S2 Design Studio Excercise 1

First off, I must confess exc1 was extremely hard for me to complete as I was still rather unsure of how to relate certain aspects of the site to the building design which I was to put forward. While I understood (and tried to show) how certain aspects of my site analysis were to affect my building design, i was unsure with the depth of these and how thin we could draw the line.

Was the process supposed to involve me understanding random aspects of the land then drawing the design from that..? Was I to design a building, then try to drag various aspects of the land (however farfetched they be) to satisfy the 5 words..? Or was it instead, a mixture of both?





The format of the two sheets gave me an opportunity to create, what I felt, to be the most easy-to-read form of presentation. With colour coding I could show what each kind of building represented, then with analysis the effected buildings would show up easily in the effects the respective studies.

From the drawings, you will find a collection of analytical images that demonstrate my understanding of the site. While some aspects of this analysis, for example the distance to water, the height necessary for water views for surrounding structures, areas of congestion for both vehicles and pedestrians, and the flow of water through the site were helpful in helping me designing the building, but some words like materiality really stumped me and I found it exceeding difficult to find a plausible relationship between the materials of the land and my design.




The site model was an interesting aspect of this project that enabled me to appreciate the site a considerable amount more. The scale my group was assigned was 1:1000, and this meant that the extent of contours were very vast. Because the other groups in our class were concentrating alot on the placement of buildings, we concentrated on the terrain. Note that a feature of our site model are the "smooth contours", created by layers of blade carved foam, then wrapped with rice paper. This process I thought was particularly creative and as you see, turned out exceptionally well.