Connect Tokyo - located in Japan.  

 

The approximately 2 weeks of continual correspondences with joiner regarding documentation, finally approached an end.  The joiners had produced their own shop drawings for the joinery pieces they would be manufacturing, based on the documentation we had provided.  To be honest, this had never happened in Australia.  Even in Japan, it had never happened with other projects.  As the result we were very curious about this process, and spent the time to check their shop drawings thoroughly.  Obviously we needed to go over all the dimensions, on top of that we also needed to check many other important items such as the methods of timber manufacturing, and how those timber pieces would be assembled on site.  The shop drawing set constituted of mere 8 drawings.  Although it was physically not that many, we input dimensions and numbers from each drawing into our heads, and when we could construct the joinery pieces in 3 dimension in our headspace, we knew we were ready for construction.

 

This time we had the pleasure to work with Mr. Nakano from Nakadate.  We spent quite some time corresponding regarding the shop drawings.  Shop drawings produced at Kasukabe City, were checked here in Sydney, and marked up on drawings to send over for instruction.  The over 9,000km physical distance was not felt from both parties.  Although we had not met Mr. Nakano until start of construction, not even spoken over telephone, simply by the numerous correspondences we felt somehow close.  By the time we met on the first day of construction, we already felt like we have known each other for quite a while.  Finally it was construction start - lets head to Tokyo!