Y3 Route Plans / Non-Traditional Method of Presentation

The type of architecture i have created under the brief for this final project of mine doesn't lend itself to the traditional plans, sections and elevations type of presentation. It also has issues with an axonometric drawing or a big impressive render because of the nature of the beast. Being a self-organised arrangement of pods surrounding a central core building it tends to look a bit messy and labyrinthian.


The solution was to draw a series of unfolded plans of routes through the labyrinth to shed some light on what goes on, but importantly to not show everything. Leaving some up to the imagination of the viewer was important to me, because it adds mystery and opportunity and it becomes something more than just a drawing, it becomes a personal investigation when you look at it
"This leads down here, but what happens down this route?"


With dimensions of 2400x1500 to fill on my display with these routes, and a limited time in which to get them finished to print i managed to achieve something along those lines. A few points:


1. I was happy at the time with the work i produced. After a week of looking around the exhibition and back at my own work, i feel i have done ok, but there is room for improvement which i will explore over the coming weeks and post up the results here. So these are by no means the final product.


2. Colour and texture control in these images aren't as good as they could be, and over-laid hand drawings weren't as crisp as i'd like. These were all because of the time contraints and had i had another week at my disposal they would have been sorted. However, time was against everyone int he year and i haven't spoken to anyone who said they couldn't improve upon what they have done.

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First up is the route which would normally be from Bromley-By-Bow to the tube station on foot. This is a ground level route only travelling north to south [displayed east to west respectively in this image]. And the end of the route is the ground floor of the forum space, where community discussions and meetings can take place to ensure the growth and safety of this community. On the way it passes past people's homes and where they have set up ad-hoc gardens and entrance ways to their houses in an effort to once again make this space their own.





The next route takes place as a potential escape route out of the labyrinth where the occupant can climb onto the roof of Bromley-By-Bow underground station and run around the housing pods which have begun to creep over the top of it. They can then get out of the labyrinth and make a quick get away. Alternatively they can use it to run into the labyrinth and then get lost amongst the maze, evading potential capture.





The next route is a more casual route through onto the tops of a set of housing pods, and it's where people have set up a roof space for them to use, utilsing the cover that the surrounding housing blocks give them they have the luxury of being a bit more free with how they use this space, and creating an outdoor area on top of the labyrinth is what they have chosen to do.

Y3 Project 3 Exhibition and Future Thoughts

First i will begin by saying that at this point, my third year is over [well, not quite but i'll get to that shortly] and so now of the next week or two i plan to update this blog with an in-depth look at project 3 and also improve upon the drawings i produced for the exhibition after a short time to reflect upon my work. After all, it's through critical reflection that we learn so much more, and i plan to take that knowledge to further work into what i have produced. 

For now i will present some photographs of my work in the exhibition, and in the next blog post i will post up the main drawings on the exhibition panel as they were when i pinned them up. After which i will work back into those drawings and hopefully elevate them to a higher standard of work to show my project off even better. 

Comments on the project itself, the backstory, the architectural thought process and of course where i intend to take it will be attached to one of the later blog posts or in a post of its own because it will be of some length.

So, for now here are some photographs of the exhibition stand:

Y3 Project 3 Propaganda Posters

These are some posters i made in Illustrator and Photoshop just to add a bit more depth to my future scenario, and also it's a bit of fun. They were an idea i had because a good bit of propaganda makes a dystopian future and also they can be used to add in some extra details for the scenario which give it more depth and believability. 


     

Y3 Project 3 Urban Control Thesis

Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture


To summarise what i have described in the above document, i mapped the relationship between CCTV and Graffiti within the district of Bromley-By-Bow (or BBB for short) and found, perhaps to no-ones surprise, that graffiti wasn't found within sight of a CCTV camera except by the underground station. It presented as a unique situation within BBB and so a decision was reached that this would be my site for this upcoming project. 


The decision was made on the foundation that it is a unique place within BB because of the relationship between the CCTV and graffiti, and this made an interesting social situation where the people in the area were actively taking a risk in vandalising this area more-so than in other places because of it's high pedestrian and vehicular traffic but also the passive policing that is so prominent in this area. 


A part of the brief for this project was also to create a future scenario for this area, and to work with that scenario. Either by creating a catalyst for change, something which reacts to this change in the future or an architecture which gets absorbed by the change. And my Thesis Document goes through this also which what i am intending to design towards.


It all starts with the local problems which are facing BBB in the present day. Issues such as gentrification [evidence of which i tried to deal with in the Boundaries exercise for Project 1], high immigrant population causing potential unrest and closed communities and for being an area which is comparatively poor. If you add in concerns from the global scene such as the economic crisis, the fuel and energy crisis and even the water problems which are being felt in New Mexico at the moment, there is a big melting pot of concerns which have no obvious resolution. It's not my objective to deal with the resolution of these issues, but to design an architecture taking all of these things into consideration.


My future scenario, not just for BB but for the whole UK, takes inspiration from places like "1984" by George Orwell, the "Black Mirror" series on C4 by Charlie Brooker, "Dune" by Frank Herbert and to a certain extent "Mirror's Edge" produced by EA games. The scenario is as follows:

The world is at a crisis point of resources, this includes food, water, energy [oil, gas, electricity] and also money. In order to stop the situation declining any further, the government has had to take emergency action and control the resource intake of the population, and this has required an increase in electronic monitoring like CCTV. In order to enforce this rationing, areas have been given their own 'Resource Management Station' which is to check on the local populations intake every month and to ensure that people are not living beyond what has been prescribed. 

 However, in BBB, a portion of the population has taken over this site and are using the connections to the main grid of the security system to ensure they are not caught and are forging an existence outside of the governments, now extreme, control. Building up their own living quarters around the 'Resource Management Station' and using the governments own equipment to distort and loop CCTV footage and to forge electronic submissions in order to keep them safe.

So that is the situation i am working with. It's definitely exciting for me to design within a dystopian future scenario which ordinarily i would never be able to. Something which i am keen to explore through process [also being in a process and CAD based unit] within and beyond what i have already learned this year. 

Y3 Project 2 Parasitic Library Models

A sheet showing some process and technical models i used for this project. The grey board model was the initial process model which lead to the final design. Moving floor plates up and down to create spaces in-between in order to create some specific and ambiguous spaces to create opportunities for the user to do what they want in the space but whilst still keeping the initial purpose clear. 



I did make a 1:50 exploded axonometric drawing which is on the above sheet along with pictures of my final model. The Axo showed the layers attached to the triangular frame of the walkways which constituted the structure of this project.


The final model didn't look as good as i had intended due to design alterations after laser cutting and also laser cutting was the wrong tool to use, i would have been much better off with a 3D print or a plaster cast model to get across the tectonics of the space. It's a learning point, and something i will remember in the future.

Y3 Project 2 Parasitic Library

The brief for this project was to create a richer boundary situation within Bromley-By-Bow. I took this brief and located a boundary situation within a prominent block of flats in Stroudley Walk [the main high street in Bromley-By-Bow]. In usual social situations within flats the integration of people is very low. People on the bottom floor do not walk up the flats to talk to someone they do not know. So to enrich this situation within this block of flats i pitched the idea of a shared library/community media library where people can leave a book for people to read anonymously so they dont have to interact with people if they don't want to [so no change there, still a boundary] but that boundary is now a play for people to share media like books, DVDs etc.



In order to make this intervention solely for the residents of the flat, it needed to be attached to the flat itself and not the floor. After a time of experimenting with form and space, and still causing the living quarters of several flats to be damaged or reduced in quality it became apparent that this will not be a 'polite' construction and so i took out 2 flats to put this installation in. 




Experimenting with space was the name of the game for this project. After researching Smooth vs Striated and learning about specific and ambiguous spaces i went about this by creating in-between spaces in which you could store books and media, or sit down etc. You can see this in a development model in the next post. You can see in the sections that the centre part of the long walkways are of differing heights to create these spaces between. The raised situations are also places to sit, or lie down or meet people and discuss books if you wanted to. Basically by having a specific circulation space which runs throughout and then the middle space which is more ambiguous it creates opportunities for people to use it however they want to.



The plans and sections were an exercise in using Photoshop to create shadows and textures to create the atmosphere i am looking for in this project. 

Y3 Project 1 Boundaries

We began this year with an exercise on abstracting a word with spatial qualities from a short bit of research we did on Bromley-By-Bow at the very beginning.  TRANSITION was the word i chose, and so the process was to draw the quality of the word on a page using only 90 and 45 degree lines inc shading and the thoughts behind it were very simple. Going from density to sparsity across the page [1] following some rules i generated quickly before i set off. It was then translated into a 3D model [2] being only cut along drawn lines. This was then assembled with everyone else's in any way i chose, then drawn over to again represent the same word [3]. It was a very interesting exercise, and got me thinking about representation of an idea in various ways right from the start. In this case the representation was of a spatial quality in a non-spatial way.



In order to get to know and understand the site of Bromley-By-Bow, i undertook a cartography exercise [the first of the year, more to come] and this time it was a hard-systems mapping so i decided to walk 50 paces, draw a section, walk 50 more draw another and do that for a route through Bromley-By-Bow. After the site visit the data had to be cut in half to make the drawing readable, but ti just shows the verticality of the location. With a high population density the people have to go somewhere and it was up. The area is mostly residential buildings, a small amount of commercial and industrial buildings as well.



One of the key words for this unit was 'Boundaries' and so the final exercise for Project 1 dealt with boundaries. The brief was to create an architectural intervention which crossed a boundary or broke a boundary down. So i attempted to break down a specific boundary within Bromley-By-Bow which also deals with social difference and gentrification. The intervention takes the user on a journey from walking along an open pavement with a busy road to your side and new builds across from old social housing. You walk into this cramped dark space intended to cleanse the surroundings from your memories and to shield you from the sound of the outside, then you walk up a ladder to the bridge which emerges you into this situation again which a fresh view. The intervention stretches out halfway into the road so it doesn't cross deliberately because it is a place to view both sides of the road as equals, and to notice the divide that is being created between the older residents and the newer residents in the new builds. 


I am highlighting the boundary situation between these groups of people, by giving them a viewing platform across the physical boundary [the road, which only exacerbates the situation] so they can see it for themselves and then this gaining of perspective intends to break down the barriers between these two groups of people.

Y3 Smooth vs Striated

Third year of architecture has begun with a choice of studio units. With a wealth of different ways to approach the subject on offer the one which i found the most interesting when it was pitched was Unit 1A, Smooth vs Striated. It was a systems based unit with an interest in teaching a broad range of contemporary skills to equip each of us with. A focus on CAD software was interesting since i hadn't used much more than basic Sketchup at this point with any success, so the prospect of using programs like Microstation, Rhino, Maya etc was enticing. 

Y2 Project 4 Shifting Tectonics (2)

The proposal for this project was a centre to re-build the defences using the material that has broken away from the cliffs of Happisburgh. It would not provide a perfect set up to protect the village but would at least provide a short to long term solution to shield the village from the worst of the erosion. 

The principle is that it would be sited 'down stream' from the longshore drift which plagues the coastline with a huge mechanical sieve stretching out into the sea to catch the sediment eroded away from the cliff faces. This material would be taken back to land with a series of lifts and conveyor belts and then processed on the shore into bricks. These bricks would then be used to patch up or create sea defences along the coastline and buy Happisburgh more time to move. 

The architecture was to reflect it's purpose and also it's meaning. It is to be a defence, and a strong beacon within Happisburgh. And although the model is not as refined as it ought to have been, it shows the intention of the architecture. Built into the cliffs at Happisburgh it becomes a place of creation and in that creation a place of hope. Hope that a villagers house won't tumble into the sea during the night as has been known to happen in violent weather.

Each of the 3 modules is where the brick manufacturing happens, with the sediment entering through the front. In between the modules the distribution occurs and also the control centre to monitor the situation in the sea and when to drag in the material based on what is currently happening and what has happened before. 

Y2 Project 4 Shifting Tectonics (1)

The final project of the year, named 'Shifting Tectonics', dealt with a dramatically shifting landscape around the village of Happisburgh in Norfolk (pronounced Hayes-Burgh). This was a site of contant coastal erosion, and despite the best efforts of all our knowledge and monetary power thus far, the speed of the erosion hasn't dimmed. It is under threat now of not existing at all within the next 100 years.


The cliffs were being eroded at an astonishing rate, and within 100 years the town will be almost underwater. The government has given up on repairing the sea defences along the coast for the most part because they are now far too expensive to maintain. First thing on the agenda was some in depth research about the erosion and why it happens in Happisburgh more than perhaps other places.




The main factors which contributed to the rapid erosion process were


1. Strong winds from across the North Sea, which in turn increased the power of the waves. This meant a greater impact on the cliff face.
2. Longshore Drift was a contributing factor. Taking away the materials, and reducing the size of the beach, which ordinarily would have slowed the waves down and reduce the kinetic force.
3.Side effects of coastal defences further up the coast such as reducing the amount of sediment which reaches Happisburgh (Trying to reduce the impact of longshore drift by the use of Groynes) and so the impact of the local longshore drift is increased.


This will become the focus of my project, which in the initial stages was pitched as a place where sediment along the coast could be re-used as a coastal defence itself. 


Here are a few site photographs to get an understanding of the situation.



This landscape provided an interesting architectural challenge. Not only was it in almost constant motion (referring of course back to 'Shifting Tectonics' the project title) but it was also a place where the population had been forgotten about, and ignored by almost everyone. It created a multitude of opportunity to design.

Y2 Project 3 Canal Club

The brief for this project was a set brief by the St Pancas Canal Club itself, and although we weren't proposing directly to the club it was used as the project brief for the third project. It contained things needed such as a kitchens, overnight accommodation, repair workshops, reception and a large social space. My initial idea for the project was thrown out a week before the final crit and what i show you now is an exploration in designing by modelling and to a very tight deadline. 

Stylistically this was my favourite model from Y2. It was clean, communicated enough information to convey the site and it's constraints yet was also simple and did not distract from the architecture. A simple 2 layered grey-board site model with a site plan drawn on top with ink. 

The design was structured so that canal boats in need of repair can sail straight in. Accommodation, social space and kitchens were on the first floor with only the workshop and reception on the ground floor. Aesthetically i designed it at the time in a very angular way and intended for a high-tech look to this building. 

Situated on the site of the old canal club and taking up around 50% more space, it could hold 2 more canal boats in the workshop (for a total of 4) and had a substantial social space plus bar which overlooks the docks and canal on the first floor (the large space that overhangs the workshops on the ground floor.)

An unfortunately fuzzy image, however since Year 2 this model has gone missing, so the chance to re-take this image has passed.

Y2 Project 2 Gasholder 8

This project was a small 4 week group project using the site of Gasholder 8 within the London St.Pancras International Station. The project came about after a folding exercise within Studio, upon which i made a simple triangulated structure which moved when compressed at one end. This idea sparked the generation of the brief. 

The brief was to create a recreational installation within the gasholder for the local community. We took the idea of the moving triangles and shifting surface to the facade and created the idea of a changing climbing wall. 

The idea was to have 3 distinct levels. Beginner (At the bottom), Intermediate (In the middle) and Expert (At the top). Each level would increase in difficulty to climb and the surface would change every day by means of pushing and pulling the facade to create new challenges for the climbers. At the very top was a platform which would have fantastic views across the city of London, this was resered for those with the skills to climb all the way to the top!

There were access points from the inside to the outside of the wall so if you wanted to stop halfway you could, and if you wanted to only tackle the expert section you were free to do so. The wall itself was made up of triangles which were connected so as to allow some movement when certain plates were pulled or pushed form the inside by machine. (You can see this from the little vignettes i drew on the side of the presentations)

I really enjoyed the idea of this project, the teamwork was both exciting and frustrating yet in the end despite some bumps in the road we managed a good idea for a small installation and for what was the first design project of the year, pretty decent presentation as well. Looking back a year on from this i would love to tackle this project again and go at it from different angles and try some different presentational techniques, but at this moment i don't have the time available for such a thing. Here are 2 of presentation panels we used (these were accompanied by a variety of hand made models to display the idea of the climbing wall)