Outside my Comfort Zone

After my tutorial yesterday, I have taken my tutors advice to go a little bit crazy with my roof. Last week I had been using physical models but Sketch up has been more useful this time around as I can easily and quickly manipulate the shapes.

I usually go for the more subtle (and I guess, fairly boring - which is where my problem was) design but this has really pushed me away from that and I've started playing around with forms that I would normally keep away from. But I kinda like where it's taking me and it really makes sense to have this disordered roof line which is in complete contrast to the formal style of the existing facade.

By playing around with the roof and, as my tutor described it, being more playful, it's started to influence the way my building interacts with the existing facade and how much of it I actually keep. Very slowly, I am loosing more and more of it, which is something I definitely didn't want to be doing a couple of months ago, but it actually seems to be the right thing to be doing, especially if I am going to keep down this route. 

I'm really curious to see where it's going to go next.

 

Roofs

Now that my tech case studies are out of the way, I've been able to resume project work. After scribbling ideas for the a last couple of weeks, I began by finally arranging the community space of my building. This has changed size since I created my programme and now has a number of spaces that can change - making larger areas or smaller ones as required. 

Resolving these spaces have let me start to resolve the roof. As I am using the site axes to design my building, I want to continue this to the roof. Tuesday saw me modelling my new design which then allowed me to start playing around with the roof yesterday. By starting with a straight forward single pitch in the roof, I could then move on and develop to get my designs modelled in paper. This was going well until I realised that my roof was South facing - meaning that there would be direct sunlight at different times of the day which I really didn't want. This meant back to the drawing board this morning and I've now taken this into consideration and as a deciding factor in the design. 

Despite being told to try and move away from a pitched roof, I have kept coming back to it. But I think I like the way it still reflects the original building and my design is beginning to do what I want it to - especially in terms of letting light into the building. I think it could still be developed further though but the paper models are definitely helping to resolve it. I need to get on with taking photos!

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.