Jun 18, 2022

Arhcitecture semester 5 @ MNU: Some pics from student final crit - part 2

#mnu Architecture.FET #FINAL CRIT

lisestudiod5

Jun 10, 2020

FINAL CRIT SUBMISSION

#FINAL CRIT

lisestudiod5

Jun 10, 2020

FINAL CRIT SECTIONS AND PLANS

#FINAL CRIT

lisestudiod5

Jun 10, 2020

FINAL CRIT SUBMISSION PART ONE - EARLY DEVELOPMENT

#FINAL CRIT

vinegarlane

Jun 8, 2020

ARCHDES 200: diaphanous.

#final crit

maddie-longson

Oct 23, 2019

Final Crit Feedback

Questions and points I had responses to:

Sections looked a bit flat, they needed context behind them of trees and the surrounding buildings. Fair enough, if I had had more time it would have happened but they needed to be sent to printing and the perspectives needed to be fixed up.

It doesn’t feel like it needs to be fully enclosed, perhaps a superstructure more like SANAA’s Grace Farm would make more sense, or the central circulation path being simply canopies so it would be more open and hence aid with ventilation. Not really something we had considered, but an interesting idea. I suppose the reason we chose to fully enclose it is because we were focused on trying to make it habitable year-round, particularly in winter. If it was half-open all the time it would be too cold in the garden areas to want to hang around. If there were some way of using the canopy idea in summer to really allow air through and fully closing it off in winter I think that could be an interesting way to take the design.

Further consideration into an irrigation system (since it’s all indoors) would have been a next step if there had been time. We’d actually briefly thought about that, thinking that slow jet sprinklers on the ground and on timers would be a good way to maintain the plants, but absolutely more consideration could have been taken into that aspect with more time.

Plants need not only light to survive but wind as well, so will there be enough ventilation throughout the entirety of the building for that? We’ve certainly tried to make it so. Not only do our three large entrances fully open up but our skylights and the windows in the bottle wall at each window seat are operable. We’ve also scattered these around the whole building so hopefully there would be good ventilation reaching every corner of the design.

Have you considered the idea of giving the design the potential to expand? We hadn’t really, primarily because of our choice of external wall structural. The bottle walls are so solid, there’s no way that the design could expand from the footprint that they created. I suppose little outlying pods could be built using the same language of this design, but they wouldn’t truly feel part of the original design since it’s intended to be quite inwards facing in terms of this outer wall protecting what’s inside. I’ve certainly thought about the fact that the roof over the rock climbing area would likely need to be raised due to the larger trees growing at that end, but we hadn’t developed a 50 year plan for the building or anything like that.

How do you see people using the design? With the amount of flexibility that we’ve fed into the design, we want people to use it in any way they see fit. We’ve specifically designed to cater for a set group of activities, but really those spaces can be used for just about anything. People aren’t required to stay for a long period of time, nor are they required to visit at all. It’s flexible to everybody’s individual schedule, especially in that we want it to be open 24/7 (for which we believe we’ve taken appropriate safety measures with railings around the roof gardens and nets under the rock climbing). Whether you want to take a quick stroll around or settle in to make something, both are equally possible. Our hope would be that the design would make students want to come inside and take part in maintaining the building as part of their daily or weekly routine.

Is your design intended to be connected to anything else in the university (presumably physically or metaphorically) or is an island in itself? No the design is intended to be disconnected from the university in almost every way. The singular connection between the two is the people. Other than that, style, physical connection and ideas are all intentionally distinctly different. We titled our brief “A Place to Escape” because it is, in many ways, the antithesis of the university. It’s meant to be an island haven in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the university, a place to rest, relax, do something that isn’t study and maybe learn a few things at the same time. Our only extensions beyond the limit of the building’s footprint are to draw people inside with the sculptures, the hills and the overhanging roof over the main entrance.

Are you perhaps designing this for a younger audience than will actually be using the space? No, I don’t think so. The activities we chose are ones that we would happily do, as would our peers and people we’ve met from the wider university. There are already plenty of well used oversized chess and jenga sets scattered around the university, so is it really much of a stretch to think that people would be quite happy to use a chess or twister room? None of the activities that we’ve chosen are age specific - grannies enjoy knitting perhaps even more than children, and meditation is something that everyone should and can do (though it is certainly popular amongst our generation). And hey, if the people using the space think that one of the activities is too young for them, they don’t have to do it. There are plenty of other options that might be more suited to them.

Praise and interesting ideas (things I didn’t have responses to):

The model does a good job of showing the design as a whole, much easier to read and understand than just trying to understand the plan.

Sections look nice.

The video of the 1:1 model does a good job of showing of the models purpose and how it as well as the overall space might be used.

The university has a lot of parents with kids on campus and there aren’t really appropriate facilities to accomodate for them at the moment, so this seems like a really good idea for their use in particular.

By getting just four willing reps, a “Montessori club” could be started which would mean the university would actually give money towards the maintenance of the building, so in that regard it’s very much a feasible idea.

You’ve really reinvented the idea of a wall with the bottle walls, it’s an interesting way to do it.

By marketing it as open for both students and the general public (which we have), it would make the design more appealing to the university as it would mean bringing in visitors from outside the university and therefore generate a little bit of income.

#architecture #final crit #final design #feedback #it's finally over

maddie-longson

Oct 23, 2019

Final Crit

After a quick group brainstorm of what we wanted to cover in our final crit, I wrote our group script.

Kate: Our brief was about designing a learning centre that was based on the values of Montessori. Montessori is a teaching pedagogy most often used for kindergarten aged children, and occasionally up to teenagers. It would be considered a radical pedagogy in that it is drastically different to mainstream school systems. A typical teaching scenario in a Montessori school would involve students partaking in self directed exploration of a subject, with guidance and aid provided from the teacher.

Maddie: The values of Montessori that we have brought through to our final design are:

Sustainability - Montessori emphasises the recycling and upcycling of materials for students use, taking donations of equipment and toys from the community.

Hands-on learning - many of the activities that children do in Montessori schools is hands on, learning how to do and learning through touch and play are hugely important.

Discovery - similar to hands-on learning, children are given the opportunity to explore and discover things for themselves rather than following a structured curriculum.

Community - Montessori heavily encouraged interaction and collaboration between students in the name of learning from one another which creates a strong community between peers. A previous critic that we had described his experience of Montessori schooling where students would share food and cook for one another.

Equality and creativity were further values that we wanted to incorporate into our design.

Jessica: To meet these values, our brief required that we cater for a variety of activities of our choice that we felt would be best suited. Since Montessori was originally designed for and most often applied to young children, and our clientele would be primarily young adults and members of the general public of all ages, the activities we chose and how we applied the values would need to be closely considered to make sure that the building wasn't designed for the wrong people. In saying that, we were particularly interested in maintaining a childlike quality to the design to reflect the roots we were coming from. A number of our early precedents were in fact Montessori kindergartens.

Zaina: Working off our brief, we came to the conclusion that the activities we chose needed to benefit visitors in ways that aren't currently available through the university. We needed activities that physically and mentally extended visitors, at their own pace and without the need for guidance. We also wanted some activities that would allow for emotional growth, helping out university students with their studies through skills like teamwork and stress relief techniques that would benefit them in the long run. Through these self-imposed parameters, the activities that we settled on were rock climbing, meditation, arts and crafts, gardening, dance, music, drawing, the board games of twister and chess, and even spaces to sleep.

Our design is essentially a glasshouse enclosing gardens and a number of internal pods that cater to these activities.

Kate: Discovery was the driving force of our building's form. We wanted our design to contain plenty of nooks and crannies, so visitors would be constantly exploring and finding new spaces at every visit. The organic shape of our building intends to create a space in which nothing can be taken for granted. Our gardens are similarly maze-like, allowing for moments of discovery around every corner. Moments scattered around inside reinforce this value, such as the quality of light that our external bottle wall creates, and the window seats scattered around that wall. We decided to interrupt and divert the existing circulation across the site by manipulating the topography. Outside of the building we placed two hills, one which blocks movement across the existing path of circulation, encouraging people into the building and thus sparking the opportunity for discovery. The second hill blocks direct visual access to the main entrance of the building, making it an act of discovery in itself to enter the building. The collection of sculptures that scatter across the landscape next to the hills create a moment of exploration, as they also interrupt easy circulation and their unusual forms make them an oddity that demands interaction. Inside the building, the manipulation of topography was continued at a smaller scale, drawing people up or down to certain areas of interest, while they are also guided by the flower gardens that follow the contours.

Maddie: Sustainability came into the design in a number of ways. First our choice of materials. We used a wide range of materials across the design, and the majority are intended to be materials that can be sourced sustainably. Our pods use rammed earth for structure, recycled brick as a veneer and timber for lintels and flooring. Our roof is timber, and large sections of our external wall are a bottle wall, using recycled glass bottles and held together with adobe. Second, we have taken the site into consideration to improve our design’s efficiency. To the north and south we have intentionally placed two of our bottle walls, creating thermal mass to the north and reducing heat loss through glazing to the south. Our three entrances are able to opened up with bifold doors to allow cross ventilation from the prevailing wind. Operable skylights in the roof can also help remove heat in summer. In addition, we've also placed our design to have minimal impact upon the existing trees of the site. Three trees that were particularly in the way of the design were incorporated inside, with a high roof over them and the rock climbing rocks, creating an extensive jungle gym of rock and tree climbing. Third, our spaces are designed around a system of material exchange for arts and crafts activities. Our main pod, the gathering space, acts as storage for materials that visitors bring, allowing all creative endeavours in the space to be done using recycled materials. People can then take their pick and bring in replacements later on. This aspect also ties into our use of the value of community in our design.

Zaina: While areas of the design such as the flower gardens are more inclined towards individual activities and introspection, other areas intend to bring people together and encourage interaction and collaboration. The veggie gardens are one of the most important social areas. All of the gardens are to be community-maintained, but the veggie gardens also act to give back. Food grown there would be given directly to the vegan lunches group, who would have their own space within the design. The kitchen, while for everyone's use, is large enough to cater for them, and equipped with a dumb waiter to bring food up to the roof gardens on top of the pods. These gardens are accessible via ramp and vary in height as walkway ramps connect the roofs of each pod. Again this is an element relating to exploration, and our design subverting from the expectations of a uniform level across this floor.

Jessica: Finally, fitting more into the self-imposed value of self-improvement are the meditation and sleeping spaces. Three sleeping pods are placed among the more peaceful flower gardens, giving students a designated space to relax and take a break from their studies. The meditation spaces are an underground level accessible down a ramp in the veggie gardens. The spaces utilise the inside of the forms necessary for the rock climbing rocks. Skylights create a play of light down the walls and the semi-rough concrete walls and timber floor are intentionally devoid of distractions to create the calmest spaces in the building, perfect for meditation.

To finish our presentation, I invited the critics to come up and look at our 1:500 model (made by Kate) on the site model to get a better idea of the form of the building and the changing roof levels in particular.

Sections by me and Zaina, roof and underground plans by me, site analysis diagram by Kate, interiors by me and Jessica, one detail by each of us, 1:500 model by Kate.