Revit Funtimes

Started playing around on Revit last night and re-familiarising myself with the programme by trying to build my design. I'm really please with what I have so far but it's made me realise that I need to know exactly what is going on with my building in order to build it. It's the kind of programme that I'm going to be obsessive about - making sure I know every measurement and wall construction so that I can translate it onto the programme. Which can't be a bad thing. So first thing first is knowing exactly what is used and how it is used to construct it.

PDP and Beyond

While most of this week has been spent on the case studies, I had an intensive brainstorming evening last Thursday after my PDP meetings. I took a (not so quick) trip to the library and picked up a couple of books. One of which being a survey of adventure playgrounds in London. This has actually been a very happy accident and lead on to me going back to the start of my project, remembering that a key theme was street life. I was then able to come up with a statement that I can use to guide my project.

The circulation as 'street'
The creche as 'playground'
The cafe as 'street side cafe'
The community space as 'public square'

This has given me something to follow and means I can make my spaces more interesting than just being rectangular rooms - one of my problems. The idea of creating an indoors adventure playground is really appealing and I know its something that I can get really absorbed in. With it also being a space for children, I can be really informal and break the rules a bit, getting rid of the solid perimeter around each area. 

I also want to play around with the roof more. Last week it was commented on that my extension looked just that - an extension - and not part of the building. The idea was to bring the roof down to the creche. After modeling this, I saw it created additional space which allowed me to play around a bit more with the first floor spaces.

Today in my tutorial however, it was suggested that I completely ditch the idea of the pitched roof - something I planned in order to reflect the original roof. So this afternoon I'm going to have a go at modelling different roof shapes to help inform my design.

I am also going to look at public spaces in Manchester to help me develop my community space. I want to take aspects from them and use them within my design. 

Basically, this week, I just need to go a bit crazy and ignore boundaries etc to really get stuck into my design.

Models!: Part 2

I've continued to use my model in order to help develop my design ideas. Today I added to it by making representations of the surrounding buildings and the 'walls' of the library. The more I use it the pickier I get about my design. At the moment it seems to be just a long list of things I want to incorporate into my building such as double height spaces etc. After looking back at photos of some of the layouts I tried, I found that a lot of them didn't actually work although I've begun to expand on a couple of ideas.

Something that has really helped is turning the boxes upside down so that I'm looking inside rooms rather than at blocks. This way, I've been able to design with the height of the rooms in mind.

Creating different shaped spaces has also helped to develop my design as it gives me more options. I started to combine some spaces as well, for example, the cafe, kitchen, staff room and storage. These would be adjacent in the building anyway so I thought about creating a combined area and then splitting it up internally. This creates a simpler layout within the building. 
 

Models!

Yesterday I built my sketch model to help me plan out my building. I used the spatial values and made small boxes to represent each space - based on the capacities and therefore the area of each space.

I began to have a play around with the layout and started to notice the axes of the site. This caused some small problems as it was something I hadn't noticed or looked into before and I was questioning whether a particular space should line up with this axis or the other. I then went back to the plan and Photoshop and started to look at these closely. Obviously, these conflicting axes need to be taken into consideration in my design. 

Another "problem" I came across was the multi storey aspect of my design. While I am using the old library as part of my building, I need to take into account the fact that it has a first floor, something I had to keep reminding myself of when playing around with my model. There are pros and cons for the different 'zones' of my building to be on either floor and now I need to decided which should go where.

The creche would be suitable to be on the first floor as it removes it from the street, therefore creating a safer and more private environment for children, however, I want to create an outdoor space as part of the creche, which would be better off on the ground floor although there is no reason why I can't create a roof space (but that comes with it's own health and safety issues!)

The cafe needs to connect with the street as this is the most public part of my building although by being on the first floor, it can over look the other areas of the building, therefore creating connections through the building that way.

The community part of my building, like the cafe, should connect the community to the building but by being on the first floor, it can make the most of using a whole floor and can also be kept apart from the creche. 

I think I need to make more boxes to represent different shapes of the rooms, and maybe split the spaces up in order to split the spaces over both floors.

Programme

After creating an outline of my programme, I began to look at the different spaces in relation to each other and to the community. While some of the spaces would be outward facing and accessible to users within Cheetham Hill, there would also be spaces only for the demographic of my building. 

I also looked closer at how a room would be used at different times of the day for different activities. I created plans using muf as an example from their book, This Is What We Do. I ended up focusing on the layouts of a coffee group in the morning, an after school club in the afternoon and a handicraft group in the evening. It was interesting when I overlapped them and was able to see how much of the room is used and which areas are used more than others. However, I feel that I will benefit more from the study when I develop my programme further and have a clear idea of exactly what goes on in each room. I think that using these plans (and sections) will be able to help me design the spaces within my buildings.