Joe Daw

MArch . Unit 21 . Tipping Points, towards a Commission of Platforms . Greenwich

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Dawn

As dawn approaches birds such as robins, thrushes and wrens start to vocalise their presence. The keen ornithologist will be in their element in these dayspring hours as they witness the change of guard in a pocket of the natural world.

The night owls disperse into the growing light into their various burrow, occupations and lives. A night well spent in repose, research or work.

With the sun climbing into the sky the building closes its door and returns to the state of slumber to be recharged by the sun for another night of activity.

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Nocturnal Sanctuary

The second floor of the building houses a nocturnal sanctuary focussed around spaces for research into new media arts. The initial concept for this stemmed from the design of spaces for relaxation, working and art. Due to the fact that my proposed masterplan includes artist studios throughout Nine Elms, the site needed to be more focussed than vague work, relax, art spaces. The three types of spaces are convivial research/discussion spaces, a digital library and individual research desks. The spaces are arranged on various levels and angles to create interesting spaces and are arranged to make the most of views, natural light or light phenomenon that occur on the site. These spaces can be accessed by interested people but are not accessible to the general public. They can be accessed day and night allowing users to not be restrained by orthodox sleeping patterns.

This is housed in jumbled repeated geometries on the roof of the theatre entrance. The fragmented and contradicting aesthetic of these units mirrors that of the adjacent Nine Elms Pier and Tideway Village. However, to keep these forms visually connected to the rest of the building they are comprised of the same material pallet.

The undercroft created by raising the foyer up is a cavelike dark sanctuary where minimal light pollution enters and only daylight from certain angles enters. This dark haven will contain a built fox den and waffle ceiling for roosting bats.

Landscape

The building creates a space that is to be landscaped and left as a natural sanctuary. Within this natural landscape will be designed ecological niches for a fox, moths, peregrine falcons and small birds such as robins and tits. These are all animals that have found the unique urban habitats their homes and are all affected by light pollution to varying degrees.

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Materials

Concrete is used throughout the building in varying forms. The textural qualities of concrete are utilised to condition the light and add other phenomenological aspects to the building. The varying textures of the concrete make the single material differ and seem like different materials. The mono-tonality of the concrete leaves a blank canvas for the theatre to utilise as they wish, for advertising etc. This lets the building take a backseat on event nights but a keen eye will enjoy the texture and form of the building. 

Window frames are to be black powder coated and their crisp dark lines contract with the raw concrete.

Touchable objects such as counter and seat tops are to be wood. The natural warmth of the wood contrasts the hard geometries and materials of the rest of the building. 

Glass bricks are used as walls in locations where a level of site and transparency can be played with. This material has high U-Values for a translucent material. The bricks can also be lit in interesting way that can produce a beacon like effect for event nights. This material gives the local historically contextual brick an interesting twist. 

The fly tower is capped with a lighter typology of materials sitting on the heave concrete. The external fabric is deep louvred glazing with and overarching roof mimicking parts of the forms of the auditorium roof This houses a public cafe and viewing deck, as well as the light harvesting technology. This brings the intimacy of the technology and public closer and helps to raise the awareness of the pollutant.

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Cross Crit Pin-up

Moving forward from this presentation I will be working on: 

Drawing the drivers with more rigour. 

Redesign the building after a deeper analysis of how it interacts with the drivers and site.

Working on the aesthetic qualities of the drawings. 

Over the next week I will be making a physical exemplar of the building and how it might connect to and enhance the site.

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Pin-Up

The drawings show 4 contextual drivers and a warped masterplan.

Networks - Nine Elms is located within networks that spread across the world, the most obvious example being the produce comes into New Covent Garden Market to be distributed in London. The networks drawing shows the networks in one small area of the site and shows how the Nine Elms network’s are even evident within the most forgotten ‘in-between’ spaces.

Light - Light is a very important building component, it defines, shapes, highlights and distinguishes spaces. The drawing aims to map specific reflections found on the wall and floor of an alley and show the hypothetical reduction of the solid by the bombardment of focussed photons.

Rhythm - places have their own rhythms. The drawing shows certain rhythms found on the site during one day (3.30am - 10.30pm) that aren’t unique to the site as individual rhythms, but as a whole paint a picture of the inhabitants, activities and happening of the area.

Temporary Structures - At ground level, the area of Nine Elms seems to be made up of more temporary structures than any other typology. This is predominantly due to the vast amount of construction taking place in the area. The drawing highlights the temporary structures whilst choosing to ignore, obscure and simplify the historically and materially permanent surrounds.

Masterplan - The area strategy adopted is to make the urban grain tighter. This will re-contextualise the area with historical grain of London and should feel more lively and less impenetrable that the current proposed masterplan, found here. To achieve this, larger proposed buildings will be split into smaller buildings, at least at ground level, to create a tighter network of interesting streets and spaces. Other areas will be filled in with smaller units leaving some pockets of open spaces. The Linnea Park will be split by narrowings using the infilled units the create pockets of intrigue. The smaller units could hold functions ignored in the existing masterplan, such as studio spaces, boutique shops and small theatres. 

The site proposed for further study is the alleyway at the western end of the Riverlight development leading to the river.

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Pin-Up

This weeks pin up showing the three spaces investigated, warped perspective and stair drawings. Moving on from this pin up I will be looking at physically modelling the stair and the space that the light makes when reflected and refracted. I will be extracting and sampling the elements, relating to my 5 drivers, from the investigated spaces to produce a drawing for each driver. I will then be combining these drawings into one drawing highlighting the drivers for my project. The key drivers are: 

Networks 

Time 

Light 

Rhythm 

Temporary Structures

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Gallery Visits

Adding to the thought process by alalysing the work of Jeff Koons in the Newport Street Gallery and Antony Gormley in the White Cube.

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Work in Progress

Past Exemplar

Warped Site Perspective

Present Exemplar

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Picturing the Sun’s Magnetic Field

This illustration lays a depiction of the sun's magnetic fields over an image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory on March 12, 2016.

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Pin-Up One

The pin up showed my my initial site exploration, area of in depth study and abstract reading of the site.

Moving on I will be:

Reworking the site exploration drawing into an axonometric site model; adding further site analysis of the historic, existing and future features of the context of Nine Elms. 

Add to the Rhino model of my chosen area. Record and and understand the movements through and around the area and any magnet fields in the area. With all of the cables running through the site it should provide a varied and interesting map.

Develop the existing axonometric of the Rhino model and annotations. Refine the abstract drawing of the site.

Research Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) - Louise Bourgeois; Herztian Tales; Semiconductor - 20 Hz; Wes Jones; A Home is Not a House - Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret.

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Learning to 3D Medel

One of my aims for the year is to learn new methods and mediums for expressing my ideas. For this reason I have started learning Rhino, a 3D model program. My 3D model of the in-between space of one of the New Covent Garden Market’s access points is coming together. However I have had to rework various elements to find the best way of modelling certain elements, for this reason I am behind on where i wanted to be on my project work at this point. The aim is to learn the technique of modelling in Rhino now so that I can utilise it throughout the rest of the year. For my Undergraduate I was using AutoCAD to produce 3D massing models and in practice I have been using Revit. However, as these programs weren’t suited to the style of model I wanted I decided it would be beneficial to learn Rhino.

With this model I hope to also learn the skill of 3D printing as this is another medium that I have not yet explored. 

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Nine Elms Market

The Sunday Nine Elms Market transforms the empty secluded market I visited earlier in the week to a thriving bustling environment. The market was made up of informal and more formal pop up stalls selling the usual various market wares.

The idea that this specific area has such contrasting operation hours and vibrancy interests me. For this reason I am going to study an in-between, void, space in the area in depth.

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Site Visit

Exploring the site further, looked around the New Covent Garden Market buildings and walked Nine Elms Lane again.

New Covent Garden Market in the evenings is very quiet, still and unoccupied; all around are lorries and trucks, construction sites, forklifts, cherry pickers. The area seemed prepared and ready to jump straight into action and all the clues suggest that this is a busy area during some hours of the day.

One object of varying sizes and shapes that appear along the skyline of the whole site between Vauxhall and Battersea are cranes. The cranes are the embodiment of change for the area. They create quite and interesting backdrop to the few existing buildings and activities that still are operational.

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Victoria & Albert Museum Visit

Took a trip to the V&A last week to see the Ove Arup exhibition, Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design. Total design has always been an interest. Two gems from the exhibition were the SoundLab room, which I studied in my BEng Part 1, and the simple yet effective diagrammatic exemplar of the Sydney Opera House forms, pictured.

FOIL by Benjamin Hubert was a very immersive and dynamic installation to the Tapestry Room, pictured. The mechanically moving plane of mirrors made mesmeric patterns of triangles of varying focusses giving a differing view of the tapestries.

The Elytra Filament Pavilion, by Achim Menges, Jan Knippers, Moritz Dörstelmann and Thomas Auer, is a woven glass and carbon fibre filament structure fabricated in situ by a robotic arm and reacted and altered the design to how people used the space, pictured.

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Site Visit

First look at the site. See my initial thoughts on the Walking Observations post.

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The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities

Affordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East

‘’Across the country – and especially in superheated London, where stratospheric land values beget accordingly bloated developments – authorities are allowing planning policies to be continually flouted, affordable housing quotas to be waived, height limits breached, the interests of residents endlessly trampled. Places are becoming ever meaner and more divided, as public assets are relentlessly sold off, entire council estates flattened to make room for silos of luxury safe-deposit boxes in the sky. We are replacing homes with investment units, to be sold overseas and never inhabited, substituting community for vacancy. The more we build, the more our cities are emptied, producing dead swathes of zombie town where the lights might never even be switched on.’’ 

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What is a Platform?

A digital platform refers to the software or hardware of a site. For example, Facebook is a digital platform. Pretty much any marketing campaign or branding these days includes digital platforms.

The success of a platform strategy is determined by three factors: 1Connection: how easily others can plug into the platform to share and transact 2Gravity: how well the platform attracts participants, both producers and consumers 3Flow: how well the platform fosters the exchange and co-creation of value