To recap in part 1 I explained the brief for this project and detailed my initial thoughts and experiments. If you would like to see the rest of the project click on the hashtag In Detail at the bottom of this post.
Leading on from my material experiments with the idea of water collectors and containers I expanded my philosophy, based on making people more aware of resource consumption, to tackle usage of heating. My concept was for a chair with inflatable sides that would inflate and hug the user when heating in the form of hot air was passed into it with the chair acting like an inflating radiator. Not only would this make heating more efficient for reducing the amount of space that needed to be heated but it would also give good visual representation to the consumption of a resource that people rarely consciously aware of.
I tested this idea out by making a 1:10 scale mdf chair frame, covering it with latex coated stretch fabric and inflating with a piece of pond pipe. One of the main considerations with the design was to make it similar to my original drawn concepts for the creatures but I think my tutor rightly pointed out that the wingback design was a bit similar to some chairs populating the foyer of the university. The stretch material was really challenging to make but I found that M and S t-shirt material covered with three layers of latex and sewn together in a chair shaped jacket worked very well.
By this point it was getting close to the final presentation in the unit and I did not have any more time to develop my ideas and in the end my plans got a bit rushed; things also did not get finished necessarily to the standard I wanted. However despite all of this I got a very high grade getting a first for the project and I learned a lot of new methods of presenting work along with a new approach to thinking which was down in part to the Narrative lectures that i attended.
Shown below is a sketchup concept for the apartment, it’s not very polished but if anyone was particularly curious about what the space was intended to look like this is it from an interior view with some furniture in place.
Along with the lecture notes that I have posted I’ve been wanting to post this for some time because it is one of the projects that I am most proud of because it really allowed me to explore ideas and themes that I was interested in. I had the opportunity to weld, design furniture and improve my illustration skills.
a new space:
You have the chance to design your own living space, the space is where you will live, sleep, work, eat and socialise. The room is no more than 36m2 and has the height of 2.4m.
The space has one window and is in an apartment development. You are in the city of your choice but the city is not in the UK. You are in this new city because you are starting a new job in a nearby design studio. You work in the studio 3 days a week and the rest of the time you work from your own space. There is nothing in the space other than mains electricity, gas and water.
The water is on for only half an hour a day but at the same time each day, there might be other factors that may need to be resolved as the project progresses.
For my project I chose the city of Aarhus in Denmark because I had always wanted to travel to Denmark and through research I felt that the city was the perfect place for me to live because of its cultural scene and location.
Image source: www.visitaarhus.com
My concept was based around the idea of water conservation outlined in the brief. I decided at the outset the only usable way to deal with the half hour of water each day would be to store it and develop systems that indicated water levels. The system I decided upon was based around the idea of a leaky roof where the frequency of water droplets hitting the floor and making a sound indicate the amount of rain outside.
I went on to look at how the rain droplets could be used to inform the overall design of the building so I looked at narratives associated with raindrops. Where do we hear raindrops? underneath an umbrella, in an old building, in a cave? Eventually this evolved into the idea of caves and cave creatures with their own personalities.
Returning to the idea of raindrops I decided a good way to make this work as a dynamic in the space would be to have metal water collection trays instead of taps. I made several prototypes of this idea in the workshops including a welded 1:1 scale tray (which now is in use as a fantastic magazine rack) and a lot of 1:5 scale experiments in vac formed polystyrene and 3mm diameter brass rods.
Contextualising Practice Lecture Notes #5 : The Subliminal Accident
The title relates more to the philosophy behind the need for this lecture rather than the lecture itself. This lecture looked at the idea that the act of drawing can add a lot to design over using a computer - happy accidents and increased freedom. If you would like to see all the notes from these lectures click on the hashtag fundamentals at the bottom of the post.
My tutor who gave this lecture, Simone Ridyard is a very skilled urban sketcher and architect and has worked for Disney in the past undertaking illustration work. The lecture looked at the creation habits of successful architects such as Norman Foster, Robert Venturi and Le Corbusier examining the advantages of hand drawing.
I’d say what this lecture really helped me with most was opening my eyes to methods of presentation through drawing. As a kid I had always loved mid century graphic design because my dad had been a graphic designer of sorts in the 80′s before computers were used commonly for design and much of his work involved doing things by hand. I used to crawl through his books on how to use airbrushes, colour pencils and markers to do ‘photoreal’ renderings of products and in my free time now I always like to try these manual methods of rendering and layout presentation.
‘architectural drawing can be divided into three types, which I call the “referential sketch,” the “preparatory study,” and the “definitive drawing” ‘
- Graves, Michael, 2012, Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing; article New York Times
The lecture looked at ways that had drawing and drafting can be used in these three ways. The referential sketch takes the place of initial ideas. The advantage that hand drawing has over writing out ideas at that stage is that drawings can often communicate ideas better and quicker which is really helpful when sifting through pages and pages in notebooks deciding here to go next. Used as an example were Le Corbusier’s sketches communicating ideas of urban planning. As someone who is more interested in micro interiors than macro environments I find that ideas on city planning go over my head but these sketches illustrated how effective referential sketches can be because I immediately understood the concept that was being communicated.
This whole lecture got me thinking about this communication and after this point I stopped trying to do everything on the computer because ultimately even though I could make accurate digital models quickly it was very hard to make visuals with them that communicated what I wanted. Also I couldn’t indulge my own interest for doing things like rendering by hand and learn the skills I wanted to. Now for every project I am trying to do finished visuals and sketches solely by hand, pencil point and brush. So far it has worked quite well and I think this lecture was a bit of a turning point for me where it made me think about who i wanted to be.
Contextualising Practice Lecture Notes #4 : Thresholds
Thresholds. This lecture was the fourth in the fundamentals series looking at the boundaries between spaces, how spaces are defined and how we enter and leave spaces.. If you would like to see all the notes from these lectures click on the hashtag fundamentals at the bottom of the post.
This lecture was very interesting for me because it was the first time we discussed architectural theory based interpretations of space. The lecture looked at the work of Ron GIlad (Home Sweet House), Simon Unwin, Tadao Ando, Marina Abramovic and a selection of Installations at the 2014 Venice Biennale.
“ The doorway is one of the most powerful instruments available to the architect. It is even richer in its powers than the wall, upon which it almost always depends. Where the power of the wall is to deny (to keep things apart), that of the doorway is to permit (to allow passage). And permission usually has more dimensions of possibility - risks as well as reward - than denial”
(Unwin, 2007)
The lecture focussed a lot on this type of idea: risk and reward; light and dark; contrast. One the best examples of this contrast is the Rabbit Hole in Alice in Wonderland that the presentation opened with or equally the twister in The Wizard of Oz where the world is plunged from black and white into technicolour. As well as a phenomenological experience of how we feel based on light and sensory input one of the things that really interested me in the lecture was the idea of subliminal semiotics of architecture. For example in any Sci-Fi film architectural semiotics are easy to observe. We understand that it is fatal to be outside a spaceship so the hull/walls are the only thing that protects us and carry great symbolism in that. We rarely observe this in day to day life because the environments we inhabit have far less danger than in these films.
Another element that the lecture focussed on was the geometry of doors and how we feel passing through shaped openings. Marina Abramovic carried out what could be called an experiment in 1977 called Imponderable where her and her partner stood disrobed in a doorway in an art gallery. The experiment was videoed and the reactions by the public were quite amusing while trying to pass through. Throughout the lectures I have attended at MMU, the tutorials and seminars I’ve always come across things that challenged perceptions of what things are meant to be and this lecture typified that. I came away really enthusiastic with a view to learning more about basic architectural theories and as of now I’m still learning and enthused with the idea to learn more about this element of Interiors.
Contextualising Practice Lecture Notes #3 : Soundscapes
Carrying on from Atmospheres the next fundamentals subject was soundscapes. If you would like to see all the notes from these lectures click on the hashtag fundamentals at the bottom of the post.
This lecture was really interesting for me because i’ve never been that interested in the impact of noises, music and sound on design mainly because my hearing has never been finely tuned to the point at which I could pursue many audio based interests beyond being a consumer. In the presentation we were shown several projects by designers and artist by the names of RVTR, Bill Fonatana, Troika and Nigel Stanford. All of which really opened up my eyes to what could be achieved through sound.
To start the lecture off it was highlighted how much print culture fostered sight becoming the prime sense though which we interpret the world because the role of news and information being passed on through word of mouth had diminished. One thing that made me question why we prefer vision of sound is the amount of colours we see and sound we hear from a scientific standpoint. We see light with a range of wavelengths thats is far far less than audible sound, furthermore we only see infront of us but our hearing is 360 degrees all around us. However because of the entrenchment of print culture and visual culture in our lives sadly the semiotics we understand are locked in to visual cues with very few audible symbols in comparison.
Much like in the atmospheres project something that I felt was quite interesting was how materials had certain sounds. It opened up the idea too of using sound design as a lens through which design - to use form to create certain noise conditions which are more or less preferable. It might not be my chosen methodology for interiors now but it’s useful to always consider something like this as a base upon which to build ideas and concepts of form. The design group RVTR used robotics to change the shape of a ceiling made from small triangular tiles to influence the acoustics of a music hall. Not only did this produce an improved and flexible sound environment but it too produced a beautiful event of seeing all of the tiles move like a breeze blowing through leaves.
In a similar way to materials creating noise the lecture touched on sound machines which produced either randomly generated sounds from everyday events or collected sounds and exhibited them as installations. Many were inspired by the world war sound dishes which were used on the British coastline to listen for incoming enemy aircraft. Others used events such as road noise pollution to base these sound machines around. Maybe if visual culture had never been so dominant society might be more open to some modern artworks which go understood because the process is the art but not the final result. Maybe if art was audible we would feel a greater understanding for the processes and appreciate this type of art more.
The lecture ended with something that resembled an instrumental inspirational montage like the karate kid waxing on and off to a static electricity generator with a lot of microphones surrounding him. It’s safe to say I came away from that lecture quite motivated but I have yet to experiment in depth with this within interiors.
Contextualising Practice Lecture Notes #2 : Atmosphere
In the second lecture of the Fundamentals lecture series the subject was atmosphere. If you would like to see all the notes from these lectures click on the hashtag fundamentals at the bottom of the post.
The lecture focussed on trying to understand principles of phenomenological narrative and semiotic interpretations of spaces such as Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Museum, Peter Zumthor’s Val de Thermes and Tadao Ando’s Church of Light.
In many ways I feel this lecture should really have been called time to think about what makes an interior something people enjoy or love to be in. Throughout most of my first year at MMU it seemed to me to be the case that the strange or the ‘artsy’ was what made an interior. Now having had the benefit of two years experience I feel that what makes an interior or makes a space have an atmosphere is treating it a little like a director treats sets in films.
In the lecture there was a section which drew attention to how narrative effects how people feel about objects. The example used was ‘the Fred West Jumper’: an experiment where a member of the public was asked if they would wear the jumper (having no knowledge of the owner) and most answered yes in the first part of the experiment. In the second part of the experiment the test subjects were told and many no longer wished to wear the jumper quite understandably. It is unlikely the jumper ever belonged to Fred West but the story attached to the object radically altered the meaning it had to people. What I am trying to illustrate through this is how important the narratives and stories we attach to objects impact how we feel. The same is applicable to interiors and architecture and film as mentioned in the last paragraph.
These narratives can be formed through many means and going away from the lecture I read a particularly relevant article that I would recommend to anyone studying interiors: A Narrative Theory of Inhabiting Space by Cathy J Ganoe. It is now what I consider first when starting a new project.
Going back to the ideas being put forward by my tutors an area that was looked at in great detail was use of light in interiors and architecture. A particularly interesting consideration that was brought up was how light affects the visual representation of materials; brushed aluminium glistens in delicate lines when light passed over it and glass refracts any light coming into it and distorts vision. This made me realise that I really need to attempt to understand how lighting works to much better effect to get the perception of environments that is desired.
I came away from this lecture feeling quite motivated to do research into my own methodology or indeed develop a methodology based around the ideas of how spaces tell stories. Since then I have been doing just that and it has worked very well, not just for how the interiors have meaning but for selling ideas visually through illustrations and presentations. I’ve found when i believe in the meaning and story behind a project I can present it a lot better.
Contextualising Practice Lecture Notes #1 : Beginnings
I’ve finally got around to starting to put up lecture notes from the interior design course that i am enrolled in at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m in my second year and at the start of this academic year our tutors launched a lecture series to give all three year-groups of students (1st year, 2nd year, 3rd year) an understanding of what the tutors deemed were fundamental design principles.
The first lecture of the series, which this post is mainly concerned with, is called Beginnings. In this lecture we were presented with several arguments as to what a designer should be to a space, society or client; which involved looking at how a designer could act as an authority, an auteur, an occupant or as a memory.
For the designer as an authority the examples given were the Council of Industrial Design, the British Board of Trade and the Festival of Britain. Each had been used by the British government as a device to control consumer tastes and ‘educate’ the public. This made me think about connections to Marxist ideas of suppressing the proletariat and using hegemony to enforce the ideologies of those in power. It opens the door to ideas that a designer can be a force for great oppression under the guise of an inspirational persona. However it’s not 1984 now so I think the state of society and design is much improved on the distopian illusions.
So moving swiftly on the presentation took us from distorted visions of the world to Frank Ghery’s Guggenhiem Museum in Bilbao looking at ideas of the designer as an auteur. Since this lecture I gathered a greater understanding of this term through attending lectures about Narratives in Art and Design. An auteur is generally defined as follows: a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie. Although the lecture made the case that becoming an auteur can be a bad approach to design, because often the occupant is not considered, I believe it is important to be an auteur. An auteur to me is very much like a narrating voice in a book to give context to what is going on and to make the reader understand what is happening in a very particular way. Frank Ghery and the late Zaha Hadid may have made unusual looking structures but their approaches contain(ed) a message that could be gleamed from just the experience of stepping inside - for Zaha Hadid the procedural approach to elements of her later buildings reflected the processes nature goes through in evolution; for those who think her buildings are vile, through evolution are we vile? Everyone has their own message and I think we would be very unwise to bottle it up and design utilitarian, brief fulfilling interiors, object and buildings.
As an occupant the presentation looked at an article by Daniel Miller called Possessions (which is something everyone should read just for the sake of general interest in the idea of the home). The article focussed in part on a case study of how designers had not considered the occupants of council houses particularly well in designing for open plan living. Because of the nature of the occupants, they were not used to this type of structural arrangement and reverted the houses back to their original, segregated state. Something that has always made me anxious about design as a profession is who to design for which this section questioned. Does one design most for the company or individual that pays for the work or for the inhabitants? It’s hard to balance this because the ideal is to design for both but the interests of the two parties would conflict on big issues such as room size.
The final section was on the idea of memory and what went before, how much we should respect old architecture. I feel and have always felt that it is a great shame to write over buildings in the name of renovation and repurposing. The slides here showed some examples of architecture that I loved for how well what went before was preserved. Shown were pictures of the Neues Museum in Berlin and the House by Rachel Whiteread. I’d encourage anyone to look at them for examples of preservation.
To conclude the lecture was a good introduction to the year posing several questions to students like myself and these ideas have helped shape my projects throughout the year looking at who i design for and why I design.
