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.