depending how soon you are taking this, i found the prep materials put together by norman dorf and available at are-solutions.com to be very helpful. but you have to wait for them to come in the mail. good luck.

yes i have tried calling the number all morning to no avail ... its not that i dont think i can pass the retake, i would just be more relaxed knowing a bit more about they way its graded. the exam is next week, so i dont have a lot of time for us mail. you wouldnt happen to have any of the materials left?

good news is that mr. dorf is in ny, so you might get the stuff quickly if you can catch him. bad news is that he runs his little operation by himself and is out of town sometimes. make sure you leave a message > he's pretty good about responding, as i recall.

unfortunately i don't have the materials for the 'building tech' section, having only bought the pieces that i needed. sorry can't be more help.

no buddies in ny have bought any of these materials? you might ask around. my old office used to keep a library of prep materials for interns to pass around.

you might also try emailing him: nkdorf@aol.com

thanks, i have emailed him. i work in a three-person office so no luck here, and ive also emailed and called most of my contacts in the city with no solid leads yet. no worries, it would just make studying easier. thanks for your help!

nyc, I also failed the Building Tech section, due primarily to bad time management - I just didn't get finished in time. The second time trhough I ruthlessly discerned exactly what requirements they were looking for - as found on the NCARB practice exam, that's all I used - and paid close attention to my time the whole way through (kept my watch laying on the desk next to the computer).

Good luck.

I am taking Mech/Elec/Plumbing section on Saturday. Haven't cracked the book yet due to heavy work load at the office. I am comforted by the fact that I know the answer to how many architects it takes to screw in a light bulb.

i never understood why i couldn't just type in my consulting engineers' phone number. (my structural engineers' too, for that matter.) that's how we deal with these issues, in't?

exactly my issue. graphic standards is the best i can do ... what exactly were the requirements they are looking for with this one? the roof plan and ramp were not my problem, it was the other sections that were iffy. any insight?

I was looking for some info on the exam and found that up to last year Daniel Libeskind was not a card carrying member of the Archi-club.
This is one of his contemporaries response on the issue.

""The world's great buildings are done by great designers, not by people with licenses," said Alexander Garvin, who was the vice president for planning, design and development at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation during the design competition. An adjunct professor at the Yale School of Architecture, Mr. Garvin is not licensed."

To be fair Libe defended the whole thing with the following statement.
Though I must say I'd certainly prefer to present my built work to the state board as opposed to having to sit through 8 exams and 1 oral in
CA.

The defenders of the licensing requirement include the authorities at the American Institute of Architects and the New York State Department of Education, which licenses more than 14,000 architects — as well as doctors, nurses, acupuncturists and shorthand reporters.

Mr. Libeskind qualified for his license based on his design and building experience overseas, where he holds several professional licenses. For his New York examination, he was required to present and discuss drawings and related materials for three completed buildings that he designed. He chose the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, and the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück, Germany.

"What I brought to the exam were technical materials," he said. "They were not just pretty pictures of buildings. At our studio, we've done all the working drawings for our buildings ourselves. I'm a great believer in not farming out those responsibilities to another office."

I'm sorry, I don't remember the specifics that well. I do remember my stairway plan was utterly stupid, the kind of meandering arrangement of risers and treads that a UPS guy with a hand truck would hate, but it met the letter of the code, and that's all that matters.

So a code book or guide to the building code would be worthwhile, perhaps.

yeah i have noticed that as long as it meets the code it doesnt matter how horrible it would be for someone to navigate ... and in the retake i recently passed (site planning graphic) i realized just how unpretty you can make it and still pass.

building code is laughable ... nyc has its own, and it certainly isnt boca, or anything that the exams are based on.

can post your solutions there. people will critique you solutions. also professor norman dorf regularly checks the site and offers his comments on solutions as well

7:11 and no more than 12 vertical feet w/out a landing (UBC 1997).
I think it is less in office buildings (8 vert feet perhaps?).

36" min width stairway...60 inch for landings (36 min depending on the occupancy) door cannot swing out over a landing...

this is making my brain hurt.

sorry f'd up with the like

www.areforum.org

NYC and most other cities base theirs on the UBC (though BOCA, CABO, etc... are prevalent in other areas of the country). There is talk of making everyone switch to the UBC.

anyone else having issues with the areforum website? it doesnt seem to load properly.

your brain hurts!? try retaining all of this information for a 6 hour exam, hehe. thanks for the posts.

ok try this, they screwed up the main page with the hurricane relief stuff. forgot to put back the navigation stuff.

http://www.areforum.org/forums/

k...............definately works now

The graphic tests are based on their own "mini code" that is always printed in a section available for viewing with each vignette that you encounter on the test.
This test-specific code is not even consistent from vignette to vignette and from one person's test to the next - so you MUST read the code sections on your test. For instance: you may encounter slightly different rise-to-run requirements on your real test than you did in the practice software. People also report encountering slightly varying requirements for parking space sizes, ramp landings, etc. from one person's test to another.
FORGET any real-world codes while taking the graphic sections of the ARE. They are irrelevant and adhering to them may even make you fail.

Code questions on the multiple choice sections of the ARE are based on ALL of the major model codes (IBC, BOCA, UBC, CABO, etc.) NCARB recommends that test-takers be very familiar with any one of these, plus ADA (ANSI A117.1) There's no need to be familiar with all of the various model codes - any one will do - because the questions are generally limited to those in which the same answer is correct in all of the major codes.

One more thing: it is not UBC that is gaining nationwide acceptance. It's IBC. 48 states have either already adopted IBC, or have plans in place to switch to it within the next few years (though with their own addendums, deletions, etc.) Some major cities intend to retain their own city-specific codes.