Assignment Submission Date Reminder, and more gems for thought

If you arent aware yet, the assignment is due on Sunday 6th May. Which means the next time we see will be the last time before you finalise your design.

Those who have yet to post any developments, you will be at a disadvantage. For those who've completed their electroliquid and geometric aggregation, blog and let me know and i will give feedback.

I want to see you all fine tuning your models continually until it fits with the brief and your concepts, taking snapshots as you go perhaps if you wish. You will need to get an attempt at this before next Wednesdays task in order to be prepared  for the final task.

For those who wont have crysis started before next Wednesday.......hope for a miracle!

More more Architecture and Landscapes

I've recently come across this building in a small place called Kitayama in the city of Kyoto. An open air art gallery, the name of which escaped my memory, designed again by Mr Ando san. A handful of concrete planes deliberated, sized, scaled, calibrated, and detailed to create a series of sequences, openings and thresholds through the site; much like what your task is now.

Is this architecture, or simply a series of blades in an empty site? Or maybe at best a sculpture (monument?) blown into a massive scale? What then constitutes architecture? Is it an artifact that fully encloses or shelters? Or is the mere presence of structure sufficient?

Something unrelated: you'll find two extremes of architecture in Japan, i call this one Optimus Prime.

Electroliquid Aggregation

Also, a lot of your electroliquid aggregation seems to sound very cold and highly "architecturally technical" to invent a phrase.

Again, think of a piece of literature. You can make a commentary on the brief - a statement about different architecture students and architecture studios perhaps? A statement on the nature of monuments? A statement that summariese Kengo Kuma and Alvar Aalto as role models for students?

A good idea would come out of thinking in terms of the concepts in addition to what they would mean to the brief, not just taking week01 exercise as an isolated case and trying to force it into the design of the three places in the final weeks.

Back to the idea of 1+1=3; we want to create something that is highly original yet specific to the design at hand.

Here are some electroliquid aggregation from last year, their brief is different and their clients are different but they all give the feeling of being a piece of literature or a statement instead of something that's instructional. You might then start to imagine how they might be interpreted in an anecdotal or an experiential sense, how you could unpack these into a story about your architecture, rather than working on something that's simply confined to the architectonic realm.

"Being strong and optimistic will lead to a gloomy and cold life."

 

"The Psychoanalysis observes

The studying professor often perform self inflected pain" 

 "If the rich and the poor work together, they can all become successful despite their difference in class, wealth and social wellbeing."

"A stubborn and anti-social person need not be two different people. More, one person following two different paths, of wealth and purity, to reach the same destination."

"Academics bounded by the rigidity of facts, wealth and social status must have a medium that is liberating; where reflection, meditation and creativity can stimulate new ideas."

  

More Topos and Massing.

Some of you have started to place your models into Crysis. What I want to see is a landscape that works with the design, rather than generating a flat surface and dropping your architecture into it like an inert object in space. Here are some of last years design to give you an idea of how the landscape/topography can engage with the architecture and so on. 

Not a students design but something where both the topography and architecture work together.

Falling Water - Frank Lloyd Wright

An architecture where the approach is important, where the vertical positioning is important. Think temple on top of a hill. 

Steven Ke

An architecture that interlocks with the landscape.

Keyan Guo

Architecture that hides and conceals itself, where the landscape encloses it. 

Zhiyuan Sun.

Architecture that bridges. Yen Dao (Above) and Chen Tian (Below)

Ps, your assignment 1 marks are in progress, being double checked.

Topos and Massings

From now on, the architecture would be lost if the landform is designed independently from it. Both your massing development/resolution and the sculpting of your landscape should occur concurrently, with both considerations completing each other in its beauty and in the synthesis of concept. Pay attention to the sketches (Concepts) and the built images of the following slideshows.



01 - Lima Houses, Eduardo Souto de Moura





02 - Mario Botta, Chapel of Santa Maria Degli Angeli





03 - Tadao Ando, Rokko Housing: Pay attention the process of sculpting the landscape that follows the placing of the masses





04 - Tadao Ando, Chikatsu Museum







05 - Tadao Ando, Naoshima Museum




06 - Jun Aoki, Aomori Museum of Art: Idea of space as that between the landscape and the mass, rather than the massing. 

Parallel Projection Fundamentals

Rendow Yee.

Next task before class

Just a reminder that the second stage of the task has been posted up on the main website already. You should all have bogged your stage 1 work, and read carefully what you need to do.

So the main thing is to pick two of your drawings and draw them as a combined geometry, think about the connection; are they going to.simply touch end to.end or are you going to interconnect them into each other?

The constraint is, your two base shapes mush be of different architects, so if u use kengo for one you have yo use aalto for the other to combine.