Student Rep Meeting 02: Notes

Hi All,

There were some questions asked in our second student rep meeting last week; below are my responses.

Q1. Regarding the perspective sketches of the crosses, do they need to include the buildings?

A1. No, just the crosses with the adjusted dimensions on each leg is fine; your tutor should be able to see that they started out as crosses though.

Q2. Do you need to import the campus model into Lumion?
A2. Yes, its important to see the context so your architecture can be evaluated properly.

Q3. Whats the point of the plan becoming a section exercise (from Week 03)?
A3. I agree it seems like a strange thing to do ... force your design into someone else's plan and then use the plan as a section because it was never intended to be used that way.

But there are actually very good reasons for doing so. Firstly, by starting with the plan from a great piece of architecture it gives you a head start; all of the plans you could choose from have interesting things going on and responding to them helps you to make decisions about the general arrangement of your spaces. In other words, the existing plans impose limits and limits give you something solid to push off from. Remember, its a negotiation between your developing design and the plan that you chose ... we would expect both to change to accommodate each other. Secondly, by turning the plan through 90 degrees so that it becomes a section helps you to avoid the problem that most inexperienced designers make ... that their architecture is simply an extrusion of the plan. For many beginner designers the plan is often quite lively; spaces are arranged freely across a two dimensional plane without much feeling of restriction. But when they come to making spaces in three dimensions gravity and their personal experience often tells them that walls go straight up, so they make their plans go straight up. they them repeat the process for the next floor up ... often keeping to the outside envelope of the floor below. This results in very one dimensional spaces; they are all the same in terms of their floor and ceiling levels. By using the plan as a section this forces you to think about spaces that have varying heights, that may go up or down. If you interrogate the finished buildings that are shown alongside the plans you could choose from you'll see this kind of spatial variation. In fact its vary rare in great architecture to see multiple floors with the same floor to ceiling height across entire levels.

Let me know in the comments below if this makes sense to you.

Here's an interesting example by Buro Ole Scheeren, inspired by a cloud, its lively spaces in terms of heights and arrangement (including the large void in the middle) is surrounded by exactly the types of spaces I'm asking you to avoid ... this is a great example of knowing the "rules' and then breaking them:

See the article at ArchDaily.

Regards

Russell