Here we are again at the next big checkpoint of the semester. As you know, there is an important project review going on today that will ultimately give us a direction, as a whole, regarding where to take this design. It’s still funny to think we haven’t even made our final design yet – today there are three teams with separate designs, thought out from top to bottom, but yet they aren’t what’s going to be built quite yet.
There are still some unanswered questions that we have and will utilize today to get clarification on: how important is signage? how important is storage? how many structures do they want/the scale? how often will these be transported? It’s best to tackle all of the issues at least a little bit and present an array of different answers and solutions, but hopefully they will have a more final answer on what must be prioritized and what doesn’t.
Most of our projects are interpreting signage, for example, in a nonliteral way. As opposed to having words or something traditional (which Reggie’s building will already have once it is built) we are making the structures speak for themselves and become the iconic object that attracts people. The iconicism of these designs is something we are certain about, and it needs to be the driving factor, so whichever theme our design portrays will ultimately be the attraction.
The team that I have been working on (with Ed & Cameron) has been focused around a previous idea of arranging ‘huts’ or ‘pods’ into configurations that create an open-air bazaar and market purely through their spatial arrangement – the huts themselves act as building units on a grid system but are unique independently, too. Earlier in the week our group had gone through some exhaustive studies regarding the geometry of the pods, whether they were hexagonal in plan, remained square, or had a triangulating repetition – and we stuck with the square! These are important studies even if they have no presence in the final strategy, as they are merely supporting research as to why we continued down the same path as before. Even though what we will be showing them is very familiar to what they have seen before, they have only been introduced to it schematically, so it’s our job to convey that this can actually work.
Clicking on the link above, you can see the construction diagram for one of these pods. Kiawah has already stated more or less that they like the look of it, but our job this time around is to convince them how they could use it with site strategies and configurations, as well as different layouts and threshold conditions, re-purposing capabilities, and more definitive approaches to it’s construction and assembly/disassembly.