Intermediate Review 1

Our first review of our urban design scheme near the Hirschgarten in Munich. Work done by myself and my teammate, Pan Jiaozheng. 

Kurzentwurf

A brief study of the Kultfabrik area of Munich. This is a former industry area that is now mainly known for its events and nightlife. I loved the street art!

Übung 1

So for one of the classes I am taking, Digitale Formfindung (Digital Form finding) our first exercise was to learn how to use 3DS Max, and produce a rendering of a free form pavilion. So I spent an entire weekend basically solely looking at YouTube videos, and after some fixing up, this is what I came up with.

I spent ages yelling at the poor woman, hahaha... I simply couldn't find stock imagery that really suited exactly what I wanted. I have two free stock websites I rely on pretty heavily, and they have never failed me before yet, but... like all of their images of seated people looked way too summery!

I also got really annoyed because it's pretty obvious (in my opinion) that the pavilion isn't truly part of this scene. It simply isn't photorealistic enough. However, for a first proper rendering attempt, I guess I'll forgive myself  Also, I wanted the metal to reflect the scene around it... but instead of becoming reflective, it just became slightly transparent. O.o Hmm. I added the background as a bitmap environment map, so it was part of the render, but...

Oh and I would never actually design something like this... especially since I don't really think it could be constructed. I played for ages with the stupid splines but couldn't get them to go in a way that both looked good and looked constructible.  In the end I picked the 'looks good' option, because this is a rendering assignment... however I will most likely lose marks for this.

Closing public blog access

Dear readers (if there are any of you, haha. I admit I made this blog mostly so I could keep track of things myself), I will be closing public access to this blog.

Unfortunately, a piece of my ARCHDRC 202 work was stolen off my blog last semester and used by another student in their portfolio. Therefore, I sadly need to close this blog to most users. As much as I love seeing what gets looked at the most, and getting feedback every now and then, it is not worth the risk of having my work plagiarised.

Anyway, to the point of this post: if you are interested in continuing to see my posts, you need to send me your email address. Then I can save your email address in the settings here, which will allow you access. You can send me your email address either in a comment on this post (if you are comfortable posting such a thing on the internet... although it's true that once I close public access to the blog only other authorised blog readers will be able to see the comments) or in a message on my facebook page. I'm afraid, that since I don't want to risk this happening again, I will be limiting blog access to people I personally know (not including the other student who took my work, obviously haha). But I doubt that many strangers look at this anyway :P (Although sometimes I'm very surprised by the page views! O.o)

So, how long do you have to request access? Well, actually forever... once it is closed blogger will still give you the option to request access. However, I will be leaving the blog open for now so this post can be seen. Since I am currently on an exchange in Germany (oh yes... had this not happened I would have already written a post about this, I guess I will get to that later!), I don't actually start university until October 1st, so it's unlikely I'll want to post any work until then. Therefore the blog will remain publicly open until then, and you can comment on this blogpost until then (although obviously you can send me a message on facebook after then too! :P)

I hope you are all well, and viele grüße aus Deutschland :)

Item Overload

This is what happens when you have too many items, people! Your house will explode and fly off into space. True story.

Purple Render

Digital Manipulation

Model Manipulation

Drawing manipulation

All the spaces

Model Photos

Presentation is key

This is how I will be presenting some of my drawings. We need to show 3 A1 pages (this is one of them, the strange Madelon-inspired axonometric I posted below is another) as well as have a portfolio. So I have two out of three A1s done and am editing my portfolio... the main problem I have right now is that I have no idea what to put on my final A1! I had better decide soon however, since I need to factor in printing time... I've had a lot of late nights this week, but at least this project is fun. I'm very glad that I actually showed up to class and worked on it during semester... so many people didn't, and I don't even want to imagine how pressured they must feel right now..!

Colourful spaces

You may remember grayscale(ish) versions of the individual images from earlier in the semester... well, I've jazzed them up with lots of colour and mixed in some stock imagery and some of my line work :)

Drawing updates

Here are the final versions of my freehand exploded axonometric and my 1:50 section.

Madelon inspired axonometric

Model nets

These were the nets I created in order to construct my models. The top one took me 6 hours to fold together, it was at 1:500 and sooo fiddly! The bottom one wasn't so bad, it was just one single unit at 1:100.

Final Crit Semester 1, 2013

Hello world, after a semester of hardly posting I am back to update... now that it is the day after my final crit I actually have the time!

So, about my final crit- it went really well, I think. Or at least I feel confident in what I presented. Unfortunately I can't show you the models yet because I didn't take a photo of them before they went in for moderation, but I think they're pretty cute to be honest! A teeny tiny version of my building complex and another teeny tiny floor plan model of one unit. They were so fiddly, they were really difficult to fold up... (the 1:1000 building took 6 hours just to fold!) I'll post photos once I am able to take them.

Here are my A0 pages for now, anyway!

So shall I explain my design? OK- so basically, our site is a real site in Onehunga, Auckland, currently owned by Housing New Zealand. They proposed putting a series of units on the site, however the local community is quite opposed to this plan, as they feel it will tamper with the unique quality of the site.

The site is indeed quite amazing: there are three main things that I picked up from visiting it.

1) How quiet it is- considering that it is right next to a bustling commercial hub including Auckland's Dressmart outlet mall, this is quite amazing. I would say that the most prevailing sound was birdsong, which I thought was quite lovely!

2) The fact that lots of people had their doors wide open: this shows that this must be a rather tight-knit community with a lot of trust and openness amongst neighbours.

3) The amount of vegetation, and the residents interaction with it: cute tree huts, steps cut into trees and a fair few immaculately kept gardens were seen in the general area... and on the site itself there is a small corn field and a bunch of banana trees! These are quite unusual to find in such abundance in an urban area... and I was really exited by this!

One of the main things I wanted to retain with my design was the ability to continue planting... so I created a plan devised of the meandering street map, and placed car parking underground, with a series of light wells illuminating it. 

There are a maximum of three levels of units (27 units in total) and the upper levels can be reached by walking on the curving, grassed roofs of the lower levels. There are also Photovoltaic cells in place on these roofs (since PV cells actually work better on green roofs, as they help regulate temperature) and rain gardens throughout the complex, mitigating storm-water run-off an encouraging the community to foster and tend to their growth.

Since the roofs are curved, there are of course areas in the corners of the curve where the ceiling heights will be to low to be occupied. I have devised 4 different types of uses for these spaces:

1) Light wells: these can provide light to neighbouring units and/or the underground car park.

2) Storage: especially useful for things such as bicycles, which would be annoying to store inside the units.

3) Services: piping etc. can be hidden in these 'useless' spaces.

4) Children's play houses: as children are, of course, much smaller than adults, they can fit in these areas, and enjoy them. This also encourages socialisation between the children throughout the complex.

In terms of acoustics, I took one unit and designed it in detail. This was the unit on the north side of the site, and would be ideal for three flatmates. The wall between separate units is solid concrete, with timber studs and insulation on the inside. The exterior wall is identical, except it also has a weatherboard cladding on the outside: this not only enhances the natural theme by being a natural (wooden) material, but also fits into the typology of the suburban architecture of the area, which features many weatherboard-clad typical NZ villas. For the interior walls of the units, there are two types: for acoustically protected areas GIB Fyreline walls are utilised, and for non-acoustically protected areas (such as bathrooms etc.) GIB walls (without Fyreline) are employed. Moreover, the placing of units throughout the complex has been deliberate: I have tried to place the corridor of one unit next to the joining of the one next to it. That way, it acts as a buffer zone for noises between units.

Freehand exploded axonometric

Here is my current version of the freehand exploded axonometric of my design for Madelon's studio. For both these sections, I still need to add figures and objects to the drawings.

Section 1:50

Here is a 1:50 section of my design for Madelon Vriesendorp's studio on the café site. It sits between two buildings, shown with the gridded bulk. I did this first on ArchiCAD, then illustrator, and finally Photoshop, with some hand drawn elements.

Green roofs

I quickly photoshopped one of the photos of my 1:500 site response model to illustrate how I imagined the building bulk to appear: almost like habitable hills.

1:500 site response model

Photos of my 1:500 concept model of the site. This shows the building elements being torn from the ground, with the roof of the one story elements acting as a garden/ balcony of the two story elements.

Site response

One thing that I really took away from the site was the amount of vegetation, and the relationship the residents in the area had with that vegetation, e.g. impeccably kept gardens, tree houses, ladders in trees, a corn field and banana tree plantations... these are all aspects I want to keep. Therefore, with my design, I am focusing on making it appear as if the units are growing out of the ground, and creating trellised spaces for plants to grow on and to act as a transition space between indoors and outdoors.

Site Analysis

Concept models in detail

My three concept models focus on networks. Concept model 1 focuses on a spiderweb, and the pathways within. Concept model 2 focuses on streets, and the possibility of folding a form of organisation onto itself. Concept model 3 focuses on the pattern within the patter, looking at a street network at various scales, and seeing how much detail is revealed with each shift.

Madelon studio render

I did another render using Artlantis today. This time I concentrated more on material and also played with the lighting settings a bit. Hopefully I can improve!