The Cad Lab in the architecture building is an immense resource that help students like me, work and print all within the same building. So far this is much more than other majors themselves offer, however the extent of the work we do causes us to work all hours of the night and with that comes the need to print. The type of printer we need access to are plotters. Meaning that the prints are larger, going up to 72 inches in length but the largest width is 48 inches. The amount of money and accessibility to these are limited due to its high cost and low printing balances at the beginning of each semester that is given to each student, as well as little outside printing resources in the area. Another problem to this is the amount of time the lab is open, resulting in a lack of printing time for the student, which makes for more crowded wait times.

The Cad Lab is open for 10am-5pm or 12pm-5pm depending on the day. The placement of this printing lab is mostly catered to the architecture students in the building, but there is minimal access due to the inconsistent hours. In the architecture building, we have set studio times depending on the year of study. A studio is a design class that each architecture student must take to be able to move ahead to the next semester, entirely it takes up is minimum of 4 hours starting from 2’o clock.  This means that most of the students who need access to printing before studio have a very limited window to do so. This worsens near final critiques everyone is printing, throughout the whole week, the small number of hours causes a long line that causes us to not use the free credit that is available for use for free in this Cad Lab.

Over time one looks for different alternatives for printing, many of them cause a lack of efficiency when it comes to the amount of work we produce. Many times, while having projects we must pace ourselves to have enough time to print. Causing us to not have time to work further into our design and drawings. When we pull an all-nighter, the only option we have is to print in the middle of the night in different locations such as 72^nd st 24 hour printing, All of these are different things that we do as students to try and ease the level of congestion that is caused due to printing and the need to print before 2.

Regarding this problem I can think of one simple solution that would help right from the beginning, being to extend the times of the Cad Lab. But not only in the mornings but as well as in the afternoon. There is always a person in the Lab with you and one is needed to open it as well, why not open at 8 am for printing relieving some of the congestion that there is closer to the mid-day on days of studios, especially final critique days. For afternoons, I believe that it closes too early, as studio doesn’t end until a minimum of 6 pm. But 3rd-year students and above we end at 7 pm, and many times even later. This all eliminates the accessibility for us to print. If the lab were to be open 24 hours, that would be the most ideal, but realistically staying open until 9 pm is a step in the right direction allowing us more time to print, as well as reduce the congestion of the mid-day rush where everyone will try to print right when it opens. I am not saying these are permit solutions, these are just steps in the correct direction to allow for a sense of tranquility in an already hectic/stressful situation of presenting work.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.