Imagine you are the Dean of a school of Architecture or Engineering. Your school has 100 students who are drawn from all around the world and are supported by scholarships. Your challenge is to design a school that forms a bridge spanning buildings in an urban environment. The urban environment is the lower part of the "UNSW Sydney" Kensington campus; the central building is the Squarehouse (building E4 on this map). In addition, you will design two moving elements that modify the students' view of the school when they see it from locations on the ground plane vs locations above ground level. These different points of view will reinforce or challenge your particular "Theory".
Initial Perspectives
Initial Element
Final Element
Stage 2: Inspiration
Inspiratory Article
Human Movement in Public Spaces: The Use and Development of Motion-Oriented Design Strategies
Words chosen: Experience, temporal, delimitation, observer, sensory perception, space, tactile.
Vroman, Liselotte, and Thierry Lagrange. ‘Human Movement in Public Spaces: The Use and Development of Motion-Oriented Design Strategies’. The Design Journal: Design for Next: Proceedings of the 12th European Academy of Design Conference, Sapienza University of Rome, 12-14 April 2017, Edited by Loredana Di Lucchio, Lorenzo Imbesi, Paul Atkinson, ISBN 978-1-138-09023-1 20, no. sup1 (2017): S3252–S3261. Accessed DOI:10.1080/14606925.2017.1352830.
Theory of Architecture
True architectural experiences elude temporal delimitation, enchanting an observer’s sensory perceptions of light, space and tactility.
External Inspiration
External Inspiration served to personalise the task so that my design philosophy would be prevalent within my submission so that it seemed like a building was created rather than just meaningless tasks strung together. The pictures below help to illustrate the foci of my research and building development.
Cubist forms and De Stijl inspired were found when researching about Meis Vna Der Rohe's brick country house, this helped me work within a gridded form and allowed for a simple yet complex final interpretation of a seemingly blocky building. It also served to high light the importance of element thickness especially in a facade, along with cementing the importance of a splash of colour.
The importance of Skylights within buildings is obvious, being important for building sustainability as well as the health of all those who inhabit them I had a look at some interesting implementations. These were wide-ranging from simple shopping malls to great libraries and parliament buildings but imbued the spaces in my final building to have a sense of decorum within their lighting.
Being Rather captivated by that last picture I adopted a mezzanine style approach, opting for vertical complexity as well as horizontal completely by allowing for various platforms at many different sizes. however, I still needed to use glass to let in the light. This caused another problem, So I examined building with prevalent glass facades.
This was awesome, the picture above seemed to embody all that I stood for as an architect and engineer, the use of the laminar plywood in such simple forms along with those curving ramps, it was rather beautiful. So I chose to attempt to use those ramps to connect my mezzanine levels, and begun research into timber structures. This turned out to be a masterstroke with many of the final pictures below acting as a direct inspiration for the external railings, roof, gallery and organisation for the design.
Stage 3: Planning
Perspective Animation
Axonometric animation
Floor Plan
Section
Additional Infographics
The notion of a bridge implies accessibility and connectivity which were two key elements within my design, as can be seen below. This spans a clear path between the university's most major traffic and pedestrian thoroughfares including ANZAC parade, High Street and Union Road.
Part of my inspiration was Mies Van Der Rohe's Brick country house which places great importance on the presence of boundaries, between spatial components as well as between the interior and exterior. I decided to subvert these theories to produce a building which is in harmony with the landscape, my adaptive roofing blurring the bounds between roof and sky, which is combined with open plan design to ensure a mediation between inside and out. The fact that this mediation isn't resolved is one of the most powerful aspects, as regardless of where you are in the building ti prevents you from being alone; by keeping you connected to the surrounding nature.
One fo the fundamental design consideration during the initial conception was the orientation of the site, this allowed for a building which aimed to use the natural sunlight present throughout the day to completely illuminate the interior during the day. Below is a sun study that visualises this effect from 4:00 to 22:00 hours during a summers' day.
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