Yesterday the two groups came together to present our concepts to Pastre and Harry with the goal of choosing one to go forward with for our final design, however it was not nearly that simple. As we went through the two designs we started to realize that they both had their own strengths and weaknesses. The main focus of the discussion became complexity of the form vs the complexity of the build. From this analysis we realized that we could not just choose one but instead needed to apply elements of both designs to get what we want, a simple form with a simple building method.
Before we could move on with the design of the roof structure we had to chose a floor plan. Despite how similar the two floor plans were, with only the rotation of the cooler and mechanical room different, we could not chose which one was better. Each one had its strengths and weaknesses, so we decided to take a look at the floor plan one more time. As we started all drawing out our ideas on a large sheet of newsprint while going back and forth with each other on what we thought was good and bad we started to realize that we where making the floor plan more complicated than it needed to be in order to try and create a more interesting space. This was causing us to sacrifice functionality for a more dynamic spacial experience. After we realized this we took a step back to evaluate our decisions, and variations of the same phrase came up again and again, “why are we trying to make the layout something that it doesn’t want to be.” We then took a step back got some diner and came back together and spent about 30 minutes working on “what the building wants to be.” We finally came up with a with a very simple, functional, and expandable layout! It only took us trying a few hundred variations over a few weeks. Here are a few from last night.
After we finalized the plan we where all feeling pretty good about it and were able to really roll forward with our roof and gathering space concepts. We where then able to break up into focused groups to tackle each aspect so that we can all work towards having a very developed design for Friday.