#phase02

[y3s1-20192020]

Southgate Estate - Phase 2

  Runcorn, The location of the Southgate estate has the characteristic of high humidity all over the year with an average of  85% which is a lot higher than the normal level of around 40-50%. With this Characteristic, it could be used as a new source of energy for the estate replacing the use of oil.

  The diagram above shows the use of Bacillus subtilis bacteria that could be used as an artificial muscle that its movement depends on the humidity in the air

  The intervention is divided into 2 part which is the part of  the porthole window and the extension of the facade which both original features of the building are part that controversy between the dweller that it makes the estate look like washing machines and Legoland

  The part on the porthole window is Humid wheel that uses the use of  Bacillus subtilis bacteria to create a self-propel that generates kinetic energy in a humid climate.

  The part on the extended facade is called Forced wheel which will only generate electricity when the dweller want to use the energy that exceeds the amount that the Humid wheel can provide     

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Phase 02: Task 02

Task 02 Pin-Up

1:20 drawing

1:20 model

Plans and axo of Aarhus spolia building and wall element

Process map

Material exploration model

1:50 models

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Phase 02: Task 02

Experiments with brass sheet material to develop possible wall and roof shapes. 

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Phase 02: Task 02

The mindmap showing the complex overlapping ideas I want to represent in my design.

Having grown weary of the tendency to approach architectural conceptual development in terms of binaries or dual relationships (light/dark, massive/light, open/closed) I am endeavouring to develop a design that has many layered relationships through loose and strong associations.

Abstracting the idea of ‘wall’ away from only physical manifestations, I married the strongest of my spolia experiments from the first task with an abstract characterisation of a ‘wall of sound’. Linking this back to the chosen rituals (opening/closing curtain and performance) was a little difficult, but I eventually settled on a program of a ‘space for private conversations’ which can be protected by a curtain of sound made by rain falling on the metal sheet roof cladding. Such a wall of sound also marks a break from the very quiet environment of the grain shed that I experienced visiting the site. Finally, borrowing from the theatre typology, I wanted to elevate these pods for conversations so that they would act as ‘stages’ for the performance of these conversations. This would then reverse the purpose of the grain shed from its role as protection to exposure. The final poetic moment is that the architecture transforms the infra-ordinary Danish rain into something extraordinary.

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Phase 02: Task 02

Material exploration and opportunities

Using some green plastic sheet I explored the opportunities of ‘slicing’ up the green corrugated steel sheeting that is on the rear wall of the grain shed. The goal here was to explore how to blend the wall into the roof so that it could become a space that is ‘activated’ by rain. As the rain falls on the metal it creates a soothing sound which reminds me of being in rural setting in Australia where corrugated zincalume is a common roof cladding material. 

First I cut the triangular shape into strips, the curved them around into a sort of shell.

From this point I thought more about how I could make the architecture ‘perform’, given my two chosen rituals are the opening and closing of curtains every day, and the ritual of watching theatre or performing. I toyed with the idea of having these long, curved walls that are then drawn up through a weighted mechanism, using the weight from rainwater collected to lift the fins into the shell shape. 

When I drew the ‘plan’ of this idea after making the sketch model I wondered whether this shape was significant in any way in Australian Aboriginal painting, which uses symbols to tell stories or provide a kind of map for the landscape - not just the physical landscape but that of Dreaming (which can be crudely described as the Aboriginal stories of creation). Upon investigation, I discovered that the shape I had created is used in Aboriginal painting to signify clouds or rain, or a sandhill - which can be a key marker in the desolate desert landscape of central Australia.

When on this path I was challenged to think about how to have this space be enclosed, given the Danish location and that it might not be so pleasant to sit in this shell in the cold weather. At this point, I kind of stalled this development and re-entered more conceptual exploration of the elements of my rituals....

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Phase 02: Task 02 Some thoughts.

During the past week or so since receiving this task I have been struggling with designing a space that lacks “place”. The brief is to design “from the inside out” - a space that embodies an atmosphere rather than a form that carries a visually distinct or aesthetic shape. I am struggling because usually so much of a design can be drawn from looking at the site, at the place; and now to design without such a designation has left me a little bit lost. 

In Australian Aboriginal culture, ‘place’ carries great meaning and significance as it is the land that tells the story of creation and ancestors, known as Dreaming. The chunk of land known as Australia was declared terra nullius (land belonging to no one) upon settlement by Europeans as there were no distinct or visually recognisable structures (at least to the Europeans) and so the assumption was made that the land belonged to no one and was hence up for grabs. Something I had not thought about is that there must be such significance in the land and such possibilities for shelter and life in ‘place’ that the Aboriginal people - who are the oldest cultured people in the world and have inhabited Australia for at least 70,000 years - felt no need to build structures; the structures are embodied in the landscape, in the place.

And so if I’m to embark on designing a space without ‘place’, then perhaps my design could seek to create a ‘place’ in and of itself, based on the assumption that this design will sit within a Danish context, specifically Aarhus. Just a thought.

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Phase 02: Task 02

The Infra-Ordinary (1973) Georges Perec What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty- two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals. In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. ‘Social problems’ aren’t ‘a matter of concern’ when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, tower blocks that collapse, forest fires, tunnels that cave in, the Drugstore de Champs-Elysées burns down. Awful! Terrible! Monstrous! Scandalous! But where’s the scandal? The true scandal? Has the newspaper told us everything except: not to worry, as you can see life exists, with its ups and downs, things happen, as you can see. The daily newspapers talk of everything except the daily. The papers annoy me , they teach me nothing. What they recount doesn’t concern me, doesn’t ask me questions and doesn’t answer the questions I ask or would like to ask. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space? How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are. What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic. To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us. What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. Question your tea spoons. What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it take to dial a phone number? Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not? It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth. Text from: http://www.ubu.com/papers/perec_infraordinary.html

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Phase 02: Task 01

Exploring spolia in Aarhus, these are the ideas I had for using the elements as-is, with modifications and as general building materials. The strongest idea I feel is the fringed ‘steel’ to create an atmospheric space involving incidental and intentional interaction with the material to create sounds.