Week 11 - Building Fabric

The building

Week 10 - Program

Old Program:

The program of the building for the interim crit was a cop out, and didn't have the substance required to truly activate the Howard Smith Wharves Site.

New Program:

The building will house a state of the art photometric laboratory, too which the current QUT photometric lab staff will migrate. The building will also serve a duel purpose as a function space with bar and kitchen attached.

GROUND FLOOR

LEVEL 1

Week 9 - Folie to Building Presentation Panels

PANEL 1 - LOCATION

PANEL 2 - FORM GENERATION

PANEL 3 - FORM GENERATION

PANEL 4 - FORM GENERATION

PANEL 5 - DESIGN PROPOSAL

PANEL 6 - NATURAL LIGHTING PROPOSAL

PANEL 7 - PROPOSAL PLAN & SECTION

PANEL 8 - CIRCULATION

PANEL 9 - INITIAL PROGRAM LAYOUT

Week 9 - Folie to Building Crit

Folie to Building

Week 8 - Design Development

Folie

Week 6 & 7 - 4D Concept Development

Reading Reflections and Thoughts

Towards an Animated Architecture against Architectural Animation.

Animation when used to conceptualise  architecture can have an obvious and expected influence on the form. Neil Spiller puts forward the notion that "the medium has become the message". I believe any medium architects use will have an influence on the outcome of a design. Whether conceptualised from pen, charcoal, pencil, Autocad, foam core model, paper model, wire mesh model or 3D animated. It is the architects choice what medium to use. The only limiting factor with 3D animation is that everyone has the same tools, whereas our hands and minds are our physical tools, and no two are the same.

Project 5: Migrating Coastlines

The use of particle systems with various space warps makes sense to me if the variables used to affect the particles are reflective of the actual element they represent. In the text, pressure systems are added to correlate to the ocean and desert views. But later it explains that the "structure and intensity of the pressures were modulated". What value or architectural merit do these elements have if they are free to be changed. The architect is merely changing variable to get a form that he/she wants. This devalues the purpose of using these animated techniques in the first place.

Temporality and Time

This reading discusses the method of a few select architects, these of which are all experimenting in similar ways to our tutorial during this semester.

Staring with a site parameter, then representing this with a space warp or pressure field, then making this affect an object or particle system. This method ins't a normal design process, and it leads to the creation of forms and relationships that are previously unknown. My key concern with this type of generative form finding is that it seems to be an exercise in post justification. ????? States "the architectural envelope becomes entwined with the exhibition surfaces, challenging the traditional concept of the exhibition space as a simple white box.". To me this is saying the form got really twisted up, and we then decided the interior space was going to be an exhibition space. But then some of the exterior surfaces merged to interior surfaces. So all of a sudden we are testing tradition concepts of the exhibition space. All of this was thought of, after the form had been found.

Techniques and Technologies

This reading basically tried to hammer home the idea that using generative or multidisciplinary design software can allow designers to push the technology and culture development cycle.

Realistically not many small firms would be able to implement avante guard designs in everyday life. So there is a very small market for this type of architectural exploration. Architecture is very market driven, and if there is not much construction or competition going on. There will be no experimental architecture.

Concept 

Adaptitecture

The Brisbane city, and commercial architecture in general does not adapt to the site or context. Often there are very small adaptions to do with daylighting, or orientation of views, but never an appreciation of the form of the site.

Concept 50 aims to experiment with the way a form can engage with the context, by appreciating and complementing the form of the site primarily. The architecture will also be an integration of greater contextual elements influencing the form, causing the architecture to evolve and adapt depending on site conditions.  

SITE HAS CONTROL

Concept Development

Week 5 - Intro to 4-Dimensional Diagramming

Tutor: Florian Heise

Design Aims.


"A place where people learn and experience bodily sensations"


The aims set by Florian leaves the students open to experiment with a large range of concepts. By doing this, the student can concentrate on the architectural experimentation of form and fully engage in the learning experience of 4D Diagramming.


Class Description.


Examine, emulate, and interrogate various approaches to the application of animation software to architectural design. This will develop a series of concept designs for our project. 


Tutorial.


The tutorial set the scene for the rest of the semester. Florian showed us his work regarding the use of animations to influence the building fabric. One of the experiments was quite interesting; through the use of particle tracing he was able to create a building form. This type of experiment visually seems to lends itself towards a design which expresses structure for aesthetic purposes.  This is shown below.

This sort of experiment has been done on a site with a very small footprint. This means Florian's variables would have to have been very tightly controlled to keep the particles within the boundaries. If we bring a similar technique to the howard smith wharves site, there is a far greater opportunity to create a much more expressive form that could react to the river along with other elements and disperse along the site.


Due to the complexity of the systems being used, it was hard to get a grasp of what Florian was actually doing. But after completing the readings, it became clear what systems Florian was using and what other possibilities we have at hand.


Readings.

The readings discussed the use of computer simulation to aid the design process, rather than using them just to extrude a form from a plan. The Architecture in the Digital Age reading comments “The plan no longer ‘generates’ the design; sections attain a purely analytical role”. By this, Kolarevic refers to the power of designing through digital mediums to create architectural that doesn’t conform to a plan but has an infinite number of possible outcomes. After using the computer to create from, the plan and section is used to analyse and understand the form.

The various ways to generate form through polysurfaces, morphing, keyframing, inverse kinematics, particle systems, space warps and so on, brings a whole new dimension to design. The way you can create objects that respond and relate to each other has a very large integration into architecture.

Before architects used to design a building to respond to a site or nearby elements, by assuming some sort of relationship. Now an architect can actually set up the strengths of relationships in space and get a visual representation of the pure responses of elements next to each other. This medium of design is very abstract and peels the context back to its most basic level. 

Experimentation.