Project 302 - Imagine a Room

“My way of inventing architecture always begins with a strong image, not just an idea. The idea is always accompanied by a powerful image and the visualization of a bodily or physical event. It is not an abstract idea. These first images are naive in an almost childlike way.

During the whole process of the buildings development, I make sure that this image becomes architecture, self- defining form of architecture.”

Peter Zumthor

Text + Image

In the course of developing the final project, you are asked to explore the spatial qualities of your proposal. The aim is to understand and express a clear idea of the interiority for your proposal using both visual images and text. It is about describing the quality of a space, not the programme of your proposal. (i.e "space for bike storage" is not an appropriate response).

Your objective is to produce a strong image of an interior architecture that is capable of focusing your architectural intentions and driving your architecture forward through to the next stage of development.

Consideration should be given to the proportion of the room, the size, position and proportions of windows and doors, qualities of light (both natural and artificial), qualities of materials and how they reflect or absorb light, how reflected light  is exploited and how this light will change over time.

Consider how people occupy the room in relation to its spatial quality. The room may be interior or an external space with the qualities of a room. It should be a space capable of generating ideas about the rest of the proposal, and embodying an essential part of the project.

Your room should be an inceptive and ambitious design approach that draws on your intuitive response to the site and its intended occupiers, and begins to draw together ideas combining your programme and how the proposal responds to the site.

Consider carefully:

How the internal environment is controlled in relation to its context, materials and climatic aspects.

How your previous project (collage, models and contextual researches) shapes and influences the constructing of your room.

What are the primary interests that compose your space (views, light sound, wind, etc) in relation to physical fabric of the architecture (material, structure etc...).

Text

In no more than 100 words describe the idea of your room and its desired spatial qualities. Your text should be highly descriptive but not abstract.

Describe:

The basic information of the room, how big, internal dimensions, it's location etc...

The qualities of light, how sunlight enters the space, how shadows are cast on the rooms surfaces, how the wind might cool and ventilate the space, the effects of rain and other climatic conditions.

Other contextual relationships, the sound of cyclists and other occupiers, views, trains, movement, history, material conditions.

Images

Using Rhino V ray we are able to express a variety of spatial conditions (materiality, light, colour, texture) over time. The required outcome is for three images that show the interiority of the space from three different view points.

William O'Brien Jr, SketchUp model rendered in VRay. Allandale House

Project 301 - Spatial Strategy

Drawing on the findings of your earlier site survey drawings and a critical analysis of Hopkins Architects' feasibility study for a new development at the Herne Hill Velodrome, produce your own spatial strategy for a new architectural proposition on the site. Hopkins' study provides us with the base client requirements for our own proposals on the site so a critical assessment of its pros and cons is an essential starting point.

Your first spatial strategies should be approached as sketch arrangements of what might be achievable on the site. You should present a minimum of three different spatial arrangement sketches and critically assess each ones merits within the context of your design portfolio. 3rd years should be thinking about how a secondary programme could be added to the existing base programme.

Peter Zumthor, Vals Sketch

Peter Zumthor, Kunsthaus Sketch

Required Outcomes:

1). 1:100 or 1:50, Spatial analysis of Hopkins Proposal including a room schedule showing key spaces, internal and external spatial relationships and proposed areas measured in square metres.

2). 1:100 or 1:50, Strategic spatial proposal. A minimum of three iterations of a new general arrangement for the site.

Key Dates:

week 16 - 10.01.12 Day trip to President's Medals RIBA and Somerset House

week 16 - 13.01.12 3rd year Portfolio Reviews and 3rd year hand-in for brief 301

week 17 - 17.01.12 2nd year Portfolio Reviews and 2nd year hand-in for brief 301

week 17 - 20.01.12 1:200 massing models workshop

week 18 - 25.01.12 Open Jury Preparation

week 18 - 26.01.12 Open Jury

week 18 - 27.01.12 Open Jury

week 19 - 31.01.12 Rhino and VRay workshop and 2nd year mid year reviews

week 19 - 01.02.12 Rhino and VRay workshop

week 19 - 03.02.12  2nd year mid year reviews

week 20 - 07.02.12 3rd year mid year reviews

week 20 - 10.02.12 3rd year mid year reviews

week 21 - 14.02.12 Tutorials

week 21 - 17.02.12 Tutorials

week 22 - 21.02.12 Tutorials

week 22 - 24.02.12 Tutorials

week 23 - 28.02.12 Reading Week

week 23 - 02.03.12 Reading Week

week 24 - 03.03.12 Depart for Paris

week 24 - 08.03.12 Return Turin - London

week 25 - 13.03.12 Tutorials

week 25 - 16.03.12 Tutorials

week 26 - 20.03.12 1:20 TS Crits

week 26 - 23.03.12 1:20 TS Crits

week 27 - 27.03.12 Tutorials

week 27 - 30.03.12 Tutorials

- Spring Break -

Project 202 - section/scenario/narrative

Perspective Section, The Lost Soul Hotel, Andrew Street.

Presidents Medals: The Lost Soul Hotel

For this short two week exercise you are asked to describe a possible scenario for the Herne Hill Velodrome site. The scenario can be inventive but you are required to use existing site conditions (structure, activities, history, materials etc). It is required that your scenario develops at least one new architectural element (roof, platform, floor, stair, wall, screen, window, doorway).

Your scenario should be explained through a 1:50 section. You are encouraged to work on a scan/photo copy of one of your existing sections, adding more information, or to produce a new section at an appropriate location within the site. We encourage you to construct the section using a composite of analogue and digital drawing techniques, collage and  photography. Your scenario should express temporality (time), duration, transition and incorporate one or more elements listed below.. In order to construct convincing narratives, you might consider producing more than one section or even a series of progressive sections that can describe events over time, movement etc...

elements to consider in your section:

-occupancy

-use

-views

-velocity

-wind, weather and weathering

-light and shadow

-lightness and density

-texture/material

-water

Perspective Section, City of High Bastions, Ramsey Yassa.

Perspective Section, The Art Foundry, Kairo Baden-Powell

Presidents Medals: The Art Foundry

Key Dates:


week 07 - 01.11.11 - Brief

week 07 - 04.11.11 - Tutorials
week 08 - 08.11.11 - Tutorials
week 08 - 11.11.11 - Submission of portfolio sheet and process diaries.

Continue to document the development of your portfolio in your process diary.

Mapping Sites - East: Expressing Interest

This is an extract from East Architect's book 'East: Expressing Interest'. It's a valuable introduction to their approach to understanding a site through mapping. 

This is our favourite way of drawing

Sticking more and more bits of paper to the first one, getting out the wider sketching paper, using the finest black pen around. Writing what you cannot draw. Drawing with four hands, as Jonathan Sergison describes it in his introduction, or even six, it feels like an occasion, with everyone sitting around the table talking excitedly, adding more and more detail, so that the thing on the table becomes complex and comprehensive. Doing this in a group makes you recall and spell out what is so clear in your head both verbally and on paper, one helping along the other.

The ‘thing on the table’ is usually a map, and we are talking about a place. We are trying to be as precise as possible. Every little granite sett, every name, every window might be important, and might help ... in our understanding of where we’re going to. This is not the time to make judgements or to generalise, or for wishing that the world was more tidy or operated according to your ideas or design principles. Wanting to do this drawing – the desire and the process – changes the way I look at a site.

observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps. apply yourself. take your time....

note down what you can see. anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? is there anything that strikes you? nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless....

Don’t say, don’t write ‘etc.’ Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out.
George Perec, Species of Spaces and other Pieces.

The drawing is an instrument that reveals or charts the specific conditions of a place with all its complexity, conflicts, contradictions – the banal as well as the sublime. Once this drawing exists, a commitment is made. The room is full of potential. Each opportunity and idea is sparked by something recorded and it is difficult for propositions not to be specific to the given conditions, and impossible to revert to the safety of urban design jargon involving axis, gateways, markers, piazzas and other formal gestures.

These, in any case, can only be drawn with thick marker pens.

The hairy drawing is also an early indication of the urge to extend and adjust a brief, to create loose ends, not all of which need to be tied in. More often than not, the extent of a site is already irregular and uneven. A drawing can test and retest whether the edges are right, or if they are solely determined by practicalities such as ownership or funding, or the preference of a single public sector client. As the public realm does not operate in isolation from its surrounds, the best commissions are those open to negotiation.

Surveying Existing Structures

Kitchen and Yard, Marios Aphram

Venice Ponte, Marios Aphram

Neues Museum, Berlin, David Chipperfield

La Grancia di Cuna, Alison + Peter Smithson

Venice Campo, Charanpal Matharu

A documentary about Herne Hill Velodrome

The Best Seat In The World TRAILER from The Best Seat In The World on Vimeo.
A documentary about Herne Hill Velodrome. The track has known some hard times with its main building now closed-down due to deterioration and political feuds that stopped any long term redevelopment. This is the back drop to a series of moving interviews with cycling enthusiasts that range from a 1948 Olympic medallist to eight-year-old track users who all want the track to stay open.


The full length 25 minute feature will be screened at Look Mum No Hands on Saturday 8th October at 7:00 pm.

http://thebestseatintheworld.tumblr.com/

Project 201 - Site Survey, Herne Hill Velodrome

Our site for the next two projects is the Herne Hill Velodrome in Herne Hill, South East London.

Detailed site exploration allows us to formulate and develop an appropriate programme with which to absorb ourselves in for the rest of the year. Your site studies should explore and describe not only the physical and material aspects of the site but also the sites historic, literary, social and cultural context.

All the elements necessary for you to construct a viable programme for your proposal are in evidence on the site. It is therefor necessary to survey and map the site as accurately as possible and to document the existing uses and occupation.

For this brief you will produce a set of portfolio sheets that describe the existing conditions found at your chosen site. Orthographic site drawings are conceptually some of the simplest pieces in your portfolio, but it is vital that they are done well; both for the benefit of your design process and to describe your project to others. You should consider each portfolio sheet as a ‘piece’ that is rigorously and thoughtfully constructed. You should carefully consider the size, orientation and quality of paper that you chose to construct your drawing on, the quality, weight and precision of line and how it is rendered, the weight and family of font, the subtle use of colour and how text and photography might be integrated into your composition.

Your work will be appraised on your observational and recording abilities and also on the development of your personal drawing language. Each drawing should show a rigorous engagement with its subject so that your personal reading of the site can be understood by others. You cannot draw everything - be deliberate, critical and self-aware in your choices.

Required outcomes:

1.) A location plan at 1:2000 or 1:1250 showing the site in relation to its immediate context.

2.) A site plan at 1:500 showing your observations of the existing buildings and infrastructure of the site including occupation, circulation and use of the site.

3.) Orthographic plans and elevations at 1:50 of the key buildings and structures on the site.


4.) A portfolio sheet of four to six key images that, for you, exhibits the essence of the site or some fundamental aspect of how the site is experienced.


These four key drawings should influence and inform each other. You should work on each of these outcomes simultaneously and not wait to finish one drawing before starting another.

Key Dates:

week 04 - 07.10.11 - Site visit

week 05 - 11.10.11 - Tutorials

week 05 - 14.10.11 - Exhibition of Project 102 studio furniture models. 

week 06 - 18.10.11 - Tutorials

week 06 - 21.10.11 - Tutorials

week 07 - 25.10.11 - Tutorials

week 07 - 28.10.11 - Tutorials
week 08 - 01.11.11 - Tutorials
week 08 - 04.11.11 - Submission of portfolio and process diaries.