assignment 3-1

assignment 3-1: due tuesday, march 18


Read David Leatherbarrow and Mosheh Mostafavi’s essay “Window/Wall” from Surface Architecture

Use Arches, Fabriano Artistico or Utrecht cold-pressed 90 or 140 lb, 22” x 30” watercolor paper.

First, draw a schematic wall section through at least 2 walls of the building at 1/2" = 1'. Use the vertical orientation of the paper. Choose locations that are of particular importance to your scheme. You will determine now how deep you define your skin to be at these locations. Is it thick enough to inhabit?

You may consider a new wall at the interior of the building to be part of it’s reconfigured ‘skin’. You may also consider the thick interior walls dividing the three buildings to be part of the ‘skin’, just as the body has interior membranes that define its internal organs.

This wall section should be a focal point of your conceptual approach to the building. It requires you to be specific to what is there (which you know in detail; it is documented in the drawing set). It begins at the line of the roof, ends at the foundation, and includes any floors connected to it. Consult the RCP drawings for accurate accounting of the floor joists and their direction. You are of course free to propose an entirely new skin, but you must reconcile how the floors that bear on the current skin are then supported.

In other words, be materially specific and conceptually clear.

Then, consider how the wall section can be the generator of the plan. How is the Center for Movement and Dance organized by its skin? Do not be afraid to be simple.

Develop plans for each of the floors of your scheme at 1/8” = 1’ and arrange them on the page. You may arrange all the plans on one (or more ) page(s), or you may leave space for future sections to be drawn in projection adjacent to the plans. Consider the future of the drawings.

Finally, be prepared to discuss how the wall sections have generated your plans, and to describe your process for arriving at a programmatic organization.

assignment 3

Sigmund Freud’s study, Vienna. Detail of the mirror in the window near his worktable.









“To live is to leave traces.
On the interior these are emphasized.”
-Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capitol of the 19th Century


assignment 3: mid review thursday march 13

Read Beatriz Colomina’s essay “Interior” from Privacy and Publicity, Architecture as Mass Media

Consider the existing building and all that you now know of it: its history, its materiality, its idiosyncrasy. Taking cues from your response to the first assignment and from the material study of your detail drawings, consider how the building could house a new use as a Center for the Study of Movement and Dance.

Consider how the building might work as a whole, through a reconfiguration of its ‘skin’ to create new spatial arrangements organized by access to light, air and view. You may reconfigure the building in dramatic or incremental ways, depending on the idiom of your process and inquiry.

To begin, draw a diagram of the building in both plan and section to show how you would modify or reconfigure the enclosure of the building. Use the diagram to demonstrate your attitude towards the interior spaces, their organization, and the presence of light, air and view. Take into account entry to the building, circulation through the building and large open spaces with ample wall surface for the movement studios.

To follow, build a diagrammatic model that shows the skin’s reconfiguration with attention to the interior spaces of the building.

Then build a diagrammatic model at a larger scale of the condition at the edge of one or several of the newly configured interior spaces.

The program of the Center is as follows:

Entry Area / Reception
Dressing Rooms / Showers / Restrooms (M & F, 3 toilets, 3 sinks, 3 showers each)
Vertical Circulation (Stairs & Elevator)
Open Administration Space

Square footage is per your own design parameters, and is open to an interpretation of the boundaries between programs…

hey guys i checked out the Peter Zumthor Kunsthaus Bregenz book
and it has the diagram of the project we were talking about...i also have scanned a few other of his diagrams from the library if you are interested. So no need to look for the Bregenz book, we have it here in studio
bige

field trip

assignment 2

“some of the qualities and charm which belong to their work is of course the effect of grouping later additions and of what someone has called the reclaiming touch of nature, softening hard lines and giving undulation and ease to surfaces which must at first have been much nearer geometrical planes…”
-Norman Isham from Early Rhode Island Houses


assignment 2 : due tuesday march 4

part 1
Working as a team of 11, document the building at 3 – 9 Steeple Street.

Using your site research, photographs and documents provided, draw a complete set of documents for the building. All sheets are to have a consistent title block. All drawings are to be at a scale of 1/4” = 1’. All full size sheets are to be 22” x 34”. Half size set is to be 11” x 17”, (at 1/8” = 1’). Site plan to be at 1/16” = 1’. All drawings (except details) are to be in Autocad. Use consistent line weights throughout (limit to 4).

part 2
Working individually, document one idiosyncratic detail of the site, to scale, in a numbered drawing. The detail drawing can be at any scale you deem appropriate. The detail should communicate an intrinsic aspect of the building and its history to the rest of the class for purposes of the rehabilitation. Presume your detail to be a highlighting of some aspect of ‘the reclaiming touch of nature’ (or perhaps of inhabitation) i.e. the material history of the building. If necessary, take creative license with this drawing in the pursuit all the detail’s particularities. How do you communicate the idiosyncrasy of this detail?

Velux Links

Check out the following links to browse cut sheets and technical data on skylights, doors and windows from Velux. Tim O'Neill will be on hand tomorrow to show us around what Velux is all about.
http://www.velux.com/About_Velux/Product_ranges/
http://www.velfac.co.uk/
http://www.rationel.co.uk

lots of pics for you all to enjoy...

There are 166 images i uploaded for everyone. a lot of them are detail pics, try to figure them out.

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v323/vdubjettaman/Steeple%20Street%20Pics/