ava architecture showcase 2009

Lives of Spaces 2

You should all be preparing your presentations and working on your portfolios. Your portfolio presentations should concentrate on the architectural ideas and intentions within your proposal. It should not consist of a walkthrough of the functional elements within your project. Reread the briefs and refamiliarize yourself with the themes of the unit: • The notion of the embodiment of light within built form and in particular the palpable presence of Venetian light referred to as Lume Materiale. • How architecture and light are co-existent and how the ‘material presence of a building ‘in’and ‘of’ light’ can encourage a richer understanding of materials. • Walter Benjamin’s description of ‘Buildings (that) are used as a popular stage. They are divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.’

Things to do:

1. Detail: A detail within the project that demonstrates the key ideas behind the proposal, integrated successfully within the overall design. The detail should be shown at a scale between 1:2 - 1:10, and demonstrate your material choices. This should be a key detail relating to people, or other piece if really key to the project. Make sure this detail is discussed with technical staff as well as us.

For Level 3 ONLY: chose a fragment of the building plan/section or axo drawn at 1:50/1:20 and annotated. Incorporating technical, environmental and material issues.

2. Film: continue to develop your film and use it to reveal the cinematic aspects of the project. Make sure it is outputted to your portfolio.

3. Plans and sections: Think of your plans as horizontal sections rather
than technical hardline drawings - they must enable a legible reading of your proposition by others, as well as yourself.
Draw vertical sections that show simultaneous spaces and adjacencies, between interior/exterior, different uses and territories etc.

All your drawings must show context - to show the resolution of the public (street/square) and private space, the nature of the ‘piece of the city’. Your
plans and sections should continue to explore themes of TIME, NARRATIVE, LIGHT, MATERIALITY, OCCUPANCY and USE.

"Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage through which one passes... In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings...
I like to work with a depth of field, reading space in terms of its thickness. Hence the superimposition of different screens, planes legible from obligatory points of passage whichare to be found in all my buildings"
Jean Nouvel

Lives of Spaces

Lives of Spaces - Short Animated Film
Duration 5 minutes (7500 frames)

storyboard from the film Bladerunner, Director Ridley Scott

Your film will explore in detail: -how people live in your proposal. -the way the interior spaces interact. -your proposal’s relationship with other buildings and their internal and external spaces. -the views from and towards your proposal. -your proposal’s relationship with the context of the site, with the landscape and its environment. Week 1 - Storyboard Friday 03.04.09 - pin up in groups. On a single A1 or A2 sheet use considered hand drawing and/or collage techniques to produce a storyboard of your short film. You should identify 8-10 key moments within your proposal that you will explore further in your animation. Weeks 2-3 - Inhabit the Spaces Referencing the storyboard work, construct partial (set piece) or fully realised models of your proposal at 1:50 or 1:100. Weeks 4-5 - Capture and Edit Use the temporal nature of film to explore themes of TIME, NARRATIVE, LIGHT, MATERIALITY, OCCUPANCY and USE.

Peter Salter, Inami Woodcarving Museum

Projection in progress

E1 building, Giudecca, by Cino Zucchi Architetti

By now you should all have developed your site work and programme:

Programme:

Be able to state this simply and comprehensibly.
Don't describe it only as 'housing' and 'public space' - that is the brief.
What is the housing? What is the public space?

Site work:

Does it look like you've been to the site?
Do you understand how big the site is?
- how the levels work?
- what the existing buildings are like?
- what the neighbouring and nearby buildings are like?
- the direction of the sun?

Context:

Think about the setting of the proposal within your portfolio.
Is there work showing and investigating a particular problem, need or characteristic that you have identified?
What is your proposal responding to?

Corte Bottera, Castello, Venice, from A Guide to Venetian Domestic Architecture by Egle Trincanato

Now and next:

Clarify your aims - include SPATIAL and MATERIAL intentions in your text. Keep it simple!
Draw and model these ideas.
They must be visible in your portfolio.

Process:

Draw and model at the appropriate scale, in as much detail as you can. ie. Draw everything you know about the proposal.

Don't wait. The production of this work, your critical appraisal and reiteration of it, is the process by which the proposal develops and your portfolio is built up.

Produce hybrid drawings to describe and explore two or more ideas simultaneously.

Materiality:

What is your proposal made of?
How is it constructed?
How do people relate to the materials?
How do the materials and construction relate to the different spaces?
How are you dealing with the existing structures on site?
How are you dealing with the ground?
How do the materials change over time?
Remember the experience of being in Venice.
Remember the idea of Lume Materiale.

Tyneside Flats (two flats in a terraced house, each with front door and backyard),
Newcastle c.1880s, from The English Terraced House by S. Muthesius

Lives of Spaces:

Inhabit the spaces.
How do people live in Venice?
How do people live in your proposal?
Explore in detail
- the way the rooms interact,
- their relationship with other buildings and spaces,
- their relationship with the context of the site, with the landscape.
- the views

Your housing may be bespoke for particular occupants,
or you may develop a typology or model of housing for a particular way of life for many people.

What is the narrative contained within the spaces?
Explore the simultaneous spaces of the proposal.
Does the way the proposal is used and occuppied change over time? Can it accomodate change?

Remember the first project and the level of detail with which you studied a domestic space.

Zuecca housing on Giudecca, by l'Atelier Collaborative /Michael Carapetian

Venice: Projection

from Theatres by Sugimoto

Housing & Public Space

Frame

In response to the work you have so far undertaken, design a public or private/domestic room for your chosen site.

Consider your room in the context of the built landscape of Venice. Use exploratory and considered drawings and models to develop your room's quality of space, its materiality, lightness, views, light and shadow. Consider who might occupy the room and what use the room is put to.

At this stage you should not be overly concerned with the constraints of site planning, your room should be an inceptive and ambitious design approach that draws on your intuitive response to Venice and its population, and begins to draw together ideas for your proposed programme.

You should work on site studies and individual projects simultaneously. Some of the site analysis can be done in groups (sunlight study, models, detailed survey etc) but it has to be described as such in your portfolios. All your individual project work needs to be individual.

Mies Van Der Rohe

Armature

Write a maximum of 100-150 words about your design approach. This should cover aspects of procurement strategy, identification of key users, construction logistics. This is the first draft of the strategic Whys and Hows of your proposal.

Things to consider

- choice of site
- choice of programme
- choice of third element to programme
- end-users
- management and procurement

Montage*

Use the work you have already carried out and are in the process of working on:

1. Aperture - Domestic Space/Public Space
2. Exposure - Virtual Venice, Split Sites and Simultaneous Spaces
3. The Campi of Venice

to inform your proposal, interests and ideas, and also provide material for drawings and other outputs.

* In film-making, a montage is a sequence of successive images or short shots. In photography, montage is a technique for combining separate elements into a single image, similar to collage. In both, a new meaning or whole is created that does not exist in the individual parts.

In film, light leaves its traces on the sensitive emulsion, imprinting on it permanent shadows. The manipulation of two realities - the superimposition of two stills, both traces of material realities - produces something that is already outside the logic of "realism." Rather than represent reality, it produces a new reality.
Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity

Venice: 17 - 22 November 2008

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare by Cartier-Bresson

Monday 17 November: Arrive in Venice, meet after dinner in Campo Santa Margerita. Tuesday 18 November: Architecture Biennale. There are several pertinent exhibitions dealing with temporality, occupation, immateriality and housing: The British pavilion is showing contemporary architects working in housing in the UK and abroad and raises differences in social and economic settings. The Italian pavilion contains an exhibition called "Housing Italy: 12 projects for inhabiting and re-inhabiting the city" showing future projects, and an overview of the current situation and the legacy of Italian public housing. The Venice pavilion is exhibiting "Carlo Scarpa and the origin of things". The Polish pavilion show "The Afterlife of Buildings" questions the future use, durability and adaptability of buildings. The Irish exhibition called "the Lives of Spaces" focuses on visual narrative revealed in film and photography, and is housed in Palazzo Giustinian Lolin on the Grand Canal.

Wednesday 19 November:
Morning - Foundation Querini Stampalia, Santa Maria Formosa, Castello.
Afternoon - Il Redentore by Palladio, housing by Zucchi Architetti, Giudecca

plan of Querini Stampalia Foundation by Carlo Scarpa

Thursday 20 November: The Campi of Venice drawn survey

study of campi in two parts (work in groups):
1. Orthogonal drawings based on physical survey - plan, elevation and section. include material and detail observations.
2. Time-based study of occupation and use - this could be film-based, photographic, drawn, mapped or otherwise surveyed. you may need to combine different types of survey (activity and sunlight for instance).

Use the observations in Interaction with Architectural Space: the Campi of Venice to inform and guide your own work.
On our return to London you will give a 15 minute presentation, in your survey groups, about the text and your own surveyed observations.

1. Campo de Ghetto Novo 2. Campo de la Madonna de l'Orto 3. Campo de l'Abbazia and Campo de la Misericordia 4. Campo San Giacomo da l'Orio 5. Campo San Polo

6. Campo Santa Margherita 8. Campo San Trovaso 9. Campo Santo Stefano 10. Rialto

Friday 21 November: Site Survey

Saturday 22 November: Finish surveys and return to London

‘For an antidote to ... dehumanized places where man shows himself an unfit inhabitant of the earth, we could turn to archetypally humanized spaces like the canals and squares of Venice where even the land is built. Always cognizant of the limitations placed on them by the surrounding water, the builders of this city have contrived an integration of all its parts which gives it the deep consistency of a landscape’.
Robert Harbison,Thirteen Ways, MIT, 1997

composite photo-drawings by Andriani Plessa

hybrid drawing of imagined room and street, by Jurgita Korsakaite